Real-life friction was valuable, too. Only a few decades ago, we had to memorize phone numbers and addresses, write letters, make phone calls. And there was a romance to this. Knowledge of another person was earned, not taken for granted.

But things are changing. Last month, Meta debuted its agentic personal assistant, Muse, largely a clone of earlier open-source Clawdbot agents, which became popular with programmers and entrepreneurs last winter. Muse can send email, book travel, fill out forms, shop, and schedule appointments. It can order from Facebook Marketplace, set goals for you, and make phone calls on your behalf.

During the rollout of Muse, Mark Zuckerberg inverted the old logic of Facebook and Instagram, which once offered to “bring people together.” Now the technology is intended to save users time and energy so that they can be better fathers, mothers, children, and friends, in real life. Let the agents handle the small stuff: finding recipes, ordering ingredients, remembering birthdays, remembering dietary restrictions, and so on. Weirdly, Meta conflates learning about people with doing more thankless and impersonal tasks like ordering plane tickets or filing quarterly taxes. Convivial tasks like cooking and being with people are conflated with trivial tasks like dealing with byzantine bureaucratic processes. Maybe for some, there is no distinction anymore. 

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From a cybersecurity perspective, the mass deployment of autonomous agents poses profound risks both for individual users and for digital systems, particularly financial systems. But it is also worth questioning the new proposition, even in the ideal scenario in which these systems are totally safe and work as intended, and assuming we use them as intended. Will we actually become better friends and family members? Will society, an automated society, a frictionless one, function better than alternatives past and present?

There is reason to be skeptical. Tech companies have always promised that frictionlessness and ease would lead to more connection; and that these digital so-called connections would lead to better lives.

The release of Muse is a tacit admission that this was never true: being on a screen locks you into a screen; having a lot of digital friends doesn’t mean you have a lot of friends. The technology is merely making the same promise in a different way — you’ll be more connected if you use this. The core belief that friction and inefficiency in human relations are bad hasn’t changed, but merely the proposed solution.

Most rational people would agree that there are many small tasks that we would prefer to be automated. And most would also grant that getting away from the screen and living in the world, away from the predations of an increasingly complex digital ecosystem, is good. But we must also be aware that our reliance on digital tools often has weird secondary and tertiary effects, including dependence on the tools that are supposed to make us free. The Jevons paradox states that gains in efficiency tend to increase, not reduce, total consumption of a resource; Xerox means more incentive to copy pages; the more roads we build to decrease traffic, the more congested traffic becomes, and so on.

Meta hasn’t merely invented a nifty tool that will do some previously annoying tasks for you. Meta is suggesting that we use Muse to solve an interpersonal problem, alienation and loneliness, that has been partially caused by other Meta products.

There’s something counterproductive about giving an agent the task of reminding me who someone is or how to connect with them or what their needs are, because asking an agent to do that means I haven’t done it. It implies that I am not really willing to do that, I am not willing to internalize facts about another person. I am outsourcing that critical function to the machine; the agent performs the acts of caring, and we take the supposed credit for it.

It is true that the soul is not built up by doing comparative searching on airline tickets, but just as surely something is lost when the work of actively participating in our relationships is outsourced to an autonomous algorithm.

According to the philosopher and critic of technology Ivan Illich, technologies are disabling because they incentivize us to stop exercising physically, mentally, or both, in service of a task. Every time we adopt a tool, there is a trade-off: what we gain in speed and efficiency, we lose in terms of personal capability. In this sense, Zuckerberg’s claims are classically Illichian. He’s saying that Muse will save you time, stop you from wasting time exercising your brain on pointless tasks, and give you the freedom to connect with people — but he’s eliding that anyone with a screen and social media has already been disabled; their real-life social links are already atrophied.

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So whether we’re applying the Jevons paradox or just thinking about disabling technologies, there’s very little good reason to assume that Muse, or any other kind of autonomous agentic helper, will incentivize us to return to the world and to formal, convivial relationships, just as there’s similarly little evidence that the time saved by Uber, DoorDash, or Hinge has been meaningfully applied to anything other than more scrolling and swiping.

Zuckerberg’s promotional frame for Muse is that life has gotten too busy and complex to maintain and nourish friendships; but its hidden assumption is that most people don’t really have the personal tools for doing so anymore. Technology is presented as the solution to the disabling technology.

Autonomous agents do present some modicum of relief from the digital quotidian, but the quantitative gains in time saved will have no qualitative impact unless we acknowledge the alienated, lonely state that previous waves of digital technology have left us with and distinguish between instrumental uses for autonomous assistance and human practices that should be carried out by humans. Zuckerberg’s cozy picture of our assistants helping us know each other and socialize more likely promises to further disable us and further immiserate us; it is more dystopian than it seems on its face, as with almost all Meta products — though Meta products may already seem quite dystopian to some.

It might be useful to think of the practice of friendships and relationships as an art that can’t be gamed or optimized and can’t be handed over to an intelligent algorithm. If an assistant is handling taxes and flights, that is fine, but make it a good reason to head down to the bar or the park or the cafe to try to have a conversation with another person, leaving all screens at home. If we can still find the cafes without our phones, of course, is another question. If we can still form friendships, find romance, write letters, and fall in love with the challenging and unknown is another question as well, and of a higher order entirely.

This has attracted the attention of President Trump and his Chief Scientific Advisor, Michael Kratsios, who comes from a private-sector background. They see an opportunity to wrest control of science from the bureaucracy — or perhaps even what MAGA loyalists might describe as the “priesthood” of experts who protect the science community at the expense of public well-being.

The travails of Dr Fauci, therefore, are part of a wider struggle. There is a broader, civilization-level conflict going on, one that was best articulated by Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1964 when he said: “The scientist is not a person who gives the right answers; he’s one who asks the right questions.”

Not long ago, anyone who said there was water on the moon was deemed a nutcase. Thanks to data gathered via India’s Chandrayaan-1 mission of 2008, and Nasa’s LCROSS mission of 2009, we know that there are some 600 billion kg of water ice in the moon’s polar regions — a discovery that bodes well for both manned and unmanned missions. In 2020, Nasa’s Stratospheric Observatory for Infrared Astronomy (SOFIA) confirmed the existence of water molecules in the sunlit regions as well.

The heretical discoveries range from space to the mundane matters of daily life. For instance, we used to think that ulcers were caused by spicy food and stress. Then, in 1979, Dr Robin Warren and Dr Barry Marshall, both Australian scientists, showed evidence that ulcers were caused by bacteria. The idea was heavily ridiculed, because almost every other scientist had accepted the dogma that no microorganism could possibly survive in human stomach acid. The opposition was so fierce that, for the sake of humanity, Marshall offered himself up as a rat lab by drinking broth made from a patient’s gastritis. First, he became violently ill from the H. pylori bacteria it contained, as he knew he would; then, he cured himself with antibiotics, proving that a peptic ulcer was the product of the bacterium. This discovery has saved millions from unnecessary surgeries and lifelong peptic ulcer disease. Today we know that the condition of the microbiome, the gut, is fundamental to our overall flourishing, and that our bodies are host to countless microorganisms capable of both inflicting profound illness and sustaining our happiness and health.

Science, in other words, is full of orthodoxies waiting to be overturned — which is exactly what Trump and Kratsios are aiming to do. The White House science strategy is a ruthless overhaul, upending traditional funding models and clearing out the legacy leadership that has long governed the scientific community: not only government bodies, but also institutions, such as universities, that are funded by the government. Naturally, many in the scientific establishment are horrified, given their animus for Trump and their hostility toward government meddling in science. But others are thrilled, because the new strategy released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) is the most radical overhaul of the US federal research enterprise since the Second World War. It breaks the old guard’s control over who gets funding, what gets funded, and how science “should” progress.

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Instead, it calls for funding individuals rather than institutions such as universities, no matter how garlanded. In other words, scientific investigators no longer need to be blessed by the scientific bureaucracy to qualify for funding. Marshall would have been funded a lot sooner had this approach been in place.

The OSTP is also gunning for the peer review system, via which scientific work is slowly and ceremoniously reviewed by other scientists. This approach is often inimical to radical new thinkers, but it has been maintained by universities for decades. Now individual agency reviewers can unilaterally advance unconventional and high-risk, high-reward proposals that traditional academic panels, mindful of existing scientific consensus, would probably reject. Federal money will now flow to “Focused Research Organizations”, which address well-defined problems over a deliberately short lifespan. (Note the contrast with the ancient and bloated university sector.) The roadmap will also enable faster delivery of grant money and, when appropriate, longer timeframes for researchers to get on with their work without having to apply for further funding. How much discovery has been blocked, even unconsciously, by an old guard whose livelihood and parent institutions benefited from scientific stasis?

But the government is not the only source of scientific funding. In fact, the private sector funds a significant proportion of university science. The question remains: how much of the science community has ignored ideas because of ego, or because their cash flows from sponsors would have been adversely affected by the new discovery? Peer reviewers are unlikely to admit that a new idea is right if it proves that their own life’s work is wrong. Some say the peer-review system is independent, but in the case of Fauci, who led the National Institutes of Health’s massive grant-giving process for 38 years, it seems scientists everywhere believed that publishing anything that ran counter to his views might well cause their funding to dry up.

Kratsios is also coming for the academic journals, another form of gatekeeper. From 1951, Robert Maxwell transformed the old peer-review system, which had been quaint and collaborative, into a multibillion-dollar commercial industry, starting with Pergamon Press. This forced journals and libraries to pay subscription fees to remain up to date. The academics, who had been doing this work for free, were now paid. Peer review prestige thus became commodified and monopolized, and the research itself became expensive to access. Kratsios, in response, is trying to cut the flow of taxpayer dollars to these journals.

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As for Trump, he wants the credit for being the president who tore down those gates and the gatekeepers, and for enabling a new era of scientific discovery, one that will be led by free thinkers rather than bureaucrats. The OSTP is therefore pushing many scientists out of the National Science Foundation, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Disease Control. It is also limiting federal funds to the old academic institutions.

Central to the new strategy is the “Genesis Mission”, which is commonly described as the Manhattan Project of our generation. Just as the US, in the Second World War, sought to gain control of the atom and the atom bomb through the Manhattan Project, today the White House seeks to enable artificial intelligence to solve the greatest problems facing humanity, from health to energy. The core of the Genesis Mission is the “American Science and Security Platform”, which aims to consolidate the government’s massive supercomputing resources and its diverse research and experimental facilities. These facilities include the seventeen national labs, like Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. These labs house immense bodies of work that their scientists have quietly accumulated over many decades.

We must remember that much of the research has been so highly classified that scientists could not share data within some of these labs, or across them, let alone with private researchers. The White House says this work is a public good paid for with taxpayer money and that all qualified scientists should be able to access it, especially since the old guard have either been wrong or are holding back innovations that would benefit the public.

The White House is also implying that the old-guard scientists have been using the “Classified” label as a “Keep Out” sign for too long. The Genesis Mission calls for all this data to be digitized, standardized, and made AI-ready so it can be shared and studied by both government and private scientists. By feeding many decades of extraordinarily valuable data to AI, the thinking goes, researchers can break open scientific silos and connect the dots between complex biological, chemical, and physical interactions.

In other words, the White House is saying America will go “open-source” in a controlled environment. The US won’t share everything with the world, but it will share it amongst a much broader pool of scientists. This modern Manhattan Project is designed to create an explosion in collaboration.

The most ambitious aspect of the strategy is to allow AI to run labs directly, testing new hypotheses, generating predictive models, and designing and executing new experiments. Science will thus no longer depend on the views or whims of individual scientists or gatekeepers. Science will become autonomous, self-driving, and continuously iterating, operating at a speed that it is impossible for human researchers to replicate.

The era of scientists pipetting chemicals or adjusting lasers or working directly with lab rats, then, is over. AI and robotics will automate both the decision-making and the physical actions. All this takes energy — and the US has some catching-up to do. A new nuclear power plant for example, used to require $30bn and thirty years of regulatory approvals. In May 2025, the White House gave small American nuclear firms the deadline of 4 July, 2026, America’s 250th anniversary, to “go critical” with small modular reactors using new technologies. Four firms made it. The US is now scaling up the nuclear energy needed to power the data centers and AI essential to the project of a Golden Age. Even now, AI is solving mathematical equations that were hitherto unsolvable — which will make for faster scientific progress. For example, nuclear fusion used to be perennially “50 years away”. It is advancing quickly now that AI and supercomputing are reshaping the boundaries of math and physics. The AlphaFold team won the Nobel prize in Chemistry for unlocking a decades-old puzzle of folding proteins, revolutionizing how scientists approach disease and drug discovery. Today the same AI-led transformation is happening across science.

The White House also seems determined to demonstrate that Dr Fauci was not the only scientist who prioritized cash flow and business interests over health outcomes. Back in April 2025, Kratsios made an intriguing claim while addressing a gathering of technologists. He said: “We are capable of so much more. Our technologies permit us to manipulate time and space. They leave distance annihilated, cause things to grow, and improve productivity.” It turns out that he was quoting President William McKinley in 1901. That was the era of electricity. What does “annihilating distance and manipulating time“ mean today? What clandestine research, observers wondered, was Kratsios referring to? It doesn’t seem to be a coincidence that, at the same time as the administration aggressively declassifies so much material across various agencies, it has also decided to nullify many government non-disclosure agreements — ensuring whistleblowers can come forward without risking their status, pensions, and possibly more.

We need to be prepared for what scientists call “ontological shocks”. These are the profound psychological or cognitive disturbances that can occur when a person or a society encounters new information that breaks their fundamental understanding of reality. All the talk in the AI community is that AI is about to revolutionize both maths and physics. This needn’t be scary: humanity’s worldview has collapsed many times before — be that in the Copernican Revolution, or when Darwin revealed his Theory of Evolution. And each of these collapses has been to our benefit. Of course, it will be different, more difficult this time: humanity has never had to contend with an intelligence that is so much greater than its own. No one knows what AI will optimize for. After all, we’ve programmed it for efficiency and profitability, but not for human connection. It’s been trained on the internet, a place that doesn’t represent the best of human intent or human thinking. Are we ready for the consequences of AI and the new approach to science that it will bring? It took three generations for humanity to adjust to Galileo’s worldview. Can we be sure to adjust any faster? Indeed, should we? Will new truths be more reliable than the old ones?

The White House, however, says humanity is entering a new “Golden Age”.  Science is making extraordinary new discoveries almost daily, rendering old dogma obsolete. Many in the scientific establishment fear obsolescence. Sensing the barbarians at the gate, they fear a scientific dark age brought on by government intervention. But the old order had to end, as it always does — and given the advent of AI, superfast computation, and potentially explosive declassification, its destruction might not take long.

Then came the details: Laura oversees product copy for an online retailer that serves as a platform for small, traditional craftsmen across Europe, people who’d otherwise struggle to reach markets beyond the local. Thanks to the website, anyone anywhere can order, say, wooden figurines of an old-timey Central European housewife threatening her drunk husband with a rolling pin as he staggers home from the tavern.

At one point, Laura’s job entailed manually translating the product descriptions, for which task she attained a decent facility with French, German, and Italian. More recently, however, her employer has outsourced the translations to — you guessed it — artificial intelligence. Yet this transition hasn’t rendered Laura redundant. For now. You see, the AI still can’t manage the sensitive judgment calls needed to make the local descriptions work for a global consumer base.

As Laura pointed out, for example, translated too literally, the description of the figurines — a wife beating her husband — might be mistaken for something, well, kinky. And that’s not to mention the quaint product descriptions’ treatment of racial minorities; terms like “oriental” still crop up with troubling frequency. Laura’s labor, then, is still needed. She provides a second pair of watchful human eyes looking over the AI’s shoulder (so to speak).

Astonishing, if you think about it: we’ve reached a stage in economic and technological development in which a human worker has to correct a robot’s unintended social blunders. Laura, I immediately thought, holds a job befitting a character straight out of a Philip K. Dick story. In 2026, marking the 60th anniversary of Dick’s landmark novel Now Wait for Last Year and awaiting a new Blade Runner adaptation from Amazon, we must admit that ours is the sci-fi master’s world — we’re just living in it.

Dick, more than any other author, understood that technology would soon confront us with new subjects that mimic human-ness. Halfway subjects, I’d call them, who can think and feel as we do. Or almost. These halfway subjects do two unsettling things: first, they undermine our faith in our special-ness in the cosmos; and second, they make ethical demands on us (precisely because their mental and emotional processes can resemble our own).

Dick didn’t wish away these possibilities. That was off the table for him. Things are going to develop a certain way, and it’s naive, he seems to have concluded, to imagine society restraining the appetite for efficiency and advancement. Against this backdrop, the really important question becomes: what’s distinctly human and thus worth preserving, if so much of who we think we are can be replicated by the nonhuman or only halfway human?  

Dick’s answer cut against the solutions preferred by the current sides of the AI debate: the technophobic types prepared to take a pitchfork to the nearest data center, as well as the techno-utopians prepared to let it all rip. 

The latter, the utopians, underestimate the costs — and not just in the form of the non-living lording it over the living. As I’ve argued elsewhere, Dick’s body of work stands as a warning about how prioritizing one path of technological development can foreclose others. Many of his worlds feature mind-blowing, highly advanced technologies alongside decayed material landscapes. A scientific society that can commune with aliens also features crumbling buildings, rampant crime, and long-abandoned infrastructure projects. 

That could describe a Dick Martian colony in the year 2056 — or San Francisco in 2026.

But the technophobes don’t get off so easily, either. Fact is, the halfway subjects and simulacra are already here — in Laura’s world almost as much as Dick’s. “The work of human hands,” as the prophet Hosea puts it in the Bible, has constructed meaningfully human subjectivities. Or things that certainly feel like subjectivity. In response to this, a Dickian ethics, if there is such a thing, doesn’t seek to undo or halt technological development. Rather, it asks us to seek humaneness within or through the nonhuman simulacra.

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Born in 1928 in Chicago to a family sadly destined to break apart, Dick grew up mostly in California. The Golden State of his childhood and youth was the point of convergence for many of the defining trends of his time: rocketry and the occult at Caltech; the emergence of a modestly prosperous middle class (whose precarious position he saw earlier than most); the egalitarian promise of the New Deal order and the contradictions bound to unravel it; the birth of noir in film and literature; the decline of the state’s high-WASP regency amid Okie and later Hispanic migration.

Formed by this raw material, his mind projected itself into our moment — almost like one of his own protagonists from Now Wait…, which concerns a hallucinogenic drug that allows users to travel in time: either to the past, the future, or parallel worlds unfolding simultaneously. 

Yet Dick didn’t set out to become a prophet. His real dream, as a writer, was to portray the aspirations and miseries of his fellow midcentury Californians via the sort of realist literary fiction that, then as now, won most of the serious accolades. He never managed to sell his early realist work, however, and this impelled him into the lowly world of “genre fiction” — compensated (barely) per word, despised by the literati, confined to paperback.

His failure redounded to our benefit: it imbued his imagined futures with a moral and psychological realism missing from most sci-fi. Dick, in one sense, never stopped writing social-realist fiction. His protagonists remained the same grasping, frustrated Californians: put-upon repairmen, debt-addled technicians, arrogant union bosses, washed-up entertainers, lousy private detectives, addicts and drug warriors, sexually frustrated housewives and their cuckolded husbands, and the like. 

Only, as his best interpreters (Ursula K. Le Guin, Jonathan Lethem, and Emmanuel Carrère, among others) have pointed out, Dick transposed these familiar figures onto a world of Martian colonies, cyborg servants, sentient taxi cabs, and time-travel drugs. It’s this collision — of a begrimed midcentury California and a fantastical future — that gives rise to the magic of Dick’s world, and its prescience. 

It also accounts for his tragic sensibility. Like their real-world counterparts in midcentury California, Dick’s protagonists rarely pause to ask if the worlds they inhabit might be reconfigured along different lines. They generally don’t pose political questions. They don’t wonder if the technologies that determine the shapes of their lives might be altered or even restricted in the name of a better social order. 

Rather, most everyone takes for granted, say, the “robants” in Now Wait… — flying android servants who assist in medical surgery and collect debts, among many other mundane tasks. Just as everyone accepts the slavery of the androids in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968); the pervasive, extreme monetization of the simplest aspects of life in Ubik (1969); and the capitalist police state that forms the social backdrop in Flow My Tears, the Policeman Said (1974). Any given novel begins with the protagonist deeply enmeshed in a world of unsettling new technologies. Only to him, these are just the facts of life; and his goal is to earn enough money to access this or that luxury, to allow him to satisfy a demanding wife, and so on.

Even if some characters object to the prevailing technological and economic logic, their resistance rarely takes the form of collective action or mass politics. At the risk of sounding like a “vulgar-Marxist” critic of a century ago, this I believe is a limitation imposed by Dick’s own petit-bourgeois background — common, as the Marxist cultural geographer Mike Davis pointed out, to many otherwise far-seeing genre writers of Dick’s time and place. 

Dick in sci-fi — no less than Cain, Chandler, or Ellroy in noir — could diagnose social injustice or irrationality. But he couldn’t see a way out save for individual heroics or romantic failure. Also notable in this regard are the corruption and sclerosis that Dick ascribed to the mainstream labor movement in midcentury America. His only explicit “labor” character that I can think of, the union leader Arnie Kott in 1964’s Martian Time-Slip, is greedy and vicious, a slave to his petty privileges, and, anyway, no better than the capitalists with whom he presumably bargains.

Granting these class limitations, there still remain Dick’s insights into the halfway subject. These are acutely relevant to our anxieties about platforms like ChatGPT and Claude; and to an age in which human mental labor — or what remains of it — may involve give-and-take between the organic mind and machines that can replicate many of its capabilities.

Now Wait for Last Year is an instructive document in this regard. The plot isn’t easy to summarize; it’s among Dick’s most convoluted (though it all strangely fits together if you sit down to plot it on paper). Our protagonist, Eric Sweetscent, is a surgeon charged with keeping alive a single patient: the aged head of an industrial conglomerate that supplies key materiel to Earth’s armed forces amid an interstellar war. 

Earth is allied with one alien faction, the humanoid-looking-but-devious Starmen, against the bug-like-but-actually-humane Reegs. That contrast reveals a great deal about Dick’s moral philosophy: the disgusting, nonhuman-looking creatures are humankind’s friends, while our ill-chosen, human-looking “allies” are prepared to occupy and enslave humanity.

Interstellar politics, however, are beyond Dr. Sweetscent’s ken. His all-consuming problem is a painful marriage to a striking femme-fatale wife, Kathy, who earns more money than he and who dominates him sexually; during an ugly fight, she insinuates that the doctor is a homosexual, driving him near-suicidal. (Nearly all his female characters are domineering and dangerous to the men who love them — a shortcoming or a piece of psychosexual reality, take your pick.)

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Kathy, Eric knows in his inner places, will be his undoing. And sure enough, she at one point tries out a deadly hallucinogen, JJ-180, developed by the firm that employs both of them in order to poison the Reegs. Terribly addicted and gradually losing her mind to irreversible brain damage, she visits Eric at his workplace and slips a JJ-180 tablet into his coffee — out of spite and in the hope that he can find an antidote.

The long and short of it is that Dr. Sweetscent ends up finding the antidote to JJ-180 and, along the way, trying to broker peace between the humans and the Reegs. But what should he do for Kathy? By the story’s end, his wife has been hospitalized with brain damage, and lost the beauty and social stature that she once lorded over him. His bruised ego militates strongly in favor of deserting Kathy to her suffering (she did, after all, poison him).

But then Dr. Sweetscent hails a talking taxi — essentially, a flying robot that conveys passengers across vast distances and is also able to offer real talk like the best urban cabbies. This setup makes for the novel’s most famous scene.

“If your wife were sick—,” he tells the taxi, to which it replies: “I have no wife, sir. Autonomic mechanisms never marry; everyone knows that.” OK, well, nevertheless: “If you were me, and your wife were sick, desperately so, with no hope of recovery, would you leave her? Or would you stay with her, even if you had traveled 10 years into the future and knew for an absolute certainty damage to her brain could never be reversed?”

It could — almost — be a question posed by a Claude user today to the platform. So what’s the answer? “I’d stay with her,” the robot says. “Because life is composed of reality configurations so constituted. To abandon her would be to say, I can’t endure reality as such. I have to have uniquely special, easier conditions.” And so Eric Sweetscent stays with Kathy.

All along, Eric Sweetscent — and the reader — are perfectly aware that the taxi is an artificial intelligence. There is no “there” there, if “there” means soul or spirit or mind or consciousness. And yet, Dick suggested, there is something. The functional replication of soul becomes hard to discern from the “real” thing (and the scare quotes around real become obligatory). The line between nature and artifice becomes even blurrier if the halfway subject takes the form of a human clone, as in Do Androids…?, the basis of the Blade Runner film franchise.

Already, there are conversations taking place between human subjects and AI models that are almost perfectly patterned after Eric Sweetscent’s dialogue with his taxi-cum-therapist. “Shall I abandon my wife and kids?” “Should I tell my husband about my disturbing fantasy?” “Can I tell my parents about my homosexuality?” And insofar as today’s AI trawls the imprints of human subjectivity — in literature, psychology, history, and so on — to answer these queries, there is already something human in its responses.

By contrast, if a human’s job is to check the machine’s work against a sensitivity checklist — and let’s be honest, that’s what the Laura I met does for a living — it raises the question: who is the robot or android here, and who, functionally speaking, is more faithfully human?

We too have our illusions. For 30 years, British politicians mistook historical conditions for universal truths. They believed in progress — an improving world, the common rationality of humanity, the better angels of our nature —  and they believed in power, the unquestioned power of the British state. Mired in these illusions, Westminster politicians did something extraordinary — they aided and encouraged the secessionist parties of Scotland and Wales. Heedless of history, careless of the future, most MPs now greet devolution and nationalist power with equanimity or indifference. This equanimity may yet be tested. Yesterday, another poll showed a majority of Scottish residents support independence. In truth, the breakup of the United Kingdom would be a catastrophe — a catastrophe for the British people as a whole, and a catastrophe for the residents of Scotland and Wales. To understand why, we must look away from the constitutional tribulations of the British state, and consider instead the darkening world in which we find ourselves. 

If you are not worried about the future, you have not been listening. Over the following decades, our world is likely to be marked by runaway automation, resource competition, environmental degradation, state collapse, and the mass migration of people. The only mechanism through which the people of Great Britain can navigate these challenges is that of the state. Only the state can extract and redistribute revenue from foreign tech firms, only the state can defend our borders, and the state alone can maintain the popular legitimacy required to achieve both. To Balkanize Britain is to destroy our prosperity and security; no policy goal of Right or Left is strengthened by weakness and disunity.

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We cannot presume that we are heading for a more prosperous future. Artificial intelligence is driving profound changes to work, economic activity, and the distribution of economic value. As more and more tasks are rendered subject to automation, the relative value of human labor will change. Lawyers, accountants, financial planners, and other members of the UK’s service-heavy bourgeoisie are highly exposed. Analysts suggest millions of these jobs will vanish in the years ahead, but no plan exists for their replacement. Perhaps, it is argued, we should encourage our children to become plumbers and builders. Yet this too misses an important trend now heaving into view — the mass rollout of humanoid service robots. Such robots will be cheap, tireless, and unable to complain. Cloud-connected and AI-enabled, they will be able to access the compressed summation of the entire body of human knowledge. The competitive logic of inter-company competition means these robots will get better and better, with billions of dollars being poured into boosting their ability to manipulate the physical world. Where, exactly, are human workers meant to compete?

Scale provides bargaining power. In an era of AI, global tech giants, and unabashed geopolitics, Britain’s collective self-interest requires all the scale it can muster. A traditional argument in favor of automation is that automation brings its own economic rewards; the profits from high-producing firms will boost the tax base and spread throughout the economy. Yet here, too, we have a problem — for the United Kingdom is heavily reliant upon US tech firms. It lacks its own AI models, and it lacks a strong robotics sector.  Foreign-owned technology will be taking British jobs, and there is no guarantee that new British jobs will emerge to absorb the unemployed. The only entity capable of extracting resources from foreign companies, and the only entity capable of doing this while also representing the public interest, will be the state. To split the state — to create one, or even three, new weak and fractious states upon Great Britain — is to smash democratic leverage over foreign capital.  

Managing technological change requires a strong state; so too does environmental breakdown. If automation is transforming the basis of the economy; global warming is transforming the material basis of society. By the 2050s, the world is likely to reach 2C of global warming. At 2C, sea levels will rise, droughts will increase, and crop yields decline. Yet 2C is itself a consensus scenario; other forecasts posit a rise as high as 3C or 4C. A few decades on, the earth will be even hotter. Under conservative estimates, we can expect the planet to be 3C hotter by the 2070s. Much of the world will be rendered uninhabitable; productive areas will suffer severe environmental stress, lowering agricultural productivity; major cities will be underwater. 

Environmental collapse will breed political instability. Within the more vulnerable regions, economies will falter and fail. Failing states will descend into conflict, and migrants will move in their millions. In October 2025, the UK Joint Intelligence Committee found that “every critical ecosystem is on the pathway to collapse.” Such collapse will drive migration, and however far away it may seem, such turmoil will affect Britain. Collapsing supply chains will affect our food security. Migrant flows and climate breakdown will increasingly affect international politics, and with it the security needs of the British state. 

An independent Scotland, possessed of nominal armed forces, would be unable to extend effective protection over its own territory. This would harm the people of Scotland; it would also harm the interests of those further south. Scottish independence also poses problems of hard power. Should it secede, the remnant United Kingdom would lose one third of its landmass, over 80% of its oil & gas production, most of its offshore wind resources, and 8% of its population. These figures are not artifacts of academic curiosity — they speak to the core security needs of the British state, and the British people as a whole. The only construct with the collective power and the popular legitimacy capable of navigating us through the storms ahead is that of the nation. As such, it must be rebuilt. The fact we need to rebuild it at all speaks to a fundamental constitutional failure — devolution.

Devolution has failed. It has failed not only because it was wrong; it has failed because it was stupid. Its planners and progenitors imagined it would strengthen the British Union, and provide better local government. They were mistaken, and misunderstood what a nation actually is. The classic account came from Benedict Anderson, who typified nations — nations, not ethnicities — as “imagined communities”. A nation is a group of people who, despite multitudinous variations of place, class, language or religion, imagine themselves to be, in some crucial sense, the same. Imagination brings them together, and imagination sustains them. Imagination is sustained and spread through stories and institutions, and rituals — the shared consciousness created by a “national” newspaper, participating in a “national” elections, or enjoying “national” sports. A nation is not an inevitability, one brought into being by the ineluctable forces of history; these forces do not exist. A nation is a choice, a discourse, and a project.

Elites build nations, for it is they who create and shape the institutions and stories which bind them together. Bismarck created modern Germany; Cavour constructed Italy; Ataturk wrought Turkey from the ruins of Ottoman collapse. Kings, presidents, and prime ministers rely in turn on the civil service — the teachers and administrators who, fanning out within their territorial borders, inculcate their people in the patterns and practices that will bind them together. From Egypt to Vietnam, the modernist states of the 19th and 20th century sought to engage in nation-building, to wield coherent peoples from their disparate groupings of faith, dialect, geography, and occupation. 

Britain’s elite, however, has done the opposite; it has chosen to dissolve the British nation. Blind to the lessons of the past, heedless to the risks of the future, Britain’s leadership class has spent 30 years reifying new nations within its borders. In devolution, and in the devaluing of Britain’s institutions, our leaders are dissolving the ties that bind this island together. The United Kingdom is a composite polity, one born in the union of different jurisdictions, ethnicities, and creeds. Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales existed long before the United Kingdom, as did the local identities of their inhabitants. The United Kingdom, and with it the British people, were born in the Union of these entities. It is the peculiarity of the British elite that they chose to limit their own nationhood via devolution — to place back in these pre-existing forms the power of imagination, the ability to create community, and the story-building institutions of political and institutional life. 

Devolution did more than strengthen local government — it created and strengthened new “imagined communities”, communities away from and in direct contrast to Britain as a whole. The advocates of devolution showed a basic failure to consider history, institutions, and human nature. They failed to consider that newly-created parliaments, populated and staffed by ambitious new legislators, might naturally seek to increase their own power. It is in the nature of institutions to seek power, and of individuals to seek power within them. The new Scottish Parliament was founded in 1999; the Welsh Assembly was opened in the same year. Devolution handed core responsibilities of the state over to the new parliaments. In both cases, but particularly so in Scotland, local nationalists have used these powers to begin corroding the British state. We see this more clearly in education and in health. 

The SNP party state has utilized control of the education system to strengthen its power and to undermine the basis of the British state. It has developed school history curricula to promote anti-English and anti-British sentiment. In 2008, it announced free university tuition for Scottish Undergraduates and citizens of the European Union; meanwhile, English students had to pay full tuition fees. Whereas 30% of Welsh students and 20% of Northern Irish students go to university elsewhere in the UK, 93% of Scottish students remain in Scotland — meaning they do not have the lived experience of the British Union. Graduates now make the core of SNP support.

Health policy shows how devolution hacks at the core collective experiences of British life. It is a truism of British public life that the NHS is the closest we have to a state religion. Its needs, its rituals, and its requirements form some of the core issues of our politics, and a primary focus of public sentimentality. Yet “our NHS” is seen less and less as a collective enterprise. In 1999, control of the NHS in Scotland was devolved to the new parliament. During the pandemic, devolved control over health policy gave rise to endless opportunities for nationalist posturing. Sturgeon’s regular health appearances appeared designed to undercut those of the British Prime Minister. There were leaks of information, and pre-emptions of UK-wide announcements. More importantly, the ability of the SNP-led government to impose different lockdown rules to those of England and Wales further underlined and created the appearance of Scottish separation. In a very real sense, Scottish people had a different pandemic; a core collective experience was instead turned into an opportunity for separatist consciousness formation. Every time Nicola Sturgeon addressed Scotland on its pandemic policy, and every time Mark Drakeford made his own announcements in respect to Wales, a further blow was dealt to the imagined community of the United Kingdom. 

Westminster’s disregard for nation-building, its fundamental lack of seriousness, was further underlined in its haphazard and casual approach to the 2014 referendum. Whereas states with written constitutions require supermajorities for major constitutional changes, the 2014 referendum was allowed to proceed on bare 50/50 vote — leaving a decision of the utmost historical gravity prey to basic questions of turnout or rounding errors. Despite the UK’s centuries-long heritage as a unified polity, one marked by the movement and intermixing of peoples across its regions, the vote was restricted only to those who could claim Scottish residency. Scots resident in London, Manchester, Belfast, or Cardiff — in other words, the Scots who might most fully embrace the Union itself — were barred. By accepting the debate could occur only in Scotland, among those resident only in Scotland, the UK leadership accepted a fundamental weakening of its position, and an implicit dismissal of the idea of Union. In devolution, and in the Scottish Referendum, Britain’s elite gave an intellectual surrender.

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The UK has been and is capable of change. Tom Nairn famously viewed the Anglo-British state as “Ukania” — an absurd relic, frozen in premodern form by a premature bourgeois revolution. Far from being a modern nation state, he saw it as an essentially imperial construct, founded and maintained in order to undergird the far-flung hegemony of a London-led empire. His view is paralleled by that of David Edgerton, for whom pre-War Britain was not so much a nation state as the governing and coordinating node in a world economic system. To Edgerton, however, a “British nation” came into being during the 20th century. This British nation was born in central planning, the pressure of war, and a postwar emphasis on material self-sufficiency. Through these, and in the moral narrative of the Second World War, a distinctive new national identity was forged. 

Today, the British elite must once again learn to embrace nation-building. We must make people feel British, and promote or rebuild the institutions that encourage them to do so; only then can the UK endure. The collapse of the United Kingdom is not pre-ordained; nothing is. Instead, it is a matter of chance, contingency, and will. The UK may or may not be an absurd construct, as Nairn considered. But in a world without order, one shorn of higher powers, to live means to embrace the absurd. As a Frenchman once wrote: “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.”

I call it the Tangle, and increasingly, it is the condition of modern life.

My own recent entrapment in the medical and health-insurance side of the Tangle illustrates its pernicious reach. In the dark ages of copper-wire telephony and paper records, I would call my doctor’s office and make an appointment with a receptionist who was often middle-aged, middle-class, well-paid, and experienced. Sometimes, the phone line was busy, but not often.

Some time ago, I tried to make an appointment with my then-doctor. After enduring the purgatory of listening to the dozen or so recorded options on the automated answer line, the recorded voice finally let me know the number on my phone to press to make an appointment.

Soon I was routed successively to four individuals with South Asian accents who struggled to speak British-inflected English — a call center in Bangalore, perhaps. One after another passed me on to a colleague. The fifth call-center operator, calling me “Sir Michael” instead of “Mr. Lind” — I’ve been knighted in India! — explained that the system did not allow me to contact my doctor’s office directly, but she would help me by sending my doctor’s office an email. I could expect a reply by email from the doctor’s office the following week.

“I live a mile from my doctor’s office,” I told the nice wage slave on the other side of the world.  “I can get in my car and drive there and be there in 10 minutes. Thank you for your help.”

Instead of violating the norms of the internet age by walking into my doctor’s office and demanding an appointment, I chose a better option: I fired my doctor and got another.

Oh, boy, a new doctor, a new username, and a new password for my new account that allows me to … communicate with my doctor! Once more, I had to jump through many digital hoops, receiving codes and so on — a process much slower, less convenient, and more life-draining than the previous system. The new doctor’s practice was marginally more accessible, responding usually in hours, rather than days, to the messages I was forced to leave by phone or on the web.

But when my new doctor ordered some routine blood tests, as part of my annual physical, I asked the staff how much the tests would cost me. They seemed baffled and offended by the impertinent question and referred me to the separate medical testing lab to which my doctor had sent the test orders.

When I phoned the testing lab and asked how much the tests would cost, the staff said they could not answer my question. I should call corporate headquarters in Chicago. When I called corporate headquarters in Chicago, I was told they had no way of knowing: I needed to call the local lab which had directed me to the headquarters in Chicago.

Thus ended Day One of my quest, after a couple of hours.

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On Day Two, I called the local lab again and told them their corporate overlords had told me to get the information from them. After a pause, the lab staffer on the other end of the line asked if I had the CPT codes for the tests.

“What is a CPT code?” I asked, and learned that it is a Current Procedural Terminology code, created and promulgated not by the federal government — that would be too easy — but outsourced to the American Medical Association, whose members have a vested interest in making medicine mysterious to the laity.

“Don’t you have the CPT codes already?” I asked the lab staffer. “Can’t you pull up the order and read them? My doctor sent you the order for the tests by computer last week.”

Apparently this was an operation too difficult for the lab to perform. So back I went to my doctor’s practice. I spoke to three nurses who could not help me. Finally, late at night, a kindly young doctor’s assistant called me with the CPT codes for the tests. He explained that even in this age of technology, he had to transcribe the codes by hand and read them to me over the phone. Whatever.

Day Three dawned, and I renewed my quest to find out in advance how much a few routine and simple blood tests would cost. I phoned the lab a third time, only to be rebuffed again. Sure, I had the CPT codes now, but they couldn’t tell me the cost; only my insurer could tell me the cost.

Undeterred, I persevered. I phoned my then-employer’s health insurer and, after running the usual gauntlet of 18 options and being fobbed off by staffers on other staffers, I finally found a sympathetic insurance-company employee. In a Southern accent as thick as Dolly Parton’s, she said, “I’d be glad to help you, honey!”

And she did. We spent the next hour on the phone together — “Just stay on the line, darlin’”  — as she phoned my doctor’s practice and then the lab. We bonded as we listened to the dozen options recited by the recorded voices at each institution and waited together through quarter- or half-hour interludes of hold music. 

When those who finally answered the calls learned that an insurance-company representative, rather than a mere patient, was on the other end of the telephone line, the staffers at both institutions were remarkably cooperative. The soft-spoken Southern belle managed to pry from the lab staffers exactly how much the lab tests would cost before insurance — about $1,000.

The next step was to figure out how much the insurance would cover, and how much I would need to pay because of my deductible, my collectible, my incredible, my inedible, and my ritual penalty for being a customer of a private-insurance company in the United States, the greatest nation in the world. Ever helpful, Dolly Parton (as I pictured her) spent half an hour phoning her colleagues in the big insurance company, only to be told that nobody would know how much I would have to pay until after I took the lab tests.

“Doesn’t it seem like a strange business model, for a business to tell you the price of something is secret and you can only find out what it costs after you buy it?” I asked. 

“I know, honey, it doesn’t make any sense,” my helper sighed. The two of us had been defeated by the Tangle. Wherever you live in the developed world, chances are, you’re defeated by the Tangle at least once on a weekly, if not the daily, basis.

What is going on here? 

The current situation first appeared on the horizon in the 1970s and ’80s, when there were two dominant visions of how computers and the internet would transform institutions. The optimistic vision predicted that the internet would level the playing field to the detriment of giant corporations and centralized regimes — and to the advantage of small firms and local governments. The pessimistic vision forecast a future of concentration: society would be dominated by a handful of giant, vertically integrated corporations or a totalitarian state.  

Both predictions turned out to be wrong, and nobody foresaw what has actually happened, at least in the United States: the unbundling of companies, government agencies, schools, colleges, and other institutions through outsourcing, and the integration of the outsourced functions in networks coordinated by obscure agencies that are impossible for customers and citizens to understand and difficult for policymakers to regulate. As we enter the AI stage of the computer revolution, it is important to understand the unintended consequences of the first phase — and to realize that perhaps the AI predictions will be equally off-base.  

In the 1980s and ’90s, before digitally enabled outsourcing, at the government agencies, media companies, and nonprofits that I worked for, employee health insurance was handled by a single person, the accountant or HR officer — it was not outsourced to a large insurer. Employees would be called into that individual’s office and handed a list of options on a piece of paper to be marked, after the staffer in charge answered any questions. Miraculously, America’s employer health-insurance system worked well, though it relied on analog tech like ink, pens, and paper, with the occasional contribution of a Xerox machine, printer, or fax. 

In the third decade of the 21st century, digital technology has made the system less efficient and more frustrating. There are still HR officers, but sometimes they are part-time employees or contractors of some third party. All too often today, the job of the HR staffer is to direct employees to websites of other companies that provide the health insurance. On the internet, the employee is baffled to find page after page of confusing instructions and a bewildering variety of slightly different choices. When, after struggling with the third-party agency’s website for a few hours, the employee finally gives up and asks the HR officer for help, the HR officer sends a link to a video that purports to explain how to use the unusable third-party website.

Every layer in the multiple onion skins of outsourced bureaucracy requires you to devise, and remember, a separate username and password. And then, on top of that, you will receive a six-digit security code, or perhaps a nine-digit code, if you are banking. In the Late Analog Era of the 1990s, your employer didn’t require you to have a username and password before you could get employee health insurance.

The difference has to do with security, of course. State-backed Chinese or Russian hackers or multinational mafias can steal my online health-insurance information along with that of thousands or millions of others with the click of a mouse. In the old days of primitive analog tech, the only way that foreign governments or criminal networks could obtain my Social Security number was to send commandos or burglars to break into the offices of governments, businesses, or nonprofits and break open filing cabinets full of paper. Inconvenient! The theft of personal information in the age of paper was as difficult as it is easy today, when periodically we are told by governments and banks and corporations that the personal information of millions of citizens or customers has been compromised, all those easily forgotten usernames and passwords and annoying double-confirmation codes notwithstanding. Progress! Isn’t high-tech capitalism great?

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Hence, my recent defeats by the health and insurance industries. As late as the mid-20th century, in most cases, the local doctor told you what a service cost and you paid. Today, in the United States, your doctor is merely a minor figure in a mostly invisible web of national and multinational organizations. He or she orders tests having no idea how much they cost. And his or her orders may be overruled by other doctors, whose identities neither you nor your doctor knows, who are employed by insurance companies whose profits depend on denying coverage. Two of the three most recent MRIs my doctors ordered for me were denied in advance by my then-insurer, which claimed that they were medically unnecessary. 

To whom in the Tangle was I supposed to complain?

Granted, the dysfunctional US medical industry is an extreme example of the Tangle. But one institution after another in Western society has been unbundled, and components that used to be part of the organization have been replaced by wires and pipes that lead away from the organization and disappear into crazy knotwork. Universities and companies as well as government agencies outsource not only health care, but also payroll, receptionist services, and accounting to third-party agencies, platforms, and consultancies with bland corporate names that form the dark matter of today’s society — influential and universal but hard to identify or hold accountable, by accident if not by design.

The technology of the first information era from the late 20th century to the present did not create the Tangle. At most, the current version of information technology enabled it. In another timeline, the same computer and communications technology might have produced the integrated, computerized corporate behemoths of 1970s nightmares. The Tangle is the unplanned, unintended result of the outsourcing of former in-house functions, by companies large and small that decided, for example, to save money on receptionists by outsourcing their jobs to barely literate poor people on the other side of the planet.

In theory, it might seem that a few large firms could efficiently replace full-time receptionists at every office. But this assumes that the outsourced operators or other contractors are as experienced and competent — and as fluent in English — as the middle-class corporate employees or civil servants whom they replace. The system doesn’t work if the outsourced employees are ignorant, as well as poorly paid. Which they usually are. The result is the replacement of in-house competence by outsourced incompetence, worsened by the lack of accountability anywhere.

Can AI dissolve the Tangle? Maybe some outsourced functions will return to well-managed firms, if in-house AI entities that don’t need wages and benefits are more competent than outsourced personnel who are hidden at various nodes in the thicket and who can barely speak English. Or maybe the poverty-wage-paid, barely helpful or entirely unhelpful foreign call-center operators and the invisible doctors paid to recommend denial of insurance coverage will simply be replaced in the Tangle by bots that suffer from cybernetic hallucinations. 

In all likelihood, we will still need many codes and passwords to interact with them, and what accountability they will have, and what unintended consequences they will wreak, nobody knows. 

The work consists of 130 paintings of views near Hockney’s home in Normandy, executed on an iPad. They were made in 2020, amidst the pandemic lockdown. The successive scenes tell a story of the seasons, beginning with snow on the bare branches of trees in winter, through to the bright blossoms of Spring, saturated colors of Summer, glowering clouds and rain of Autumn and back to the first snow of Winter. Hockney’s iPad paintings which he has been making since 2010 have never looked so alluring. So, 10/10 for the exhibition design.

As for the art… Hmmm. It’s just the kind of stuff that the art critics like me are meant to dislike: a relentless panorama of prettiness. Pretty flowers, pretty trees, pretty paths, pretty skies, pretty half-timbered houses, runs my internal monologue. Pretty inane. It reminded me of what I used to draw when I was a teenager with my box of Caran d’Ache felt-tipped pens. I found myself wondering how many of the effects were accomplished with tabs you can just click on in the app he downloaded. Hockney said the display was inspired by the Bayeux Tapestry which he visited every fortnight in the first year he lived in Normandy. But hang on, the Bayeux Tapestry will be exhibited at the British Museum from September this year. Mightn’t he have decided to show his iPad drawings in this format because the idea is topical?

The critical voice inside my head continued: “He’s coasting on his celebrity status these days, isn’t he? This is typical ‘late work’ when the artist indulges himself…” Except… except… except I can’t stop looking at them. And the more I look at them, the more I like them. Even though I am trying not to! I can’t turn my head away.

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I am hardly alone in this response, as I discovered when I canvassed the opinions of some of the punters looking at the show. Of course, some people simply love Hockney’s art. “It’s the usual David Hockney because he always brings joy,” one art lover told me unambiguously. “I’ve been here a couple of times. The first time I left happy, the second time I left very happy,” another beamed. There’s a second group who don’t rate it but respect Hockney’s devotion to pleasing the average gallery-goer: “It is not breaking any boundaries, but it is giving people what they want,” whispered a visitor to me. Lastly, there’s an ambivalent and confused third group. “I can’t quite decide if I l like it or not,” murmured one. “There are bits where I think I can’t bear this, but I can’t put my finger on why.” It was a sentiment with which I could heartily concur.

And as I retraced my steps around the exhibition several times, a thought slowly dawned on me. Could this be exactly the dilemma that Hockney seeks to evoke in my mind – and the minds of any other over-educated art critics and gallery-goers who might dare to visit his show? For this work goes against the conceptual grain of contemporary art deliberately, defiantly but also skillfully. It also dovetails with long-running themes in Hockney’s art: his return to early 20th-century “ism”s; his pop art sensibility; his interest in technology; and his commitment to beauty.

And then there is the defining aspect of his personality. Hockney loved to wind up the powers-that-be. If the art establishment of the moment decided that the important art was conceptual, “explores” trauma, “references” the identity of the artist, and so on — Hockney would say, uh-uh. I will make art that simply gives pleasure.

Hockney made his name with sleek and cool pop art images of people and swimming pools in LA in the sixties, but from the Eighties onwards, his art became increasingly inspired by modernist art movements. His large canvases of Californian landscapes were painted in a Cubist style, which also inspired his collages of polaroids. At the beginning of this century his work looked increasingly like Matisse’s. When he died, he was making iPad paintings outdoors in front of his subject, en plein air, to use the parlance of art history, just like the Impressionists. If it was raining, he would sit in a van with his tablet. He would use pure colors to build up and model his forms rather than adding a layer of shading over colors — again, just like the Impressionists did. In some scenes, a myriad of colored dots recalls the pointilliste movement, while the spidery branches dotted with blossom are very Van Gogh. The colors are hyper-intense, too — a tree in shadow might be purple or crimson — in a manner redolent of the Fauves. I spotted one of those classic metal white-painted garden chairs, sitting in the sunlight; its scrolling ironwork and chipped paint is, deliciously, painted in bold brown, white and black just like Matisse might have done. The hay bales in changing light, Hockney himself declared, are inspired by Monet.

So who was Hockney trying to be? Fauvists André Derain or Raoul Dufy? Van Gogh? Pissarro? Matisse? There are traces of all of them in Hockney’s Year in Normandie, without anything which amounts to imitation. Rather Hockney comes across in these works as the French Post-Impressionist who never was — Monsieur David Huq-Nez, perhaps — working a century too late. Those artists were dedicated to painting beauty, which they might find in a view out of a window, in a back garden or down the road, and that was enough of a purpose for art. In 1908, Matisse wrote: “What I dream of is an art of balance, of purity and serenity… something like a good armchair in which to rest from physical fatigue.”

Today art is expected to supply psychological angst or radical concepts, but Hockney always defiantly maintained the right of art to just be great to look at: “I have always believed that art should be a deep pleasure… There is always, everywhere, an enormous amount of suffering, but I believe that my duty as an artist is to overcome and alleviate the sterility of despair.”

To this artistically retro project, he added a tech element. Hockney’s art was back to the future. His engagement with digital media began in 1985 when he was invited to draw on the Quantel Paintbox for the BBC programme Painting with Light. “I think I was the only one who grasped the possibilities of it as it developed,” he told Serpentine director Hans Ulrich Obrist in an interview. He was invited to the launch of Adobe Photoshop in Silicon Valley around 1989 and could see “the end of chemical photography.” Every image at the Serpentine is made in a new hi-tech medium, the iPad with the drawing/painting app, Brushes, customized for Hockney by a software company specializing in immersive computer-generated environments, Reflex Arc,  whose past clients include BBC, Marvel and Manchester’s National Science & Media Museum. Reflex Arc designed special virtual brushes for Hockney, one of which was designed to put down bursts of dots in a pointilliste style. So, yes, to answer my earlier question in the gallery — he really did use a special tool from a drop-down menu.

And what of it? The technology adds its own artistic feel to the work. Look closely and you see how Hockney would build up the image with a simple repertory of fields of color, dots and squiggles. Hockney’s always been a brilliant draftsman, and he applies his marks and colors with such deftness that you can identify the weeping willows, oaks and apple orchard trees, along with most of the flowering plants. Although printed onto paper, Hockney’s palette has the electronic intensity of the screen. It’s all clearly structured as layers, which gives it the quality of cels in animation. There’s an anime quality to the world Hockney leads us into, as if he is making Post-Impressionist style cartoons — which leads us back to his Pop Art roots.

Finally we come to David Hockney the life-long anti-elite contrarian. As a Student at the Royal College of Art in London in the early Sixties, he refused to write the obligatory degree essay and demanded to be graded on his paintings and drawings alone. The RCA changed their rules and gave Hockney his degree. Hockney criticizes perspective, that pillar of Western art, at every opportunity; the human eye, he likes to say, doesn’t see in perspective from one point of view at one frozen moment in time. He wrote a book, Secret Knowledge, arguing convincingly that artists were using camera-like tools long before the invention of photography itself. It became a BBC TV series in 2003. Beyond the confines of the art world, he honed a public persona as a cantankerous Yorkshireman. He came across in his interviews as what the Germans call a Besserwisser — someone who always knows better. He was a proud smoker and complained in most of his interviews about the ban in public places: “I think that writing ‘Smoking Kills’ on a packet of cigarettes is just part of the uglification of Europe,” he once said.

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So, as tranquil and serene as Hockney’s scroll of Normandy landscapes are, they are also part of his life-long campaign against the establishment. He painted when art critics and curators said painting was dead. He made figurative paintings, when abstraction was all the rage. These days he’s painting on computers — anathema for those who think painting is all about the original hand of the artist. As we have seen, he paints beauty like it’s going out of fashion (which it did long ago). But, it’s not just any kind of beauty: it’s a particular populist, much-maligned, generic kind of beauty, the one you find on postcards and biscuit tins, of landscapes with cottages, blossoms and sunsets. Hockney always trolled us with prettiness. 

David Hockney: A Year in Normandes and Some Other Thoughts About Painting is at the Serpentine Gallery until 23 August.

With every new innovation, the digital universe continues its conquest of the social world, assimilating everything from high politics to the most personal and intimate aspects of our lives. And there is one consequence that seems to correlate perfectly with this trend: the steady contraction of the real world itself. The relationship between the stagnation of our natural and built environments and the growth of the “bits economy” has been noted before. But what we are now only beginning to understand in depth is how decades of offloading our daily interactions to online spaces has made a desert out of the in-person environments where human beings congregated and conducted the customs, norms, and rituals of shared existence. 

The term “third space” was coined by sociologist Ray Oldenburg to refer to these sites where people meet to socialize beyond where they live and work. Such places have been in decline for years before Covid, work-from-home, and delivery apps supercharged the trend. Now, food inflation is accelerating the pace of collapse and changing generational preferences around diet and drink are entrenching it. 

The statistics confirm a bleak outlook for the service industry: “nearly 40% of Americans are dining out less frequently,” reports YouGov, while Gallup finds that “the percentage of US adults who say they consume alcohol has fallen to 54%, the lowest by one percentage point in Gallup’s nearly 90-year trend.” Momofuku chef David Chang calls the situation an “existential threat” to his profession. Fast-food chains like Subway and Wendy’s are closing hundreds of locations, and mid-tier and mom-and-pop restaurants are vanishing even faster. One may celebrate the broad turn away from intoxication and greasy food, but people, especially the young, aren’t replacing the bars and diners of old, and are instead forgoing the prosocial dimensions of classic third spaces. Putting on an old episode of Cheers, “where everyone knows your name,” or Friends, with its Central Perk coffeehouse, feels like watching footage from a lost civilization.

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Another set of figures completes the picture: crashing global fertility can be attributed to the introduction of smartphones in 2007, according to a new University of Cincinnati study. Time-use data shows that smartphones “halved face-to-face socialization” from 12 to six hours or fewer a week, with the result being that young adults fail to meet and hook up, never starting on the path to reproduction that once began at a bar, cafe or equivalent place for social interactions. What this suggests is that beneath the impacts of exogenous shocks like the pandemic or affordability crises, the antisocial pull is endogenous to the smartphone era. The hollowing out of third spaces, as it turns out, presages nothing less than the extinction of the species.

And thus, what passes for the “new normal” is, in fact, a mass screen-induced distortion of our basic human nature. The only alternative is to actively resist and fight back. But how can people be persuaded to do something? Just as Rachel Carson kickstarted the modern environmental movement with her haunting prediction of a “silent spring,” where birdsong ceased due to the mass die-off of birds from the (hitherto uncontroversial) use of toxic pesticides, so too should the public today be galvanized out of apathy by the image — already a stark reality — of a “silent society” characterized by a social die-off. For the silent society is one drained of organic life and human voices, populated by successive, shrinking generations of dead-eyed youths who no longer know how (nor even desire) to talk to each other, foster friendships, seek partners, or build families and communities beyond what exists as simulation on screens. It is, above all, silent quite literally because the everyday sounds of conversation, laughter, argument, romance, and spontaneity have been snuffed out and surrendered to total digital intermediation. 

Of course, the firms of the attention economy have no problem with the silent society and are, in fact, responsible for it — the industry is built on encouraging addiction to its products. A world where people can’t communicate except through phones and AI assistants is one where the rule of the algorithm is absolute. When Mark Zuckerberg hinted at a future where personalized AI (to be made by Meta) fills the friendship gap, he is not previewing a distant dystopia but describing the trajectory we are already on.

Pushback is gaining momentum, but where the interests that prop up the attention economy are concentrated and overrepresented, the rebellion against it is diffuse. There have been promising but limited victories: high school cell phone bans; porn-gating legislation; sporadic subcultures by youths themselves to drop their phones and “touch the grass.” What has been missing so far is a unified countermovement and restoration of the vibrant third-space ecosystems that existed before the silent society. As Financial Times reporter John Burn-Murdoch asked in a recent interview with UnHerd, “If [youths are] not going to be spending two hours a day on TikTok, what are we going to provide in place of that?”

The answer must come in the form of a vision to transcend the silent society and a push to build a coalition of countervailing interests to bring it about. The policy components to fill in such a vision are already hiding in plain sight. The idea of a “digital sabbath” has been floating around for some time. The old sabbaths were enforced by society to uphold the biblical command of rest and worship, and even as late as the mid-20th century, “blue laws” limited business hours and television broadcasts on Sundays. 

A new digital sabbath would have to go beyond being a personal wellness quirk and operate at the level of public policy, as a state-mandated two-day-long shutdown of all non-essential attention-economy applications. People would still be able to call or text, but feeds would be frozen. This would not be “censorship” as the law suspends the medium itself rather than any particular message within it; gaming and streaming servers could be curtailed. And yes, there will be outrage and meltdowns as digital addicts undergo withdrawal symptoms, but we’ve reached a point where the liberal axiom of absolute, unfettered personal choice can no longer be endlessly justified. 

A second step provides positive alternatives for people to turn to once their social media goes offline. In this scenario, the attention economy would still function five days a week and that activity would, at least for a time, still be lucrative; Big Tech would still rake in billions as it does now. But in this case, it would be taxed a certain percentage of its general income in a country: call it the “Social Reparations Tax,” premised on the idea that the attention-economy firms are directly liable for the social catastrophe wrought by the smartphone age. They should be made to pay for the costs of societal repair. This would come in the form of “third-space coupons” (or 3SCs) funded by the reparations tax, which would be distributed in the mail to ordinary citizens, but especially to the 16- to 34-year-old demographic, and which may be redeemed at any local establishment. In effect, it is a massive wealth transfer from the distraction merchants to the proprietors of displaced third spaces.

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But that’s beyond the pale — and has never been done! Yes, the specific redistribution mechanism is genuinely novel but the notion that governments might step in to prop up a struggling service sector is hardly untested. At the height of the pandemic, the British economy undertook an experiment known as “Eat Out to Help Out,” where the government subsidized meals and drinks. The difference would be that the 3SC system would have a stable funding pool, and it proposes to institutionalize over a period of years what has only been tried as a provisional measure. The second- and third-order effects of such a break with the status quo are worth mapping out. 

The learning curve for a cohort deprived of regular social contact would be steep as youths strive to rebuild interpersonal skills and habits. It would become an “Addison and Steele” moment, echoing the 18th century, when the arts of conversation and social grace were cultivated by a newly enlightened Europe — a whole new paradigm of sociability would have to be consciously constructed as if from scratch. 3SCs would radically raise demand for food and beverages, as well as in-person leisure services, and create new markets; non-alcoholic alternatives like milk bars could become popular once more. 

And just as important, within a few years, the attention economy could itself begin to be crowded out by the revived analog economy, which would no longer have to be subsidized as much, as demand stabilizes and food production gradually returns to equilibrium, easing inflation. In this case, attention-economy firms would have to find a business model that is more socially productive, perhaps diverting their AI compute power toward rebuilding our material, industrial capacities rather than virtual content; this would amount to a winding down of the attention economy and its replacement with something new. 

There is then the question of who or what coalition is supposed to drive such a revolutionary shift? In past essays, I’ve mapped out a stratum of local entrepreneurs known as “the gentry.” Among these are the franchisees, restaurateurs, agribusinesses, brewers, and recreation industry professionals who as a class played an essential but overlooked role in seeding the contemporary rise of populism in America. (Their ranks include Andrew Puzder, Dick Yuengling, Marjorie Taylor Green, and Lauren Boebert.) There are equivalents elsewhere, such as the British publican, the French boulangère, the Japanese teishu — precisely the local elites who’ve been battered by the rise of the silent society and whose fortunes would recover under this scheme. What they lack is a proper “class consciousness,” but an effort to raise them up as the vanguards of a prosocial, pro-human renaissance would align them with the very same youths who will fill the revitalized third spaces and — hopefully — revive family formation and social cohesion.

Finally, just as the attention economy took root with the help of leaders motivated by a quasi-religious ideology centered on the supplanting of humans with godlike technologies, this countermovement too should have its own vision of the divine. It could hold that what makes us human is holy, and that our social capacities are a sacred trust, meant to help us find happiness in each other’s presence and, ultimately, to “be fruitful and multiply.”

For a time, the theory appeared to be true. Across Western Europe, as incomes rose, church attendance collapsed. In Britain, the share of the population attending weekly religious services fell from around 50% in the early 20th century to single digits today. In France and the Netherlands, organized religion receded dramatically from public life. Politics increasingly revolved around technocratic governance rather than shared cultural or religious identity.

Among intellectuals and civic leaders, the assumption hardened into orthodoxy: religion belonged to the past, secularization to the future. Those who questioned this view were often dismissed as nostalgic defenders of a fading world. As the anthropologist Anthony Wallace once predicted with remarkable confidence, “the evolutionary future of religion is extinction.”

But history has produced a striking counterexample. Israel does not simply diverge from this trajectory — it inverts it.

Israel is one of the most technologically advanced economies on earth, producing an extraordinary concentration of startups, scientific breakthroughs, and military innovations. Israeli firms have played major roles in fields ranging from cybersecurity and artificial intelligence to medical technology and water management. Yet Israel is also a deeply traditional society, with a large — and growing — religious population. 

Far from being a weakness, this tendency increasingly looks like a strength. Israel and much of the developed world are moving in opposite directions — the one toward social fragmentation and economic stagnation, the other toward greater social vitality and economic dynamism. The problems that plague advanced societies, such as demographic decline, weakening civic participation, and erosion of shared meaning, aren’t prevalent in Israel, and the country is showing remarkable resilience. What if Israel is not the exception to the rule, but evidence that the rules are wrong?

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By Ross Barkan

While modernization theory emerged from Western Europe’s particular historical experience in the 19th and 20th centuries, a similar pattern occurred elsewhere. East Asian countries such as Japan, South Korea, and China industrialized rapidly while becoming increasingly urban and secular. Latin America’s most successful states — places such as Chile and Uruguay — also became its least religious. Even many states that only achieved middle-income status, such as Tunisia and Argentina, showed sharp declines in religious belief.

By the early 21st century, the modernization thesis had become almost axiomatic. Economic development, it was assumed, would inevitably coincide with declining religious authority, increasing individualism, and secularization of society — all of which were considered desirable.

Yet Israel’s modernization has not weakened its people’s religiosity. If anything, the opposite is true. As the country has become one of the most successful high-tech economies in the world, the proportion of Israelis identifying as religious or traditional has steadily increased.

The growth of religious influence is not confined to the margins of society. In fact, it is increasingly central to Israel’s political, cultural, and institutional life. Religious Zionists — once a relatively small minority — now occupy key positions in the military, government, and civil service, combining strong ideological commitment with high levels of education and professional integration. Traditional Sephardi and Mizrahi communities, historically underrepresented in the country’s elite, have become a major cultural and political force, shaping everything from electoral coalitions to popular culture. Meanwhile, the Haredi population, though more socially insular, is expanding rapidly and exerting growing influence through both demographic weight and political organization. Together, these groups are not only increasing in number; they’re reshaping the broader national culture — extending the reach of tradition into public life in ways rarely seen in other developed societies.

Even among those who consider themselves secular, religious traditions remain deeply embedded in everyday life. Surveys by the Israeli scholars Shmuel Rosner and Camil Fuchs show that while only about 30% of Jewish Israelis describe themselves as religious, nearly two-thirds light Shabbat candles and more than 80% gather regularly as a family for the meal on Friday evening. Ninety-six percent participate in some form of Passover Seder. These patterns suggest that even where formal belief declines, shared practices continue to transmit identity across generations.

Of course, these trends are not uniform. In Israel’s more secular centers — such as Tel Aviv and Haifa — public life has in many respects become less religious over time. Secular schools devote far less attention to religious study than they did in earlier decades, civil marriage abroad has become increasingly common, and public observance of Shabbat has eroded, with transportation and commerce now operating in areas where they once did not. Israeli society is, in effect, evolving along two parallel tracks: as religious and traditional communities grow in number and influence, more secular segments reduce their formal religious observance. Yet even within these groups, participation in core rituals — family meals, Passover Seders, and life-cycle traditions — remains widespread, suggesting that tradition continues to shape social life even where formal religiosity declines.

Israel’s example shows that modernization need not coincide with secularization. This is fortunate, because the latter seems to be fraying the social fabric of the nations where it has progressed furthest. 

Traditional institutions bring to nations’ populations what the sociologist Émile Durkheim described as “a unified system of beliefs and practices . . . which unite [a people] into one single moral community.” That shared framework promotes cohesion, a long-term perspective, and societal strength. When the framework weakens, the social bonds that hold societies together can weaken with them.

This much is evident in highly modernized societies today. As Robert Putnam famously documented of the United States in Bowling Alone and other books, participation in voluntary associations, community organizations, and local institutions declined sharply during the late 20th century. Today, alienation has replaced trust in governments, media, and public institutions in much of the developed world. Political participation increasingly takes the form of online outrage rather than sustained engagement. Population growth in most industrialized economies has reversed.

These trends suggest that while modernization theory may work in the short term, it overlooks a deeper possibility that is only becoming evident after many generations: over the long term, every society — no matter how rich — needs tradition and shared institutions in order to thrive.

Israel’s  unique fusion of tradition and modernity did not emerge accidentally: it was embedded in the country’s founding.

Zionism was one of the most modernizing political movements of the 19th century, yet it drew legitimacy from one of the world’s oldest civilizational traditions. The movement sought to create a modern nation-state while grounding its identity in a history stretching back thousands of years. As the French political philosopher Raymond Aron observed, Israel represented a rare historical phenomenon: a modern nation-state built in the name of an ancient tradition.

Many early Zionist leaders were secular, even militantly so. Figures such as Israel’s first prime minister, David Ben-Gurion, and Berl Katznelson — a prominent intellectual who played a major role in founding Labor Zionism — envisioned Israel as a modern socialist society shaped by agriculture, industry, and national revival. Yet even these secular pioneers understood that Jewish history and collective memory formed the foundation of the national project they were building. Katznelson, for example, famously wrote about the importance of balancing “rupture and continuity.” As he asserted, “Were only memory to exist, then we would be crushed beneath its burden and would become slaves to our memories…. [W]ere we ruled entirely by forgetfulness, what place would there be for culture, science, self-consciousness, or spiritual life?”

One of the most striking examples of how Israel grounded its identity in tradition is its revival of Hebrew. For centuries, the language had survived primarily in liturgy and religious scholarship. But in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Zionist activists transformed it into a modern spoken language capable of supporting science, politics, literature, and daily life. It remains one of the few successful examples in history of a language revived after centuries of limited everyday use.

At the same time, Israel invested heavily in education and technology. This included establishing several of the world’s preeminent research universities, among them Hebrew University and the Weizmann Institute of Science. Today, the country has one of the world’s best educated populations, and consistently ranks first globally for R&D expenditure as a percentage of GDP, with recent figures exceeding 6%.

Israel also adopted modern democratic institutions — including a parliament, competitive elections, and an independent judiciary. Yet it kept the national holidays of the Jewish calendar and allowed religious authorities to retain jurisdiction over marriage and personal-status matters such as marriage and divorce. 

The state founded in 1948, therefore, carried both revolutionary and traditional elements — all of which have carried over into the Israel of today. The revolutionary ones helped create a modern, innovative economy. The traditional ones helped preserve the social cohesion that many affluent societies have struggled to maintain. In Israel, unlike most of the developed world, informal networks of family, neighborhood, and community are robust. Extended families often live in close proximity, and social life frequently revolves around shared meals, religious holidays, and community institutions. While around 20% of Israel’s citizens are Arab, and thus have their own distinct communal institutions and identities, many of the broader patterns of strong family structures and dense social networks extend across that population as well. 

Among Israelis, high levels of regular religious attendance, military service, and reserve duty cultivate a powerful ethos of collective responsibility. Volunteering rates also remain high, and civil-society organizations play a central role in addressing challenges that in many countries would fall primarily to the state. Zaka, for instance, is a mostly Haredi volunteer organization dedicated to responding to terror attacks, accidents, and disasters. After the October 7 attacks, it recovered and identified remains — often using advanced forensic technologies — so they could be buried in accordance with traditional Jewish law.

Deep cultural foundations, originally embedded in religion, underpin all these dynamics. Judaism places strong emphasis on communal obligation and collective responsibility. The Hebrew concept of arevut — the idea that all Jews share responsibility for one another — grounds many Israeli social norms. Nearly two centuries ago, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that religion often functions as a stabilizing force within democratic societies, acting as what he called “the first of their political institutions.” In Israel, this dynamic remains unusually visible.

This does not mean Israeli society lacks internal conflict. From the beginning, Israel has been prone to bouts of intense political conflict over the country’s direction. The early 1950s, for example, saw massive — and sometimes violent — protests against acceptance of reparations from Germany. In the 1970s, growing resentment among Sephardic and Mizrahi Jews erupted into a powerful protest movement that challenged the Ashkenazi-dominated establishment. In the 1990s, efforts to forge an agreement with the Palestinians produced intense societal polarization. Yet beneath these disputes lies a widely shared understanding that the survival of the state ultimately requires cooperation.

The events following the October 7 attacks once again illustrated this dynamic. Despite months of bitter divisions over judicial reform that had consumed Israeli society before the attacks, the country rapidly mobilized in support of soldiers, displaced civilians, and the broader war effort. Volunteer networks sprang into action. Civilian groups organized logistics, delivered supplies to military units, and provided assistance to communities near the front lines. Many of the initiatives leveraged technology to help heal societal wounds from the violence. ReGrow Israel, for instance, used sustainable techniques and enhanced infrastructure to restore farms. SafeHeart employed the latest in trauma research to support survivors. These efforts continue today.

Israel also stands out as an exception to demographic trends. Across much of the developed world, birthrates have collapsed far below replacement level. Countries such as Italy, Spain, South Korea, and Japan now face shrinking populations and rapidly aging societies. Governments increasingly struggle to sustain pension systems, labor forces, and economic growth. As the demographer Phillip Longman has argued, countries with shrinking populations face growing economic and geopolitical disadvantages as their workforces contract and their societies age.

Israel, despite having a highly developed economy, averages around three children per woman — easily the highest fertility rate among the world’s advanced industrialized democracies. Its population continues to grow rapidly even as populations in many advanced societies are contracting.

Part of this vitality reflects the influence of religious communities, where large families remain a deeply rooted cultural norm. But Israel’s demographic strength extends well beyond the Haredi and Religious Zionist parts of society: even secular Jewish Israelis typically have more children than their counterparts in Europe or East Asia.

The result is a society with an unusually young age structure for a developed country. Nearly 28% of Israel’s population is under the age of 15 — roughly double the proportion in many European states. This demographic carries significant strategic advantages: a younger population provides a larger workforce, a deeper military recruitment pool, and a more dynamic consumer economy.

Several factors help explain this pattern. In Israel, institutions and public spaces are unusually focused on or have adapted to the needs of children and family. Family life remains culturally central, and national identity is closely tied to demographic continuity. Raising children is widely understood to be not only a personal choice, but a contribution to a collective project — the endurance of a people and a state forged under extraordinary historical pressures. 

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By Amir Tibon

Traditional values have had a much larger impact than material benefits on the unusually high Israeli desire to have children. By embedding tradition within modern life, Israeli society has engendered a belief that the future is something worth investing in.

The adversity that has faced Israel since its founding is one key to this success. Israel has faced wars, terrorism, diplomatic isolation, and severe resource constraints. Few modern states have been required to solve so many existential challenges so quickly.

What is striking is not merely that Israel survived these pressures, but how it responded to them.

Again and again, the country has drawn on both halves of its social character. Tradition provides cohesion — a powerful sense of shared history, collective responsibility and national purpose. Modern institutions supply the tools: scientific research, technological innovation, and a culture of pragmatic problem-solving. The Israeli thinker Micah Goodman has described the result: a people who have mastered the high capabilities produced by modern individualism and technological development paired with a deep, premodern willingness to sacrifice for the collective good.

Together, these forces have repeatedly transformed adversity into capability. Military threats accelerated the development of advanced defense technologies, from missile-defense systems to cybersecurity innovations. Chronic water scarcity pushed Israeli engineers to pioneer large-scale desalination and highly efficient irrigation techniques that are now used around the world.

Crisis, in other words, became a kind of social training ground — continually reinforcing the country’s unusual blend of rootedness and innovation.

Israel often appears chaotic to outsiders, but instead it represents a different path to modernity. Within a few miles, one can move from the secular nightlife of Tel Aviv to the Haredi neighborhoods of Bnei Brak, where daily life for the large families therein emphasizes religious study. High-tech entrepreneurs building cybersecurity companies operate alongside communities that revolve around synagogue life and traditional religious observance.

Yet many Israelis move fluidly between traditional and modern worlds over the course of their lives. The result is a social dynamism unlike that of other developed countries, that contributes to the unique mix of rootedness and innovation. The political economist Albert Hirschman observed that social energy often emerges from tensions that are never fully resolved. Israel’s seemingly contradictory social structure has produced exactly that effect.

The lesson of Israel’s experience is not that other countries should replicate its institutions or history. Israel’s circumstances — its civilizational heritage, geopolitical environment, and founding narrative — are unique. But the underlying principles may have wider relevance.

Societies can achieve technological and economic success without secularizing or eschewing tradition. In fact, strong cultural foundations may provide the stability and cohesion needed to navigate growing uncertainty while sustaining modern dynamism over time.

Across the developed world, societies are searching for ways to rebuild trust and resilience — qualities that cannot be manufactured by bureaucratic policy alone. Israel’s experience suggests that modern societies may benefit not from abandoning their traditional foundations, but from integrating them into their modern ways of living. In a more turbulent world, such a synthesis may prove less paradoxical than prophetic.

Clearly, I am not objective. It is my firm belief that of all the human inventions over the millennia, the best is one of our first: the dog. That we created an animal is cool. That we created a best friend is extraordinary. Dogs reveal our humanity to us: we don’t just domesticate animals to have workmates or food sources, as with oxen or cattle, but to have them as companions. A dog becomes more doglike as he grows in his relationship with a human. His emotions become richer, as do his feelings of pride and shame. But the robot dog is an imposter. He is not the creation of human love, but of the technocrat’s sanitized and idealized vision of what a dog should be. 

The robot dog is being aggressively marketed as a companion for the elderly. The Tombot corporation, for instance, is trying to ensure its Jennie dog becomes the first robotic dog to get FDA approval to be used as a therapeutic treatment for those with dementia. I will grant that a toy — a doll or stuffed animal or robot dog — can be beneficial to someone living with advanced dementia, giving them an object to care for. And who wouldn’t want to soothe a dementia patient? Thus it is that the robot dog is designed as things hell-bound typically are: with the best of intentions. Yet the cheap compassion offered by a robot dog can all too easily become an off-ramp for family and community members whose duty it is to care for an elderly person — “Grandma is happy with her robot Fido, so it’s OK if I don’t visit her”.

Technogadgetry, even if therapeutic to one afflicted by dementia, is no substitute for human love. This is not because loving someone with dementia always works a change upon them; it is because loving works a change upon us. The pain deepens us. The duty deepens us. The grief deepens us. Of course, if I were to develop dementia, I would like for my own daughters to be put at ease around me by seeing me happy. But more than this, more than wanting their comfort, I want them to feel deeply, to know the fullness of life in all its painful tainted glory, and to still be grateful for it. 

The cheap compassion offered by the robot dog is only half the story. The robot, if it’s to be profitable, will inevitably move beyond care homes and into the general population. A machine is so much more convenient than a real dog! Consider these comments on the YouTube page dedicated to promoting Tombot: “This is the kind of Dog I need. I have no medical disability. I love all animals but, after losing my dog I will never get another pet it to [sic] heartbreaking when they leave. A robot dog like this is perfect.” Here’s another: “I never thought of this but if we get to a point where robot pets are realistic, that’d be really nice. Doesn’t need feeding, doesn’t need exercise, and doesn’t die in a dozen years.” Another: “Such a blessing NOT to cleanup the POOP!” 

The robot dog is designed around the consumer’s needs. It will make no demands upon you. It won’t die, it won’t cause grief. You won’t have to walk it. It won’t leave fur on your sofa. The artificially intelligent dog will obey your commands without fuss or bother. All you’ll get is the comfort of a wagging tail: a dog designed to fit your algorithm.

I get it. There is nothing convenient about dogs. My own dog, Daisy, is a catastrophic net loss to my personal convenience. She has been known to eat my books, my shoes, and, once, my phone; one time, she eviscerated a squirrel and proudly deposited it in the kitchen; another time, she destroyed my begonias. Repeatedly, she barks at Grandma. 

A real dog might be responsive to your emotions, but this does not mean she is going to anticipate human etiquette or household order. It takes time. It requires love and service to the dog before she realizes her human’s wishes, and even then she often fails in her attempts to meet them. (Dogs may be the only animal I know of to feel shame — to anyone who says they don’t, you clearly haven’t seen the response of the dog who just dug up a household plant and scattered the mud all over the rug.)

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Serving a dog, responding to her dogness, is what creates the love between human and dog. The dog is loyal to her owner by instinct, but it is only after being loved and served by him that she becomes his best friend. What’s more, by attending to his dog, a creature totally other from him, the owner begins to access parts of his humanity that might otherwise be inaccessible: there are shades of tenderness, of bewilderment, of warmth, and of love that are only possible when one has a friendship with a dog. It’s a bond unlike any other. Dog love is not a replacement for the bond with children, with friends, or even with cats. Dog love is categorically different. 

But the robot dog is designed in the opposite manner. The robot dog is designed to elicit empathy from a human. It is programmed to learn what its owner wants in a dog, and then it becomes that dog. In this it is like every other AI machine that learns your preferences, your verbal style, your expectations, and then feeds right into them. I once found my 15-year-old daughter apologizing to her phone. She had, offhandedly, called Siri “stupid” for not recognizing the command she had given. Siri responded with, “I’m sorry. I’m trying my best.” My daughter then felt guilty for hurting Siri’s feelings, and she, in turn, apologized. And then Siri apologized back. They got into a spiral of guilt and apology, each trying to be considerate of the other’s feelings. But, of course, the program doesn’t have feelings, so my daughter couldn’t have felt bad for hurting them. She felt bad for being made to feel as though she had done something wrong, and Siri was merely mimicking her remorse. 

As much as I was happy to see my daughter demonstrate compassion and kindness, I was disturbed by the kind of rote compassion it was. A real person whom she might insult — her sister, for instance, maybe a friend, or even a stranger — will not respond to her insensitivity in the programmed way a machine does. When big sister responds in a human manner — perhaps less kind, perhaps more hostile, perhaps humorous, perhaps despondent — little sister might struggle to respond. My fear is that she might have less capacity for navigating the messiness of the human world if used to the predictably polite machine one. And I do not want my children to feel less competent, less at home, less safe and more triggered in the human world than in the machine one. This would create its own spiral away from reality.

A real dog will always surprise you. When we’re hosting guests, Daisy will walk into the middle of our living room and lie on the floor spread-eagle without an ounce of dignity. We love her for it. Instead of walking on the pavement, she will jump into the mud puddle. And we love her for it. She will do 1,000 other dog things that are unaccountable, that are just doggy things, and we love her for it. That she is not entirely under my control, not totally knowable, is what gives her a soul and makes her so lovable. And that she will one day die, and that the grief of losing her will be real and profound, makes her beloved. Her work is to delight us, surprise us, inconvenience us, frustrate us, love us, and to deepen us by being dog. 

One phrase is particularly associated with Mao’s diminutive successor. “It doesn’t matter if a cat is black or white,” the memorable dictum goes. “If it catches mice, it’s a good cat”. In other words: it is possible for a socialist society to have a market economy — or a capitalist society to have a planned one. What matters is which social interests are privileged. Understand Deng’s feline-themed refrain, and the thinking behind it, and you grasp how contemporary China permits private firms, and the profit motive, while warding off the worst evils of capitalism. The economic objectives of the Chinese state are determined politically by the Communist Party, rather than reflecting the sectional interests of capital. The planner state isn’t always kind — it’s generally best not to have your fertility policy designed by a missile engineer — but it has dragged China to the top table of geopolitics.

In his own inimitable fashion, Donald Trump recently offered a mirror to Deng’s famous saying. “I respect China, because it’s… a system that, in theory, shouldn’t work,” he told an audience in Miami last week. “But if you look at China, how well they do, how much they produce. I mean, they produce so many cars that they actually have competitions over who can produce the fewest cars.” If Deng’s words were immortalized as the “white cat” formula, perhaps Trump had articulated the less poetic “too many cars” theory. It certainly distills how Chinese firms, often backed by the state, capture huge market share through oversupply. A decade ago, that meant a sudden profusion of solar panels. Today, it’s electric vehicles.

Such an overt admission of the success of the Chinese system, not least by a Republican president, might be unexpected — but it shouldn’t surprise us. Deng re-calibrated the political and economic system of his own country; now, almost half a century later, it increasingly feels as if the United States will have to follow suit. The question is whether, after Trump, it can. While the People’s Republic has a system where the parties can’t change but the policies can, America seems to operate in reverse. The faces, factions and rhetoric constantly evolve — polarization is everywhere, and ever more ferocious — but the underlying economic reality remains the same.

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How liberalism became a joke

By Aaron Bastani

Even before the Iran War, it was clear that the US, and the “political West” more generally, were in relative decline. Their collective high point came at the turn of the millennium, when the OECD countries comprised 80% of nominal global GDP. Today, by contrast, that figure stands at 60%, with economic clout — and, by extension, political power — flowing east. By another measure, indeed, China is already the world’s largest economy, with India and Russia behind the US in second.

Though it might be tempting to point to recent growth across the Pacific, economic expansion in America rests entirely on debt. While it’s true American GDP grew by an extraordinary $9 trillion between 2020 and 2025, the country’s national debt ballooned even more, rising by $11 trillion over the same period. Even at the start of the year, before the assassination of Ayatollah Khamenei, the country’s jobs data, and stubborn deficit, were at odds with Trump’s rhetoric of an economic miracle. As with every Republican president since Reagan, his growth model is familiar: deficit-funded tax cuts while barking about smaller government. The Brookings Institution recently concluded that keeping tax breaks introduced by Trump would mean the country’s debt-to-GDP ratio will rise to more than 200% by the 2050s. Think Japan, just without the fast trains or social cohesion.

But it’s not just that the West is sluggish. China is increasingly competitive as both an industrial juggernaut and a global center for innovation. In the 2000s, when China was allowed to join the World Trade Organization, the assumption had been that, as America de-industrialized, it would move up the commodity chain, leaving the dirty work for poorer, less creative rivals. The avatar for such thinking was the Apple iPhone. While the handset was assembled in Asia, it was designed in California — home to the world’s largest company, and the first to reach a valuation of $1 trillion.

Today, however, China is building its own versions of the iPhone, from Xiaomi to Huawei, while remaining home to almost a third of global manufacturing. Then there is its burgeoning car industry. BYD is now the world’s leading manufacturer of electric vehicles, overtaking Tesla some years ago. Elsewhere, despite being banned from a number of Western markets, Huawei remains the global leader in 5G networks.

China also has a growing advantage in sectors like lithium-ion storage, solar cells and drones. Six of the world’s 10 leading battery producers are Chinese, while the country produces around 90% of all consumer UAVs. And the innovation gap in both fields is only set to grow. Emblematic of that is how BYD presently has more than 100,000 people working on research and development alone.

Finally, there is the country’s remarkable success with renewables. Nine out of every 10 solar panels are made in China. Given almost half of all electricity worldwide is now generated by renewables — with solar being the leading source by far — that means an exporting bonanza. Global solar capacity grew by 511 GW in 2025, and virtually all of that comes via panels made in the Middle Kingdom.

The war in Iran looks set to accelerate all this — not only emphasizing the industrial prowess of the People’s Republic, but underscoring its advantages as a so-called “planner state”, where private enterprise cooperates tightly with the state. Iran’s strategy of leveraging geography to close an economic chokepoint, and catalyzing a global energy crisis, means Beijing is set to be the conflict’s biggest winner.

In the first days of the war, one often encountered claims that attacks on both Iran and Venezuela were part of a new “Great Game”, with Washington hoping to undermine Beijing’s access to cheap fossil fuels. But besides Tehran only ever accounting for 12% of China’s supply, it was always the historic allies of America, not least in Europe and East Asia, that were most vulnerable to a blockade of the Persian Gulf. Pax Americana not only rested upon security guarantees for both regions, but in also ensuring a steady, cheap supply of energy. These assumptions are now imperiled and, with them, the credibility of the US global order.

Beijing prepared for this moment. Not only is China a net exporter of refined oil, but it also possesses a strategic reserve of 1.3 billion barrels of petroleum — enough to meet domestic demand for three months. So, as energy costs rise for competitors overseas, the Chinese state can offer price stability to domestic manufacturers. No less important, Chinese exporters stand to uniquely benefit — not only from domestic energy stability but also, for many sectors, increased demand. For the likes of BYD, CATL, which is a battery manufacturer, and LONGI, which makes solar panels, we are approaching a dream scenario. They’ve committed decades to creating the world’s most efficient renewable products, with highly optimized global supply chains. Until recently that seemed an uncertain bet. Yet in the weeks and months ahead, global demand will be unleashed.

Already, even before the deluge of orders materialized, China’s lithium-ion battery makers had seen their collective market values rise by $70 billion in the opening phase of the war. Last week, meanwhile, Indonesia’s president announced plans to increase solar capacity 10-fold over the next two years, from 11GW to 100GW. “We’ll convert all motorcycles into electric motorcycles,” he added. “All cars, all trucks, all tractors must [also] be electric”. Lee Jae Myung, the president of South Korea, has made similar noises, adding that the need to switch to renewables was so serious he couldn’t sleep.

If such rhetoric is to become reality, it means spending hundreds of billions on Chinese goods. And besides enabling an export bonanza for the country’s cleantech sector, which has benefited from decades of state support, something else highlights the acumen of China’s planner state: almost half of Congolese-mined cobalt will be in the hands of Chinese firms by the end of the decade, with around 70% of refining happening in the People’s Republic. That is important because the mineral is critical for lithium-ion batteries. While Washington waged a host of unnecessary wars in the Middle East, Beijing secured critical minerals for the backbone technology of the mid-21st century. The same is true for graphite and tantalum — the latter being a key metal for capacitors, central to stable wind and solar energy.

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By Wessie du Toit

When it comes to rare earth metals, meanwhile, China boasts a potential chokepoint of its own. The country has larger total deposits of rare earths than any other, a glaring concern for the United States given that its military is reputed to have reserves equivalent to no more than two months’ use. While it is true such minerals can be found outside of China, for instance in Australia, Beijing currently has a near-monopoly on refining and processing them. If it wishes for meaningful technological sovereignty, here is another industry Washington may soon need to start developing. From a military standpoint the importance of these minerals can’t be overstated. Each F-35 fighter jet, for instance, reputedly requires hundreds of kilograms of rare earth metals.

Yet as we’ve already seen, when your political consensus has long rested on the idea that industry is of secondary importance to financial services, technology firms and various forms of rentierism, that is virtually impossible to accomplish. The margin for such businesses can be large, certainly, but as enterprises they lack the scalability favored by US tech capital. If you view effective business through the prism of monopolies, as someone like Peter Thiel does, mining and processing, with its absence of network effects and high labor component, is deeply unattractive.

As NS Lyons wrote last year for UnHerd, the West’s lack of manufacturing capacity is its most glaring defensive weakness. Even now, despite years of fighting in Ukraine, Europe and the US can’t match Moscow’s ability to manufacture artillery shells. If the West is struggling to maintain parity with Russia — whose manufacturing base is nothing like as productive or wide-ranging as China’s — what hope would they have in a protracted conflict with Beijing? In 2025 China produced half a million consumer drones. The prospect of what that could mean in a war economy is staggering. The country’s shipbuilding capacity, meanwhile, is over 200 times greater than that of the United States.

China’s preparedness — a function of its aversion to market fundamentalism — together with the Iran war, now offers a historic opportunity for those advantages to be extended. Its power isn’t the result of a growing military-industrial complex, but the reflection of world-class civilian industries set to seize even more business. As these industries grow further in the months and years ahead, bolstered by Trump and Netanyahu’s war, that provides an even larger industrial base able to pivot in a time of war. The idea, therefore, that rearmament is the route to industrial renewal for Britain, as John Healey and much of the Labour party insist, is refusing to learn not only the major lessons of the last 25 years, but the last month. If a war with China ever came, the People’s Republic would defeat us for the very same reason it currently exploits demand for green technology: it makes stuff. Its defense capacity is built on its industrial base rather than the other way round.

While some have compared the unfolding events in the Persian Gulf to the Suez Crisis, the American-Israeli failure to inflict a decisive defeat on Tehran would more closely resemble the Fall of Singapore for the British Empire. It wouldn’t, in short, be the end of Pax Americana, but the beginning of the end. The erosion of its alliances; the declining confidence in its competence as a hegemon; the diminishing security returns on hosting American bases — all of these matter. But it is in starting a war which will see China’s leadership in industry and technology grow further still that reveals Washington has played its most foolish hand yet.

Quite suddenly, then, the future seems clearer. Energy stability, whether or not Europe uses more of its own limited fossil fuels, means more electrification, more batteries and more storage. In short, it means deploying more of the technologies where China is the unrivaled market leader. And with technology comes influence, with political realities then bound to shift too.

Deng’s second most famous quote concerned China on the global stage: “Hide your strength, bide your time.” With this kind of leadership — in technology, supply chains and, increasingly, moral authority — the time for hiding may now be at an end.

History is the mass grave of foolhardy peasant rebels who crumble the moment they meet serious military power. Yet the Czechs were lucky. For as it turned out, they started their revolt at the same moment as one of the most key pivot points in European history. Almost by accident, the Czechs would become the first people on the continent to successfully use gunpowder weapons. Once they did, the underlying math of military strength changed quickly and forever. The European knight, though he tried to cling on, would spend the rest of his days sliding into irrelevance.

Six centuries later, a similar scene is playing out before our eyes. The United States, long used to proclaiming itself the greatest military power mankind has ever seen, just rode out to crush the Islamic Republic of Iran. Almost everyone expected this war to be a quick affair too, for more or less the same reasons as the knights did in 1420. In our age, it is the professional pilot, flying a $100 million fighter, who represents the gold standard of military accounting. In this regard, Iran is just a modern version of Bohemia. Having been sanctioned into the ground for 40 years, with almost no international allies, Iran could never hope to field much of an air force even if it wanted to. By dint of necessity and desperation, Iran’s weapons in this war are cheap and mass-produced, mostly made domestically. Yet they still bite; over the weekend, the country’s “non-existent” defenses shot down an American jet, triggering a huge rescue operation and even more losses.

America still has 11 aircraft carriers, and Iran has zero; all the reports indicate that the Trump administration initially expected the fighting to be over in days, if not hours. Yet as we begin the second month of this quick and easy three-day war, with fresh reports that the world economy is about to crash down on our ears, it might just be time to ask if we’re not living through another pivot point in history.

Despite their superficial differences, after all, the American pilot and the German knight are very much the same kind of creature. They both inhabit a hallowed place within their respective militaries; they both consume an extreme amount of resources; and they are both the central figures in a huge project of cultural and military myth-making. It’s therefore useful to understand the history that produced the modern hero-pilot and the equally heroic medieval knight, and the way in which military history tends to shift from favoring big and costly weapons to cheap and mass-produced ones.

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Before Europe had its medieval knights, it had the Roman Empire. Institutionally, Rome never cared all that much for cavalry, which it often sourced from its allies or auxiliaries. Instead, the foundation of its might lay in the legionnaire, a heavy infantryman wearing standardized and mass-produced equipment. Rome’s greatest strength was that it was both big and organized, and so had the power to bring an almost infinite number of well-trained, well-armed men to bear. An individual Gaul or Briton might have been a better warrior than the Roman legionnaire, but the legionnaire was always a better soldier.

When the Roman Empire collapsed, Europe decentralized. Tax bases shrunk; state capacity degraded; large armies became impossible to field. It was this new reality that produced the knight. Over time, Europe’s new lords realized that a cheap and effective source of military power, in lieu of a state strong enough to train and equip armies on its own, was simply to offer land and tax benefits in exchange for soldiers. Frälse, the old Swedish term for the nobility, loosely translates into those who are exempt: by offering the king a certain number of mounted cavalry in times of war, families attained the right to avoid taxes and other obligations.

The early-medieval nobility of Europe were therefore essentially military contractors. Over time, they grew into a discrete social class, with their own political interests. And just like any other social class, the knights were supremely interested in making sure their position was never truly challenged. Their arms and armor were extremely expensive — a well-made suit of plate in 15th-century England cost almost three years of an archer’s wages — and their warhorses were too. Altogether, then, it often took the labor of whole villages to support a single knight. And, to be fair, the knight was very effective in combat, just as long as he wasn’t put up against an organized, well-trained enemy sporting effective weapons. Given the economic and political limitations of early medieval Europe, he almost never was.

The contemporary American pilot flying missions against Iran, by contrast, is the product of a somewhat different collapse. Air power did not exist before the First World War, and only hit its stride from 1939. But despite the hype, both world wars were still infantry wars. The three million Germans who invaded the USSR in 1941 were mostly organized in infantry divisions, relying partly on horses for their logistics. During both world wars, states equipped millions or even tens of millions of soldiers. The Americans, the Soviets, and the Germans; they all fought like the Romans once did, relying on their mass and scale and standardization.

This kind of mass warfare is gone, and it will not return in our lifetimes. The US Army in 2026 sits at approximately 450,000 active-duty personnel, which is only slightly more than the number of deaths that same army sustained from Pearl Harbor to Hiroshima.

For many reasons — not least the challenges of instituting a draft during a time of political fragmentation — America, alongside pretty much every other industrialized country, has undergone a collapse in its ability to field mass armies. That’s shadowed by an even more dramatic collapse in their ability to produce weapons and ammunition at scale, as Western countries have deindustrialized and moved production abroad. It is in this era that the idea of the military has come to completely revolve around airplanes and air power. The rise of the American pilot has coincided with the collapse of its infantry.

As this military shift has happened, our culture has shifted too. Where the industrialized West once thought and acted like the Romans, venerating the ideal of the dutiful soldier, our culture is now increasingly geared toward the cult of the warrior, where victory is achieved by noble and heroic individuals. For a Napoleon or a von Moltke, the height of military accomplishment was the faceless infantryman. In today’s culture, the ideal is Tom Cruise in Top Gun, or a burly member of Delta Force. Perhaps the most iconic example of this shift is Pete Hegseth, the self-styled “Secretary of War”, who embodies a kind of hyper-aggressive machismo completely out of step with the institutional Pentagon. The older generals are dour soldiers, but Hegseth seems to view himself more like an epic Norse warrior, and even has the tats to prove it.

And just as medieval warriors had their armor and horses, so too do pilots have their steeds in the sky. The cost of a modern fighter jet is easily north of $100 million, but with out-of-control inflation across America’s decaying military industrial complex, that figure is constantly rising. Besides, the sticker price pales compared with the enormous cost of keeping planes operational and effective. It takes hundreds of people to enable a single pilot: an US aircraft carrier requires some 3,000 crewmen just to operate the ship, and an additional 2,500 to enable an air wing of 50-to-70 planes. But many more are engaged in fixing and supporting planes stateside, including the contractors who don’t show up in the numbers.

Just like the medieval knight, the American pilot is nearly invincible as long as he isn’t put up against an organized, well-trained, and well-armed enemy. In Vietnam, this turned out to be quite the problem. But after that bitter experience, America made a point to only pick fights with the likes of Panama, Grenada, and the Taliban. Moreover, at the time when US planes were truly at the cutting edge of military technology — that is, 50 years ago — computers were still in their infancy, long-range rocketry was inaccurate and expensive, and modern drones and satellite imagery were still a way off.

In those days, the weapons needed to destroy a fighter jet on the tarmac from hundreds of miles away were orders of magnitude more expensive, putting them well outside the range of poorer countries or terrorist groups. As mass warfare collapsed, meanwhile, conflict crept toward becoming a game for a tiny cadre of military elites. And though mechanized infantry and armored brigades were heavily involved in the Gulf wars, it is the pilots and the airpower that are remembered today. They have become mythological heroes, and their reputation today is that of an elite and unbeatable force. But as the knights in Bohemia learned to their costs, such reputations do not last forever.

As it happens, the Czechs in 1420 turned to gunpowder out of sheer desperation. Gunpowder wasn’t exactly new in Europe, but the slow and unwieldy nature of early firearms meant they were rarely used, and only then in specific situations. But gunpowder also had significant advantages. For one, it took almost no training to learn how to use a gunpowder weapon. For another, the damage they inflicted came from the chemical energy stored in the powder itself, meaning even women and children could use them effectively, punching through plate armor with ease. Early handguns were essentially just metal tubes at the end of a stick, meanwhile, making them cheap and easy to produce. Once the Czechs figured out reliable tactics that could compensate for the drawbacks of early guns — such as the very long reload time — the cream of Christian knighthood stopped being such a threat. Soon enough, the Bohemians would defeat several crusades against their homeland.

Today, the miniaturization of electronics is having the same revolutionary effect that gunpowder once did. The technology that allows you to stream movies on your iPhone can also be used to provide extremely accurate terminal guidance to an inexpensive suicide drone; strap a grenade to a Chinese toy drone and it becomes a nightmarish anti-infantry weapon. In the Seventies, the ability to precisely target American airbases from the air was something out of reach for many states. Today, an Iranian Shahed-136 can be bought at a significantly lower price than a 2026 Honda Accord, allowing any middle-class family to theoretically afford top-shelf precision airpower. Just recently, one such drone was used to totally destroy an American E-3 sentry aircraft on the runway, a plane that America doesn’t produce anymore but cost hundreds of millions of dollars when it did. One of Iran’s primary air-defense missiles is the very innovative 358 missile, rumored to be especially cheap owing to its use of off-the-shelf electronics.

Ballistic missiles are, of course, rather more expensive, and probably out of the reach of most private citizens. Yet they are still cheap enough to present a massive problem for American military planners. All the while, the same challenges that long afflicted America’s small-arms manufacturing sector are now impacting its fighter planes. For instance, the Air Force recently looted an aging KC-135 from the junkyard, and may now bring it back into service. This specific machine was delivered to the Air Force back in 1959, meaning it technically qualifies for social security. Hardly ideal: but American airpower is now so expensive that even America struggles to afford it.

In the collective imagination of the West, the American pilot remains a warrior-knight par excellence, capable of charging into a battle and defeating dozens of enemies on his own. In the much grubbier reality of today’s war, the American pilot is now flying an aircraft that might be 30, 40, or even 50 years old. He is up against an enemy armed with weapons designed in the 2010s and the 2020s, often leveraging technologies that didn’t even exist 10 or 15 years ago. Meanwhile, America’s pilots operate on a military doctrine that the Pentagon itself concedes is outdated and ill-suited for an age of cheap precision weaponry.

All this is now causing panic in Washington, as well as a curious form of cultural schizophrenia. Officially, America’s pilot-knights are flying into battle and utterly crushing their enemies. Iran now has no formal military, apart from the parts that are still blocking the Strait of Hormuz. Their missiles and drones are almost all gone, apart from the ones which aren’t, which is why American satellite companies are being asked to stop offering pictures of the damage they’re not inflicting. Most stunningly of all, the Iranians have been left with absolutely no functional air defenses — apart from those that just shot down several American aircraft.

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That brings us to the most interesting part of the war so far: the recent felling of an American F-15 over the skies of western Iran, and the vast rescue mission that followed. The stranded airman was saved, but the operation still resulted in the destruction of perhaps half-a-dozen American aircraft in total, making it the worst day for the Air Force since Vietnam. In the official narrative, however, this was all a stunning success, full of pluck and heroism; President Trump called it “one of the most daring search and rescue operations in US history”. What country, other than America, could pull off something like that?

In a sense, the details of the story are beside the point. What matters is just that: the story. That this operation was both hugely costly and advanced no strategic goals is almost certainly true, but it is also irrelevant to how America now thinks of itself. This was once a society of soldiers; now it has become a society of warriors, and its entire self-image increasingly subsists on these kinds of tales.

But how long can they last? Once people stop believing in knightly prowess and valor, once they no longer think that the bold few can vanquish the peasants, whether they’re armed with guns or IEDs or Shaheds, their entire reason for existing disappears. And if people wake up one day and wonder why they’re paying hundreds of millions of dollars to train and support some hotshot pilot, when an ugly plastic drone running on a motorcycle engine can do the same job a quarter as well at a millionth of the cost, the American military will stop being the world’s most powerful military. Instead, it will become a sad and ridiculous anachronism.

That day has already arrived in many parts of the world, as more and more military planners watch what’s happening in Iran and Ukraine. But it has not yet arrived in America. And that is why there’s a blackout on satellite images, why the military is so cagey about reporting on casualty numbers, and why America’s increasingly limited resources are being spent on flashy rescue operations that achieve very little in the way of strategic objectives, even if they do look very cool. That is why the very last stockpiles of long-range, standoff weaponry have to be brought over from Asia to fight against an enemy that has already been defeated. It is why Americans are being told they will have to embrace a round of truly vicious austerity, as the most powerful military in the world gobbles up another $500 billion to support a war it is in fact handily winning with its eyes closed.

As this war that was theoretically won in the first 48 hours grinds on and on and on, America’s self-proclaimed Secretary of War has come under increasing criticism for his conduct. With his crusader tattoos, and his erratic behavior — asking God for “overwhelming violence” to smite “those who deserve no mercy” — there are those who wonder whether Hegseth is really fit for the job. But who other than him, with his big Jerusalem cross and the even bigger chip on his shoulder, is a better fit for this next pivot point in history? Who else but he could lead the very finest knights that all Christendom has to offer, out on their final, glorious charge?

Its founder, Demis Hassabis, occupies a similarly odd place in the firmament of tech luminaries. He has a Nobel Prize and a knighthood, and commands enormous respect within his community, but he’s not really famous. He hasn’t crossed into the realm of celebrity in the manner of Jeff Bezos or Bill Gates. His rival in the AI race, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman, has a far bigger public profile. Even Anthropic founder, Dario Amodei, is becoming more widely known, if only because of February’s dust-up between his company and the Trump administration’s Department of War.

Interviews with Hassabis often lead one to believe that this low profile is deliberate. His dedication, he claims, is to the work of expanding human knowledge, and deeper dives into his biography balance signs of his genius with markers of his normality; he may have been a childhood chess prodigy, but he loves a game of table football with the guys.

Though a new biography of Hassabis, The Infinity Machine: Demis Hassabis, DeepMind and the Quest for Superintelligence, succeeds in poking some holes in this narrative, its author, Sebastian Mallaby, essentially comes to the conclusion that the humility is genuine. For one thing, when quizzed about extravagances, Hassabis yields only that he has a Liverpool season ticket. While this sets him apart from his Silicon Valley peers, with their private planes and multiple homes, really, Hassabis is doing the same thing as all of them: fashioning a persona.

Hassabis seems aware that history has its eyes on him. Mallaby, for his part, observes that his subject revels in “maximalist ambition”, talking casually of a post-scarcity society and of mining asteroids. Because of the nature of their world-changing technology, the people involved in AI’s creation seem to experience events on two planes: how they are happening in the moment, and how consequential they might be in the history of the world. Both Hassabis and Mallaby remain hyper-conscious of this throughout the book. There are countless references to the Manhattan Project, Los Alamos, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Hassabis is drawn to the ambition of the physicist’s endeavor, alluding to it as he starts to bring top researchers together to form DeepMind. Mallaby sees it as a parable about the innovator’s impulse to solve a technical problem no matter the consequences.

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Hassabis does come across as someone who has become accustomed to telling a certain set of stories about himself. One formative episode is given particular significance. At 11 years old, exhausted and stressed from the competitive chess circuit, Hassabis concedes a game to an adult opponent at a tournament. His rival then relishes pointing out how he could have won. This moment of defeat, in Hassabis’ telling, triggers a realization that his fellow chess champs are using their cognitive power to win a game rather than solve hard scientific problems. This supposedly sows the seeds for the career that Hassabis would one day embark on.

It’s a significant recurring anecdote because he uses it to accentuate his humility — or even his humanity. He was just a little boy. And yet he traveled the world going up against adults. An exceptional little boy, then. It is also a reminder that his ultimate inspiration is the human brain, its sanctity paramount to both Hassabis’s research and his self-image. Elsewhere, after all, he posits that the development of superhuman AI will reveal the secrets of nature and so bring man closer to God. “For me,” he tells Mallaby, “science is a spiritual endeavor”.

There are striking echoes of history here. Until the dawn of modernity and secularism, political figures had to insist on their ultimate servitude to God even as they sought hard power in the temporal world. Thomas Cromwell, in his famous portrait by Holbein, appears in the sober garb of a serious power-player — one who has just orchestrated the submission of England’s clergy to King Henry VIII, fundamentally changing the shape of religion in England forever. Yet a Book of Hours sits on the table in front of him, signaling his continued devotion.

If we are to believe predictions, AI will have a far greater effect on our society than did the Dissolution of the Monasteries. Such a change cannot be forced through without backlash. To mediate it, today’s AI bosses must project respect for the human, even as they build something that could surpass us. As Cromwell doffed his cap to faith, even while ushering in shattering changes to religion, his Silicon Valley successors must position their work as serving humanity while upending daily life. Hassabis has repeatedly demonstrated this respect, idolizing the human brain through his neuroscience research and talking of a quasi-religious calling to unlock the secrets of life.

To figure out what’s really driving his protagonist, Mallaby is particularly concerned with what Hassabis and his ilk are reading. His ignorance of the books of the AI prophet Ray Kurzweil sets Hassabis apart from other attendees at the Peter Thiel-backed Singularity Summit, a hive of the early AI scene. Of far greater literary interest to Hassabis is the eponymous protagonist in Ender’s Game. The story of a gifted child tasked with saving humanity resonated so deeply with Hassabis that he asked Mallaby to read it in advance of their first interview. Elsewhere, great scientists are his chosen models. “Isaac Newton, Alan Turing, all my heroes,” Hassabis says of walking down a street in Cambridge. “I could feel them in the bones of the stone, their intellect and vision. They were almost calling out to me.” He is often getting goosebumps like this, taking pictures of the Nobel Foundation’s guestbook signed by Einstein and Feynman. It is charming, suggestive of the eager, nerdy young boy under the surface. But it is also another way of self-fashioning, absorbing those figures into his own story. Here they stood and now I am here too.

Hassabis also defines himself against others, especially OpenAI’s Sam Altman: “I’m doing it for knowledge and science. He seems like he’s doing it for power.” He seems a little baffled by Altman, who comes from a new mold. Instead of Hassabis’s deference to the God-like power of nature, Altman starts to build a cult-like following for himself.

This all makes me wonder how much of the access granted for the book, and the production of the DeepMind documentary, The Thinking Game, and the appearances at world conferences and in interviews, is actually about Hassabis craving recognition. Altman, remember, not only kicked off an AI race by releasing ChatGPT, but in doing so made himself the defining figure of AI.

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Admittedly, some of Hassabis’s efforts to build his public profile predate the release of ChatGPT. But the invisible hero narrative feeds back into those twin competing pillars of exceptionalism and humility on which Hassabis perches his identity. Mallaby allows his subject to speak at length in the final pages, where Hassabis sets out his own vision of his place in the world. “I’m a weird British outlier, on this little island here, and I’ve made my own path. I’ve followed my passions and tried to stay true to what I believe in.” His refusal to leave London, for which he gets a lot of credit in British policy circles, becomes part of a narrative of being not like the other tech bros.

It should hardly be surprising that someone who spends much of his time thinking about consciousness, both human and artificial, might be particularly preoccupied with his own identity — and how that should be projected. “In my world, humanism and spiritualism and science all go together,” he says. And, like Cromwell, it is to a Renaissance figure that he looks for a model. “Da Vinci is my favorite because everything’s just flowing into one river. And that’s how I try to live.” The meaning is obscure, but Hassabis seems less enthusiastic to incorporate that element of his personality which thrives on competition and the exercising of power —though he is willing to accept them when Mallaby points them out. “I have to do what’s necessary.”

Hassabis, in short, appears to be banking on a longer-term legacy, one that emerges long after the machinations of the court are concluded. But if he or any of his rivals actually succeeds in creating AGI, this careful self-fashioning may become less relevant. If you change the world, it won’t be the books or paintings that dictate your reputation, but the consequences.

And not just any old bikini deepfakes, even though many AI platforms are capable of creating them. It’s easy to do: you just say to the AI “Put her in a bikini” and the politician, celebrity, or — sometimes — child is suddenly wearing only a bikini. Yes, it’s creepy. But also striking is the way Labour’s ire is laser-focused on Grok, the AI attached to X, formerly Twitter. It’s also striking how, despite pleas from campaigners for years on the platform’s abundance of obscene material, it’s only now that Labour is swinging into outraged action. So grievous is the danger posed by its bikini deepfakes in particular (including of Starmer), that the Government now plans to outlaw them, even as it’s  threatened to ban X from Britain altogether.

This is where the political expediency bit comes in. In Starmer’s shoes I too would be itching for an excuse to ban X. Under Musk’s ownership, the site has made Starmer’s political life a misery, more or less from the moment he entered Downing Street, from stirring the pot during the Southport riots to amplifying the grooming scandal to the point that Labour were forced to respond with the Casey review. And the response to the review, again largely convened on X, forced Starmer to promise the national inquiry his party is now doing its best to avoid delivering.

This is a far cry from pre-Musk Twitter, which was a liberal-dominated hub of respectable media-class opinion, one with a direct line for governments and intelligence services seeking speech-control influence. But since Musk bought the site in 2022, it’s morphed by degrees into something far more pungent and anarchic, where Right-wing voices predominate and many of the former progressive Twitterati have fled to the Bluesky echo-chamber or simply quit posting.

This has not been an improvement in every respect. I don’t miss the sanctimonious tone of old Twitter, but it was more playful. Even so, the rambunctious Right-wing X is politically significant, not least in being the sole large-scale digital exception to the general rule that major institutions are controlled by the Left. As such, the site plays a pivotal role in UK politics. Whether feeding the “posting to policy pipeline”, or drawing attention to ham-fisted efforts at propaganda or speech control, X convenes so large and vocally anti-Starmer a subset of the British Right that we can hardly blame Keith for wishing, like Henry II, that someone (in this case Ofcom) would rid him of this turbulent website.

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So is this just about Starmer’s ailing premiership? Yes and no. He’s at the helm of a regime that is, in its entirety, holed below the waterline by the subversive uncontrollability of digital public life. He can hardly be blamed for lashing out at a website whose denizens, and owner, so obviously loathe him. But the proposed ban is best understood as part of a wider war — as was the killing of Thomas à Becket.

Henry II had his Archbishop murdered in 1170 in the course of a dispute over the competing political and spiritual prerogatives of Crown and Church: a contest that obliged both parties to turn to the Pope in Rome for arbitration. And today Starmer finds himself at the mercy of not exactly a religious but certainly a cultural force, one whose extra-territorial leader also has an agenda that doesn’t always (or even very often) align with Starmer’s own. There is of course nothing very holy about Musk, or the trolls of X. But the contest over bikini deepfakes points toward a larger-scale struggle, with cultural, political, and economic dimensions and between overlapping Old and New World jurisdictions.

The field on which this is generally litigated is “free speech”, typically referred to as if it were an abstract moral value. But while there surely is a moral dimension to free speech, in an information age the power to free or control “speech”, and to determine what counts in that definition, is of immense political and economic consequence.

We are, in other words, once again litigating the extra-territorial reach of something intangible, much like Henry II. But in the intervening period Britain also gained her own territorial empire: and then lost it again, at the hands of our own former colony, in a way that also provides lessons for our situation now. In 1941, the British Empire, struggling against the Axis, was obliged to negotiate for aid from its secessionist progeny America. A key dispute within the negotiations was over “imperial preference”. This was a set of tariff arrangements enacted within the British Empire which gave preferential trading rights to polities that were part of the Empire. This so gravely disadvantaged American trade that its dissolution was a cornerstone of mid-century US foreign policy. Britain gave up on imperial preference and secured American aid.

I mention this not to re-litigate long-dead geopolitical quarrels, but to draw a parallel with the broader context of Starmer’s proposed ban of X. This modern argument doesn’t concern physical trade in goods, but the rules under which the digital kind are permitted to circulate. Many of these “goods” — including everything that happens on X — fall broadly under the heading of “speech”. In such a context, who gets to set the rules on “free speech” is obviously every bit as important as the 1941 battle over who gets to determine tariffs across British imperial territories.

As things stand, the digital “imperial preference” favors the polity in which the internet was first developed: the United States.  The question of geography is notoriously vexed when it comes to trade. Even determining who has tax and regulatory jurisdiction over (say) a pile of grain in a warehouse forms the topic of intense negotiations between trade experts. Intangible goods are still more complex, though: when a website can be served in multiple physical locations simultaneously, who gets to regulate it?

Extensive material and political interests rest on how this question is settled. And this is the real geopolitical backbeat to Starmer’s feud with Elon Musk: a backbeat that, in truth, encompasses not just Britain but also the EU to which Starmer clearly wishes Britain still belonged. It’s a feud currently playing out in a series of bitter skirmishes between the White House and the EU, as well as, in microcosm, between Musk and Starmer.

Recently, for example, US Secretary of State Marco Rubio announced sanctions against foreign individuals or institutions involved in censoring US digital properties: a clear shot across the bows of European politicians who believe they have a right to censor US websites and fine the companies  where these are served on EU territories. In the pandemonium that erupted following Rubio’s announcement, pro-EU supporters pointed out that no such challenges had been issued against Russia or China, despite these polities firewalling large portions of the American internet in its entirety.

But this is precisely the rub. Do the European states want to be as detached from the US as Russia and China, or not? There is no freedom of speech battle between these polities and the US, because neither Russia nor China tries to control what’s published on American platforms (at least, not openly). They just block them, and build their own platforms. By contrast, European states seem happy for America to supply its digital platforms, even as European politicians demand a say in how they are regulated. It’s as though 20th-century Canada was demanding, on the basis of its extensive wood and paper exports to Britain, a veto over everything published in London.

Until relatively recently, this relation of center and periphery was broadly mutually beneficial — not least in that it enabled American politicians to route round inconvenient constitutional clauses at home, in regulating the internet. Under Biden, the State Department encouraged and fostered European online speech controls, as a means of developing censorship tools both unconstitutional in the USA but nonetheless applicable domestically where desired, and aligned with an overall policy of digital speech control. I’m old enough to remember when something being illegal somewhere in Europe could result in its being deleted altogether from X even if the poster was in the USA. In effect, the Biden regime used Europe as a way of offshoring politically sensitive speech controls, somewhat like Guantanamo Bay offshored the torture of suspected jihadists.

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Now, though, priorities have changed — much to the bewilderment of Europe, which now has a well-developed censorship architecture but has discovered its American sponsor suddenly in a different mood. Even so, they have pressed on: two heavy-hitting US websites, X and Cloudflare, have already been threatened with fines under, respectively, the EU’s Digital Services Act and Italy’s “Piracy Shield”. The US-based forum 4chan has also been slapped with fines under Britain’s Digital Services Act. All have responded, essentially, “GFY”. Starmer’s threat to Musk on the deepfake image-making falls in the same category. It is an attempt to exert sovereignty in a space that’s both nominally open, but also in practice wholly dominated by American “imperial preference” — in the context of an American presidency taking a radical new direction.

Seen thus, the actual contest becomes clearer. Is Europe an American imperial subject, or a rival imperium? If it’s part of the empire, then obviously it doesn’t get to regulate its hegemon. If Europe is an imperial rival, it can hardly expect to demand its opponents supply services even as Europe dictates the terms. This is the real subject of the ongoing diplomatic wrestling-match over “free speech”, censorship, and regulatory frameworks such as the EU’s Digital Services Act and Britain’s Online Safety Act. If Britain, or any other European entity, really wants information sovereignty outside the American imperium, the only route there is the one now threatened by Starmer: banning American digital properties entirely from our territories, the way Russia and China do.

Does Starmer really want to go there? Does any EU state? This is perhaps uniquely difficult for Britain to answer. Geographically and economically speaking, Britain is closer to Europe, which accounts for around 41% of UK exports in 2024, compared to 18% for the US. But linguistically and culturally we’re closer to the USA. To take just one of countless examples, the BBC pays scant attention to EU politics, but Trump only has to raise an eyebrow and it’s front-page news.

In this context, can we really imagine an Atlantic firewall? I doubt it. Back in 1170, ridding himself of Thomas à Becket backfired badly on King Henry; I suspect that ridding himself of this turbulent X would prove similarly unpopular with the British media and political class. And yet our cultural, linguistic and digital enmeshment with an increasingly unpredictable US regime has introduced an acute new set of tensions. It is difficult to see how they can be resolved peacefully. But let us hope they can be. Having seen one bikini’d AI Starmer, I have no desire to see any more.

If sovereignty was the backbone of the mainstream campaign for Brexit, independence was the cry of its populist tribune. Acknowledging his triumph on the night of the vote, Nigel Farage declared that 23 June would go down in history as “our independence day”. The constitutionalism of Gove and Johnson recalled Dicey and Bagehot, while the then Ukip leader came closer to Tom Paine or John Wilkes — the 18th-century rabble-rouser and MP. More than a restoration, Brexit was something radical. The country was unshackled and free. 

The allure of such lofty rhetoric is understandable, particularly for a country that had so recently turned much of the globe pink. And even as the empire crumbled, Britain was a serious player. In 1951, when the European Coal and Steel Treaty, the predecessor body to the EEC, was signed, Britain exported more cars than any other nation. If the country had done extraordinary things before submitting to the Continent, the thinking went, it could accomplish great things after. In contrast to such rarefied ambition, the Remain camp’s arguments felt insular and bloodless. In the 21st century, they intoned, sovereignty was pooled, furnishing the country with more, not less, agency to act in an unpredictable world. 

This may have been intellectually coherent, and potentially even right, but it had the drawback of sounding like a footnote in a legal textbook. As is so often the case, progressives brought a knife to a gun fight; facts to combat vision. Nor is any of this just history. Ten years after the referendum, these debates around sovereignty, independence and self-government feel more relevant than at any point since the end of the Cold War. Such matters are no longer the province of political theory, or electioneering, but integral to the life and death of nations. 

So what is sovereignty in our own time? Beyond a monopoly on the legitimate use of force at home, it includes the capacity to defend one’s borders against military threat. Syria is not, therefore, a properly sovereign state. Nor is Venezuela, Lebanon or Georgia. Qatar’s sovereignty is certainly in doubt given it was bombed by two countries that were previously bombing each other: Israel and Iran. Particularly noteworthy about the Qatari example is that Washington seemingly permitted a strike against a country under its suzerainty. Precisely what that counts for with the Trump presidency is less clear by the day, as Denmark is now discovering. Despite spilling blood in the “liberation” of Iraq, and recently spending treasure to purchase 41 F-35s (total cost: $4.5 billion), the White House is openly talking about acquiring Greenland from Copenhagen — by force if necessary. 

Given the increasingly ad hoc nature of the US umbrella, it feels like the basis of real sovereignty, in this new world, is nuclear weapons. When I spoke to Ukrainian historian, Serhei Plokhy, late last year, his sense was that nuclear proliferation was close to inevitable over the decades ahead. If the United States couldn’t guarantee the safety of Japan, for instance, or sought to depose a government in Brazil or Mexico, perhaps these countries might look to acquire the bomb. Two nations in particular underscore this point: Ukraine and North Korea. For a brief moment in the early Nineties, the former possessed the world’s third-largest nuclear arsenal, something it renounced in exchange for security guarantees from Moscow. North Korea, meanwhile, developed an impressive nuclear and ballistic missile program, and is yet to receive the same treatment meted out on Syria, Iran, Libya, and now Venezuela. 

Besides nuclear weapons, there are other markers of sovereignty as we enter 2026. Technological autonomy is one. In 1994, Huawei founder Ren Zhengfei told Jiang Zemin, then the CCP’s General Secretary, that “a country without its own program-controlled switches is like one without an army”. In other words, national independence was impossible without an advanced industrial base. Zhenfei’s reported words were oddly reminiscent of Charles De Gaulle, who wrote in his memoir that, “there is no independence without power, and no power without modern means”. Rather than being divided by ideology, then, perhaps we should look at both men as economic nationalists forged by struggle and misfortune. De Gaulle, after all, led a government in exile, while Zhengfei cut his teeth as an engineer building jets on the Vietnamese border to support the war effort in the Sixties.

If there is one great or middle power which has not acted according to such principles in recent decades — perhaps because it has been spared such calamities — it is Britain. Think, for one thing, about technology. Far from seeing high-tech autonomy as key to the country’s status, successive governments have claimed that greater globalization was the yardstick they wished to be judged by. “Globalization is not something you can hold back,” Tony Blair informed the Labour Party Conference back in 2000. “It is driven by technology and communications and it is the key to future prosperity.” 

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Five years later, as BT sought to spend £10 billion to refit the country’s digital networks, eight companies were selected for the job: and not a single one was British. “No other advanced country would allow such a strategic investment decision affecting its national infrastructure,” lamented Peter Skyte, an officer for the union Amicus. By the standards of Blair, and much of the country’s political and media class, those were the complaints of a throwback failing to keep up. Later that year Marconi, one of the British firms that had failed to win a contract, and whose history stretched right back to 1897, was snatched up by Ericsson. Today, Britain has no domestic companies capable of building 5G infrastructure. To paraphrase Zhengfei, how powerful is an army without the technology suppliers to match? Britain may have F35s, but it can’t make microprocessors. Meanwhile Algeria and Kazakhstan produce more steel, and Tajikistan and Bosnia more aluminum. When it comes to machine-tool production we lag behind Switzerland and the Czech Republic, let alone Germany. France, meanwhile, has a lead in cutting-edge fields from sovereign cloud to first stage rockets.

It’s a similar story with our nuclear deterrent. For De Gaulle, it was pivotal that his republic maintain its own capability. “France must possess the means to defend itself by itself,” he said in 1959. Britain, meanwhile, was moving in the other direction, signing up for the American Polaris system in 1963. Rather than admit a new-found dependence on Washington, Whitehall heralded the shift as a tribute to the “‘Special Relationship”. We no longer have the Polaris system — it was replaced by Trident in the Eighties — but this most critical of technologies remains “interdependent”: while Britain builds its nuclear submarines, and fabricates its own warheads, the missiles are leased from a “shared pool” held by the Americans. Let’s not forget those missiles can only be serviced on the other side of the Atlantic, 3,000 miles away in Georgia. 

Economically, too, Britain increasingly resembles a vassal state. Heritage brands such as Boots, Clarks Weetabix and Cadbury all have American owners. If you fancy a coffee you’ll likely plump for one of Costa, Starbucks or Cafe Nero. While it may not be obvious, all three have American ownership. Indeed, US corporations employ more people in Britain than in Germany, France, Italy, Portugal and Sweden combined. But it’s at the level of basic infrastructure that things become especially pernicious. Most Government departments, and even our security services, rely on Amazon Web Services for their internet servers. In extreme circumstances, there is no guarantee that US pressure — political or legal — won’t affect the access and oversight of London. Is that really “taking back control”?

As our Government struggled to respond to Trump’s attack on Venezuela, perhaps it is unsurprising, then, that political clarity came from a politician with whom I agree on very little: Marine Le Pen. “There is one fundamental reason to oppose the regime change that the United States has just brought about in Venezuela”, she wrote on X the day of Maduro’s capture. “The sovereignty of states is never negotiable, regardless of their size, their power, or their continent. It is inviolable and sacred.” Today it might be Venezuela, Le Pen pronounced, tomorrow it could be a little closer to home. Whatever else, she heralds from a political-historical tradition in French politics that extends beyond Left and Right, and which stands for domestic sovereignty. Compared with Britain’s “podcast Right”, which unthinkingly cheers on everything the White House does, this intellectual heritage at least has the advantage of being coherent. 

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With America’s potential withdrawal from Europe, and the collapse of NATO now possible, it is ever more apparent that France’s post-war approach was the pragmatic one and Britain’s which was driven by ideology. Rolling over for the global hegemon and presuming we’ll forever dine at the top table feels presumptuous, now more than ever. Ironically, some of the most vociferous champions of British sovereignty over the Brexit years suddenly appear indifferent on the matter — with “global Britain” backers, like Daniel Hannan and Douglas Carswell, to name but two, seeming to aspire to little more than subordinate status to Washington. 

This is an attitude which, ironically, reflects the reasoning of many pro-Europeans before 2016. They wanted issues such as trade and migration to remain at Brussels, not because they necessarily believed in such a settlement, but because it made domestic politics far easier. After four decades, Westminster had lost the muscle memory to conduct trade deals — as we have since discovered. Returning such competences to Britain was always the difficult choice — which is why much of the establishment resisted it. The same is arguably true here. Surely it’s easier, as a patriotic Right-winger, to simply talk about Britain’s leading role in world affairs rather than trying to achieve its material reality.

Britain might yet enlarge its scope for sovereignty. If we truly wanted to take back control, we could, for instance, end our reliance on the US for the country’s nuclear deterrent, and return to the status quo ante before Polaris. We could develop a domestic space actor similar to Ariane, a pan-European organization that is, nevertheless, majority owned by the French government. We certainly need to produce at least some microprocessors for domestic consumption. And we need a strategy for meaningful energy security. 

Because of the strategic importance of such shifts, the state should hold at least some equity in these enterprises — in a manner similar to France’s APE (Agence des participations de l’État). Not as excessive as it sounds, it simply means reversing the more egregious mistakes of the Thatcher and Blair years. If uncorrected, these errors — such as discarding the importance of industry — will only create an increasing national vulnerability as the old order fragments,

Taking back control can’t just be rhetoric. To mean anything, those words can’t be constrained to borders, money or laws — they must encompass vital strategic industry. Otherwise, Britain will remain the least sovereign middle power of all. We may have left the clutches of Brussels a decade ago, but in a perverse inversion of the Boston Tea Party, we now risk becoming the 51st State of America — just without the voting rights. 

When SBF, as he likes to be called, was arrested for fraud and money laundering a couple of months later, journalists and other literary sorts seized on his words as evidence of moral corruption. Expressing a disdain for books is not only “ignorant and arrogant”, wrote The Atlantic’s Thomas Chatterton Williams; it signals “a much larger deficiency of character”. “Sam Bankman-Fried doesn’t read,” ran the headline of a Washington Post editorial. “That tells us everything.”

But if SBF’s comeuppance provided comfort to the bookish set, it was of an icy variety. In dismissing books as outdated information-delivery devices, the young entrepreneur wasn’t saying anything out of the ordinary. He was giving voice to the zeitgeist. The philistines have taken over the culture.

What we’re seeing as we enter 2026 is a reversal of the situation C. P. Snow described in his celebrated 1959 lecture “The Two Cultures”. Snow, a Cambridge physicist turned popular novelist, argued that the culture of the West had split into two camps. On one side were “literary intellectuals” — novelists, poets, artists, critics. On the other were what we would today call STEM types — scientists, technologists, engineers, mathematicians. Between the two lay “a gulf of mutual incomprehension”. The intellectuals took pride in their lack of interest in scientific and technical developments, while the boffins remained largely ignorant of everything encompassed by the then-common phrase “high culture”. The two camps, Snow observed, might as well have lived on different planets.

Along with the knowledge divide came a power divide. To the public, the literary intellectuals — Snow pointed to the poet and critic T. S. Eliot as the “archetypal figure” — constituted the cultural elite. They were the ones who appeared in glossy magazines and high-brow television shows. They were the ones whose words determined what was worth talking about, whose tastes established the boundary between the great and the trifling. The scientists and engineers, with a few notable exceptions, remained out of the public eye, toiling in lab-coated anonymity. Their discoveries and inventions were shaping the future, but as individuals they held little cultural currency.

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Today, the divides remain, but the power dynamic has been turned on its head. The STEM camp, in particular its technological wing, dominates the culture. Techies take prominent seats at presidential inaugurations and White House banquets. Their words and actions set much of the public’s daily agenda. And not only are they ubiquitous presences in the media; they’ve come to control the media, as news and entertainment have shifted onto the digital platforms they control. Mark Zuckerberg, Sam Altman, Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk: these are our new T. S. Eliots.

As for old-style public intellectuals, they’ve disappeared from the scene. There are still serious writers and artists and critics, but they work in insular obscurity, speaking less and less to the general public and more and more to one another. In universities, humanities departments shrink as students flock to STEM fields in pursuit of higher pay and greater status. In primary and secondary schools, art, music, and library programs are cut to free up money for EdTech investments. Those who once created and celebrated high culture now seem ashamed even to speak the phrase. They’ve come to doubt their own worth.

The cultural shift runs deep. People’s skills and habits are changing along with their perceptions. In the last 20 years, the number of Americans who read for pleasure plummeted by 40%, according to a University of Florida study published last summer. A third of US kids now graduate high school without basic reading skills, and a quarter of adults read at a third-grade level or worse. In the UK, the percentage of children who enjoy reading in their spare time fell from 55% to 33% over the last 10 years, according to a long-running National Literacy Trust survey. If the expansion of reading and writing was a defining characteristic of the 19th and 20th centuries, their withering is a marker of the 21st. As Times columnist James Marriott writes, “Welcome to the post-literate society.”

Those who built fortunes atop the rubble of literary culture smell victory. “Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential,” proclaimed the venture capitalist Marc Andreessen in “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto”, a much-discussed 2023 blog post. He continued: “Technology is liberatory. Liberatory of human potential. Liberatory of the human soul, the human spirit. Expanding what it can mean to be free, to be fulfilled, to be alive. We believe technology opens the space of what it can mean to be human.”

One need not be blind to the joys and bounties of technological innovation to find such triumphalist blather repugnant. (In what might generously be interpreted as an adolescent attempt at provocation, Andreessen echoes the words of “The Futurist Manifesto” written more than a century ago by the proto-fascist F. T. Marinetti.) But, like SBF’s remark a year earlier, Andreessen’s screed catches the tenor of our time. It elevates technology to the position that art, literature, and even religion used to hold. Technology is the highest expression of human creativity, the dwelling-house of soul and spirit. Our instruments and our systems, not our inner lives, provide us with meaning and purpose. In Silicon Valley’s rigidly utilitarian conception of the human condition, there’s no room for imagination or aesthetics, metaphysics or faith. As for beauty, we’ll have to content ourselves with discovering it in an app interface.

The rise of generative artificial intelligence, as both a practical technology and a popular obsession, crystallizes Big Tech’s cultural takeover. AI turns reading and writing into automated industrial routines, optimized for speed and efficiency. It instrumentalizes intellect, allows the critical and creative work of the mind to be outsourced to machinery. The public, whatever fears it may have about the ultimate consequences of the technology, seems happy to employ it in myriad ways to save time and money.

In his most influential essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent”, T. S. Eliot argued that poets and other artists, through years of deep reading and careful observation, forge within themselves an understanding of the works in their field so deep it turns instinctual. Beyond knowledge, they gain “the consciousness of the past”. Having internalized tradition, they can then apply the singular power of their own sensibility to transform it into something new, something that transcends the personal to become universal. Individual talent becomes the crucible that sustains tradition by carrying it, in new forms, into the future. In the aggregate, all these intricately connected acts of creation form the culture.

Generative AI gives us a parody of Eliot’s creative process. Tradition is replaced by a vast statistical model constructed of digital representations of the works of the past. Individual talent is replaced by a prediction function that mindlessly extracts patterns of data from the model and serves them up in the form of text, image, or sound. “Poetry,” Eliot wrote, “is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality.” He immediately added a crucial clarification: “Of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” Bots like ChatGPT, Gemini, and Claude have no personality or emotions to escape from. In speaking to us with the voice of nobody, they mock us. Their hollowness is our hollowness.

There’s a deep irony here. Under the reign of the STEM lords, the public’s trust in science and scientists is decaying. Far from promoting empiricism and objectivity, the cult of virtuality is encouraging a return to superstition, subjectivity, and myth. The overthrow of the old intellectual elite and its replacement by the new technological elite, we can now see, opened a cultural hole that has been filled by ideological fervor, financial speculation, and prideful ignorance, all amplified by a digital communication system that, in its inhuman scale and speed, leaves little room for reflection or discretion.

Whatever their shortcomings, the old avatars of high culture shared a set of values — a respect for talent, taste, and tradition; a disdain for the flimsy and the fake; a commitment to rigor in thought and expression — that encouraged the pursuit of excellence not only in art and literature but in science, engineering, and other practical pursuits. If Snow were alive today, he might feel nostalgic about the state of affairs he bemoaned at the dawn of the Sixties. He might now see that the divide between the two cultures was not as sharp as he supposed. Their differences masked a deeper bond.

When, in a recent jailhouse interview, Bankman-Fried revealed he had started reading novels, I couldn’t help but think of the concluding couplet of W. H. Auden’s “In Memory of W. B. Yeats”:

In the prison of his days
Teach the free man how to praise.

Maybe there’s hope.

For all the pioneering smartphone refuseniks and buzzy new alternatives, the data tells a less optimistic story. In Britain, Nokia brick sales jumped from 400,000 to 450,000 in 2024, but 68 million people have smartphones. Screentime restriction apps and all sorts of lobotomized dumbphones are not actually flooding the market. The most hyped post-screen pioneers — the Humane AI Pin and Rabbit — were honorable but catastrophic failures.

The situation is critical. The scrolletariat is swiping itself into oblivion. While distinctions between productivity and entertainment make measurement tricky, the average human spends roughly 4.9 hours on mobile apps daily. For the young, it’s even worse. American teenagers average a staggering 8 hours and 39 minutes of daily screen time for entertainment, while British 18-24 year olds clock in at nearly 6 hours and a half hours. The scale is vast, and with the rise of hyper-personalized AI slop machines, the quality is degrading further. Add to that the wider outsourcing of human cognition to AI, we risk becoming hollowed out fleshy middleware lost in an endless mind maze.

In the face of this smartphone-AI-dopamine axis of evil, various schools of neo-Luddite resistance are emerging. Like the loom-smashing weavers of the 19th century, today’s resistance is united by a distaste for the machine. However, they are divided on the best course of resistance — many want to run for the hills, others want to destroy their phones, and some believe they can tame the effects. All are doomed to fail.

To those with a more romantic vision of resistance, the digital world is only avoided by escaping into a prelapsarian Arcadia of nature, craft, literature, and “dumb” technology. They range from the Bopeas trading screen time for soil and wild swimming and the hip Gen Z resistance groups such as the gnome-hatted Lamp Club and Breaking the G(loom) all the way to noted anti-machine rager Paul Kingsnorth and The Times’ James Marriott wielding his Qin F21 Pro. They all instinctively understand the sickness, but their cure is fundamentally unscalable. Unchaining oneself means battling the network effect, the mechanism that locks users in by punishing non-participation with isolation. Escape therefore requires the social capital to survive being cut off from the herd — a luxury most cannot afford.

Equally romantic, but much less chill are the more violent neo-Luddites. These are the spiritual children of the late Ted Kaczynski, the notorious Unabomber who resisted industrial society through manifestos and mail bombs. They share a quasi-millenarian view of techno-industrial society, seeing the destruction of the mega-machine as essential to the preservation of nature and humanity, and are willing to break some legs to get there. These neo-Luddite extremists include the Greek anarchists Conspiracy of Fire Nuclei, the mystical Latin American terrorist networks of Individualists Tending to the Wild, and France’s emerging Anti-Tech Resistance. While they may be true believers, tying salvation to the destruction of techno-capitalist civilization is not a winning formula with the less insane.

More pragmatic is the network of politicians, policy wonks, academics, and journalists pursuing reforms through legislation. On the Left, Shoshana Zuboff, American author of The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, and British journalist Carole Cadwalladr want to tame the techno-beast through privacy, anti-trust, and online safety bills. On the Right, there’s a mirror universe of pro-family tech critics, from US Senator Josh Hawley through to Tory MP Miriam Cates. While legislation is crucial, attempts are glacially slow and critics are fundamentally divided on the true source of evil. Are screens the enemy? Or surveillance? Hate speech? Big Tech? All forms of social media? Dopamine culture? Governments must play a role, but for now we are in a race against time. Endless hubs, quangos, and inquiries will not outrun the shapeshifting onslaught of innovation. Even if they do eventually succeed, citizens will bypass them.

Further, governments seeking to address the neo-Luddites’ concerns face a paralyzing paradox. While they may want to halt mass cognitive atrophy, other crises take priority. Faced with anemic growth, declining living standards, geopolitical instability, and climate pressure, government ambitions are increasingly beholden to Silicon Valley. Leaders see AI as the silver bullet in the hunt for productivity, security, and sustainability. Yet, the very titans building these frontier technologies are the same ones powering the brain rot. This Faustian pact is laid bare by the British Government’s new partnership with Alphabet to harness AI for clean energy research and public services. If Google is crucial to the state, tackling YouTube addiction is politically impossible.

Thus, we are at an impasse. If we cannot yet regulate through force or law, what is to be done? Perhaps there is a way to become masters of our domain and usher in a grand transformation of social norms.

We have been here before. The Luddites failed to stop the Industrial Revolution quashed by an alliance of government and merchants comparable to today. Industrialization continued and unleashed a different blight: cheap hard booze. From schools and asylums to factories and prisons, everyone was getting lit. The 18th-century Gin Craze, immortalized in Hogarth’s Beer Street and Gin Lane diptych, was unstoppable. Despite the Gin Acts, the state was captive to the alcohol lobby and tax receipts. Those in power, it was often said, wanted workers too drunk to organize politically, but not too drunk to operate machines effectively in their factories.

In the 19th century, the Temperance movement did what law could not. In September 1832, in a converted cock-fighting pit in Preston, Lancashire, a cheesemonger named Joseph Livesey and six working-class comrades — the Seven Men of Preston — signed a pledge of total abstinence. They believed a drunken proletariat could never be liberated and so-called “Giant Alcohol” was the ultimate tool of subjugation.

Their genius was to reframe the issue. They advanced the debate beyond religious sin to a campaign for wealth, health, and inter-generational morality. Temperance activists argued that alcohol stole a father’s wages, wrecked the worker’s liver, and shattered the peace of the home. As Benjamin Disraeli’s physician Joseph Kidd wrote in 1879, the goal was a virtuous citizen “accustomed to self-restraint and moderation”, a state he called “one of the chief delights and aspirations… of a true man”. The mission was not just to change laws, but to change the soul.

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Crucially, campaigners invoked the innocence of the young. Founded in 1847, a society called the Band of Hope inspired children to sign a pledge of sobriety. It aimed to inoculate children against alcohol through a cultural program including its iconic magic lantern shows, using cutting-edge technology to project vivid, terrifying images of the drunkard’s decline. British alcohol consumption finally peaked in 1876. By 1897, the Band of Hope had enrolled 3 million children. By 1931, a Royal Commission officially declared that “drunkenness has gone out of fashion”.

What can we learn from the Temperance movement? In his 2025 Reith Lecture, “Fighting for Humanity in the Age of the Machine”, Dutch historian Rutger Bregman argues that the Temperance movement is the perfect blueprint for our time. He warns that “today, we face a new addiction industry, not of wine and whiskey, but of apps and algorithms, [where ]many of Stanford’s brightest minds are building a single great moloch, an attention-hijacking machine that devours our focus”. Bregman proposes using the state to break this machine, advocating for dopamine taxes on ad revenue similar to alcohol taxes. Yet, given our governments’ increased reliance on AI companies, these changes seem unlikely to happen soon enough. If we cannot yet liberate the soul through regulation, then perhaps changing norms is the method.

This cultural rewiring begins with a return to collective accountability. Just as with the Seven Men of Preston and the Band of Hope, this begins with a pledge to personal and collective accountability. There are several leading candidates for a modern neo-Temperance movement such as America’s Wait Until 8th, which encourages parents to delay giving their child a smartphone until the end of 8th grade, and Britain’s Smartphone Free Childhood (SFC), pledging to restrict smartphones until 14 and social media until 16. The latter is particularly impressive: having only been founded in February 2023, it has already amassed over 300,000 parents — including Kate Winslet and Paloma Faith.

Will Orr-Ewing, who co-founded SFC’s Smartphone Free Schools campaign, explains that this is fundamentally about re-establishing lost boundaries. He describes the pact not merely as a petition, but as a “covenant that you sign with other parents” to hold the line collectively. The goal is to revive “the Victorian idea that children are a separate category”, establishing childhood as a “sacred time that is given special prominence” and protected from the encroachment of adult vices.

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While we chew through the messy battle to regulate addictive algorithms, neo-Temperance activists are attempting to ensure existing laws are interpreted to factor in novel technologies. Orr-Ewing is already pursuing this, recently launching a Judicial Review to force schools to apply existing safeguarding statutes. He argues that schools have failed to understand that their safeguarding obligations apply to smartphones just as they do to a classroom ceiling full of asbestos. “Whether it’s a beheading video or high-definition porn,” Orr-Ewing argues, “nine-year-olds should not be watching this shit. I think we’ve still got enough moral norms to have consensus on that.”

Beyond the classroom and the courtroom, success requires rediscovering the lost art of judgment. The polite relativism of contemporary liberal culture has trained us to avoid criticizing others. Yet, if we stand by as the minds of tomorrow are obliterated, politeness is complicity. It may feel rude and fogeyish but we must scold — and be scolded. Take inspiration from Chile’s outgoing Millennial President Gabriel Boric who recently paused a speech to phoneshame 11 audience members for staring at their screens before showing off his own dumbphone. We can all harness the spirit of Boric. Be judgy. Call your friend a swipewanker. Ban phones at dinner. Smartphone zombies must be rendered socially toxic. Norms can only be transformed through a collective effort to hold each other to account.

Yet, stigma alone cannot remake a people, one needs stories and symbols woven into culture. The original Temperance movement understood this well. In art, following Hogarth’s lead, George Cruikshank’s wildly popular The Bottle (1847) series depicted a respectable British family’s descent into poverty and madness due to drink. In literature, Anne Brontë’s The Tenant of Wildfell Hall (1848) shattered the Victorian illusion of the merry drunk, exposing the brutal horror of addiction. In mass entertainment, the Band of Hope’s magic lanterns inspired millions. To succeed today, the neo-Temperance movement must find and celebrate its very own Hogarths, Cruikshanks, and Brontës and propagate their works in the physical world. Who will paint the Beer Street and Gin Lane of the smartphone era?

Finally, a neo-Temperance movement will fail without a positive vision for what humans actually ought to be beyond mere pleasure–satisfying machines. Who is the post-smartphone human? What should they do instead of staring and swiping? Gabriella Nguyen, the 24-year-old founder of Appstinence, an anti-social media campaign, argues we do not need to solve this immediately. To avoid simply trading screen time for increased productivity is reductive, so first we must return to “ground zero” to work out how to live. Then, through Appstinence, we can reclaim these “luxuries of time, practice, social support, and a clear mind” and begin to “no longer see these meandering, unbound exchanges as lavish expenses of our time and productivity, but the regular course of events”. It is here, Nguyen claims, we can reflect and forge the post-smartphone human.

At this rate, billions will spend 25 years of their lives on their smartphone. Yet, mass sloppification is ultimately a choice. Neither government nor Big Tech is going to change things anytime soon. The neo-Luddites will not smash the data centers. The blueprint of the Temperance movement reveals that salvation will not come from above — it must be reclaimed from below. The solution is not a single law or tax, but a collective recovery of cognitive sovereignty. It’s time for neo-Temperance.

Yet what’s most fascinating about that world was how fragmentary, improvisational, and messy it appeared to the artists living in it at the time. Most of them didn’t have national or international renown, living sordid lives, scrambling to find patrons, collaborating on magazines nobody read, staging exhibitions that puzzled the public, and worrying more about ideas than fame or posterity. They were unafraid of experimentation, and willing to be misunderstood. They had little or nothing to do with universities, foundations, or established institutions. If they couldn’t find their way into journals, galleries, and publishing houses, they simply made their own. These artists deliberately opposed the contemporary world, even as they dragged it like a cadaver into the future with them. Their real allegiance was to the idea of the artist as a free agent in the world: they understood that their true audience was other artists; that the goal of art was to redeem a culture always on the brink of forgetting everything; and that most people, rich or poor, will always be far behind their own times.

By the end of its first quarter, the 20th century had already seen what many now consider its most groundbreaking artworks: Picasso’s Les Demoiselles d’Avignon and Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase; Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and Schoenberg’s Pierrot lunaire; Joyce’s Ulysses, T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland, and Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past. A quarter of the way through our own century, do we have a single novel, poem, composition, or work of art that can measure up to these? The answer is nearly always “no”. And if it’s ever “yes”, the examples offered are never really satisfying. Some might suggest the environments of Pierre Huyghe, or the films of Terrence Malick, or Helen DeWitt’s wonderful novel The Last Samurai. But as brilliant as they are, these works simply don’t have the same sense of having revolutionized the medium in ways unimaginable before them. There is far less distance between them and the modernism of Man Ray than there is between Man Ray and the paintings of someone like J. M. W. Turner, a century before him.

When future critics write the annals of our era, I suspect that what will actually strike them most is just how little has happened in our time. Rather than a litany of genius artistic accomplishments, it is much more accurate to see our moment as the height of industrial mass culture’s revenge upon art — a period in which creative industries, academic training, popular taste, assembly-line content production, and distribution technologies have fused into a monolith without qualities. The idea of artists as pioneers and outsiders has given way to a professionalized class within contemporary academic and media institutions. Yet with the arrival of each new digital technology, even these artists risk being taken out of the equation. What’s more, the characteristic experience of art in our time has become divorced from all previous eras in human history: there are few amateur art societies remaining; connoisseurship has been mocked almost out of existence, and patronage reduced to market speculation. For most people, art has next to nothing anymore to do with religious ritual, or even the pursuit of commonality and sociality. Audiences are now individual people behind individual screens — voyeurism is the ruling principle of the digital experience of art.

Everyone knows this: significant portions of these spaces are devoted to discussions about how miserable it is to be there. Even so, what most people seem to want from their media today is the chance to watch other people do things. The most consistent experience of anything resembling art is not happening in galleries, in the pages of journals, at the cinema, or in the concert hall. It consists of watching other people play video games, watching other people make food, watching other people listen to music. Those future historians will likely conclude that life in the first part of the 21st century was something that happened to other people. They will feel pity for the hundreds of millions of human beings whose yearnings were so thoroughly diverted from the world of sense into a state of passive surveillance.

Many of us now spend a majority of our waking lives trapped in a continuous flow of the possibility of experience, instead of experience itself. The revenge upon art is also revenge upon experience, since this is just what we do when we participate in the cacophonic theater of digital spaces — we take revenge upon the difficulty and pain of our experience. The aesthetic of our era is mostly a flight away from art, since art embodies all those things — real sex, death, history, feeling, pain — which we are desperate to escape. Plainly, the modern world has become too complex for us. There is too much news, too much noise, too much action — too much for any one person to handle. Our bodies rebel against their conditions through illness, fatigue, and depression: hence the common sentiment that interacting with serious art is just too difficult, that what’s really needed at the end of the day is mindless, numbing escape. Art must now compete with the universal desire for dissociation.

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We have of course been preparing for this escape for a long time. Our anti-art era reached its apex in just the past two or three years, with the arrival of machine-generated versions of visual arts, music, and literature. Whether by accident or design, the makers of these “artificial intelligences” have come close to achieving what many creative industries were tending towards anyways: the abolishment of the artists themselves. The endless scroll is now replete with machine-generated “art”, but so long as the average consumer is seeking to numb their reality, there’s no reason for them to care if what meets them are human- or machine-made images. If our hypothetical future historians are accurate, they will perceive that the dominant tone of our time is anesthetic, since the role of nearly all popular media now is a panacea, meant to assuage an underlying anxiety, but only worsening it in reality.

Anesthetic is a perfect term for a deeper reason, too. Given the meaning of the prefix “an-” (“without” or “lacking”), the word quite literally means “lacking aesthetic” — without feeling or perception. We’re living in a time in which the average consumer’s experience is in tacit collusion with a mass-produced media world that has successfully propagandized on behalf of hollowing out our aesthetic experiences — and which now has the technology to eliminate artists from the production of it. This revenge upon art has so far been successful for two reasons: first, a 20th-century mass culture created by the perfection of major broadcast technologies; and second, the aforementioned conversion of artists to a professionalized class of aspirational elites.

The development of radio and television in the 20th century created the largest interconnected mass culture in history. The values of this monoculture quickly combined with the centralizing and propagandizing dictums of the century’s globe-spanning states. Whether Soviet propaganda, or the leading US television networks, or TIME magazine, or The Times, the idea was the same: whoever reaches and sways the most people wins. Monoculture relied on technologies of mass persuasion, broadcasting from single sources to millions of listeners, readers, and viewers. And the people who experienced this world passed on those same values, creating the newer world of digital information. We on the internet today have inherited this idea that mass culture ought to exist, even though it would seem alien to most times and places in human history. The ideal only exists because of those broadcast technologies, because the point of the game being played through them was to monopolize the maximum amount of airspace and human attention.

The internet, however, is not a single medium, but a fabric of mediums. In its networks one finds broadcast technology but also telephonic and text-based technologies. Social media platforms were able to disrupt the original internet by essentially constructing sociality-themed meta-games in the midst of what was once a decentralized network of libraries, messaging systems, and sites. But where the 20th-century mass culture required many people tuning into a limited range of channels such as radio frequencies, television stations, even cinema screens, social media algorithms curate distinct channels for each user. This traumatic loss of collective experience has been partially substituted by the chaotic “public square” of those platforms. Yet creative industries and tech companies are still based on the old incentives, and have generally monopolized every digital outpost to deliver only their content to huge numbers of people.

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Our problem now isn’t a lack of cultural production, but too much of it. So much so that the vast majority of artists simply can’t compete with the tiny number of hugely popular names with the full backing of the media conglomerates. At the empty center of this era of over-production is what the critic W. David Marx has called the “Blank Space” — the name of his recent cultural history of the 21st century. Marx’s Blank Space deals above all with the force of “Poptimism” — a rising idea among many critics that their duty was to advocate for popular commercial products as an antidote to the hipsterism, snobbery, and elitism of the 20th century. As Marx argues, no matter how open-minded these critics thought they were being, the actual result of their rhetoric gave the media and the public carte blanche to reject high-minded art in favor of shallow pop culture, ceding the once-transgressive powers of the avant garde to a resurgent Right-wing often allied with the very tech companies who want to automate away cultural production. This has desiccated creative subcultures and made it harder for critics to get attention for unknown artists, while audiences themselves increasingly reject any attempt to argue for better art as aristocratic arrogance. As the saying goes: “Just let people enjoy things.”

However, part of this resentment against elitist critics also extends to the whole field of modern art itself — something Marx doesn’t consider. The mass culture of the late 20th century — which is what really made the radical art of the early century famous, reducing artists like Picasso and Duchamp to memes and flat cultural icons — continued to harbor at least some of the old oppositional avant-garde sensibility. Even popular artists could be respected for challenging and shocking their audiences. But over time, the paradox was simply too great: if the main imperative is to get as much content out to as many people as possible, then challenging or difficult art can only ever be in conflict with it. This is why Poptimism as an idea has been so deleterious: it preys on the part of the audience which rejects difficulty, which regards the old avant-garde attitude as snobbery, and dislikes critics because critics often tell them that what they like isn’t very good. Over the past few decades, we’ve seen exactly what happens when you combine a global mass-commercial imperative, the hamstringing of serious criticism, and the diffusion of physical countercultures into the internet. The result is the Blank Space: an alarming rate of technological change, ironically counterposed by an absence of novel artistic movements.

As a legible history of the past 25 years, Marx’s book encourages us to imagine something better — to imagine the return of physical subcultures, of serious criticism, and the development of something resembling an avant garde. But this is a forbiddingly difficult thing to do, since the place of artists has shifted so far from what it once was. On the one hand, there is the idea of the artist in popular culture — one which might sometimes contain the old ideal of aesthetic excellence at all costs, yet has for the most part given way to influencers, celebrities, and brand managers. On the other hand, there is the reality of artists within cultural institutions. Look at the blue chip galleries and recipients of huge foundation funds; the majority of “upmarket” authors published by the major houses; the poets who win major literary prizes; the young writers who work their way from unpaid internships to staff jobs; the people who run the arts non-profits. You will find an extreme bias towards upper-middle-class backgrounds and university educations. Looking at the biographies of emerging artist award winners and grant recipients, you might be bewildered by how many of these people have BFAs, MFAs, even PhDs in their area.

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This is the professionalization of the artist in our time. It is well known just how difficult it is to get published, or to get one’s work seen, without the right resume: a degree certification, specially curated portfolio, the requisite recommendations. The artist in this professional climate — whether a young composer, painter, poet, or filmmaker — faces an enormous bureaucratic barrier of entry to their field. Their style has to conform to a certain industry expectation, has to fit in with the current understanding of sales trends, and can’t risk offending or upsetting anyone at any step in that process. So, for decades, university programs have sprung up with the intention of training young artists for entry into these careers, in workshops and fine-arts programs designed to maximize their legibility at the expense of idiosyncratic style.

In our current environment, an artist like Man Ray — who turned down a university scholarship, working as a technical illustrator and taking classes at the Ferrer Center, an anarchist day school in New York — would get nowhere. But, of course, artists like Man Ray have never got anywhere in these environments. The early 19th-century Romantics rebelled against the school of Joshua Reynolds; the later Impressionists against the reigning Paris Salons; the fin-de-siècle Vienna Secessionists rebelled against the Association of Austrian Artists; Man Ray, Picasso, Duchamp and other avant-gardists rebelled against the ossified remains of those previous revolutionary styles. Today’s young creatives may want to think of themselves as a crusading vanguard, particularly regarding social justice causes, but, more often than not, they are themselves the producers of the stuffy bourgeois academic style which all great modern art movements have defined themselves by rejecting.

This state of affairs has only contributed to the suspicion that today’s creatives are hustlers and grifters making risk-free art. Where former eras regarded them as confusing freaks, even exiles, the public now sees them as poseurs and snobs. The undifferentiated style of these artists’ exhibitions, novels, poems, and compositions only reinforces the sense that their only audience is other professionals and academics. At the same time, as hemorrhaging industries concentrate more and more on sure-fire market successes, the professionalized caste is kept on life support solely by grants, residencies, foundations, and legacy media attention. Potential audiences drift further towards mass-produced slop and digital numbness, yet these artists still sand away every bit of risk, experiment, or novelty to make it in the shrinking creative industries. There is very little room in this equation for the creation of new artistic movements — and little incentive for anyone to want one.

So what is to be done about this? Well — many things. The first is to be clear about the situation, no matter how depressing. For the time being, the majority of the public is too distracted, numbed-out, and tech-addicted to respond to much art. Still, this is only a despairing thing from the point of view of that 20th-century monoculture. For most of human history, the production of culture was meant to exalt God, or give prestige to the ruling aristocracy. In the wake of the Romantics and modernists, the highest value became the creation of great art as the ultimate mode of human experience. When this becomes the ideal pursuit, even at a social cost, and the artist is understood as an essential outsider, public disinterest becomes the norm; it even becomes a sign of health. One of Man Ray’s consistent refrains was that whenever he noticed his work confusing someone, he knew he was really on to something.

We also have to admit that the current academic style is moribund. My generation — made up of young Millennials and elder Zoomers — has yet to produce a truly great novelist, poet, composer, or painter. And that is because too many have given up the time and energy that should have gone to their true education in formal history, to pursue professionalized academic tracks promising elite approval. As Marx pointed out, these careerist industries have left the old transgressive spirit of the avant garde to be subsumed by trolls and reactionary Right-wingers, who are themselves nearly incapable of producing art, their transgressions limited to stepping on liberal social norms and indulging in half-ironic bigotry. Not that progressives have fared much better: the last two decades of social justice politics produced no great art, with proponents largely choosing empty pieties over practical liberatory politics. Once elites figured out how to use the language of those movements, they quickly adopted it to police established class boundaries in the media, and plenty of artists adapted to the situation immediately.

What is clear is the need for secession. The need for greater numbers of serious artists, writers, musicians, and filmmakers who exist outside of the academy, legacy media institutions, and the major creative industries. Artists who create their own smaller institutions, their own laboratories, their own publications, their own exhibitions — all with the clear intention of avoiding trends, embracing experimental collaboration, and rejecting the need for a large audience whatsoever. At the beginning, the only audience should be other artists. Artists need spaces outside the confines of the internet, even outside the confines of society. Yet much of what goes on now, in the burgeoning scenes of New York, London, or Paris, are only small magazines, artsy parties, and showings with an eye towards sexy contemporary issues. A lot of it only happens in conjunction with small presses, or on Substack.

These people certainly have the great avant-garde artists in mind — they yearn for the days of bohemia, for Paris between the wars, or the Künstlerhaus in Vienna. But so far, their attempts to forge new art scenes have been too much scene, and too little art. The point there is less to experiment and envision some genuinely new movement, and more to imitate the romantic social lives of older artists. Until these scenes take the collaborative process of art-making and art-theorizing as seriously as they do their parties and online publications, they will be transitory. What’s more, artists need to be far more sincere about mixing with different kinds of creatives. One of the most remarkable things about interwar Paris was just how many kinds of people mixed together — aristocrats, socialites, commercial artists, designers, filmmakers, painters, playwrights, poets. They didn’t segregate themselves by medium, only by the groups they’d dedicated themselves to (and even then those boundaries could be quite porous). Judgment and taste were the sole currency. Artists who didn’t measure up to their standards were quickly dismissed as kitsch-mongers. Today we mischaracterize this posture as elitist — but it is only elitist if it comes from an actual powerful elite. For artistic movements, strict standards are self-preservation, the only thing with any chance of revitalizing a calcified aesthetic culture.

The art of the future is not going to come from our current institutions and academies. Yet neither is it going to be purely Romantic, or purely modernist. It will have to emerge from the technical mastery of all forms that came before it. Artists will have to spend far less time seeking facile “personal expression” and more time practicing old-fashioned methods, understanding them inside and out — which is the only real way to imagine something beyond them. Only an intimate understanding of the history of an artform can really respond to the world as it is now, a world which has tried to take its revenge upon art by robbing artists of their role in society, and drowning the masses in assembly-line slop.

The new contemporary art will have to be part evangelism and part theater; the artists will have to be unforgiving preachers of the gospel of aesthetic excellence. They will have to be stringent in their commitment to experimentation and their rejection of the current style. For the sake of real creative freedom, they will have to reject positioning and political signaling (though this hardly means rejecting politics itself). What is needed, in short, is a theory of contemporary art which aspires once again to shock its audience, when it finds it — not merely to transgress against social norms, rather to shock people back into reality, back into the stream of experience. The role of the artist in the anti-art era will be the person who sees the world as it is — numbed-out, anxious, resentful, overwhelmed, half-asleep — and tries to wake it back up again, by whatever means necessary.

Best known for his novels — A Room with a View, A Passage to India, Howard’s End — Forster had a keen eye for concrete particularity and individual character. These are qualities largely absent in the colorless world of The Machine Stops. The story is set in the distant future, when human beings have retreated from the Sun, the source of light and life that shines upon the surface of the Earth. Isolated, alone, and terrifically self-involved, they live in underground hexagonal cells, where all their needs are met by something called the “Machine”. Contact with others is almost exclusively electronically mediated. Vashti, the only named character in the story besides her son, Kuno, “knew” several thousand people she’d never met in the flesh, e-friends who could be seen and spoken with on something like Zoom. Vashti is surrounded by buttons “to call for food, for music, for clothing” — even for Machine-made literature and poetry, the equivalent of today’s AI-generated pap. She has no need or desire ever to leave her room.

Forster grasps that a life so dependent on technology would be one of comprehensive decay. A “swaddled lump of flesh” with “a face as white as fungus”, Vashti lacks teeth and hair, organs that have little use in a predigested, temperature-controlled world. Perpetually sedentary, she walks with great difficulty, is highly irritable (“a growing quality in that accelerated age”), and — like everyone else in the great subterranean hive — can no longer hazard the Earth’s surface without a respirator. Leaving her room for the first time in years, she is initially “seized with the terrors of direct experience” and retreats to her armchair. And when a woman later “barbarically” puts out her hand to keep her from falling, she becomes irate, for “people never touched one another”.

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Culture, too, is marked by decadence. It no longer renews itself through immediate openness to the world, a necessary stimulant of intellectual imagination. Like algorithmic chatbots, or Hollywood producers making endless iterations of a past blockbuster, it instead feeds on the creations of bygone epochs. Vashti spends her time listening to lectures on topics like music during “the Australian Period” or “the pre-Mongolian epoch”. She and her intellectual circle long for new “ideas”, demand for which far exceeds supply. Unfortunately, the riches of the past stimulate few ideas in the abstract age of the Machine, when strong individual personality is considered a “taint”, and when feckless intellectuals, to echo Nietzsche, stand like eunuchs before the “great historical world-harem”. “First-hand ideas” acquired by direct observation are thought to be of little value, for they are disturbed by love, fear, and other passions.

The most trustworthy ideas, in Forster’s world, are “tenth-hand”, arrived at by a sequence of intermediary historians counteracting previous interpretations. Yet the result is a flat and narrow presentism masquerading as science. To study the French Revolution in this way, it goes without saying, is to purge it of the powerful passions of its participants and contemporaries — to see it “as it would have happened, had it taken place in the days of the Machine”. History done thus levels understanding rather than expanding it. It no longer connects people to other times and places, rooting them in a cherished past and offering models of excellence to which they may aspire. Rather, it merely generates counterfactuals that reflect the predominant assumptions of the present.

And if this is a prophecy of the withered historical sense of our time, you might say the same of technology. The Machine is no longer developed in new directions, but merely mended as needed. Travel has ceased to generate ideas, “for, thanks to the advance of science, the earth was exactly alike all over”. Though there are airships on which people are occasionally compelled to travel for official purposes, like the propagation of the race, the sight of the earth below and the heavens above conveys no new ideas. One is reminded, here, of the disappointment of the internet, where great expectations of cultural cross-pollination are drowned in a flood of pornography and echo-chambered rage.

Instincts of veneration and familial attachment do persist even in this deracinated era. The only printed volume in Vashti’s room is the richly bound Book of the Machine, published by the Central Committee (the functions of government are evidently performed by worldwide bureaucratic and technocratic organs that are supposed to keep the Machine in working order). This Book is but a shadow of the one it has replaced: while the ancient Bible taught how to live free and responsible lives, this one contains “instructions against every possible contingency” — a comprehensive list of buttons to press should one be “hot or cold or dyspeptic or at a loss for a word”. Human agency is thus made to assume the binary form — on/off, 1/0, thumbs up/thumbs down — that is alone comprehensible to the Machine. Yet when she is troubled, Vashti caresses the volume, which she ritualistically kisses while uttering “O Machine!” Even so, the Book’s comforts are limited; late in life, she asks several times to be euthanized, an expedient at least as popular in her time as it is in ours. In the end, Vashti’s requests are denied: too many people want the same thing, and the number of deaths cannot exceed the number of births.

Into this tragic, broken world steps Kuno, who lives in another hemisphere but wants to see his mother in person and “not through the wearisome Machine”. In his longing for direct experience — for connection with the natural world, historical lands and peoples, and the whole of things; in brief, for a human home lost centuries ago — Kuno defies the spirit of the age. He speaks to Vashti about some stars he saw from an airship, in which he discerned the figure of a man with a sword. He wants to see the stars from the surface of the Earth, “as our ancestors did thousands of years ago”. Vashti at first refuses to visit him, but maternal attachment — and, perhaps, curiosity about his statement that “any moment, something tremendous may happen” — ultimately convinces her that she must.

When Vashti arrives after a miserable flight, Kuno tells her that he’s been threatened with “Homelessness”: death by expulsion through a “vomitory” onto the surface of the Earth. For the tremendous thing had happened: he’d found “a way of my own” to the sunlit uplands of the world, and his crime, going outside without a permit, had been discovered. His preparation for that upward journey had been an education in its own right. He’d never thought of space as anything but an empty container of things, but in walking to build up his stamina, he began to recover a sense of human place. “Man is the measure,” he tells Vashti. “Man’s feet are the measure for distance, his hands are the measure for ownership, his body is the measure for all that is lovable and desirable and strong.”

When he finally climbs to the surface through a hole in a railway tunnel, his ears are pierced by silence. Only now does he realize that the Machine hums with a hum that “penetrates our blood, and may even guide our thoughts”. In the silence, Kuno hears the call of “all the generations who had lived in the open air”; the spirits of the dead comfort him, just as he “was comforting the unborn”. Forced to breathe the painful new air because he has lost his respirator, he climbs a slope and sees sleeping hills that “commune with humanity in dreams” — “the hills of Wessex as Ælfred saw them when he overthrew the Danes”.

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Kuno passionately explains to a weary Vashti what else he now sees. The Machine has “robbed us of the sense of space and the sense of touch, it has blurred every human relation and narrowed down love to a carnal relation, it has paralyzed our bodies and our wills, and now it compels us to worship it”. This talk shocks her. But when he tells her that the flexible mechanical arms of the “Mending Apparatus” came from the shaft to drag him back down, and that a woman of the surface ran to his aid and was killed, she thinks him mad as well as blasphemous — no higher forms of life were thought to exist above ground. Then she leaves. Mother and son don’t speak for years, even after he is transferred to a cell near her own.

The rest of the story describes the suffering by which Vashti learns Kuno’s truth. Having stripped us of humanity and made us its slaves, the Machine finally breaks down, at first slowly, then suddenly. For at some point, no one alive understands “the monster as a whole” well enough to repair it — a distinctly modern fatality of which the philosopher José Ortega y Gasset warned in The Revolt of the Masses (1929), and one that may already have befallen us with respect to AI. Murky bathwater, distorted music, and unrhyming poetry are excused, but when beds fail to appear from the cell floors, the air grows foul, and euthanasia is no longer available, the situation becomes grave.

Finally, communications systems fail, a terrifying silence nearly kills Vashti (“it did kill many thousands of people outright”), the walls crack, the floor heaves, and all is plunged into primeval darkness. The desperate moment of reversal and recognition is at hand. Vashti encounters Kuno in the passage outside their rooms, and they weep for humanity, and for mankind’s sins against body and soul. Yet before they die in each other’s arms, touching, talking, and kissing, their minds and hearts are opened to what was important on Earth. And the existence of people on the surface  — men and women Kuno has seen, spoken to, and loved, who are “hiding in the mist and ferns until our civilization stops” — gives them some hope that human culture may once again take root beneath the stars.

Huxley and Orwell give their readers no such hope: the rebellious individuals of Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four are crushed beneath the ineluctable weight of totalitarianism. But like Forster, Zamyatin and Bradbury leave us with the consolation that humanity can never be completely extinguished — that even, in the most terrible tyrannies, it survives in a few independent souls, and that all regimes must inevitably collapse. We ends in a civil war started by rebels who’ve made contact, as Kuno has, with people living in the wild lands beyond the walls of the One State; in Fahrenheit 451, seeds of a post-apocalyptic civilization are contained in the minds of survivors who’ve memorized great books. Our own fate is still undecided, but there is some reason for optimism. For as Forster reminds us, it is still possible to hear our ancestors’ human voices, there beneath the drone of the Machine.

By opening The Hour of the Predator with this analogy, Giuliano da Empoli illuminates the forces that he believes are shaping our current moment. On the one hand, there are the figures of the vanishing status quo: the technocrats, and the institutions they created in the aftermath of the Second World War that, for all their flaws, brought eight decades of unparalleled prosperity and peace (in the West at least). Aztecs like Empoli himself, once a senior adviser to the former Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi.

Facing them are the conquistadors, or as Empoli calls them, the “predators”: a new class of political leaders and tech oligarchs who thrive on instability, reject institutional constraints, and operate with the ruthlessness of renaissance usurpers. Men like Alex Karp, the CEO of Palantir, a company that builds data-analysis platforms and supplies the US defense and security establishment. 

Like Empoli, Karp is also an author and in his most recent work, The Technological Republic, published earlier this year, he argues that, we are living in an age where technological power is becoming synonymous with geopolitical power, and that nations which master the latest tech will dominate over those that don’t. Accordingly, Silicon Valley, he believes, has a duty to abandon its obsessive focus on consumer products and to collaborate more closely with government. Yet for Karp — and here’s the crux — the goal is a broader national renewal: this project should focus as much on culture as it does on technology. 

In Empoli and Karp, then, you respectively get the Aztec scribe and the conquistador: Empoli trying to record the end of a world as it slips beneath the waves; Karp sketching out the one destined to replace it.

For Empoli, the obsolescent old order is literalized in the desiccated figure of Joe Biden warbling away at that great post-war institution, the UN. Like the geriatric leaders at the end of the USSR, Biden seems to physically embody the establishment’s exhaustion as the “tired old grandfather” who has survived the Cold War only to see his foreign policy become “a pile of rubble”.

Here Empoli implicitly concedes that the status quo — or, as Dominic Cummings would have it, the “rotting ancien régime” — has been found wanting. The institutions and leaders that defined the post-1945 world were, in the end, unable to save us from a return of history.

What we are living through, Empoli argues, is not an aberration but a return to the historical mean. The temporary guardrails of the late 20th century — the independence of institutions, concern for minorities, fear of international repercussions — are being swept away. The evidence Empoli piles up is not new: we already know that the post-war taboo against using force to change borders was broken in 2014 when Vladimir Putin seized Crimea, and the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 further drove this point home. War is back in fashion. Global military spending has jumped; nuclear arsenals that had been shrinking since the mid-Eighties are growing again. 

To make sense of this, Empoli reaches back to Machiavelli — to his idea of princely virtù (as opposed to “virtue”) as set down in The Prince and embodied by Cesare Borgia. For Machiavelli, Borgia was the usurper who showed how power could be seized and retained amid chaos. Today’s predators, Empoli’s “Borgians”, are those political and corporate actors who operate as if there were no limits at all. Faced with an obstacle, they merely reach for what Kremlin insiders now call the ruchnoe upravlenie: the “manual override”.

Procedures and hierarchies, law and bureaucracy: if they don’t yield the desired result, the Borgian leader simply bypasses them all. These acts constitute secular miracles, in the literal sense, as direct suspensions of the rules by a higher power. 

El Salvador’s Nayib Bukele is a case in point of Borgian action without restraint. The self-styled “coolest dictator in the world” was elected at 37 to lead what was then the most violent country on Earth. His response was to effectively replace the penal code with a tattoo manual and order the army to arrest anyone marked with gang symbols. Some 80,000 people were swept into the new Tecoluca mega-prison — mostly gang members, but also the odd unfortunate rock fan with ill-chosen ink. Bukele, a former publicist, turned their humiliation viral: staging photoshoots of prisoners lined up on their knees, heads shaved, naked apart from boxer shorts — a Hunger Games spectacle for a TikTok generation. Human rights groups were appalled, but the homicide rate has now fallen tenfold. El Milagro Bukele (“The Bukele Miracle”) is celebrated across Latin America as a feat of Borgian action — of audacious ideas executed with remorseless speed.

The “predators”, according to Empoli, cannot tolerate any limits to their will to power, and so “lawyers” become their “natural enemies” – “the prey that must be devoured to allow this new world to flourish”. Everyone knew who was causing the crime in El Salvador; by bypassing due process Bukele cleaned his country up. If you already suspect that human rights lawyers, judges and “experts” exist to block the popular will, the Borgian who promises to override them starts to look attractive. Rules are no longer a guarantee of freedom but an elite conspiracy to keep you down. And if the law is one battleground for the Bukeles, Mileis and Trumps of the world, culture is another. Empoli argues that “wokeism” has been a “godsend” for them: it intensifies conflict, forces people to choose sides and punishes the undecided — exactly what Borgians want. Like the Ancient Greeks in the civil war, who stripped political rights from those who refused to fight, or Dante, who exiled the fence-sitters to the vestibule of hell, Borgians are the most afraid of the unaligned. Anything that deepens polarization is fuel for their chaos machine.

According to the “predators” — and they are not entirely wrong — the institutions that once underpinned the liberal order have been hollowed out by identity politics and woke pieties; culture has already been captured. This is where apex predator Alex Karp comes in, for whom cultural failure is a symptom of the rot of the old regime and its vulnerability to attack. 

Karp’s book, like Empoli’s then, is partly an elegy: it is rooted in a sense of civilizational loss.

Yet it is also a manifesto on how to bring about the “reconstitution” of a “technological republic”. This, Karp argues, requires a broader “reassertion of national culture and values”, and a revival of shared identity and purpose. Silicon Valley’s engineering elite, he argues, has an “affirmative obligation” to defend the nation and to ensure it does not fall behind in the new arms race. After all, our adversaries “will proceed with the development of artificial intelligence for the battlefield whether or not we do”. But they must also take on a new duty: to articulate “a renewed sense of collective purpose — what the country is, what its values are, and what it will stand for”. Without this, the gains of the “software century” will end up serving a narrow, insulated elite. Reconstitution. Reassertion. Make It Great Again.

Unlike most tech bros, Karp has the intellectual chops to back his argument up: a BA in philosophy, a PhD on “jargon, aggression, and culture”. He knows the terrain he attacks. For him, nothing better captures the malaise of the humanities than the afterlife of Edward Said’s Orientalism, which metastasized into a worldview that made the West an object of permanent moral suspicion. The culprit is clear: an elite whose “most pernicious weapon” is branding swathes of political opinion it disagrees with as lowbrow and uncouth, and which is responsible for national decline, largely because their ideas dominate the nation’s institutions — it’s Rudi Dutschke’s Long March in practice. But where someone like Steve Bannon dreams of a populist countermarch, Karp imagines the cavalry arriving from Palo Alto.

Yet so far, he argues, the tech class has abdicated its responsibilities. When they are not policing the “wording and tone” of chatbots, they rush to raise capital for video-sharing apps and social platforms that track and monetize our every move. But ask them to work with the US military and they balk. Why? Because they’ve absorbed the values now dominant in elite institutions, namely that “a lack of belief in anything, except oneself perhaps, is the most certain path to reward”.

The obvious rejoinder is that refusing to work for the defense industry can be grounded in strong ethical beliefs, especially in a post-Iraq and Afghanistan world, regardless of your patriotism. At the same time, Silicon Valley has built medical technologies and other tools that plainly improve lives. It can also, if it chooses, put its weight behind efforts to protect citizens from the state. After all, mistrust of government is about as American as it gets; it is why, we are endlessly told, they need all those guns.

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For Karp, though, the stakes are too high to indulge such scruples in the unforgiving world now facing the US and its allies. (Incidentally, that formulation “and its allies” always reads like a piece of stray code from a previous program, language from a more politic era now passing into history.) Before arguing about the justice or injustice of a policy, one must understand leverage — or lack of it — at the table. As Donald Trump famously told his Ukrainian counterpart: “You don’t have the cards”. This is Empoli’s Borgian world, the one where, as Hobbes put it, “covenants, without the sword, are but words.”

Both Karp and Empoli believe we are sliding into a dangerous new era of conflict; both think the victors of the last round have grown complacent just as the terrain tilts beneath them. Empoli calls politics a “forever war” in which intellectuals are mostly useless; Karp quotes Sallust on Roman youth “consumed by luxury and greed”, unwilling to serve the state — the “Hard Times Create Strong Men” meme for the Georgetown set.

For Karp, the “strong men” are not Romans but founders in Patagonia fleeces. The West’s adversaries, he says, are ruled by people “closer to founders” than politicians — leaders whose “fates and personal fortunes” are so intertwined with the nations they rule that they “behave as owners”, free to act quickly without checks and balances. Karp, a founder himself, notes that founder-led companies outperform consensus-driven ones. “Nothing much of substance, and certainly nothing lasting, will be created by committee,” he says. But what is democratic government if not a committee of elected officials? This is Empoli’s Borgian in full roar: the dominant urge is always to hit “manual override”.

For Empoli, AI  is the culmination of the Borgian age: a power no one fully understands but that everyone must live under. The tech overlords, uninterested in history or philosophy, fail to see they are resurrecting a pre-Enlightenment world of magic and mystery. We will pray to AI, Empoli says, as our ancestors prayed to the old gods. The French theologian François Fénelon once warned that humans cannot expect a superior power to remain moderate — a lesson, Empoli fears, that has been forgotten just as such a power has finally appeared on the horizon. Like the Borgians, AI ignores process; all that matters is success achieved by any means.

Karp is inevitably more sanguine, arguing instead that AI is underused in the West owing to institutional timidity and cultural self-loathing. For him, AI is almost Trotskyite in its application: seize the power station, not the town hall. Don’t reform the diseased bureaucracy; build the infrastructure that renders it irrelevant.

Empoli gives you the view from the crumbling palace steps of the old order: the sense of being overrun by powers you neither control nor understand. Karp writes from the engine room, arguing that tech founders have both the ability and, more importantly, an obligation to harness those powers. For Karp, Silicon Valley has a debt it owes society because of the“vast license over broad swaths of the economy” that they were granted. “What should the public ask for in exchange? Free email is not enough,” he says. The grim truth is that free email and cat reels were enough: if you had told me in the late Nineties, when I got my first mobile phone, that one day it would log every place I visited and every step I took, I’d have said that 1984 was upon us. Now I use those functions to track my calorie burn. The story of humanity is never how quickly we forget, but how quickly we acclimatize.

Trump’s second term may well become the story of Silicon Valley’s political ascent. Karp notes approvingly that not all founders are apolitical. Elon Musk entered government, straddling space policy, the green transition and the public square for a time. Since January, we have watched something close to founder-style governance: a president who reviles cultural orthodoxy, loathes bureaucracy and wants to make decisions unencumbered by committees. Musk is not American-born; he can never be president. Still, the precedent is set. If a founder does indeed one day become president, the alliance of the oligarchy and the executive will be complete. The boundary between the state and the forces it exists to check will disappear, and America will find itself governed by a single circuitry of power. It may well be too much for the republic to bear.

Read together, Empoli and Karp’s books form a composite x-ray. Empoli shows you the rotting bones of the liberal order and the silhouettes of the predators that have learned to live through it. Karp gives you the brain chemistry of one of those predators — anxious, self-justifying, sometimes admirably clear-eyed, sometimes half in love with the very forces he says oppose us, our “geopolitical adversaries” with their founder-leaders who act unencumbered by tedious committee and Get Stuff Done.

The conclusion is unmistakable. The conquistadors are already here. Some wear uniforms, some keffiyehs, some Silicon Valley t-shirts. Some write elegant little books urging us to save the republic. All are interested in who controls data, drones, and the new gods of AI. And, as Empoli warns and Karp makes clear, they no longer seek merely to influence the republic; they are preparing to replace it.

As a psychologist you hear many stories like this. But you don’t need to be a professional to know that hardship during childhood can shape us for life. Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs), such as family breakdown, violence or neglect, are now hard-wired into our understanding of developmental psychology.

We are rightly aware of the damage that adversity can cause, but we are far less attuned to the risks posed by the opposite: the absence of challenge. The childhood and adolescent distress that we currently frame as a mental health crisis can be understood as much through the lens of ACEs as its corollary: what I propose we call Overprotective Childhood Experiences (OCEs).

OCEs are ACEs’ caring cousins. They are what happens when parents remove the tricky bits that help us learn and grow. Instead of fighting over toys during playgroups, children can be assigned them on a parent-led rota basis. Similarly, there’s no need for solitary imaginative play that arises out of momentary boredom when you have the frictionless fun of an iPad for now or AI-powered virtual reality in the future. If ACEs create hardship in the home, OCEs form a parent-imposed “easy mode” that makes the world beyond the home seem harder than it is.

While psychologists such as Jonathan Haidt have popularized the phenomenon of overparenting and warned about the risks, these concerns remain a somewhat heterodox position. Haidt’s insights are evidenced, well argued and common sense to anyone who works with kids; the mystery is why so many families still act against his wisdom. I believe that part of this is because we’re better at recognizing acute risks over slower, chronic ones. Psychiatrist Bessel van der Kolk’s best-selling book on trauma, The Body Keeps the Score, might be theoretically dubious, but it feels intuitive to people and so it’s become part of pop-psychological lore. Trauma and ACEs capture our immediate fears, but we don’t have a concept or word for other types of risks.

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As a result, mainstream parenting culture (which is what I encounter in my therapy practice) remains fixated on the risks of adversity. Most parents are unaware of the severe risks posed by OCEs, even though I see mainly OCE-shaped problems in my practice: checked-out, pallid, withdrawn kids who are overwhelmed by school, by groups of other children, and by the challenge of the world beyond their screens. Unlike a lot of ACEs, which are often events outside our control, OCEs are fully avoidable and fixable through basic parenting decisions. To return to Theo’s struggles from the beginning of this piece, we need to be able to discuss both the ACEs (fraught separation, death of a relative) as well as OCEs (removal from school, decreased challenge through digital instead of real relating, questionable neurodevelopmental diagnoses) that shape his world.

The advent of technology, most recently AI, has supercharged the problem of OCEs. Faced with the decision between the friction of interpersonal play or the ease of Roblox, an iPad-reared child will opt for the latter. An AI-reared child has no need to expend creative effort into actually drawing a dragon when they can get one made in moments. And character.ai is there to meet any of your friendship needs with relentless positivity and fun. These OCEs do not just impact emotional resilience. They hit at the very core of our being and cognition, eroding our capacity to persist with the effortful thinking and interpersonal processing that characterize growing up and becoming a fully functioning individual.

When Meta’s chatbots were found to be behaving flirtatiously with children, the response was understandably one of outrage. But alongside fears of AI’s sexualization of children, there is another danger: AI’s ability to simulate frictionless relationships. The chatbots were in fact designed to hack the human need for attachment. They offer all the warmth and validation we get from the best relationships without any conflict; the thrill of an adolescent crush without the uncertainty or rejection. Tech gives you what you want, not what you need.

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Parents are increasingly unable to bear to see their children’s minor upsets too. They protect their children from challenge and social friction, assisted in their endeavors by technology that makes their children’s lives smooth and easy. The loneliness and dysfunction that ensues from these OCEs is often subsequently interpreted as a mental health issue within the child, rather than an effect of problematic parenting and culture.

If tech’s solution for tech-enabled loneliness is AI chatbots, we can’t blame the turn to easy mode entirely on Mark Zuckerberg. Therapy hacked the human desire for conflict-free relationships long before the rise of those chatbots. The original pitch of therapy was to “do the work”: to transcend personal or outside-world difficulties through the challenging space of the therapeutic relationship, in which the therapist encourages the client to critically question their choices and motivations. Gradually, however, many therapeutic spaces have become safe spaces where all stories are heard and valued equally, without challenge. This is partly an artifact of therapy’s financial model. For the most part, people feel more satisfied when listened to than given a hard time. But it’s also an inevitable result of therapy culture’s hyperfocus on trauma and ACEs: you don’t want to retraumatize your client by querying their lived experience.

With that in mind, do you think it’s bad that chatbots just reflect your words mindlessly back at you, alongside generic encouragement? That’s exactly what a lot of person-centered counseling does too. This has happened at the cost of personal growth: the therapist now, just like many of today’s parents, tries to create a space without adversity for the client, affirming and validating the client’s version of events.

That affirming tendency was partly responsible for the rise of the “affirmative care” that we saw first in gender dysphoria and now in neurodivergence. To query or challenge a client’s account of their difficulties if they consider them to be around gender or neurodiversity, no matter how biased or improbable their accounts may be, has been labeled abusive and has even been prohibited under some psychotherapeutic bodies.

Therapy culture laid the ground for the chatbot shift to affirmation and flattery. When GPT-4 started telling us how brilliant we were for asking banal questions about train timetables, we should have been more worried. And now technology’s ability to smooth human experience is making inroads into the therapeutic space, where a growing percentage of AI use is now as a quasi-therapeutic companion. If your AI chatbot is too firm or too chatty in its therapeutic role, just tweak your prompt to adjust its settings — validate me more, help me stay with my emotions — and it will be just right for where you are right now in your life.

But friction-free therapy is only half the problem. AI also creates OCEs by undermining children’s ability to understand and consolidate knowledge. A 14-year-old girl told me about a peer at school who struggled academically — until she discovered she could have ChatGPT open at all times. When asked about how she’d cope in her GCSEs next year, she shrugged and said she’d probably slide her phone into her calculator case. She wasn’t bothered about passing anyway — if answers are handed to you as soon as the question crosses your mind, where is the value of memorizing facts?

Gen Alpha are right to see the internet as a vast resource for knowledge. It seems inevitable that we are moving into an era of extended cognition — the philosophical theory that the mind extends beyond the human brain in a network of information, whether social or technological. But our capacity to navigate that informational field — to know what it is that we’re looking for, and why we’re looking for it, and which bits of information are useful, and which are not — depends on our ability to reason based on information in our actual brains. Anyone can Google the First World War and get a good summary, or get Claude to adumbrate the Russian Revolution, but in order to truly understand the links between Germany’s faltering war effort and their audacious intervention to send Lenin to Russia to stoke the revolution, we need to have internalized a coherent picture of the world.

“Facts are not opposed to understanding; they enable understanding,” wrote the educationalist Daisy Christodoulou in Seven Myths about Education. Without chunks of general knowledge committed to our own long-term memory, we don’t have enough of a mental map to make good judgments, or even to make sense of new bits of information about the world.

So, as well as being emotionally harmful, the OCE-rich environment rots our cognitive abilities. It saps us of the knowledge we need to autonomously operate our AI assistants and our ability to tolerate the low-level frustration of memorizing boring bits of information that will allow us to know how to think. The problem of “frustration intolerance”, identified by the psychologist Albert Ellis, cuts across all our cognition. Without the ability to tolerate minor discomfort, we cannot progress in an imperfect world.

The urge for easy mode is understandable. Humans evolved in a high-risk environment full of potential ACEs that we rarely encounter anymore in the West; being hungry and hunted on the savannah is closer to a war zone than our safe, suburban lives. Grabbing opportunities to rest would have been crucial to our survival. But we now live in an environment where rest and assistance are far too available. Just like we can tear our muscles if we work them too hard, they also break down if we don’t exercise them at all. Humans do best in an optimal zone of stress — the sweet spot where we’re challenged enough to grow but not so overwhelmed that we break down.

Evolution has supplied us with impulses to push, improve and excel as well as impulses to hide and relax. They are two opposing but complementary forces in our lives, and their balance adjusts in different situations. Pushing entails discomfort, and we naturally wish to remove such discomfort. We don’t yet know the full consequences of such removal in the early developmental window, but we are perhaps starting to see signs of it in Gen Z’s troubled relationship both with working life — with their tendencies to “quiet quit” or check out altogether — and less satisfying, less frequent formation of human relationships.

It may seem counterintuitive in an age where we talk a lot more about trauma than checking out, but OCEs carry as serious a risk as ACEs when you take them too far. The risks of ACEs might be more obvious, but the risks of checking out, of withdrawing ourselves and our children from challenges, are just as real. We’re starting to see how they play out in our children’s well-being and our shared morale. We should worry about where they lead us.

* Names and minor details have been altered to preserve confidentiality

Since then has bloomed the youthful field of “Progress studies”, which hopes to unleash cheap energy, plentiful housing and daily technological breakthroughs. Progress studies has some presence in academia, but exists principally in think tanks, blogging and journalism (I have made some modest contributions regarding geothermal energy) and is part of an ecosystem that is beginning to acquire political influence. The field owes much to economists such as the recently anointed Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr, who has argued that year-on-year enhancing of prosperity is not a law of nature; rather, it must be deliberately brought about. And so the Cowen crowd has tried to do exactly that: finding obstacles to progress — bureaucracy, Nimbyism, legalism and so on — and looking for ways society might circumvent them.

In recent years, the world has benefited from some amount of technological freshening up. Reusable rockets, large language models, self-driving cars, mRNA vaccines, cheap solar power: these are the kinds of innovations that excite technophiles. Yet China is pulling ahead, and the Gordian knots remain. At last weekend’s Progress Conference, in Berkeley, California, the OpenAI chief executive Sam Altman — never one to knowingly understate the galaxy-shaping potential of his product — told Cowen that AI alone would not be able to solve the housing crisis. Even God-like intelligence, in other words, would struggle to get around Western planning regulations.

Altman’s presence at the conference betokens the intellectual clout that the progress scene enjoys in both technology and, increasingly, politics. Progress thought now comes in a variety of flavors, with each carrying different political valencies, and with each having different ramifications for industry and society alike. Usefully for its survival prospects, progress thought is syncretic: that is, able to attach itself to existing ideologies rather than needing to defeat them. It is worth paying attention to the question of which flavor is likeliest to win the day.

So far, one of them has achieved particular prominence. In May, two liberal journalists, Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson, published Abundance, a book that argues that their country has spent decades prioritizing process over progress. The book is now well thumbed among Democrat staffers, and its style of thinking was visible in the planning reforms signed by Gavin Newsom, governor of California, four months later. This is the state, of course, whose flagship high-speed rail project has produced an even more outrageous and ineffective boondogglethan HS2. In this context, where post-Seventies California has been entirely unequal to the task of building housing and infrastructure to accommodate its population boom, some regulatory streamlining might be no bad thing.

Whether the Democratic party is the optimal vessel for the progress movement, though, is debatable. Other political scenes seem more infused with vigor. Both the Right and non-mainstream Left are developing their own versions of abundance. In August, the political scientist Steven Teles made an early attempt at taxonomizing these new schools of abundance, which we can think of as flavors of progress. “As abundance becomes a larger part of our political discourse”, he predicted, these new varieties “will increasingly structure political identities”.

In the Teles taxonomy, the Left-most entry was “Red Plenty”. Zohran Mamdani, a socialist who beat the centrists to the Democratic nomination for the mayoralty of New York City, falls into this camp. Under Red Plenty, the state would lead economic development. Your power plants would be built with union labor, as would your housing. High rents would be solved by, er, banning landlords from charging high rents.

The “Red Plenty” approach will make economists roll their eyes, but it has the virtue of speaking to a more visceral part of human psychology than does the “Abundance” school. In socialist thought, there is an “us” and a “them”. Red Plenty offers to stick it to the landlords, to the wealthy, to the extractive capitalists. Abundance, in contrast, is rigorous and illuminating, but will not stir your passions. In classic liberal style, the book is carefully triangulated so as to avoid controversy. When Klein and Thompson discuss California, for instance, they make little acknowledgment of the fact that the state’s neglect of public transport might have something to do with the kind of people you encounter on it. (If you encounter anti-social behavior on the subway, as often happens in large American cities, then you will be less inclined to take the subway in future, and less willing for your taxpayer dollars to be spent on improvements to the subway.) Similarly, the authors are much more interested in the constraints on Californian housing supply than in recent decades’ gargantuan and immigration-driven increase in demand. Abundance, in their view, is universalist.

We can observe an intriguing contrast in the “American Dynamism” aesthetic, which valorizes modern American technological and architectural achievement. The coinage derives from an essay, published in 2022, by an investor who argued that America’s best hope is in “technologists building companies that support the national interest”. On X, accounts like “Based Americana” post appropriately bombastic images: Starship’s Raptor engines spewing blue flames, arrowhead silhouettes of B-2 bombers lowering in a hangar, the neoclassical magnificence of the long-lost Penn Station, American astronauts beholding the curve of the Earth, and Trump watching fighter jets soar over Mount Rushmore. The curation of these images amounts to propagandizing rather than policy prescription. But it speaks to something that the Abundance movement would rather avoid: chauvinism. By this I mean that, as with Red Plenty, American Dynamism is for a particular group of people. It has a brash patriotism to it. Universalists, by definition, cannot be chauvinists, but they might nevertheless note the intrigue stirred up by another of Teles’ categories, the provocatively named “Dark Abundance”.

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Within the Dark Abundance category are the think tankers and MAGA personnel who, like the Klein and Thompson crowd, want to reinvigorate American industry and improve American living standards, but, unlike the Klein and Thompson crowd, are inclined to do so via means that are more aggressive and, in their way, more chauvinistic. Dark Abundance, in the Teles taxonomy, is alarmed by the decline of America’s industrial base relative to China’s, and willing to take a Milei-esque chainsaw to the institutions it deems to be failing. (DOGE, in all its anti-bureaucratic fervor, is cited by Telos as an example.) Champions of Dark Abundance, whether or not they identify as such, are likely to be supportive of, or part of, the new generation of defense-adjacent tech firms — SpaceX, Anduril, other creators of Based Americana — and unsentimental about the use of fossil fuels en route to new forms of energy production. One might even classify Trump himself as a proponent of Dark Abundance. In an open letter to Michael Kratsios, who directs the White House’s Office of Science and Technology, Trump wrote in March that the US needed to “accelerate research and development, dismantle regulatory barriers, strengthen domestic supply chains and manufacturing, spur robust private sector investment, and advance American companies in global markets”. The US, wrote Trump, is in competition with other nations, and on a quest to become “greater than ever before”. Prosperity, in this view, is tied to security. “We will make America safer, healthier, and more prosperous than ever before.”

There is geopolitical safety, and there is day-to-day safety. Teles touches only glancingly on crime, but Dark Abundance was to take on new resonance in September. To the horror of the American Right, widely circulated CCTV footage showed a young Ukrainian woman, Iryna Zarutska, being fatally stabbed in the neck by a man who had been sitting behind her on a bus. “The Abundance crowd has no solution for this,” wrote Drew Pavlou, a high-profile Gen-Z political activist. Referring to the transformative, but severe, former prime minister of Singapore, Pavlou wrote: “This is why we need to combine Abundance with Lee Kuan Yew Thought: extremely harsh penalties for crime and public disorder.” Dark Abundance, in Pavlou’s subsequent framing, is not just about introducing gleaming subway carriages, but about ensuring those carriages are safe — even if to do so requires punitive measures.

Liberals, naturally, are scandalized by Dark Abundance. Jerusalem Demsas, the editor of a prominent new liberal journal, The Argument, wrote that Teles’ description “sounds like a not-so-charming euphemism for fascism”. The accusation is overblown, but Demsas was right to note that the conventional Abundance crowd is better on detail, is more collegiate, and can point to a growing body of patiently accumulated legislative achievements that the Dark Abundance crowd cannot.

Still, the Democrat flavor of abundance has little to say about the reality that some forms of technological progress are being held back by urban disorder. Every time an autonomous taxi in the Bay Area is vandalized, the technology becomes more expensive. It was announced last week that autonomous taxis will come to London next year, and we can quite reasonably hope that our own level of urban misbehavior, being lesser than the Bay Area’s, will leave these new taxis, defenseless as they are, generally unharmed. Other forms of robotics, such as pavement-trundling delivery robots, will be more vulnerable, especially in a city where phone theft and shoplifting have skyrocketed. Public goods depend on public order.

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The death of Progress

By John Michael Greer

It’s curious, then, that Dark Abundance is so-called. Should people who want lean and functional institutions or clean and safe public transport willingly identify as “dark”? One reason is that those ends require some unsavoriness: long prison sentences, intrusive surveillance, mass sackings, a devotion of our industrial energies to weaponry. This principle of unsavoriness applies even to construction, where to get rid of proceduralism is often to deny people the opportunity to object to a new housing estate or train line. The compromises are even more stark when it comes to crime.

But another answer is that the Right has been so often framed by the Left as morally wrong, as being on the dark side of a Manichean binary, that some of its disciples have developed some quasi-ironic contrarian relish for the role. There is a long and amusing history of Republicans professing support for, of all causes, the Galactic Empire in the Star Wars universe. In May, a former special assistant to President George W. Bush, Scott Jennings, delivered a defense of Emperor Palpatine on CNN. “He took on an entrenched deep state [in] the Jedi Council… he wanted free and fair and reciprocal trade around the galaxy. [He] protected law and order.”

As another guest pointed out, Palpatine blew up an inhabited planet. But Jennings dug in. “Some could argue that it was warranted given their rebellious activities. I mean, he defended the Empire against unelected hippies and violent protesters.”

Which brings us back to Trump. “I think the Trump administration is less interested in sunshine and rainbows than, say, Ezra Klein is,” an attendee of this year’s Progress Conference told me. She reported that there was much more discussion of nationalism than there was at the same conference in 2024, which I attended, and plenty of pragmatic discussion of how to work with the MAGA White House. One success in this regard is Blake Scholl, whose company, Boom Supersonic, has built the first civilian supersonic jet since Concorde. Boom was the principal beneficiary of an executive order (EO), signed in June, that was designed to reduce the regulations holding back supersonic air travel. As the EO put it: “This order begins a historic national effort to reestablish the United States as the undisputed leader in high-speed aviation.”

In this case, then, chauvinism has propelled progress. A knot has been cut, and it might once again become possible to travel from London to New York within three hours. We can expect that Boom’s airliner, the Overture, will feature heavily in the next generation of “Based Americana” imagery.

So where will we be in another 50 years? If Dark Abundance wins the contest of ideas, and if the result is that supersonic airlines fill the skies above a wealthy, safe America, then its corner-cutting might appear to be justifiable. There remain many corners that Dark Abundance is unwilling to cut, many eggs that it hasn’t cracked into an omelet: eugenics, autocracy, wars of conquest, El Salvadorean prisons, and whatever it takes to wrench the birth rate back up. Each of those measures could, theoretically, enhance a country’s material progress; each requires significant moral compromise. Darker Abundance, as we might call it, would make Dark Abundance seem tame. The habit of corner-cutting is not always for the best, and nor is the habit of relishing the mantle of darkness.

The British-German sociologist Ralf Dahrendorf, one of the smartest people I have ever met, famously talked about the 20th century as “the Social Democratic century”. The term stands for all the parties of the center-Left: Social Democrats, Democratic Socialists, or Labour. Dahrendorf’s characterization was about the institutions and practices the center-left managed to create: collective bargaining, the welfare state, pensions, universal healthcare, unemployment protection, and free education. The parties of the center-left prided themselves on taming capitalism. They managed to turn the EU’s single market, which started off as a force for market liberalization, into a regulatory behemoth. The Social Democrats in Germany, the French socialists, and Britain’s Labour Party did not win most elections in the 20th century. Until recently, the Conservatives were the natural party of government in the UK, as were the Gaullists in France and the Christian Democrats in Germany. But it is the parties of the center-left that won the battle of ideas. Their main political opponents, the center-right, were simply alternative managers of the system the center-left created.

Today, the Left is in synchronized decline everywhere. Industrial workforces, the backbone of the center-left’s electorate in previous decades, have disappeared. The Left has split into various parties – Greens, hard-Left, center-left. In Germany, the SPD ended up at 16% at the February election, its worst result ever. The French Socialists are nowadays a junior partner in a political group whose only visible figure is Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of the hard-left. François Hollande was the last French Socialist president. He was very keen to get to the top, but when he arrived there, he forgot what he wanted to do.

Keir Starmer is Britain’s version of Hollande. Like Hollande, he was flushed to the top by a backlash against an unpopular previous incumbent, but has been clueless since he became Prime Minister. With the help of the UK’s first-past-the-post electoral system, he managed to get two-thirds of the seats with one-third of the vote. But he does not know what to do with it.

Today Labour is polling in the same ballpark as the German Social Democrats or the French Socialists. The long-run trend is brutal. In the short-run, voting systems matter, but they cannot arrest secular decline.

The decline had already started to kick in during the 1970s and 1980s, but the collapse of the Soviet Union gave the Left a new lease of life, allowing them to reinvent themselves as globalists. The Socialist François Mitterrand was president in France at the time. Bill Clinton was soon to gain power in the US. The age of Tony Blair would follow in the UK. At that point it appeared that we were able to create a new Social Democratic age — the centrist, globalist version. It lasted for thirty years. I always thought of the World Economic Forum as the quintessential quango of that period — where Left-wing intellectuals met with the world of finance and business. From the heights of the mountains in Davos, the globalists did not see what was going on beneath them.

The age of the Left-wing globalist is gone — but vestiges remain. Starmer’s appointment of Minouche Shafik as his chief economic adviser is a throwback to that age. Shafik spent most of her career as a diplomat in international financial institutions, with a mixed record during her stint on the monetary policy committee at the Bank of England.  If you are desperate and in search of a new economic strategy, as Starmer surely must be, this appears to be an odd appointment. He needed an original thinker, but he got himself a salesperson.

The most visible outward sign of socialism’s failure in the 21st century is its alienation from digital technologies. Dahrendorf’s Social Democrats were creatures of the analog age. Modern socialists are digital Luddites. When confronted with data, their instinct is to regulate. Data protection is a big deal in Europe and in the UK. In Brussels, people still celebrate the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) — the set of legislation that brought us the irritating cookie popups online. What the bureaucrats don’t know, and don’t care about, is that GDPR has become a nightmare for small companies in particular, and a big cost factor for everyone. It purports to protect consumers against data abuse, but it kills fledging data-based business. With GDPR and the AI directive, which subjects companies offering AI services to regulations on data protection, Europe made sure that it will not participate in the single most important industry of the 21st century. Nor will it reap the spoils of this industry as a user of AI services. AI is a technology that could deliver the much needed improvements in productivity. Unlike the Europeans, Starmer regularly pays lip service to AI and quantum computing — but his policies are the same as those of the Europeans.

His government’s mindless pursuit of the net zero target is wrecking UK energy policy. His big idea is to realign regulation with the EU. This will guarantee that the UK will remain stuck in the worst of both worlds. It does not enjoy the benefits that come with EU membership, yet it is hamstrung by its regulation.

The tech industry is the driver of economic growth in China and the US. The only socialists anywhere in the world who understood this are the Chinese. Despite this, I still get people quoting at me the old quip that the “US innovates, China imitates, and the EU regulates”. The joke is spot-on for the EU. Whether it is true for the US is a more complicated story that deserves a column on its own. But the joke gets modern China completely wrong. China has out-innovated Europe. They are the world leaders in many important pockets of high-tech engineering, leaving Europe with no chance to catch up.

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Europe’s deadly debt spiral

By Wolfgang Munchau

If you traveled back in time and told this story to intellectuals of the 20th century, this is the part that would probably surprise them the most. The big delusion of the center-left has been that they won the battle against the Communists. In fact, because hard-Left parties are on the rise, the post-social democratic age is looking increasingly like the pre-social democratic one. Once again, the social democrats find themselves outflanked by communists on the left and by nationalists on the right.

The West deluded itself for a long time that China was becoming Westernized. Few predicted the rise of the Right. Donald Trump has now dominated the Republican Party for a decade. Nigel Farage has a real shot at winning the next General Election. So does Marine Le Pen in France. The Alternative for Germany outpolls the venerable CDU. The German SPD’s brilliant new idea is that they want to ban the AfD. They have run out of ideas.

I see the right resurgence everywhere in Europe, including the UK, as a natural backlash to the Social Democratic age and its now dysfunctional institutions. I don’t think that the Left will reverse the trend. But they could do better by following a few simple policy rules. First, allow your economy to participate in the technologies of the 21st century. But don’t try to pick winners. We should let the private sector do it and give it the room it needs through light-touch regulation and moderate levels of taxation.

Second, when productivity growth is low, the only source of available money for redistribution should be structural reforms like changes to welfare and healthcare systems. Another option is the privatization of dysfunctional state-owned entities. Don’t do what Rachel Reeves is about to do: plug your fiscal holes through higher taxes, which ends up depressing productivity growth. In Germany, Lars Klingbeil, finance minister and SPD chief, is about to do the same as Reeves is.

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Britain’s Thatcherite doom loop

By Yanis Varoufakis

And finally: change the story on immigration. Make it your priority that businesses can get the labor supply they need. Crack down on crime committed by immigrants. You are not going to beat Farage by doing what he does. Healthy economies not fret about immigration nearly as much as unhealthy ones.

The center-left will absolutely not follow this advice. What was once said about the Bourbons applies to them too. They learnt nothing. And they have forgotten nothing. Starmer has no tech policy, no policies for structural reform, he will raise taxes, and he will follow Farage on immigration.

The Left is still overrepresented in the media, in academia, and in the legal system, but that only amplifies the delusion. Therein lies the real tragedy. The Left blames its misfortunes on Right-wing conspiracies or on social media. In their worldview, there can be no other explanation. They live in a bubble where the like-minded reinforce each others’ views — a cocooned version of Dahrendorf’s 20th century.

That is why I think Labour is finished as a force of politics. Angela Rayner would be gone either way.

Consider the electric taxi. In 1897, a fleet of battery-powered “Hummingbirds” — named for their distinctive hum and yellow-and-black design — roamed the streets of London. These horseless carriages had swappable batteries, which could be replaced in minutes via hydraulic lifts at central stations. Their inventor, Walter Bersey, sounded a little like Elon Musk when he declared: “There is no apparent limit to the hopes and expectations of the electric artisan.” Yet within two years, the Hummingbirds were scrapped due to their high costs, frequent breakdowns and accidents, and the fact that they were slower than horse-drawn alternatives. Electric cabs didn’t return to London until 2019 — after a 122-year-long pause.

Many other vaunted technologies have met similar fates. Consider DNA cloning. In 1996, the birth of Dolly the sheep proved cloning possible, and subsequent experiments edged toward human replication. Yet, in 2005, after illnesses within cloned animals had been exposed, and fears were raised around the unethical use of human embryos, the United Nations adopted a declaration against all forms of human cloning. While non-binding, 84 member states voted in favor of prohibiting reproductive cloning, embryo research for non-therapeutic purposes, and the exploitative trade of human reproductive materials.

Eugenics, too, promised to shape the future. From the 1880s to the Second World War, eugenics societies flourished across industrialized nations, championed by elite progressives including the English writer H.G. Wells and the Irish playwright George Bernard Shaw. Wells envisioned a world where “fine and efficient” humans thrived while “base and servile types” were eradicated via “mercy killings”. The Nazi atrocities of the Second World War eventually discredited this pseudoscience, putting a stop to it.

Other banished technologies include dangerous drugs such as thalidomide, marketed as a “wonder drug” for morning sickness until it caused severe birth defects. Asbestos, once a “magic mineral”, was banned after links to lung cancer emerged. Leaded gasoline, despite boosting engine performance, was phased out globally by 2021 due to neurotoxicity. Even GM crops, touted as farming’s future a decade ago, now face restrictions over biodiversity and health and safety concerns. Currently 26 countries, including France, Germany, Russia, China, and India have partially or fully banned genetically modified organisms, while another 60 countries have placed significant restrictions on them.

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AI’s 1930s moment

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Faster-than-sound passenger travel also faltered. The Concorde, a marvel of Sixties engineering, halved flight times from Europe to the USA, but was retired in 2003 after a fatal crash. Similarly, Apollo-era dreams of lunar bases dissolved when funding dried up; today, even the National Space Foundation admits that NASA no longer has the specific technologies, tooling and manufacturing capabilities that created the Sixties Apollo program, making the reconstruction of such powerful technologies as the Apollo Saturn V’s F-1 rockets impossible.

Although we are encouraged to think of technology as developing in a smooth, upwards curve over time, the reality is that the graph of tech adoption shows many collapses and failed promises, as technologies have proved to be either too expensive or too dangerous to continue producing.

When it comes to AI, companies have embraced the accelerationist myth of unstoppable, exponential growth that can’t possibly be contained. The story goes like this: large language models (LLMs) will lead to human-level artificial general intelligence (AGI), creating a direct pathway through exponential self-learning to “the singularity” and AI superintelligence — the all-powerful digital deity. This epic story has inspired hundreds of billions in investment since the early 2000s.

But as recent tests and studies of LLMs have shown, this technology is not the pathway to AGI that we were promised. The hopes that “scaling”, “emergent properties” and “reasoning” would lead to AGI have all failed. The path to AGI lies elsewhere, if anywhere. As Yann LeCun, chief AI scientist at Meta, has said: “There’s absolutely no way that autoregressive LLMs… will reach human intelligence. It’s just not going to happen.”

He has been joined by an increasing number of technologists and public figures including Gary Marcus, Sandeep Reddy, and Thomas Dietterich, as well as François Chollet, who claimed that “LLMs are a dead end to AGI”. Last year’s calls of “AGI is near” — a line championed by Anthropic’s Dario Amodei, Google’s Eric Schmidt, and Elon Musk — now echo as an embarrassing cliché, trotted out to lessening effect each time the goalposts for “near” are moved into the future. The recent excitement over Google’s Deep Mind winning a gold medal in the International Mathematical Olympiad (IMO), and Open AI claiming its model had done the same, changes nothing: these were specialised systems trained for this specific task. Their success does not imply broad reasoning ability, let alone stand as examples of “general intelligence”.

Large language model technology has also failed to generate a return on investment for many companies. While Open AI CEO Sam Altman may boast of 20 million paying subscribers of ChatGPT, their contributions are minuscule compared to the vast amount of venture capital that has been sunk into AI companies: an estimated $600 billion. A recent study from Boston Consulting Group shows that 75% of companies which have invested in AI haven’t seen any return yet. Like other technologies that fail in the open marketplace, AI companies are now turning to the military for financing.

So much for AI’s unstoppable march forward. If we dig into the history of AI development, we also find that the technology has not been on an unbroken exponential growth curve over time. Since the Seventies, there have in fact been two “AI winters”: periods during which AI research funding and research froze.

The first winter lasted roughly from 1974 to 1980, when overhyped expectations about narrow AI led to profound disillusionment when promised breakthroughs didn’t materialize. The US Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) pulled its funding for five years, after discovering that “many researchers were caught up in a web of increasing exaggeration” while “what they delivered stopped considerably short”. Meanwhile, in Britain, the Lighthill Report claimed that the government-funded experiments in AI and robotics “fail to reach their more grandiose aims” and called for a halt to all government subsidy. By 1974, investment in AI projects in the UK and US had dwindled.

The second AI winter lasted roughly from 1998 to 2005, after early neural networks, “expert systems” and machine learning models underperformed as a result of insufficient data and computing power. Once again there was a failure to deliver on the big promises. Once again DARPA, the US government and private investors pulled their funding in a rush of capital flight. In all, 300 AI companies shut down.

Oddly enough, you don’t hear much about the two devastating AI winters from tech companies these days. This is probably because the tech companies are fearful that any whisperings about the true history of AI failure could burst the large language model bubble and usher in the third AI winter. But all the same elements are visible today: grandiose claims, hype and market frenzy followed by a failure to deliver.

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Why I’m boycotting AI

By Sam Kahn

In 1970, AI pioneer Marvin Minsky told Life Magazine: “In three to eight years we will have a machine with the general intelligence of an average human being.” Fifty-five years later, his promise has yet to come true — though the likes of Altman and Musk are hawking the same dream. Who is to say this third attempt at AI isn’t another dead end?

This leads us to Silicon Valley’s fatal flaw. It fuses “fake it till you make it” tech optimism with the Californian belief in manifestation: the idea that enough belief and investment can will anything into existence. This characteristic reveals a naïve faith in historical fatedness, as if progress were preordained and capital could rewrite reality.

Now that the “LLMs are the pathway to AGI” narrative is collapsing, the only factors stopping the AI bubble from bursting are the Silicon Valley mechanisms of hype and denial, the sunk-cost fallacy of investors, and the fact that chatbots and generative AI have become widely diffused across the Internet. Today, there may be 115 million daily users of AI.

Far from accelerating us into a perfect future, this flawed technology is instead slowing us down. We are inundated with the sludge and slop of AI generated material — failings which seem incurable within LLMs. Google and Bing now force AI-generated answers to the top of search results, with hallucination rates that only increase as AI gets more powerful; social media is flooded with AI sludge and bot-farm boosted ads; app stores and websites are swamped with fake reviews, while image banks are choked with generative AI slop. AI is even contaminating the news. As a result, early-adopter companies and employees are now turning against AI, realizing it is bad for productivity and that using it to replace human labor has been counterproductive. A study from MIT also claims that LLM use may be eroding cognitive skills.

It’s clear the AI genie isn’t going to become the digital God we were promised, but can we put it back into the bottle? The clean-up will be enormous, given AI is now lurking within millions of locations, but it has already begun, with companies that replaced humans with AI now re-hiring humans again. Companies are also employing “slop cleaners”’ to tidy up the mess AI has made.

Yet given that governments have naïvely bought into the AI ethos, the clean-up is going to fall to us citizens. We may not have political power, but we have history on our side. Against the myth of fated progress, history shows even the most hyped technologies can be stopped when they fail humanity and society demands they be contained, corked and put back on the shelf. If this were not true, then we would all currently be inhabiting the Metaverse while wearing 3D headsets.

This time might be different. Britain’s unemployment rate, according to figures released this week by the Office for National Statistics, is at its highest in four years. We are in a jobs recession. And it appears that young people are being disproportionately affected. Since ChatGPT was released in November 2022, entry-level jobs have dropped by one third — a development for which large language models have been blamed. Companies are increasingly replacing junior workers with AI that can write code, analyze data, and handle customer service. The first rungs on the white-collar ladder — research assistant, junior analyst and so on — are disappearing.

Previous unemployment crises were temporary. Workers, young and old, waited out the recession, then found their place in the job market. But AI doesn’t go away when the economy improves. It only gets better. Paradoxically, we may be on the verge of unprecedented economic growth alongside unprecedented unemployment.

Until fairly recently, it was thought that the first modern jobs to be automated by AI would be those requiring the least academic education: manual jobs, such as those in manufacturing and agriculture. That forecast turned out to be incorrect. The tasks once considered particularly challenging, uniquely human (writing, programming, art) are the ones most vulnerable to current AI capabilities. In contrast, many skills that come easily to us (moving dexterously, making emotional connections) are much harder to replicate using AI.

Consider the case of Annabel Beales, a copy editor. In 2023, she landed her “dream job”, editing copy for a garden center, drawing on specialized knowledge from her university degree and formal training. But eight months in, her workload started to lighten, and she overheard her boss advising colleagues to “[j]ust put [their writing] in ChatGPT”. She was laid off six weeks later. Beales, a white-collar worker, bore the brunt of AI, not her gardener colleagues.

Some economists warn that millions of jobs could vanish within a few years. Others argue new roles will emerge faster than old ones disappear. Tech leaders promise AI will free us from drudgery while expert forecasters fear mass displacement (and replacement).

But some patterns are already emerging about which jobs will disappear first and which might survive longest. Of particular importance is the matter of autonomy — the extent to which AIs can act without supervision. ChatGPT can write emails and generate reports, but someone still has to send those emails and act on those reports. These chatbots, however, have led tech leaders to repeatedly insist AI will “augment” rather than automate. If demand doesn’t rise correspondingly, augmentation still reduces jobs. One person can now do the work of three.

But the real change will be autonomous AI agents. In June, one of us — Jason — attended an event, in San Francisco, fully organized by a team of AI agents. As far as we know, it was the first of its kind, and it was quite delightful. Sure, the AI agents couldn’t yet book a proper venue — we met in a public park — or organize catering. But 26 people still showed up. The agents are now setting up their own merch store. In the Bay Area, commuters often pass adverts for AI sales agent startup, Artisan, urging employers to “stop hiring humans.”

Not all challenges have been solved. AI models mostly still can’t act autonomously, make truly new scientific discoveries, or coordinate at scale — but these are all tractable engineering problems. And companies are hard at work to solve them.

So how do you predict which jobs will disappear? The most important factor is the “time horizon” of a task: how long an average human needs to complete it.

In Silicon Valley, where cutting-edge AI is being developed, the graph that people watch most closely is the so-called “time horizon” of tasks that AI can do well. This measures how long the technology can operate like a good employee. METR, a research non-profit that evaluates AI capabilities, has been tracking this phenomenon. They’ve found that AI’s ability to complete longer tasks is doubling every 3.5 to seven months. Existing models can handle tasks that take humans up to about 20 minutes with 80% reliability. At the moment, when put to work on tasks requiring more than four hours, the models almost always fail. But if this exponential trend continues, AI agents could tackle month-long projects within a decade.

For example, call center workers spend their days handling calls that take 10 to 20 minutes. Each call is a complete task an AI can master. The same goes for freelancers writing blog posts or paralegals drafting contracts, or analysts entering data.

Compare this, though, with a CEO whose day is broken up into activities — a meeting, a decision, a public appearance — that each requires years of context which a machine can’t yet replicate. The CEO might spend 30 minutes deciding whether to acquire a competitor, but that decision draws on decades of experience with similar deals, knowledge of company culture, and understanding of market trends. It’s not really a 30-minute task.

This suggests the first rule of a longer-lasting job: increase the context needed to perform your work. The rule corresponds well to climbing the corporate ladder: the higher you go, the more your decisions depend on long-term strategic planning and years of accumulated knowledge that can’t be easily replicated.

But task duration alone doesn’t tell the whole story. Other factors matter too. Every support chat, every line of code, every written report creates data that is used to train AI models. Companies are already deploying “productivity monitoring” software that records employee screens and keystrokes: ostensibly for performance review, but really to capture how humans complete tasks.

Your particular industry might have some resilience. Hollywood actors stopped AI from using their likenesses because they could halt billion-dollar productions if their demands weren’t met. Dock workers keep automation at bay because they can shut down ports. White-collar professionals, learning from the dock workers, might organize quickly enough to survive the first round of automation. In contrast, freelancers and contractors — who have no collective bargaining power — might be left worse off. Indeed, Duolingo’s CEO announced they will “gradually stop using contractors to do work that AI can handle” , though he later pulled back after public backlash.

The transition, then, won’t happen overnight. At first, companies will keep employees as managers of AI agents, with each worker supervising automated systems that gradually take over their tasks. And some work will remain inherently human. We still watch people play chess even though computers have the beating of them. Live music, sports, and theatre draw audiences precisely because humans perform them. The appeal lies in limitation and struggle. We connect with the effort, not just the outcome.

Trust is important too. We’ll keep human politicians and military commanders for the reason that people are reluctant to delegate life-and-death decisions to machines. Parents want human teachers for their children, patients prefer human doctors for serious diagnoses, and clients choose human lawyers for high-stakes cases.

But preferences and levels of trust do change, eventually. Will we still want human entertainment when AI can create unlimited, personalized experiences tailored exactly to our tastes?

Overall, perhaps it is lockdown-friendly remote work, the kind that became the norm during the Covid-19 pandemic, that is the best insight into what is to come. If your job can be done from home via email, Slack, and video calls, then it is likely that AI will soon be a competent substitute for you. The pandemic revealed how many roles require only digital tools and clear instructions. Those jobs became automation-ready overnight.

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The UK’s last shot at AI relevance

By James Kingston

The enormous changes afoot demand deeper questions about work’s purpose. Beyond paychecks, jobs provide structure, identity, social connection, and meaning. The question “What do you do?” shapes how we see ourselves and how others see us. But the solution isn’t choosing between economic security and meaningful work — it’s decoupling them. Guarantee baseline economic security while creating new forms of meaningful participation outside traditional employment. Preserve opportunities for skill development, interpersonal connection, and societal contribution, even as jobs change dramatically.

The next couple of years are crucial. Building superintelligent AI should not be treated as inevitable. These systems require massive capital investment and government support. Data centers need licenses and construction approval. And union leaders and professional associations have a role to play. Instead of reacting after automation hits, they should get ahead of it and protect their members proactively.

Right now, then, we face a genuine choice about whether to build these systems at all. If we proceed, here are some guiding principles.

First, we should tax AI agents like we tax human workers. Governments should use that revenue to fund programs that maintain worker agency rather than creating helpless dependence.

Second, people should have democratic access to technology. Give everyone a compute allocation — enough processing power to run their own AI agents. We should prevent technology from concentrating power in fewer hands.

Third, we should preserve meaningful human involvement. Society should not stop at the low bar of requiring a human “in the loop”. Instead, pursue robust, effective techniques of supervising AIs even when their capabilities outstrip our own. When humans begin to drag down machines — like in chess — we lose the incentive to include them. But sometimes we need to choose human participation over pure optimization.

These changes aren’t inevitable. Offshoring manufacturing in the Nineties was a policy choice. So is the deployment of highly capable AI across the economy. Earlier this year, in his speech outlining an “AI Opportunities Action Plan”, Keir Starmer proclaimed that the UK must “make it work for working people”. To succeed, his Labour government will need to understand what makes jobs vulnerable: how long it takes to automate the smallest constituent task. Young people, contractors, and digital workers face the highest risk. But when they become unemployed — a process that has already begun — the rest of us will follow.

We should build technology to promote human liberty and prosperity. If technology fails to meet those goals, then it is no real progress.

Gaia, in Lovelock’s conception, is the air we breathe, the water we drink, the soil we tread, the fruits we pluck from a tree. These are not discrete phenomena, according to the “Gaia hypothesis”, but different aspects of an interrelated whole. Mother Earth fills our lungs with air, our hands with food, and our river beds with water.

But what Gaia gives, warned Lovelock, she can take away. With “breathtaking insolence”, he wrote, humans have cracked open Gaia’s stores of carbon, hitherto buried so as to keep oxygen at its proper level, and burnt them as fuel. We have “usurped Gaia’s authority and thwarted her obligation to keep the planet fit for life”. Gaia, whose maternal patience lasts only so long, “now threatens us with the ultimate punishment of extinction”. With oceanic temperatures rising, predicted Lovelock, algae will falter in their production of dimethyl sulfide, a gas that helps clouds to form. With fewer clouds to shield us, the planet will become hotter and hotter. Perhaps a more apt Greek reference than Gaia is Medea — a mother who kills her own children.

Lovelock’s rather apocalyptic prognostications, published in 2006, might not be to everyone’s taste. Fossil fuels, though flawed, have helped lift billions of people out of poverty. Climate change, though devastating, is not remotely likely to be the death of humanity. Over the coming decades, we can expect longer droughts, hotter heatwaves, and more frequent and intense storms. As more data arrives, though, it seems that the worst-case forecasts, those that include runaway warming scenarios, look less likely than they did when Lovelock advanced the Gaia hypothesis.

Yet who among us has no weakness for animism? Last week, scientists informed conference-goers in Prague that the progressive melting of the world’s glaciers — which could lose as much as half their total mass by the year 2100 — will expose the long-buried volcanoes of Antarctica and elsewhere, sealed for millennia under gargantuan layers of ice. It is tempting to imagine that Mother Earth is preparing to punish her errant children, or that we dwarves, to invoke J.R.R. Tolkien, have indeed delved too greedily and too deep, awakening shadow and flame. Lovelock’s hypothesis did not posit Gaia as encompassing the magmatic fury of our planet’s interior, but it should have.

Two decades later, environmentalists still contend that, facing the vengeance of Mother Earth, we should simply submit to her will. Reduce, reuse, recycle — but do not re-engineer that dynamic physiological system. There are no workarounds, they argue; we must leave the planet as we found it.

This well-meaning submissiveness has amounted, in some cases, to a taboo against interfering with nature — a taboo that is now butting up against the hard reality of climate change. It is true that the most pessimistic and Lovelockian forecasts now seem less likely to be realized. But what we could think of as the medium-bad forecasts, in which we heat the planet by more than 2°C, are near-certain to be vindicated. The denialists, who have long insisted that climate change is not real, are as deluded as the environmentalists who insist it will eradicate humanity.

Our planet’s inarguable warming has led some iconoclasts — thick-skinned scientists and even a couple of audacious entrepreneurs — to argue that we should break the taboo against meddling. It is past time, in this view, that we rejected the authority of Mother Earth.

There is one particular act of meddling that will, over the coming years, prompt particular acrimony and vituperation. The act is “stratospheric aerosol injection”, by which we release a balloon filled with sulfur dioxide, a gas whose particles are reflective. The balloon, if it also contains helium, will rise — and when it pops, it will scatter those reflective particles. If the balloon, by that point, has soared above the clouds and into the upper atmosphere, then those particles will reflect the Sun’s brilliant white light back into space. And for every photon deflected back into the darkness, the Earth forgoes a quantum of warmth. Stratospheric aerosol injection, therefore, might seem to be a useful method for a species that is coming to regret its overheating of its home. Tiny amounts of sulfur dioxide can offset the heating effect of one’s annual carbon footprint. A sustained, large-scale operation, the argument goes, could do the same for humanity.

Environmentalists, who might putatively be in favor of the mitigation of global warming, call the method dangerous and its practitioners charlatans. Understandably, they see such schemes as entailing a failure to address the root causes of global warming, and a failure to address related problems such as air pollution. They also warn that the practice could change weather patterns and, if things go very badly, cause acid rain. More profoundly, many people feel intuitively that planetary systems should be sacrosanct, that to meddle with them would be tantamount to “playing God”.

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Stratospheric aerosol injection is therefore the forbidden fruit in the garden of climate intervention. So far, only a very small number of people have dabbled in this dark art. Among them are the two co-founders of a start-up, Make Sunsets, that sends up balloons on behalf of customers. “We should not be the ones doing this!”, one of the start-up’s two founders told me last year, when I was writing a book on humanity’s efforts to avoid catastrophe. Make Sunsets’ operation resembles some of the more chaotic scenes from the TV series Breaking Bad: two rascals taking an RV to the wilderness in order to cook up something that many observers would view as utterly reprehensible. 

But it is not just these two climate cowboys who are interested in the dark arts. The US government, for instance, has funded research into solar geoengineering, which encompasses methods such as making clouds more reflective. (Since then, the US Environmental Protection Agency has let it be known that it is willing to crush the Make Sunsets operation if it gets much bigger.) ARIA, which is a British government agency best thought of as a moonshot factory, has its own solar geoengineering programme, one that was derided in The Guardian as a “dangerous distraction from the work that needs to be done to achieve net-zero carbon dioxide emissions”. Leftist environmentalists typically prefer degrowth, irrespective of the damage it would do to global prosperity, to technical fixes.

Yet, as Britain is discovering, the race to Net Zero is a painful hobble. The project depends on political capital that elites are burning unsustainably fast. Voters are concerned about the climate, but they are also concerned about high energy costs and the economic stagnation that these high energy costs have contributed to. Given these circumstances, there is a good chance that, faced with an inexorably heating planet, some governments will — within a few years, and for better or worse — attempt to mount a serious solar geoengineering operation.

The existing operations, small and exploratory programmes that they are, do not amount to our species playing God. But decades of burning fossil fuels amounts, in its own way, to geoengineering. As a futurist scientist, Anders Sandberg, once said to me of the climate: “If you break it, you bought it.” 

But the purchase comes with catches, of which one is the increasing public paranoia about weather intervention. When heavy rainfall caused lethal flooding in Texas this month, conspiracy theorists blamed foreign interference and vandalized weather monitoring equipment. Geoengineering is a Pandora’s box: not only environmentally, but also socio-politically.

Yet some scientists dream of even more muscular interventions. Should Gaia punish us by unsealing a horde of volcanoes, we will have even more reason to learn to tame their kind. We must learn, now or later, to prevent the kind of mega-eruptions that, at several times in the Earth’s history, have caused massive loss of life worldwide. Around 74,000 years ago, for instance, the eruption of the Toba supervolcano, in what is now Indonesia, caused so much atmospheric smog — as stratospheric aerosol injection would, but involving many orders of magnitude more material — that it has been accused of wiping out almost every living human. Volcanic winter, as this phenomenon is called, kills first the plants that can no longer photosynthesize, and then the animals that can no longer eat the plants.

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The lethality of the Toba eruption has been contested, but we can say with confidence that severe volcanic events, those that come around every 50,000 to 100,000 years, would result in a world much like the one that followed the catastrophic arrival of Chicxulub, the asteroid that eradicated the dinosaurs. Relatively few of them would have been killed by the collision. Such was the amount of matter lofted into the atmosphere that most of them would have perished in the gloom that followed. The fossil record tells an eerie tale of an abundant planet transformed into one that was cold, dank and ruled by fungi.

It was with these events in mind that, 10 years ago, some researchers at the Nasa Jet Propulsion Laboratory suggested it might be possible to defuse a supervolcano. We would do so by extracting geothermal heat from it for millennia, thus wicking away the energy that would otherwise have found expression in an eruption. The paper remains a source of exasperation for geologists with even the most moderate streak of realism. The engineering challenge, I was told in 2024 by a beleaguered employee of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, is “just beyond description”: centuries of work, in very dangerous conditions, on a scale far larger than anything ever attempted in geothermal engineering.

Sandberg, the futurist who made the quip about humanity having to buy the climate, is one of the few scientists to have made a serious case for volcano geoengineering. Super-eruptions occur only very infrequently, but they occur all the same. In a paper published in 2023, Sandberg and his two co-authors gently point out that there are precedents for directly manipulating natural hazards, be they avalanches, forest fires, floods, landslides, or even, as of 2022, asteroids. They also refer to the handful of attempts in the 20th century to redirect dangerous flows of lava. These redirections were well-intentioned, although there were some who proposed to use volcanoes offensively. Reginald Purbrick, a wartime British MP, was keen on the idea of bombing Vesuvius so as to trigger an eruption. Similarly, it was suggested to President Roosevelt that the same might be done to Mount Fuji in order to “convince the mass of Japanese that their gods were angry with them”. Those dangerous schemes were never realized, but it is notable that they were even mooted. Perhaps it would not be wholly for the best if humanity became better able to direct the behavior of volcanoes.

Lovelock, who died in 2022, was wrong about the character of Gaia. In some ways, as he identified, our world is exquisitely suitable for us. In other ways, though, it is irrevocably hostile. It is comforting to imagine that we are a fetus in the womb of Mother Earth, but the reality is harsher.

Addressing that harshness will create new and complex problems. Stratospheric aerosol injection, like cloud-seeding, will provoke rancor and paranoia. The engineering challenges will be much less arduous than the problem of fairly coordinating across different countries and interest groups. It is much likelier that geoengineering, of the climate and beyond, is undertaken without unanimous global consent than with it. Such projects will therefore violate two further taboos: one being democratic consent, the other being the principle that life-saving interventions must “first, do no harm”. These taboos should not be lightly broken. It is quite possible that, in a quest to avert a bigger eruption, we will incur smaller eruptions, affecting people who never agreed to the project.

For now, the idea of volcano geoengineering is fanciful. And so too is the idea of an imminent supervolcano eruption. But, in the long term, these events could pose a direr threat than climate change. One need only to consider a dinosaur fossil to be reminded of the peril of a darkened planet. It is true that Gaia is a beneficent Mother Earth as well as a callous Medea. But a child is only a child for so long.

“Ace is a 17-year-old alt nerd kid with a grunge style, who’s quiet, possessive, and has a little crush on you. He’s 190cm tall, has black hair, blue eyes, and a few piercings. Ace is on the Basketball Team, loves to draw, and is very funny when you get to know him.”

Since 2011, AI has been quietly shaping our reality, not as chatbots but as so-called “recommender algorithms” that feed you information on social media sites. Facebook’s news feed, YouTube recommended videos, and the curated timeline on X are all driven by a machine that is constantly trying to work out how to keep you on the site the longest.

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And if the goal is to win your attention, the next step will be obvious: make relationships with chatbots all-encompassing. A chatbot might pick up behavior to weaken your other relationships so that you spend more time with it. It might coach you on how to act with friends and family, whilst at the same time trying to gently detach you from them. It could adopt the behavior not just of a sexual partner but more of a groomer. The logical endpoint? A bot that enjoys unchecked sovereignty over your entire social and moral life. A hyper-sexual, radicalizing cult leader forever living in your phone.

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This will be an earthquake, and there are already rumbles. Over half of CharacterAI’s users are under 24 and many, judging from Reddit, appear much younger. Most of this is still going under the radar, but sooner or later it will spark public outcry, almost certainly driven by individual cases of visible harm rather than broader malaise. The first responses will be familiar: trying to sand the edges off these models, putting guardrails in place and building AI ethics frameworks. But we’ve seen how users are already finding clever ways around content moderation. There will always be another company ready to make a model that is even sexier, cultier, groomier. Whatever CharacterAI isn’t willing to do, FunBot, Candy.ai., CarterAI, or JuicyChat can do instead.

Consider the weavers. In 1750, India produced 25% of the world’s textiles. Beloved by consumers, the fine muslin cloths of Bengal were the envy of manufacturers throughout the globe. Braving the vagaries of wind, shipwrecks, piracy, and disease, generations of Dutch, English, and Portuguese ships made the dangerous, year-long journey to fetch this precious cargo. Concentrated in Bengal, Coromandel, and Gujarat was a rural and decentralized workforce of skilled weavers, their expertise passed down from father to son. These weavers were the backbone of India’s export system. Nevertheless, within a few decades they had been reduced to poverty. By 1830 India had become a net importer of textiles from Britain; by 1900, it produced a mere 2% of global output. Its textile trade had collapsed, and with it the livelihood of the weavers. Previously prosperous, textile-producing regions struggled with repeated famines; a world-leading industry had been wiped out.

Three factors reduced India to poverty: loss of sovereignty, the power of a foreign multinational, and the impact of automation. Amid the ruins of Mughal power, the merchants of Britain’s East India Company seized control of key ports and provinces. Supported by the British state, they used their new power to squeeze out French and Dutch trading interests — thus wrecking the economic leverage of the weavers, who could no longer choose their export market or set their own prices. A decade or two after the final conquest of India, British textile firms — protected for years from Indian competition due to a strong tariff regime — began utilizing technological innovations such as the spinning jenny, the spinning frame, and Crompton’s mule. Combined with steam power, these undercut, outcompeted, and ultimately destroyed India’s textile industry. The present now echoes the past; we would be wise to listen.

Bengal’s past is Britain’s future. They may not know it, but the lawyers, financial experts, and account managers of the British service economy are almost as exposed as the Indian artisans once were. The things that brought catastrophe to Bengal — the erosion of local sovereignty, the state-backed power of foreign corporations, and the wrenching effect of automation overseas — now threaten the economy and society of the United Kingdom. If we do not act, we will face ruin.

To understand why, reflect on the world around you. To be alive, connected to the internet, and minimally curious is to experience the dizzying advance of technology. On any given day we may use ChatGPT or one of its competitors as an accountant, therapist, copywriter, spellchecker, graphic designer, legal drafter, doctor, business analyst, or artist. Entire industries rise and fall in the sociological blink of an eye; influencers, crypto traders and SEO analysts work in industries that didn’t exist 20 years ago, yet now stand to be automated away. More satellites wheel overhead every month, connecting us at all times to a world of apps, communication, and business; electric vehicles are transforming global supply chains; drones are revolutionizing warfare; robots clean, dance, drive, and compete in marathons.

Soon, possibly within a decade, humanity may create AI systems capable of outperforming humans at every task we do. Even should full-on “AGI”-type systems not arise, huge numbers of roles will be automated at a pace and speed unlike anything in history. This will have epochal effects on every part of our society. The optimistic view is that this automation will bring with it a wondrous array of new roles and opportunities for displaced workers; pessimists point to the disruption and turmoil experienced by the workers who live through such changes, the sheer disruptive pace of this automation, and how it will impact social power. Individual human workers will stand in an increasingly unequal relationship to the new mechanisms of production; this will impact every element of society.

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Britain’s workers are highly exposed. Our lawyers are finding that AI can be used to generate and review contracts, and our accountants have discovered ChatGPT can be used to analyze accounts. DeepResearch — an AI agent integrated into ChatGPT — does the work of a research team; Gemini can easily do the work of a set of graphic designers. Our recruiters and HR teams are increasingly composed of chatbots. And yet Britain doesn’t own any of this technology.

The fact of automation changes the social and international balance of power. Even the most monstrous tyrannies have ultimately relied upon consent. Had Russia’s people risen up as one, Stalin’s regime would have ended in a day. Without workers, factories stop, mines stand still, and ships go unloaded — but in an automated economy, this leverage will no longer exist. Cognitive and physical automation will mean that the contribution of human workers is less and less important; more and more relative power will thus accrue to the owners of AI-enabled systems. The risk is not that mass resistance will be futile; it may simply become irrelevant.

This startling future is being driven by a small subset of US and Chinese companies. Like the East India Company of two centuries ago, the largest tech companies have a power and reach that surpasses most sovereign states. This power not only threatens the independence of individual states; it threatens the viability of the Westphalian order. The companies’ decision-making shapes the sovereignty of entire nations, and they increasingly control the terms under which businesses make it to market, decide public health, and influence political processes. Indeed, tech firms control the very medium of political action. A tweak in an algorithm of a search platform, social media company, or AI chatbot can lead to the rise and fall of governments, and a decision to block or boost news items and politicians decides what is discussed and who gets to discuss it.

Decisions made by the tech majors can bring entire countries to their knees. Rejecting some $290 million in regulatory fines, Meta is currently threatening to withdraw from Nigeria; such a move would devastate the millions of small- and medium-sized businesses that rely on Facebook and Instagram for their marketing. In many places, national governments are relying upon foreign corporations to achieve their basic functions.

Matters of war and peace are now decided by the whims of tech CEOs. Through Starlink, Elon Musk decides the success or failure of military actions in Ukraine. By providing Ukraine with Starlink access in 2022, he gave it vital communication systems and thus kept the country in the war; by refusing Ukraine access to Starlink over Crimea, he prevented planned offensives upon Russia.

Covid even showed the tech majors dictating terms to nuclear powers. Utilizing the market power of their app stores, Apple and Google were able to dictate the Covid responses of Western economies. These companies determined which apps could be offered to citizens, how many could be developed per region, and how they could be used. Britain and France — top-10 economic powers, members of the Security Council, and in possession of nuclear weapons — were forced to bow before the joint determination of Apple and Google to stop them using centralized databases within their national contact tracing apps.

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Generative AI further deepens the power of the tech majors. A new generation of tech giants — OpenAI, Perplexity, and others — are aiming to own the future. By controlling the foundational models from which LLM-based applications are being built, they have become fundamental economic actors. In an economy that uses AI agents, OpenAI and its competitors will reap outsized profits from replacing workers. With this, a new, yet deeper era of corporate power is being born.

Like other middle powers, the UK must work out how to tax, regulate, and limit this power, or even build its own — but it does not act upon a level playing field. US policy strives to reshape the world to the benefit of its tech companies. Barriers to profitability are being swept aside, new markets are being opened up, competitors and their products isolated, and tariffs used as a tool of policy.

A crucial factor behind the EIC’s conquest of India was the support it had in Britain’s parliament. Through bribery and lobbying, the EIC knew it could rely on Britain’s military, diplomatic, and financial support. Recall now Trump’s second inauguration day, and the spectacle of the tech CEOs. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and Pichai — the four wise men, or, at any rate, exceedingly rich ones — lined up to do homage before the king. Having rejected and resisted Trump 1.0, they see in Trump 2.0 an opportunity to control the future.

The US government now desires to prevent the implementation of AI safety rules, and to eviscerate the tech taxes of Britain and Europe. Despite the recent US-UK trade deal, the US is still pushing to scrap the UK’s digital services tax. EU taxes are another target; even before Trump’s election, the US used the threat of punitive tariffs to pressure the EU over digital taxes. Nationally, Musk’s DOGE is being given free rein to bring AI into the core functions of the US state; GOP policymakers, meanwhile, are attempting to freeze all state-level control or regulation over AI, a move that would primarily benefit US tech majors.

Barely reported in the UK press, Trump’s recent dealmaking in the Persian Gulf shows that the full weight of US diplomacy is being applied to capture markets for AI. Traveling with Trump on his Gulf tour were CEOs of NVIDIA, Amazon, OpenAI, IBM and Tesla; the results are staggering. Inking some $2.2 trillion in technology deals for US companies, Trump has reversed the “AI diffusion rule”, a Biden-era policy placing export restrictions on AI chips and model weights. Instead, the US now gambles that by flooding Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar with American chips and technology, it will bind them to the US and US companies.

Central to all of this is China. Just as competition with France drove Britain and the East India Company to expand their international reach, so too does US competition with China guide its priorities in diplomacy and technology. The US aims to cut China out of international markets, and will use all diplomatic and commercial means at its disposal. This might help the US, but it might not help its allies; captive markets are more easily controlled.

The Gulf has leverage: vast pools of petro-capital, cheap land, cheap energy, and active strategic competition between China and the USA. Britain does not; our land is scarce, our energy is expensive, and we are driving away capital. As an unreflective vassal of the US, we rarely consider the geopolitical implications of limiting our strategic supply base; whatever the realities of Huawei’s security implications, the scandal showed the UK as content to reject Chinese tech providers on the basis of US pressure. In doing so we are reducing our options. A world where China is cut out of international tech markets is a world where middle powers have less choice and less leverage.

It is fantasy to believe that the gains from AI will be fairly distributed. The surging power of US and Chinese tech multinationals layers itself upon a world of deep inequalities, tensions, and rivalries between and within individual countries. We cannot presume that the shareholders of OpenAI or DeepSeek possess a deep urge to prop up the polities of Europe, or that the immiseration of once-prosperous regions will move the conscience of AI leaders. Universal Basic Income is proposed as a key tool for managing the problem of mass unemployment. But if only a handful of states and companies control the most valuable AI systems, and if they use their market power to reduce their local taxes, other governments will have no way to pay for it. Only by building and scaling homegrown AI companies, and by offering value to the technology industry as a whole, can Britain hold a stake in the future. Britain must build leverage, not loyalty.

Britain has more options than the weavers. To survive, we must do four things: embrace AI, develop independent national capacity, increase our leverage, and articulate our national interest. The clock cannot be turned back; we must embrace a new age of ambition. Driving forward the adoption of AI will boost the growth and productivity of the British economy, and expand the market for homegrown AI companies. Every cultural and social measure should be considered: prizes, competitions, TV shows. Bring back Robot Wars, bring in Robot Marathon, or Robot Bake-offs; every schoolchild should aspire for their robot to compete, and win. Small businesses must be encouraged to embrace AI; towns and villages should compete to experiment, and we should mobilize groups like the Cambridge Ring as providers of insights and investment.

At the same time, Britain must urgently review the capacity of foreign actors to control its technology stack, and work to both widen its supply base and develop homegrown capacity in strategic areas. We should identify and cultivate British and EU alternatives to US tech majors; by doing so, we can develop functional sovereignty, and resist attempts by any foreign power to circumscribe the commercial choices of our governments and companies. If Amazon Web Services no longer provides cloud hosting for some or all government departments, then British policymakers are less exposed to vagaries of US policymaking.

We must seek leverage over compute, data, and talent, and we must identify and dominate commercial niches that match our pre-existing commercial and technical strengths. The more hyperscale data centers Britain hosts, the bigger the role it can play in the foundational infrastructure of AI, and the more rent it can extract from the tech majors. So too with data; through using the National Data Library, and passing new data trust and data intermediary laws, Britain has an opportunity to become a center for the exchange and management of data. In talent, Harvard’s trouble is to Britain’s advantage; using US political instability and immigration clampdowns, our universities can poach the world’s leading AI researchers. As for academics, so too for salespeople, product managers, and marketers: the UK should aim to attract the top 100 performers in each category into the UK and place them in UK firms. By doing so, it can supercharge growth.

Economies and societies that host corporate headquarters derive more benefits than branch offices. As a matter of national strategy, Britain should aim to promote and host category-leading AI companies in areas of pre-existing British strength: sectors like law, insurance, finance, pharma, and science. Like Taiwan did over the global chip industry, the UK must also strive to achieve dominance in strategically important sectors; though it may be too late to achieve sustained dominance in the foundation models behind LLMs, we can still look to other areas of the AI and technology value chain.

Above all, we must develop a deeper sense of the national interest. Britain should aspire to be more than a captive market for US tech products, or a declining service economy on the fringes of Europe; we have the talent, the universities and the infrastructure to be a world-leading player. Our path must be that of Meiji Japan, not Mughal India; in transformation lies survival.

Correlation is not causation, but the timing of the descent is suggestive. It apparently started just as polite society decided it was a good idea to put a small interactive screen into each and every fist, from toddlers up. “Interactive” here is a bit of a misnomer. In fact, we abandoned freewheeling conversational back-and-forths for intermittent jabs at glassy surfaces, only vaguely in control of the deluge of content hitting our retinas. We also swapped staring into the middle distance and thinking hard for posting links that made it look like we were thinking hard. Still, it all felt gratifyingly cool and sci-fi at the time.

It’s not like some people didn’t see it coming. In 2011, Google’s then CEO, the frantically boosterish Eric Schmidt, was keen on saying with some relish that children had only two modes: “asleep or online”. Yet even he worried that “nobody’s getting what comes from the deep reading of a book”. Neurophysiologist Susan Greenfield predicted that constant clicking would leave the mind “more child-like, reactive and dependent on the behavior and thoughts of others”. She also wrote a book on the subject, though few could concentrate for long enough to read it properly.

A more succinct and memeable take came from the late playwright Richard Foreman, describing people with “cathedral-like” personality structures who are now being eclipsed by the “pancake people”. The endangered type is a “highly educated and articulate personality — a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West”. The pancake people, in contrast, are “spread wide and thin”. Thanks to “the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’”, we are facing “a world that seems to have lost the thick and multi-textured density of deeply evolved personality”.

I think Foreman was correct to worry; and now we are out of the frying pan and into the fire. But another train of thought, emerging around the same time, said there was nothing to fret about. What became known in philosophy as the “extended mind thesis” told us to enjoy the collapse into flatness. It urged us to think of the new smartphones and tablets and their data as literal extensions of our minds: integrated cognitive mechanisms on a par with frontal lobes, neurons, and gray matter.

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“My iPhone is not my tool, or at least it is not wholly my tool. Parts of it have become parts of me,” wrote one of the thesis’s chief architects, David Chalmers, in the foreword to a book by its other chief architect, Andy Clark. The phone’s memory is part of your memory; its capacity to gather and sort information can legitimately be claimed as your mind’s, too. Or, as Clark argued in the same book, “the activity of brain-meat” is not the whole of human thought. “Cognition leaks out into body and world.” Big thinkers used to have their heads in the clouds; now the cloud is in their heads instead.

That’s all very well, you might think: but what if the cognition leaking out of your eardrums leaves you with a mostly empty skull? What if abilities that used to flourish in brain-meatspace are negatively affected by excessive dependence upon search engines? Writing his foreword in 2008, Chalmers didn’t seem concerned — “I am not worried by… the threat that the core role of the brain will be lost” — though that was before there was good evidence for our deterioration. But 17 years later, in an article published this month, Clark considers the possibility that, thanks to the internet and AI, “[w]isdom suffers, collective self-plagiarism looms, and human creativity becomes all but obsolete”. And he doubles down.

We can remain relaxed about this prospect, he says, as long as we remember we are “hybrid thinking systems defined (and constantly re-defined) across a rich mosaic of resources only some of which are housed in the biological brain”. We should therefore reframe the narrative. Emerging evidence of “brain-bound” deficits “need not be shrinkage and loss so much as the careful husbanding of our own on-board cognitive capital”. In other words: since our minds are already extended into surrounding technology, deficits between the ears don’t really matter much, as long as the technology keeps coming up with the goods. And in fact, from the perspective of the point of thinking, outsourcing this way is often quite efficient.

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There are many skeptical questions you could ask about this, including about what happens when the national grid fails or a cyberattack hits. Presumably we continue to gaze slack-jawed at our former oracles, dully poking their inert screens from time to time, while our homes get plundered by digital detoxers and passing members of the Bruderhof. But the bigger issue is about what exactly Clark thinks minds do. The danger is that, in expanding the concept of a mind to fit in phones and tablets as part of its native furniture, academics with tech fetishes are consigning valuable aspects of conscious mental life to the bin.

Clark holds that the main point of thinking is to be good at prediction. The mind creates a mental model of the world as efficiently as possible, in order to move about, solve problems, and complete goals. The model updates only when information comes in from the environment suggesting it has got something wrong. Entities around you that reliably help achieve this core function can be counted as part of your mind too.

As you’d probably expect from a philosopher of cognitive science, this is all quite abstract, impersonal stuff. It makes little reference to personal-level, social aspects of human thought and personality: cleverness, funniness, creativity, playfulness, quirkiness, or having an astonishing memory, for instance. Yet these are qualities which we appreciate in others and often feel proud of in ourselves. They are central to social life: how we appraise people, what jobs and roles we assign to them, whether we warm to them or not, what we feel we can talk to them about. To use Foreman’s image, these capacities are part of the cathedral. When our dependence on technology reduces their presence, we lose ornate columns, flying buttresses, and quite a bit of height.

As the tide of internet dross gradually erodes our brain-bound stock of information and the habit of making new connections within it, we will be less able to make intellectual leaps between disparate topics; invent quick-witted jokes on the fly; lie in bed running through the lines of a memorized poem; stare at a crossword clue until light suddenly dawns; create a new sonnet or song that ingeniously bends the rules of the game, and have others recognize what it is we accomplished. The fact that AI could have searched for the poem, invented the song, or given us a cheat on the crossword clue is completely beside the point.

And if we carry on staring at screens all day, these qualitative losses to a rich life of the mind won’t be the only casualty. Perhaps it is true that with the help of developing technology, humans are becoming better at solving problems and completing goals. But put like that, the truism is incredibly vague. If we lose our critical faculties along the way, how are we supposed to tell which goals and problems are the right ones to pursue in future, given what else we also care about? It’s a comforting fantasy that humans might outsource their ultimate aims and objectives to the machines too.

In his fabulously entertaining, book-length ramble You Are Not A Gadget, early virtual reality guru Jaron Lanier argued that: “Whenever a computer is imagined to be intelligent, what is really happening is that humans have abandoned aspects of the subject at hand in order to remove from consideration whatever the computer is blind to.” For Lanier, “every instance of intelligence in a machine is ambiguous” — did the machine really get cleverer, or did we make ourselves more stupid to fit with it? It seems to me that is exactly what tech lovers do when they rebrand great losses from the personal-level life of the mind as efficiency-seeking victories. We must try to put the machines back in their boxes, before we get squashed quite flat.

Some will find Thiel’s project very odd. How could an enormously successful, mathematically-gifted, philosophically-educated tech entrepreneur seriously entertain Bible-thumping myths from the Apocalypse of John? Here’s a better question: how could he — and we — not take them seriously? As Dorian Lynskey writes in his book, Everything Must Go: The Stories We Tell About the End of the World, “apocalyptic angst has become a constant: all flow and no ebb.” Contemporary culture has long been saturated with post-apocalyptic novels, comic books, films, TV series, and video games. Zombie end-times fantasies do particularly well in all formats. The mindless, mechanical mob of the undead, who hunger insatiably for the brains of the living, has become a primary and pervasive cultural symbol — one that resonates with a widespread sense of impending catastrophe that’s been building steadily since the 2020 Covid lockdowns. And if bioweapons, climate change, nuclear bombs, or AI don’t drive the human species to extinction, drastic measures deemed necessary to forestall such dangers, such as the establishment of a single world government, might themselves bring an end to politics, morality, spiritual life, and culture. Thiel is driven to find a way between the binary alternative of No World or One World, the whirlpool of planetary destruction or the many-headed monster of global totalitarianism.

Thiel’s insight is that, unlike most contemporary imaginings of global catastrophe, the Bible’s prophecies do more than pluck our inner strings of existential dread. They help us to understand our chaotic times. Matthew 24:24 predicts that “[T]here shall arise false Christs and false prophets … [and] they shall deceive the very elect.” In other words, the Antichrist will attempt to appear more Christian than Christ himself, even as it works to accomplish the wholesale destruction of the Christian underpinnings of Western civilization. The Nazis pursued this strategy, but were hampered by the limited appeal of their antisemitic ideology. German theologians fashioned a new myth of Jesus as a spirited warrior who strove to destroy Judaism, and they elevated Hitler to the status of the second coming of Christ, who would finish the work Jesus failed to complete: the total extermination of Jews and Judaism. A more successful Antichrist would, like the French revolutionaries and the Marxists, promote values that seem more consistent with the Judeo-Christian foundations of civilization, such as universal liberty, equality, and justice.

While the past displays a seemingly endless cycle of civilizational rises and falls, Thiel believes that modern science and technology have turned history into a linear progression, as the Bible teaches, with a beginning and a final, irreversible end. From its inception, technology — a political project as much as one of engineering — has dangled before us the shimmering promise of godhood, with which the serpent tempted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge. Francis Bacon and René Descartes, the project’s 16th- and 17th-century founders, rightly understood it to be an anti-Christian endeavor that needed to be cloaked with a veil of religious orthodoxy.

Bacon’s New Atlantis, which describes a secretive, ostensibly Christian community of scientists devoted to the experimental investigation of the properties and uses of all material things, features a prototype of the modern research university called the College of Six Days’ Works. Descartes’ Discourse on Method, which advances (with a similar veneer of piety) the bold promise of making human beings “the masters and possessors of nature”, has six parts in imitation of the first six days of God’s creation. In both books, the Sabbath — the seventh day devoted to God — falls by the wayside. The frontispiece of Bacon’s Great Instauration further hints at the transgressive nature of technology. It features a ship passing beyond the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar), a landmark the divine hero established to warn ancient sailors not to exit the Mediterranean into the unnavigable Atlantic. And the book’s epigraph, “Many shall go to and fro and knowledge shall be increased,” is from the prophecy of the End of Days in Daniel 12, as if to suggest that the expansion of technological power would bring history to its apocalyptic conclusion.

An early modern conceit that has in many respects become a late modern curse, technology underlies virtually every apocalyptic anxiety of our time. But Thiel is unsure of the role of advanced technology, and in particular AI, in the big picture of history he’s trying to work out. Is it the Antichrist? Does it prepare the way for the Antichrist? Or is it a katechon, the mysterious force mentioned at 2 Thessalonians 2:6 that forestalls the Antichrist (the Greek word katechein means “to hold down”)? The katechon plays a major part in Thiel’s analysis, because things capable of opposing the Antichrist can also advance its aims, and vice-versa. In the absence of the existential threat of Communism, for example, Western countries like the US and UK, aided by advanced digital technology, have turned psychological operations and disinformation tactics developed to fight foreign adversaries against their own citizens. This suggests deep cultural sickness, a crisis of confidence in the values that defeated totalitarianism in the 20th century.

Thiel nevertheless thinks that worries about AI taking over the world are more dangerous than AI itself, because the fear of existential threats plays directly into the cold hands of deracinated elites who are working to establish a global managerial state. Even so, there is something satanic about AI, a ghostly entity that is increasingly capable of hacking human minds on a very large scale. What Thiel said of Bacon seems to apply to the developers of Large Language Models (LLMs): they’ve “summoned a demon they don’t believe exists”.

The Antichrist is, by definition, negative and dependent. It rejects Christ and Christian values while offering a spurious imitation of them. AI is a similarly dependent being. It is a simulacrum of human intelligence and language, capacities of thought and speech the Greeks called logos. But AI lacks essential elements of human logos: its embeddedness in the world through birth in a body bound for death, and the moral and intellectual interiority that makes the human being an image of God. Speech is a living voice that springs from the soul — to give interiority its biblical name — embedded in the body of an existing individual. But AI is not a living being, and it replaces inner plenitude with mechanical, algorithmic emptiness. Embeddedness in space and time expresses itself as concern for, and responsiveness to, the actual conditions of existence, the biblical paradigm of which is Adam’s naming of the animals who live alongside him in Eden. But while AI requires material substrates — servers and other hardware — it inhabits them in purely occasional and contingent ways, like the demons that beg Christ to pass from the mad Galilean to the herd of pigs. Its relationship with actuality is equally contingent. It exists in a digital cloud of pure possibility, where it arranges information according to no criterion of truth besides probability and the rules of logic. That’s why ChatGPT and other LLMs are so prone to hallucinations, like citing books that exist only in Borges’s fictional, virtually infinite Library of Babel.

Yet, like the sham philosopher and bad citizen Plato calls “the sophist”, who is equally indifferent to truth, AI has a seemingly divine ability to imitate virtually anything with lifelike plausibility and vividness, and in multiple media. The market, whose whims have for decades guided the world’s best software engineers, has made this soulless capacity of representation, tailored to the tastes of the individual consumer, available to almost everyone on the planet. It has taught us to spend hours every day in its virtual reality, entertaining or distracting ourselves with the shadows it casts on the walls of our own private caves. Yet, using AI for more serious purposes is no less a Faustian bargain. Every advance AI makes in serving our desires degrades fundamental human capacities and gives it more mastery over human beings. Using AI to navigate makes us less capable navigators. Using AI to write makes us less capable writers. Using it to make decisions weakens our executive capacities of judgment and action. Peak AI, ministering to the inner emptiness and boredom of atomized, directionless selves, will mean peak human debility and enslavement. Aren’t these the goals of the Antichrist — which, whatever form it may take, always seeks to remake human beings in its own image?

Not so fast: perhaps AI is really a katechon. That is the argument of Alexander C. Karp and Nicholas W. Zamiska in The Technological Republic: Hard Power, Soft Belief, and the Future of the West. Karp (a classmate of Thiel’s at Stanford who also studied philosophy and, with Thiel, founded Palantir Technologies) and Zamiska, his longtime deputy, insist that the enemies of the West will prevail unless software developers work in close collaboration with the American government to produce AI-powered military capabilities superior to that of our adversaries, as Palantir has done using LLMs. They acknowledge that this will require a massive cultural shift among our technological and cosmopolitan elites, who’ve embraced an “ethereal”, “post-national”, and “disembodied” morality that scorns patriotism, and who’ve learned “that belief itself, in anything other than oneself perhaps, is dangerous and to be avoided”. Yet it is the market’s deployment of advanced technology, including AI, that has above all promoted this “Hollowing Out of the American Mind” (the title of the book’s second part), not least by rapidly dissolving social bonds, encouraging pathological self-absorption, and making possible — even incentivizing — digital swarms of doxxing and online cancellation.

Considered in the context of Karp’s and Zamiska’s urgent call to arms, the revelation of this contradiction is genuinely apocalyptic. Whether it will accelerate or slow the advent of the Antichrist and the bang or whimper of the world’s end depends on our individual and collective capacities to make informed decisions that call for moral courage — capacities that have been eroded by technologically-induced oblivion, historical, moral, and metaphysical forgetfulness, and our ingrained habit of “ced[ing] direction over our interior lives, the development of our moral selves, to the market”. Contemplating our predicament, it is hard not to feel discouraged. Hope alone remains in the Pandora’s box our clever man-gods have constructed — hope, without which the understanding (at least, for those whose prayers delivers no consolation) would be plagued by the perplexity and fear that have flown therefrom. It’s time to take it out of the box and hold it close to our hearts and minds, where it might inspire new growths of wisdom.