How to Start a Sand War

Much of this article comes from “World in a Grain” by Vince Beiser, “Narconomics” by Tom Wainwright, and several academic papers on the economics of Moore’s Law.

Let’s discuss Moore’s Law.

Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit (IC) doubles every two years. Every time someone declares Moore’s Law dead, a new discovery in computer architecture optimization appears or manufacturing processes improve.  Or both.  Moore’s law holds.

As manufacturing processes improve and older ICs become commodities, the fabrication cost of producing less complex ICs drops. Moore’s Law implies that the $cost/transistor falls on a predictable curve. General-purpose, less-dense ICs become more affordable over time. On a long enough time scale, the manufacturing cost of less dense, but sufficiently powerful, ICs drops to a penny per chip. 

Personal compute becomes essentially free.

Internet of Things (IoT) applications, even those running “AI at the Edge,” do not require the most expensive, bleeding-edge microprocessor available on the market for computation.  IoT chips are single purpose computers, and only need enough computational power to serve their one purpose.  The complicated computations – training the deep neural nets on vast data sets – occurs on enormous, expensive server clusters spread worldwide in the cloud.  The IoT application only needs to query the system across a ubiquitous Wi-Fi network and perform local work.    

As chip prices drop, designers and manufacturers will take advantage of the new emerging technologies and put low-cost IoT-grade microprocessors into more consumer goods.  Those IoT-grade chips will process single-use AI at the Edge computations, interface with Bluetooth-enabled devices (in the hand or plugged into the brain), and power devices to make consumer goods “smart.” 

Chips will become ubiquitous.  They will appear in everything — running shoes, coats, hats, purses, fans, vacuum cleaners:

• A vacuum cleaner detects the flooring beneath it and know how hard to adjust suction.
• A shoe measures running impact and give hints on how to adjust running posture.
• Purses keeps a running inventory through object recognition and send that inventory to an app.
• A fan knows how hot or cold a room is, how many particles/millions dust particles are in the air, and runs optimally without human interaction.

The future of microprocessors in every device implies an order of magnitude more microprocessors running in the wild.  Dozens per person, thousands per household, trillions of microprocessors throughout the world powering everything from a hanging planter to a dog bowl. 

Let’s step back, have a moment of curiosity, and thing about resourcing this massive emergence of IoT devices.  Microprocessors, even tiny ones, are things.  Things are made of other things.

What are microprocessors made from?  Transistors.  What are transistors made from?  Sand.

Demand for Sand

Sand is one of, if not the building block of civilization.  Sand is concrete.  Sand is asphalt, and sand is glass.  We live in sand today and all around us – sand.  It’s also in microchips. 

Gazing at the creeping desertization of the world through global warming, you may assume the Earth has an inexhaustible supply of sand, and therefore infinite microchips, within a reasonable infinite.  But that sand, the exposed desert sand, is the wrong sand. 

The winds and the sporadic rains buffet the sand found in deserts.  Natural erosion rolls the sand grains around until they’re round and smooth. Those sand grains are too polished for high-grade manufacturing. Concrete, microchip production, and glass requires silicon dioxide sand, the kind of sand that comes down off mountains and rolls around in riverbeds. Corporations can find the right sand only on lake beaches, on lake bottoms, on river bottoms, and the bottom of deep mine shafts. 

Reinforced concrete, like the integrated circuit, is a miracle of modern technology.  It’s malleable.  Humans can pour it into forms to make any shape.  Sand makes skyscrapers and roads. Like microprocessors, only the right sand can go into modern urban concrete.  Desert sand results in brittle construction materials. As populations grow, urban development also puts enormous pressure on the world’s supply of the right sand.

Now, IoT is eating the world. The demand for the right sand for integrated circuits competes directly with the sand for buildings.  Building isn’t slowing down any time soon.  Neither are Christmas sales. 

The world is not running out of all types of sand, but it is running out of the right sand, the best sand.  The world is low on the sand that makes the dense ICs that powers the AIs in the datacenters, the less dense ICs in the running shoes, the roads, the apartment buildings, and the glassware in the cupboard.

The demand for sand will accelerate.

Enter Sandmen: The Sand Cartels

Let’s talk about the possible future.

What is a cartel?  A cartel is an association of manufacturers or suppliers who maintain high prices at a high level and restrict competition.  A sand cartel is a group of corporations who come together and decide, as one, to rig the economic sand game. 

Like all commodities, sand is sold and traded on an open international market.  As the amount of the “right” sand dwindles, the cartels lock out competition, jack up prices, and put their foot down on the neck of the competition.  High prices mean high stock prices, big valuations, and high quarter over quarter profits for them and poverty for everyone else.

Sand is the next oil.  Some countries have tons of sand and will continue to have access to the “right” sand for the foreseeable future.  The bottoms of the Great Lakes around Michigan are some of the richest sources of the “right” sand in the world.  As cartels form around the last, big sand depots, cartels will force countries without their own native supplies of sand to buy sand on the open market at the cartels’ stated prices.

As the population grows, so does the demand for building.  The need to build turns into economic pressures for the “right” sand:

• In the wealthiest countries in the world, the population drops, but the demand for ICs in every corner of life grows.
• In the poorest countries in the world, the population explode and drives the need for building.

As sand the supplies dwindle, the cost of legal sand explodes. The cartels ensure the prices stay high and no one can enter their market – and not with a sand-replacement, either.  They won’t accept anything that endangers their profits. 

As the price of sand soars, the price of microchips should rise.  But the system doesn’t quite work that way: manufacturing upgrades, commoditization, and demand will exert an equal and opposite downward pressure on the price of microchips.  Microchip manufacturers will eat the miniscule rise in part costs in the overall pricing of the items. The price of building will skyrocket as concrete itself becomes scarce, not the microchips – the AI-ifcation of everything marches on regardless. 

The one-cent microchip rules the world. More sand, more IoT, more AI, more environmental destruction, more desertization.  Technologyeats the earth.

Getting Sand in International Crime

What happens when the sand supplies dwindle?  The first economic answer is crime. 

Organized crime is a cartel, too.  They also conspire to ensure prices stay high, and no new entrants to their products emerge. And their product is crime. 

What is a developing nation to do when a local city is urbanizing (or mass-slumming) fast, and the need for concrete grows?  The local governments cannot afford sand cartel prices. But, if they don’t build, their people have nowhere to live.  The slums sprawl, the economy contracts, and the local government becomes an ex-local government. 

The sand cartels set their prices for the microchip needs of the rich nations and not the concrete needs of the developing world.  The prices of the “right” sand, as the world’s supply dwindles, rise.  One might think the right answer is to work with the cartels for better pricing, but the actual economic answer for developing nations is to work with the organized crime cartels.

It’s a matter of pricing.  The market always finds a way. The organized crime cartels offer high sand prices, but they are not as expensive as the legitimate sand cartels.  Black market sand is cheaper for the developing world.  Since the developing world has a looser legal structure and fewer vendor reviews, nothing stops local governments from picking a less-clean freelance supplier.  Criminals even launder the transactions through a legit-looking front.  The supplier meets the customer in the middle.

Where the narco-cartels smuggled heroin, cocaine, and meth, they got into the business of smuggling sand. The narco-cartels already have the infrastructure for international smuggling, and sand has several advantages over moving drugs.  Sand doesn’t decompose in the heat, and no one has sand on their classified substance list. The DEA isn’t sending helicopters to look for sand smuggling (yet).  Sand is lucrative in the right market.

Stealing and smuggling sand worldwide has its challenges. It’s heavy, and it’s difficult to hide.  It’s hard to get over international borders in bulk without a highly sophisticated smuggling operation.  And sand is not so easy to acquire.  Sand requires raids on corporate mining operations, and cartels employ very expensive mercenaries.

But sand is more straightforward to transport than oil and less legally fraught than drugs, so it’s a fine market for organized crime syndicates to enter. Working with the organized crime cartels does bring up tricky moral issues like:

• Where did this sand come from? 
• Who died for this bag of sand to get here? 
• How was the sand smuggled from its mining places? 
• Did the cartel sweep a beach into a bag and bring it here, leaving enormous environmental damage in their wake?   

But if a local government is working with organized crime, they’re not thinking too hard about these sticky questions.

The Coming Sand War

What happens as the sand supplies dwindle? The second economic answer is war. 

Where theft is for the developing nations, war is for the rich.  Theft is cheap, and war costs money. But those who control the sand controls the economic future. The right sand is a matter of significant strategic importance to nation-states. Nation-states host (occasionally) tax-paying and local-hiring cartel-participating corporations. Taxes are good, jobs are good, so corporations are good.

When one rich nation runs out of sand, or the economic burden of paying the cartels becomes too much, nation-states gaze upon their enormous tax spend on defensive forces.  Then the government performs a calculation.  While wars do need a casus belli in the modern world – one nation-state cannot point at another nation-state and go “I want your stuff,” – such a thing can be ginned up for the delight of AI-ified modern audiences.

Corporations contribute to GDP.  Taxpaying citizens pay into the tax base.  If the corporation needs lower sand prices, it’s on the nation-state to get those lower sand prices so the corporation can continue to post enormous profits and pay those citizens’ salaries.  The nation-state can use all the diplomatic soft power at its disposal to push the other sand cartels in line on prices before it gets to a hot shooting war.   

But things can and do get out of control.  This giant expensive army and navy is sitting there.  Government officials are up for re-election.  Large corporations unable to print their trillions of microchips because of shortages isn’t going to work.  Amid tensions, the unexpected happens. Consider one strange and 100% theoretical possibility:

Lake Superior has some of the best sand in the world.  One day, an explosion goes off at the Ontonagon Sand Processing Plant, now the biggest producer of sand for IoT microchips in the world. Thousands die, and the government declares the explosion a terrorist attack.  Microchip production worldwide comes to a temporary standstill, putting a massive dent into multiple corporate profits for that quarter. The corporations threaten layoffs. 

The evidence points to Quebecois separatists who deny any involvement in the episode. In the heightened world of always-on Internet, a rumor whips around that the Quebecois separatists have more attacks planned. The mood in the US shifts deliberately Anti-Canadian.  The media dumps fuel on the fire.  The US government wants to take possession of Toronto because of Ontario’s access to Lake Huron and Lake Erie anyway.  In response to the attack, the US declares war on Canada.  Canada, of course, isn’t sitting still since it’s the world’s producer of fracked oil… 

This scenario is ridiculous. But one could launch a war for sand as easily as a war for oil.  One massive input into a nation-state’s GDP is as good as any other.

Nation-States vs. Organized Crime

Back on the crime front, the nation-states must end the organized crime networks smuggling sand out of their lakes to the developing nations. Massive worldwide theft of a core natural resource is never a good look.

According to the sand cartels, organized crime networks put downward pressure on their prices and create a leaky back-channel for their product.  As the sand cartels are (state-backed for the most part) corporations, it’s on the nation-states to protect their interests with their large defensive forces.  That’s what those defensive forces are for – protecting sources of taxable income.  

That’s not a war, though, when the shooting starts and the army deploys to various corners of the world.  It’s militarized police action.

Bringing the Sand War to Your Game

That’s the end of some musing on how the world ends in sand.  How would you gamify these concepts to use in your game? 

Here are three Cyberpunk game seeds for anyone running a game based in the cyberpunk future.  I like time-traveling games like Timewatch, so here are two straight cyberpunk seeds and one Timewatch seed.

1. Cyberpunk: The Great Arctic Thaw from global warming is upon us.  The last few receding glaciers reveal enormous stretches of pure, perfect, “right” sand along the northernmost coasts of Canada, Alaska, Russia, and Finland.  The Sand Cartel Corporations (including the Danube Corporation) rushes in a huge land rush to claim these long stretches of lake and beach for themselves.  They all have their own private and heavily armed security forces they forward deploy into the theater as part of the land rush.  They’re willing to hire some pretty impressive thieves, saboteurs, ex-military, and ex-spies (the PCs) to undermine, screw over, and stop their employer’s rivals while grabbing that land for themselves.
2. Cyberpunk: A Danube Corporation VP hired the party to track down a group of particularly violent criminals.  Following their trail through the city and a series of informants leads the group to the Peschany Demony – Russian criminals in the sand trade. Except, it turns out the Russian sand pirates are in the employ of another Danube Corporation VP.   The two VPs are vying to knock each other out for a shot at an EVP slot up over the Danube Corporation Sand Mining Unit.  Who are the PCs going to align with?  Their VP backer?  The other guy? The Russian sand pirates?  Sell them all out to another corporate bidder who wants nothing but anarchy?
3. Timewatch: 2078 was the year when an enterprising young scientist-inventor finally proved humanity could replace the sand binding agent in concrete with a timber-based substitute.  Within the next ten years, countries around the world were using the substitute in all construction. In twenty years, it became the standard building material and contributed to the re-forestation of the world. But, she disappeared from her place in time. In her place appeared centuries of wracking Sand Wars as nation-states rose and fell, fought each other for small shreds of dominance on Planet Earth, and slowly collapsed into anarchy.  Who kidnapped the scientist-inventor from the timeline?  Aliens?  Rogue Timewatch Agents? Where did she go?  WHEN did she go?  How far back was the ripple in time to ensure she’d never be born?     

If you make the organized criminals into Vampires, you could do something like Night’s Black Agents.  Or the players are Vampires, and they could be out to stop the organized crime sand cartels and their nefarious plots (and eat them).