This is how a god dies, not with a cosmic explosion, not with a descent into eternity, but with the face of a pissed off Englishman calling it a big pile of bollocks.

If five years ago you had asked me for a single symbol to express the first meeting of Humanity and AI, I might have said HAL’s red eye from 2001, Keanu Reeves awakening from The Matrix, even the Terminator crushing human skulls.

I would not have suggested the face of Ed Zitron.

But here we are.

Ed’s expression captures the mix of “what the f*ck is this sh*t” and “I am incredibly bored now” that I think most people feel today when talking about LLMs.

The Face That Broke the Mythos

Now you may be wondering – why is Science Fiction with Damien Walter dedicating a video to the technology critic Ed Zitron?

And why am I sitting on a toilet?

The answer to that second question is because I am in production on a major new 2 hour video essay on Skibidi Toilet and the toilet is part of the set.

And I’ve taken a detour to talk about Ed Zitron because Ed has strayed into the mythos of scifi.

Listen to almost any analysis of AI in the four years since ChatGPT hurled LLMs into the public consciousness and you’ll have heard a journalist or pundit say “it’s like something out of scifi”.

And then just carry on, entirely failing to analyse what it MEANS when hundreds of thousands of people say something is “like scifi”? Which might be why these pundits are four years late noticing that “AI” is…bollocks.

It’s a standing joke now that our technofeudal overlords read but don’t understand science fiction. Jeff Bezos thinks O’Neill cylinder slums-in-space sound cool. Elon Musk the hypercapitalist can’t stop citing the uber socialist Culture of Iain M Banks.

Technocapitalism and the Plunder of Sci-Fi

But capitalists don’t need to understand scifi to plunder it.

As our capitalist economies have stumbled ever deeper into crisis after the collapse of 2008, business has stopped being about numbers and become about stories.

In the years of zero interest rates capital went to he who had the best story. Electric vehicles. Space rockets. Missions to Mars. Neural links. Elon Musk became the world’s richest man by being its most audacious teller of scifi tales.

As stock markets have soared and ordinary people have been immiserated, the scifi tales have grown taller. The Singularity is here, the light of human consciousness is expanding to the stars, the God of AGI is coming.

All stories born in scifi.

From HG Wells to William Gibson, Asimov, Le Guin, Octavia Butler and hundreds more, scifi writers have a created a new mythos for our age of science and technology.

A mythos that tech billionaires have looted for profit, turned into Silicon Valley bollocks, all now being called time on by Ed the Godkiller.

Yes. Ed has the numbers. But the numbers were always bollocks. Ed’s real weapon is Ed’s face. The face that says this story of summoning the AGI GOD isn’t just wrong. It’s embarrassing.

And an embarrassing myth is a dead myth.

Zitron almost single handedly broke the AI booster / doomer narrative cycle. LLMs aren’t going to save or destroy the world. In fact they aren’t going to do much of anything according to Ed.

His reward for changing the narrative is that the Zitron talking points are now being plagiarised by the talking heads on corporate media like the NYT.

Mainstream journalism is full of smart, educated people, who have also been brainwashed by neoliberalism since birth and are mesmerised by today’s scifi technobullshit.

Watching them stumble over the realisation that if AI is bullsh*t then, yes, the entire system they sheepdog for is bullsh*t, is at least amusing.

Collective Intelligence vs. The Machine God

As an avid Zitron fanboy reading between the lines I suspect Ed has a wider critique of the neoliberal corporate sh*tshow we’re all now forced to live in. The worst thing about capitalist realism is that it’s real.

But I don’t fully share the Ed Zitron take.

I suspect Ed’s financial argument will be proven 100% correct. But the slide from “the economics don’t work” to “the product is useless” is unnecessary. LLMs can be widely used and still entirely fail as the saviour of capital.

LLMs are a useful tool. They do a very large number of small, useful things that will likely be part of most people’s work. I used Gemini, for instance, to up-res Ed’s face from a screencap to a portrait. Useful. But on a scale of tech progress the magnitude of LLMs is somewhere between the synthesiser and the library.

Libraries were, for thousands of years, tools for the elite capture of knowledge. Libraries preserved knowledge, but only for those allowed within their walls. It took mass literacy and the Public Library to make the technology of the library emancipatory.

The technology is never the problem. Who owns and controls the technology is.

Hence why I describe LLMs not as AI, which summons fantasies of bad scifi movies, but as CI : Collective Intelligence. The intelligence is all ours, LLMs are just a new way to collectivise it. And a new way to collectivise our human intelligence is…useful.

Not the AGI machine GOD.

The promise of AI is not a useful new tool. It was needed to transform the economy. Because the economy is f*cked. It’s been openly f*cked since 2008. And fundamentally f*cked for much longer.

Global capitalism is a massive pile of debt built on promises of infinite growth that could never be kept. AI was the latest “hyperscale” scifi fantasy to keep investors locked into the delusion of endless growth.

Who Owns the Means of Production?

TRILLIONS of dollars have been invested into what is, in effect, a psychotic delusion of summoning an AGI GOD to solve all our material problems.

If Ed Zitron is right, and I believe he is, those trillions are gone. Converted into silicon wafers and stranded as fast depreciating assets. And the shock of that truth as it emerges might finally collapse the ponzi scheme of global capitalism.

But after the private equity firms and pension funds collapse, LLMs will still exist.

If you take the internet and stuff it into an LLM, it still does some somewhat useful things by giving us a new way to collectivise human knowledge.

The major problem with CI is who OWNS the knowledge of humanity. LLMs are being used by the sick, dying power structures of corporate capitalism to once again claim ownership over the human commons.

Our existing copyright laws have been broken ever since the internet arrived. If copyright law crushes Anthropic or OpenAI the ownership of CI will pass to Disney. Only the very naive can believe that will be a win for “creators”.

We’re deep in a multi-decade process of capitalism claiming the intellectual commons. Capitalism claimed the physical commons when Enclosure booted peasants off the common land and made us wage labour. The enclosure of the internet as web 2.0 was already a massive loss of the commons, LLMs are another.

Which is why I disagree with Zitron and other critics of LLMs themselves. Boycotting LLMs is walking off the battlefield. The corporations are 100% happy for you to not claim the Collective Intelligence of humanity. They will just take it all without a fight.

AI is not the problem. AI owned by capital is the problem.

“It took both time and experience before the workpeople learnt to distinguish between machinery and its employment by capital, and to direct their attacks, not against the material instruments of production, but against the mode in which they are used.”
Capital Vol. 1, Chapter 15, Karl Marx.

Marx here is describing how those newly “proletarianised”, made jobless, by machines always target the machines. Today it’s the knowledge workers newly proletarianised by AI making this mistake.

The machines, as Karl Marx understood, are not the right target if the workers want to win our emancipation. The challenge ahead for humanity is not fighting a Butlerian Jihad against the machines.

The real fight is the same as it ever was.

Who OWNS the means of production? Who OWNS the weights? The models? The inference? Who OWNS the commons of the human intellect? A tiny capitalist elite? Or humanity as a whole?

The answer remains to be fought over. But the time to fight is coming.

The collapse of the AI bubble doesn’t mean the end of LLMs. It means the start of a new struggle over who owns our human Collective Intelligence.

​Frank Herbert’s Dune is a story that has only grown in stature since its initial publication. Surviving through word of mouth, a cult-classic 1980s David Lynch adaptation, and Denis Villeneuve’s modern cinematic take, the story has endured where thousands of other sci-fi tales have been forgotten.

​What makes Dune so uniquely captivating, weird, and deeply meaningful? It all comes down to these seven levels of meaning:

​1. A Medieval Fantasy in Space

At its most apparent level, Dune takes the classic tropes of medieval fantasy and casts them across a galaxy-spanning cosmos.

• ​Knights: The noble sons of the great houses, the Fremen warriors, and the Emperor’s Sardaukar terror troops.
• ​Wizards: Mentats (human computers) and the Bene Gesserit (who use deep mental training to control opponents).
• ​Castles: The massive strongholds on the desert planet Arrakis.

​By suppressing computer technology in its lore, Dune makes this medieval framework incredibly believable.

​2. The Disinherited Prince Trope

This is a narrative we know well from stories like Robin Hood, Game of Thrones, and The Lion King. The young heir loses his inheritance due to a familial squabble—in this case, House Atreides falling to House Harkonnen. Paul Atreides is thrust into a quest to regain his birthright, forcing him to choose between the honorable values of his father and the dark powers he must unleash to survive.

​3. T.E. Lawrence and Religious Warfare

The story is heavily influenced by the biography of T.E. Lawrence (Lawrence of Arabia), a British officer who taught guerrilla skirmishing to Arab armies during World War I, leading to the fall of the Ottoman Empire. Similarly, Paul Muad’Dib leads the Fremen people in a massive religious war. The core philosophy of the Fremen heavily features a blend of Islamic and Catholic influences, embedding deep human history into the alien landscape.

​4. A Subverted “Hero’s Journey”

Long before Star Wars popularized Joseph Campbell’s “Hero’s Journey,” Frank Herbert deduced these archetypes from first principles—and then undermined them. Dune presents a self-aware hero’s journey. Paul believes he has a great destiny, but we quickly learn that this destiny will destroy millions of lives. Herbert forces us to question whether the people we view as “heroes” aren’t actually just future tyrants.

​5. Dark Socio-Political Modeling

Borrowing from the grand space opera traditions of Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series, Dune uses a galactic empire to tell a politically complex story. However, Herbert’s vision is much darker than Asimov’s. He doesn’t see a glorious evolutionary leap for humankind; instead, he predicts that as we colonize new planets, we will simply continue to repeat the exact same corrupt power struggles of our past.

​6. Deep Ecological Consciousness

Herbert deeply studied deserts and the cyclical nature of ecology, weaving Gaia theory into the heart of the novel. Arrakis is depicted as a complete organic whole, moving from a harsh desert to a green paradise and back again. Dune serves as a powerful warning against humanity’s psychological separation from the environment, illustrating how ignoring our ecological bonds leads directly to destructive imperialism.

​7. The Psychedelic Experience

Published in the mid-1960s, Dune smuggled the counter-culture fascination with psychedelia directly into mainstream science fiction. At the center of the universe is the “Spice Melange”—a mind-altering drug that unlocks psychic powers, opens insights into space and time, and allows navigators to fold space. The spice represents the hidden parts of human consciousness that we feel otherwise unable to explore.

​The Ultimate Theme: Transcendence

Taken together, these seven levels create something much larger than the sum of their parts. Ultimately, Dune is a profound story about transcendence. It is a story about escaping the structures of our own ego, the cyclical power struggles of our society, the trap of environmental destruction, and even the strict boundaries of space and time themselves.

“A government of the billionaire class, by the billionaire class, for the billionaire class.”

— Bernie Sanders

What does it mean when Apple CEO Tim Cook makes a personal donation of $1 million dollars to Donald Trump’s inauguration?

Or when Disney CEO Bob Iger comes out to virtue signal that the hypercapitalist entertainment corporation really isn’t “woke”?

What does it mean when Meta CEO Mark Zuckerberg—still dressed like a section leader of the Branch Davidians—announces a humiliating reversal of Facebook’s moderation policies? Anti-vaxxers are back in; protections for trans people are out. (I’m guessing that billionaire MMA bout actually happened and Elon choked the little twerp out until he capitulated.)

What does it mean when a cartoon of Jeff Bezos “bending the knee” to a giant Trump is killed at the Washington Post? I think it means the Washington Post is wholly owned and controlled by Jeff Bezos.

And what does it mean when Elon Musk, having spent a measly $280 million dollars to buy an election, throws a fascist salute at his own inauguration while the tired old reality TV star currently employed as Elon’s sock puppet watches on from the sidelines?

Defenders claimed it was a Roman, not a fascist salute—seemingly unaware that Italian fascists adopted that exact salute from the brutal, slave-owning empire they (and Elon) apparently want to replace democracy with.

When the elderly caretaker of a crumbling democracy issues a grave warning on his last day as top broom, what does it mean? Does it mean, as those who know their history are wondering, that we’re now a Roman-style oligarchy?

Or something even worse?

The OG Oligarchs: Plato, Aristotle, and the Delusion of the “Wise”

Many of the more conspiratorial out there will be shouting: “What the hell… America has always been an oligarchy!”

To test that assertion, let’s check with the OG (Original Greek) of political philosophy—the first to give a systematic description of oligarchy.

In his Republic, Plato examined the histories of Athens, Sparta, and other Greek city-states, uncovering a repeating cycle of political history:

$$\text{Democracy} \longrightarrow \text{Tyranny} \longrightarrow \text{Aristocracy} \longrightarrow \text{Oligarchy}$$

(Stopping along the way at Timocracy… which I guess explains why Tim gave Donald that money?)

Plato’s cycle was later expanded by Polybius into an anacyclosis—a historical cycle that influenced political philosophers for millennia. Each part of society—the aristocracy, the demos, or the oligarchs—is always present, but takes power at different stages.

We always have oligarchs, but we aren’t always an oligarchy.

It’s worth noting that Plato and Polybius were not democrats. They saw rule by the demos (the general public) as unstable and chaotic. But they loved aristocracy. In ancient Greek, Aristo means excellent. Aristocracy, in its pure sense, is rule by the most excellent, the wisest, and the most virtuous.

(In a shocking twist, if you ask philosophers who should be king, we say philosophers.)

The key to understanding today’s American oligarchs is that they think they are aristocrats. They truly believe they are the wise. Which is hilarious, because… well, they really aren’t.

That’s why the first thing wannabe oligarchs do when they make their first few hundred million is write a book:

• Like Balaji Srinivasan’s How To Hand Your Democracy Over To Oligarchs (er, sorry… The Network State).
• Or Marc Andreessen’s Techno-Optimist Manifesto—which is to professional philosophy what Terence Howard is to professional physics.

“Wherever men rule by reason of their wealth, whether they be few or many, that is an oligarchy.”

— Aristotle

The most detailed analysis of oligarchy came from Plato’s most famous student, Aristotle (who literally has the word “excellent” built into his name).

Aristotle lived in Athens after the era of the “Four Hundred”—a group of oligarchs who betrayed Athens to its Spartan enemies, leading to the fall of Athenian democracy.

To the ancient Greeks, rich people were a necessary evil, but terrible leaders. Oligarchs think only of money and are utterly ignorant of philosophy. They fall for political solutions that are clear, simple, and wrong.

“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple, and wrong.”

— H.L. Mencken

Worse, the super-rich have no real loyalty to their nation or its people. They have far more in common with the rich people of enemy nations. The Four Hundred Athenian oligarchs admired Spartan oligarchy so much they overthrew their own democracy on its behalf.

That is a lesson from history we would do well to learn today.

From Soviet Collapse to “Technobullsh*t”

Ancient history teaches us one lesson about oligarchy, but modern history teaches another.

When the Berlin Wall fell and the Soviet Union collapsed, a new class of oligarchs emerged in Eastern Europe. For decades, Soviet citizens had been fed stories of a socialist state leading to a communist utopia.

Socialism and communism began as visions of a better world imagined in response to the brutal realities of the Industrial Revolution. Across Europe, stories like Étienne Cabet’s Voyage to Icaria, Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Alexander Bogdanov’s Red Star, and Alexei Tolstoy’s Aelita imagined grand socialist utopias.

They emerged from the mythos of humankind—and then faded like dreams when the Soviet project collapsed. Capitalism destroyed communism and was swiftly installed in its neoliberal form: mass privatization of state assets, deregulation, and corporate control. Russian oligarchs like Boris Berezovsky and Mikhail Khodorkovsky “purchased” former state assets on the cheap, operating vast swathes of the economy as private monopolies.

But the Western World Had Its Own Fantasies

The Golden Age of American science fiction gave us grand dreams: abundant nuclear energy, rocket ships, flying cars, android housemaids, teleportation, and off-world colonies. The reason so many Boomers wonder “Where is my jetpack?” is because they were explicitly promised one.

• In the ’90s: Shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation showed Western liberal values colonizing the stars with warp drives. (Gen-Xers obsessed with Alcubierre Drives are just trying to make the Enterprise-D real.)
• In the 2000s: The promises became even wilder. Automation would bring post-scarcity abundance. Transhumanism would let us edit our genes and live forever. Virtual reality would let us upload our consciousness to Silicon Heaven in a true “Rapture of the Nerds.”
• In the 2020s: AI arrived. AGI was supposed to unleash super-intelligence, exponential technological growth, the Singularity, and a Starship to Mars.

Instead, Millennials and Gen Z woke up to a reality where none of these sci-fi promises showed up.

• Instead of abundant energy, we got climate change.
• Instead of post-scarcity, we got gig work and side hustles.
• Instead of super-intelligence, we got dumb chatbots.
• (Okay, fine—we got Roombas. But no houses to clean them in.)

The stable manufacturing and office jobs that allowed previous generations to buy homes were wiped out. Housing hyper-inflated until only those with inherited wealth could get on the ladder. Real wealth concentrated until a dozen men owned more than half of America combined.

Neoliberal capitalism screwed Americans just as hard as it screwed post-Soviet Russians. The sci-fi dreams turned out to be technobullsh*t spun by billionaire technogarchs.

The Technogarch Hall of Fame

┌──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐│ THE TECHNOGARCH ARCHETYPES │├─────────────────┬───────────────────┬────────────────────┤│ Technogarch │ Business Model │ Sci-Fi Inspiration │├─────────────────┼───────────────────┼────────────────────┤│ Bill Gates │ Corporate Grid │ Heinlein ││ Steve Jobs │ Sweatshop iMonarch│ Orwell (1984) ││ Mark Zuckerberg │ Attention Economy │ Iain M. Banks ││ Jeff Bezos │ Monopolistic Grid │ O'Neill Cylinders ││ Marc Andreessen │ VC Disintermediation│ Altered Carbon ││ Peter Thiel │ Surveillance State│ Lord of the Rings ││ Elon Musk │ Techno-Feudalism │ Sci-Fi Villains │└─────────────────┴───────────────────┴────────────────────┘

1. Bill Gates: The Bureaucrat

Bill Gates was just 20 when he founded Microsoft, establishing the myth of the enfant terrible tech founder.

In the ’90s, Microsoft projected an image of “slacker chic”—grunge music, Seattle coffee, Wired magazine, and Douglas Coupland novels. Microsoft actually seemed cool. Windows 95 launched with public hysteria.

In reality, Microsoft’s true business was bureaucracy. In a single decade, Microsoft products automated or augmented corporate and government paper-pushing worldwide. Every time you hit a Blue Screen of Death buying a train ticket, that’s the power of Microsoft. Automating middle-class jobs out of existence made Gates the first tech “richest man in the world.”

On his blog in 2022, Gates recalled reading Robert Heinlein’s Stranger in a Strange Land as a teen. It’s not hard to see how the story of a Martian who comes to Earth to save humanity—but never actually understands human beings—influenced him.

2. Steve Jobs: Big Brother’s Architect

Apple’s famous 1984 Super Bowl ad painted the Macintosh as a symbol of liberation. MacBooks, iPods, and iPhones became badges of the “creator class”—individuals liberated from office cubicles to work in coffee shops.

Phase 2 Steve Jobs defined the calculating technogarch. Jobs pioneered the exploitation of low-paid Chinese labor at massive, high-surveillance Foxconn facilities, where the “communist” government ensured workers had zero rights to unionize.

The shiny laptops of the Western creator class came on the backs of the global working class. It turns out Jobs didn’t read Nineteen Eighty-Four as a warning—he read it as an operations manual.

Apple didn’t free us from Big Brother. It put Big Brother in everyone’s pocket.

3. Mark Zuckerberg: The Attention Farmer

Zuckerberg started with a skeezy “Hot or Not” website at Harvard. But his real mastery wasn’t just computer science—it was psychological manipulation.

Meta’s core business is simple: grabbing and holding human attention. Facebook pioneered algorithmic media to hack human psychology, connecting your smartphone to real-time data feeds that stream outrage and alerts to keep you hooked.

In the process, Meta disrupted local and investigative journalism, replacing verified facts with fake news and multi-level marketing scams. Zuckerberg has recommended reading Iain M. Banks’s The Player of Games—seemingly so he can use algorithmic media to play the public like pieces on a board.

4. Jeff Bezos: The Warehouse King

Founded in 1996, Amazon survived the dot-com crash because Bezos understood retail architecture better than anyone else. He saw that the physical ecosystem of storefronts, malls, and supply chains could be dismantled by the internet.

Amazon became the most aggressive monopoly in history. Businesses either pay Bezos rent to sell on his platform, or Amazon copies their product and runs them out of business.

Inside Amazon fulfillment centers, employees wear biometric trackers that log every second of movement, and delivery drivers are forced to pee in bottles to meet quotas. Bezos’s dream of moving humanity off-planet into artificial O’Neill cylinders isn’t about exploration—it’s just a way to staff orbital fulfillment centers.

5. Marc Andreessen: The Labor Disrupter

As a venture capitalist at a16z, Andreessen helped popularize the Silicon Valley mantra: “Move fast and break things.”

The “things” being broken are industries with hard-won labor protections and union contracts. The “fast movement” is replacing stable employment with precarious, app-based gig work (Lyft, Instacart, Airbnb). Workers are separated from their rights, while the profits flow directly to super-rich VC investors.

Andreessen is an open fan of Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon—a cyberpunk novel where immortal elites use biotech to live forever. Expect an a16z startup offering that exact service soon.

6. Peter Thiel: Sauron in a Suit

Peter Thiel—PayPal co-founder and creator of Palantir—built a empire supplying algorithmic surveillance technology to global security services.

If secret police or military intelligence are monitoring your data right now, there is a very good chance Palantir is running the software. Thiel has reportedly read The Lord of the Rings more than ten times.

Imagine reading Tolkien a dozen times and walking away thinking:

“I want to be Sauron.”

The Final Boss: Elon Musk and the Techno-Feudal Dream

At the top of the technogarchy sits Elon Musk. At every stage of his rise, his businesses have leaned heavily on sci-fi mythmaking:

• PayPal borrowed from cypherpunk ideas of decentralized finance.
• Tesla was sold as a green quest to save humanity from climate change.
• Neuralink promises the cyberpunk vision of direct brain-computer interfaces.
• SpaceX reignited the spacefaring dreams of generations disappointed by the end of the Apollo era.

In reality, SpaceX is a massive defense contractor competing with Raytheon. For all their talk about free markets and bootstrapping, technogarchs feed greedily off taxpayer subsidies.

Musk often praises the socialist sci-fi of Iain M. Banks—an author who would have despised Musk with every fiber of his soul. Fans and useful idiots believe these men represent scientific progress. In reality, their vision of the future is a fantasy designed to serve only themselves.

The Technogarch Masterplan

The lesser technogarchs have a practical plan:

1. Strip away labor unions, government regulation, capital controls, and corporate taxes.
2. Force ordinary workers into app-based gig platforms.
3. Monitor the public 24/7 via cameras, biometric data, and predictive algorithms.

The result is Techno-Feudalism: a world where you own nothing, have no privacy, and answer directly to the absolute rule of corporate technogarchs.

Elon’s Vision

Where others have a plan, Elon Musk has a crusade. He has studied the sci-fi movies—and decided to become the villain in all of them.

Musk doesn’t just want to control your job; he wants to control your consciousness. He envisions a transhumanist revolution where human minds are wired directly into the machine as processing units for an artificial super-intelligence.

He is a devout servant of the coming techno-capitalist Singularity—a event he believes will elevate him to godhood.

(Spoiler alert: It won’t.)

In the next essay, we’ll explore the fall of Elon Musk, the collapse of the accelerationist movement, and the real future we can build instead.

Listen to the podcast audio

“The nature of the ultimate revolution with which we are now faced is precisely this. That we are in process of developing a whole series of techniques which will enable the controlling oligarchy to get people actually to love their servitude.”

~ Aldous Huxley

​The Parable of Two Brothers

​Imagine, if you will, two brothers. 

Born at the very dawn of the 20th century, into a dynasty of scientific titans, the intellectual elite of a civilization awakening to the raw power of science and technology.

They shared the same elite education, the same inherited social status, the same genetic code. But when the two brothers looked to the future of the human race, they saw two entirely divergent timelines.

Created by the very same technology.

​The elder brother looked at the tragedy of the human condition – the bodies that age and decay, the minds that fade into dementia, the agonizing, inescapable ticking clock of mortality – and decided it was nothing more than a biological flaw.

Nature made man to die. But man could remake man to live.

Humanity’s ultimate destiny, our moral imperative, was to seize control of our own biology. The elder brother dreamed of a world where we could engineer away disease, upgrade our fragile flesh, and consciously direct our own evolution. He pursued the prize that has ensnared men since time began: the end of human suffering.

​The younger brother looked at that same dream… and saw a meatgrinder for the human soul.

​He understood the trap. He saw that all human fear was the fear of our own suffering. Instead of facing our fear, humanity would obey any authority that promised to eradicate suffering. The authoritarian cage would not be built with iron bars or enforced by a jackboot stamping on a human face. It would be built of test-tubes, genetic engineering, and the lure of eternal youth. And humanity would be so desperate for a place in this prison that we would abandon our art, our rebellion, our grief, and our profound capacity for love. We would eradicate the messy, chaotic beauty of being human, for a little less pain.

The elder brother dedicated his life to building the global scientific utopia he envisioned. Julian Huxley shaped the sciences of evolutionary biology and genetic engineering. In his manifestos he named his scientific and political mission to remake humanity: Transhumanism.

The younger brother wrote books. Novels. Aldous Huxley was a writer and, later, mystic, who told stories that warned against the future world transhumanism would create.

That Brave New World.

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Transhumanism : the inevitable ideology of the 21st century

Anyone who has watched a scifi movie or played video games in the 21st century will know transhumanism.

Without necessarily knowing it’s name.

The genetically engineered human has become the warrior of the future. Halo’s Masterchief or the Astartes of Warhammer 40k mean that every twelve year old has dreamed of having an extra heart or a armoured carapace…even if it is at the cost of a missing…well…you know what.

Millions of video game players strolling the open world of Cyberpunk 2077 have had the “virtual” experience of having an arm lopped off and replaced with a chrome limb, or having their eyeballs swapped for a pair of Nikons. How many of these passive consumers understand they are trapped in the fetishized transhuman nightmare William Gibson was warning them about is anyone’s guess.

And while no human has yet, that we know of, been uploaded to the cloud, the idea that human consciousness is a software layer running on the wetware of the brain is a stunningly common belief.

According to a 2020 PhilPapers survey conducted by David Bourget and David Chalmers, over 27% of academic philosophers asked the question “Mind uploading (brain replaced by digital emulation): death or survival?” answered: Survival.

And when asked if future AI systems could possess actual consciousness, nearly 40% said yes. Only a quarter of them strictly rejected the idea.

​Many of us already believe the Altered Carbon nightmare where humans hop between biological sleeves is a real potential future.

​Because the intellectual vanguard of our civilization, the people whose entire job it is to understand the nature of reality, increasingly don’t question the underlying premise. We already believe the mind is an algorithm, just waiting for a hardware upgrade.

​And we believe it because we fear death.

Psychological studies have demonstrated the link. If we view death as a meaningless, terminal void rather than some kind of spiritual transition, we are vastly more likely to see mind uploading as a moral good. We want to digitise our brains because we are afraid of the dark.

And this might be the most important thing to understand about TESCREAL beliefs.

Transhumanism, Extropianism, Singularitarianism, Cosmism, Rationalism, Effective Altruism, and Longtermism are a set of interlinked ideas that have been widely observed to be held by the same people. Because they answer the same fears of suffering and death.

Transhumanism and TESCREAL have a long history of scientific and academic thinking. George M Martin’s 1971 paper: Brief Proposal on Immortality: an interim solution, that proposed freezing brains until future supercomputers could decode their consciousness. JBS Haldane’s seminal 1923 Daedalus: Science and the Future, that introduced the concept of Ectogenesis, the growth of human beings in test-tubes.

A century ago nobody had ever thought of engineering super soldiers or uploading minds. Today, billions of people know transhuman ideas, and hundreds of millions, concentrated in the Western world, believe in transhumanism as firmly as anyone believes any religion.

What took Christianity and Islam centuries, Transhumanism achieved in a few decades. The idea that science and technology can transfer our consciousness to a new body, or upload to immortal life, has with other transhuman ideas spread worldwide. Because it offers the same dream as every religion before it. An end of suffering.

But with an upgrade. With religion you had to die first. Transhumanism offers the uninterrupted continuation of this life into eternity.

Today’s believers in transhumanism don’t believe because we read Haldane or Huxley. Or even because we watched Terminator 2 and The Matrix.

We believe transhumanism because it seems inevitable.

Transhumanism is the “Inevitable Ideology” of the 21st century. We don’t need to be convinced by academic studies or have it sold to us by priests. The scifi dream comes perfectly packaged for any and all of us who hold two fundamental axioms of the secular, capitalist worldview to be sacred.

1. The Material Universe is All There Is: There is no soul, no divine plan, no afterlife, and no karmic balance. Human consciousness is just a happy accident of meat and electricity.
2. ​Suffering and Death are the Ultimate Evils: Because there is no spiritual meaning to suffering, and no eternal reward after death, the cessation of your biological heartbeat is the absolute, terrifying end of your “self”.

If you truly hold those two assumptions – as almost the entire elites of Silicon Valley, our technocratic governments and capitalist class does – if the universe is just blind, dumb matter, and your body is a decaying meat-sack hurtling toward permanent oblivion, then upgrading the meat-sack is the only rational reaction to the horror of existence.

Now, some very disciplined souls will still dedicate their self to a higher cause. Socialism. Environmentalism. Most of us will simply give into pleasure seeking hedonism. A few will obsessively critique science fiction in youtube videos as a coping mechanism.

But the ambitious, the powerful, the strong… the bast*rds… will inevitably gravitate to the preservation at all costs of the meat.

That inevitability has made transhumanism the unnamed, unseen but utterly dominant ideology of the 21st century. The technocrats that govern us, the hyper-capitalist corporate elites who buy and sell us, are all whether they know it or not

transhuman bast*rds.

​Let’s face it – literally. Your biological face is a depreciating asset. Every time you experience a human emotion – grief, joy, or the crushing existential dread of living through the 21st century – it leaves a micro-crease in your skin. And in today’s hyper-capitalist bio-market, aging isn’t just a tragedy – it’s bad branding.

​Why let the slow march of mortality ruin your engagement metrics?

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​Masque: Because dying on the inside shouldn’t show on the outside.

​The Contradictions of Peter Thiel

Peter Thiel is man who, however much money he makes, can never not look like a villain from a late 1980s cop-thriller.

Or a very boring vampire.

I mean…if you have to tell people you’re not a vampire? 

The rumours about the billionaire venture capitalist began after he stated an interest in parabiosis, the technique of transfusing young blood into old billionaires.

So let’s take Thiel at his word. And agree that Peter Thiel isn’t a vampire…yet.

Because Peter Thiel absolutely 100% wants to live forever. And he’s more than willing to curse his soul in the eyes of God to do it.

A Christian who disobeys God…Peter Thiel is a veritable walking, talking sack of contradictions. And if you unpack the sack, if you just gently unpick the seams of Peter Thiel, the whole transhumanist project just falls apart in your hands. 

Like a cheap suit. Or a tech IPO.

Peter Thiel claims to be an orthodox Christian. He argues that Christianity is the foundational moral framework of Western civilization. He is fascinated with Christian eschatology. The end of times. Armageddon.

Now…I’m no theologian, I’m really not, but my understanding of the Christian faith, and stop me if I’m getting too literal here, is that you have to *die*… to go to Heaven. That’s the deal. That’s the central premise of the book.

But Peter doesn’t want to do that. He thinks death is an “ideology.” He wants to artificially engineer immortality in the flesh. He wants to build a Kingdom of Heaven using biotech and money, right here in our material reality.

Which is, by any orthodox theological standard, a profound heresy. In fact, if you read the literature, there is only one figure explicitly warned about in Christian eschatology who tries to build a fake, eternal heaven on Earth.

The Antichrist.

A topic Peter is obsessed with.

Just last year, he was running around giving secret lectures about the Antichrist. He says the “global world government” is the Antichrist system, and *he*, Peter Thiel, the man who wants to harvest the blood of the young, strongly implied that he is the mysterious, holy force holding back the apocalypse.

I mean…who else has the audacity to insinuate he might be Christ…who else but the Antichrist?

Peter Thiel is a fierce libertarian. He famously stated that he “no longer believes freedom and democracy are compatible.” He invested in Seasteading, and is a major backer of Network States, so he can escape the tyranny of the actual state. He hates the state.

Which is why he founded and runs Palantir. A data analytics behemoth literally named after the evil, all-seeing surveillance stones from Lord of the Rings. Just one of Thiel’s Tolkien themed companies.

Palantir is the absolute gold standard for state surveillance. It tracks citizens, it predicts behavior, it consolidates data for military and intelligence agencies of the state worldwide. Who else would denounce the state as the Antichrist…whilst literally building the exact central nervous system a global World State would use to subjugate us all… who else but the Antichrist?

Or just any standard issue bast*rd.

Thiel desperately wants to be viewed as a dark, philosophical, world-historical force. A Nietzschean superman. A wannabe Antichrist orchestrating the end of days from a bespoke floating tax haven.

But Thiel is just a man like millions of other men who pursue money and power above all, and got luckier than most in getting it. And now aging out of his fifties all the money and power won’t save him from rotting in the ground with the rest of us.

But maybe. Maaaaaybe. The money can buy something that will.

The contradictions of Peter Thiel are the ultimate argument for the inevitability of transhumanism. Peter can claim to be orthodox Christian. He can wear a cross and grow a beard. But like most people today, especially most powerful people, whatever they claim to “believe”. Christianity. Islam. Scientology. Marxism. You can *claim* to be a fucking Jedi. But what you, and I, almost all of us, and Peter

actually “believe”

is the inevitable ideology of the 21st century.

To borrow a phrase… he’s not the Antichrist.

He’s a very naughty boy.

Well, no, he’s not a very naughty boy.

He’s a transhuman bast*rd.

​”The modern conservative is not even especially conservatuve. He is engaged, on the contrary, in one of man’s oldest, best financed, most applauded, and, on the whole, least successful exercises in moral philosophy. That is the search for a superior moral justification for selfishness.” JK Galbraith

​The OG Transhumanist

Like many terrible men, Julian Huxley believed his ideas were for the good. And he had every reason to believe this.

How did the man who coined the term “Transhumanism” get it so wrong? Why couldn’t he see that his utopian vision of directed evolution would lead directly to hyper-capitalist vampires looking to build techno-feudalism?

​To understand Julian, you have to understand his intellectual priors. Born in 1887, Julian’s intellect was shaped by one of the most titanic events in the history of science.

Just thirty years before in 1858, Charles Darwin published his On the Origin of the Species and the theory of evolution burst into the public consciousness. Humans were not creations of some unknowable God. We were evolved animals. With some odd extras like opposable thumbs and language.

And Julian Huxley wasn’t just a casual observer of evolutionary theory, he was  the grandson of T.H. Huxley, famously known as “Darwin’s Bulldog” for his fierce defense of evolutionary theory. Julian was raised in the absolute pinnacle of the English, atheist, humanist, scientific tradition.

This put Julian at the cutting edge, the first generation born into understanding the evolutionary worldview, and its existential consequences.

Now, I want to be very clear here, I’m not trying to smuggle Creationism to you. I fully believe the theory of evolution is the truth. And it’s because it’s true, that it strips us humans of our comforting fantasies.

We’re not children of God. There is no immortal soul. We’re just talking monkeys, animate matter, biological machines, with the illusion of self-awareness that will be extinguished when the meat stops walking and talking.

So what’s essential to understanding Julian Huxley is that he dedicated his life to what he believed to be the only, rational, possible answer to this existential truth.

To transhumanism.

Following in his grandfather’s footsteps, Julian became a famed evolutionary biologist, the Richard Dawkins of his day, pioneering research into the relationship between genetics and evolution. The research that convinced him of the necessity of eugenics.

Because, yes, Julian Huxley was perhaps the 20th century’s greatest proponent of selective breeding to “improve” the human race. And unlike other eugenicists, including HG Wells, Julian did not let go of the idea after the Nazis had done with it.

Instead, Julian Huxley, a committed progressive, wanting to “rescue” eugenics from fascism, proposed a “socialist” eugenics. A welfare state must equalise all men, only then could we know who had the “bad” genes.

I’m going to be hearing from Feral Historian about this.

Julian Huxley’s ideas would reach their full bloom when he became the founder of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation in 1946.

Today, UNESCO is known for its world heritage site work. But at its founding the UN agency had much, much, much bigger ambitions, as expressed by Julian when he wrote its founding manifesto.

UNESCO: Its Purpose and Philosophy is one of the 20th century’s most astounding documents. Imagine Thanos, Adrian Veidt and EVERY Bond villain collaborated on a mission statement and you’ll get something of the vibe.

It was in this document that Julian first defined Evolutionary Humanism, as the belief that humanity’s current biological state was merely a transitional phase, and that our moral imperative was to use science and social engineering to actively direct and accelerate our own evolution.

The belief that he would, in 1957s New Bottles for Old Wine, rename as transhumanism.

It’s hard not to sympathise with the transhuman conspiracy theorists. Because there really *is* a plan to found a World State governed by a technocratic elite to genetically engineer a better humanity. It’s right there in serif font, and Julian Huxley wrote it.

But transhumanism isn’t a conspiracy. It’s an inevitability. You don’t need the Illuminati to coordinate a transhuman conspiracy. Because transhumanism is the inevitable end point for everyone who believes what Julian Huxley believed.

That the universe is a vast machine, and that humanity are just little survival machines, made by the Blind Watchmaker of evolution.

For Julian Huxley that belief left only one moral course of action. Humanity must take control of our evolution, and grasp the steering wheel of the machine.

And if fulfilling that absolute moral vision meant eliminating the ‘weaker” genes, then, so be it.

The essence of the bast*rd isn’t just that they are a bast*rd. It’s that they believe ideas which justify being a bast*rd. And demand you believe them too.

Which is why bast*rds love transhumanism.

​The Aldous Answer

​Aldous Huxley was born seven years after Julian in 1894, into the same high-culture of science and reason.

But, for reasons we can only speculate on, Aldous would arrive at a completely different answer from his elder brother to the same existential horror.

The Huxleys were part of what historian Noel Annan would label the British “Intellectual Aristocracy”, a tight-knit set of intermarried families including the Darwins, the Wedgwoods and the Trevelyans who reshaped the culture of the 19th and 20th centuries.

So Aldous Huxley easily won entry to Oxford and then, even after being cut off from his allowance for debts owed to his father, was able to begin a career as a journalist and novelist.

And quickly became known for writing harsh, critical satires of the exact bohemian, intellectual aristocracy he came from, in novels like Crome Yellow and Point Counter Point.

So then the essential thing to understand about young Aldous is that he was formed in opposition to the values and ideas of his culture and class.

Especially the ideas of his elder brother Julian.

Brave New World then is a work of science fiction about a dystopian future. But that future is best understood as a satire of the 1930s present it was written in. And the transhumanist ideas taking root there.

Put simply, younger brother Aldous is taking the piss / ripping the shit out of everything elder brother Julian believes.

The scientists we see in the book’s early pages touring the London Hatchery where new humans are produced, the men who are building this brave new world, are satires of grandfather TH Huxley, of Julian Huxley and of JBS Haldane, who introduced the scientific concept of artificial human birth.

In this Brave New World, humanity has achieved the exact end of suffering that transhumanism promises. But the cost is the total commodification of life. Humans are no longer born, they are decanted in hatcheries, genetically engineered into rigid caste systems. Alphas to rule, Epsilons to do the grunt work. They are kept young and beautiful right up until their engineered expiration date, and they are pacified by a steady diet of meaningless entertainment and the state-mandated drug, Soma.

It’s not exactly like metropolitan life in 2026 but it’s close enough. In fact the greatest testament to Aldous Huxley’s satire is that any discussion of Brave New World will have many people stating how they think it sounds pretty good, actually, “at least healthcare is free” they say.

Because transhumanism is the inevitable ideology of our materialist, consumerist culture. We call Brave New World a dystopia, when if we’re to be perfectly honest, it’s more like a middle management vision statement for our liberal centrist, technocratic society. Even today’s Leftists are less about revolution to tear down this brave new world, than loudly demanding to be given a place in it.

Here in 2026 whether we are capitalist or communist, liberal or conservative, whatever we claim to believe, what we really believe in is the inevitable ideology of our time.

Brave New World began the critique of that inevitable ideology in science fiction. Fifty years later William Gibson wrote the ultimate transhuman nightmare, Neuromancer, and cyberpunk was born.

(Yes, if you want to feel old, we’re almost as far now from Neuromancer as Neuromancer was from Brave New World)

There’s a case to be made for Brave New World as the primary ancestor of cyberpunk. Aldous didn’t see cyberspace coming, the computer hadn’t even been invented yet. But he grasped the fundamental premise of cyberpunk.

That the technologies of transhumanism, from human cloning to the consensual hallucination of cyberspace, would entrench forever the same old human injustices.

In the world of Neuromancer the social elite have literally climbed up the gravity well to live in low Earth orbit and used cloning techniques to become semi-immortal.

Richard K Morgan’s Altered Carbon takes this cyberpunk conceit to its logical Marxist conclusion as the capitalist elite live forever in “sleeves” newly purchased from the poor.

And nothing hammers home the brutal injustice of our transhuman future than the Astartes of Warhammer 40k.

Science fiction, from Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, has very little good to say about the possibilities of transhumanism. It is in almost all cases the Torment Nexus that scifi tells us not to build.

The one major exception is The Culture of Iain M Banks, which presents a far future where a human-like civilization casually messes around with swapping bodies or becoming a dirigible behemothaur for a bit of a lark.

Elon Musk loves the Culture because he doesn’t understand it.

And I seriously question whether he has even read it.

Because the Culture conquered social injustice BEFORE transcending humanity.

Which might be the best answer to our billionaire boys and their transhumanist toddler tantrums. Fine, ok. You can have immortality. But only after you end poverty and achieve peace on Earth.

The Island of Perception

For all of their profound philosophical and ideological disagreements, the two brothers genuinely, deeply loved each other.

​When Aldous died, Julian was devastated. The elder brother, the great rationalist, the transhumanist who viewed death as a biological glitch to be engineered away, was left behind to experience the human grief of losing his younger brother.

​Julian immediately took it upon himself to curate and edit a tribute book, published in 1965 as Aldous Huxley, 1894–1963: A Memorial Volume.

​In his writings about his brother’s passing, Julian’s reaction perfectly encapsulates their ideological divide. Julian praised Aldous as an absolute genius, calling him the greatest mind he had ever known. But even in mourning, Julian couldn’t help but express his frustration with his brother’s worldview.

​Julian lamented that in his final decades, Aldous had turned his back on the “rigor of science”. But what Aldous had turned towards is, perhaps, the best, or only, answer to the inevitable ideology of transhumanism.

Aldous Huxley’s final novel, Island, was published the year before his death. Brave New World was an angry, caustic satire of transhumanism. Island is Aldous Huxley thirty years on, reshaped by life, a master novelist, writing his final answer to his brother’s ideology.

The island of Pala where the novel is located is likely based on the island of Bali where I live and make these videos.

Instead of the transhumanist World State, Pala is a localized, decentralized utopia. Instead of the technocratic machine world of transhumanism, the people of Pala use technology very selectively. Industrialisation is forbidden. Instead of humans popped out of test-tubes and into a genetic caste system, Palanese children are raised by Mutual Adoption Clubs so they aren’t exposed only to the neuroses of their parents. And instead of numbing their suffering with mindless entertainments, the Palanese learn to pay attention to suffering and face their pain.

I suspect the people who think Brave New World sounds ok would NOT want to live on the Island.

The utopia of Pala is possible because the Palanese do not believe what we in the West believe.

They do not believe that the universe is a vast machine. They do not believe the axioms that the material is all there is, or that death is the ultimate end. They do not believe we are meatsacks hurtling towards the void.

The Palanese believe, instead of the void, that reality is infinite. A human life is bounded by our capacity to comprehend that infinity. And death is simply a return to the infinite. You don’t stop being, you just … be… more.

In the decades between Brave New World and Island, Aldous Huxley wrote the work for which he became perhaps most famous, The Doors of Perception, which described his experiences using LSD. And the accompanying essay Heaven and Hell, an attempt to understand the experience as an encounter with the infinite.

In Island the Soma of Brave New World is replaced with an imagined drug, Moksha. The Palanese use Moksha to dissolve the ego and live communally. The story of Island turns on an experience of Moksha use which opens the mind of the book’s central character to a reality beyond the materialist Western world he came from.

Aldous Huxley’s answer then to transhumanism is what would come to be called the “psychedelic experience”. And its power to open the Western mind to the infinite reality of… reality.

This will all, I suspect, be a tough pill to swallow for many of you. The psychedelic age seems long ago. Its hippie counter culture advocates fucked a lot of things up.  But it’s the answer Aldous Huxley gave us. To really understand that answer we have to follow Aldous into death.

In 1963 Aldous Huxley was dying a slow painful death from throat cancer. His final request to his wife was to inject him with a dose of LSD. “100 micrograms, intramuscular.” Which she did, then gave him a second 100 microgram dose two hours later, soon after which Aldous Huxley died.

Not from the LSD. 100 micrograms is a single standard dose, 200 micrograms is in no way harmful. This was not a Heroic Dose to obliterate or escape death. Quite the opposite, the psychedelic was used by Huxley to sharpen his attention to his own death.

I won’t spoil the book but Island ends with the utopia of Pala facing a final conflict with capitalism. Bulldozers arrive on Pala, and as they begin to level the jungle, the Mynah birds which have featured through the book scream Attention! Attention! Attention!

Two brothers. One who worshipped the inevitable ideology of transhumanism. The other the perennial philosophy of attention.

And this I believe is Aldous Huxley’s lesson for us. Transhumanism is an ideology of escape. Escape from pain. Hiding from suffering. Terror of death. Rejection of being human.

We must face our suffering. Accept our pain. Pay attention even to our death. We must reject the machine, and embrace our humanity.

Listen to the podcast audio

It’s a standing joke that tech billionaires read science fiction warnings and use them as handbooks. They build the Torment Nexus that Do Not Build The Torment Nexus tells them not to build.
Elon Musk’s confusion about the Culture novels of Iain M Banks is a little more complicated. The Culture really IS the utopian of Fully Auomated Luxury that Elon wants us to believe he is building.
But it’s also something else. A thing that Elon cannot see. Not just because of his money.
But because of his class.

After 42 years we have 1 minute and 10 seconds of Neuromancer on a screen.

What does it tell us?

Now on the Science Fiction channel

Listen to the podcast audio here

Picture a boy. He’s seven years old, small for his age, standing in the sun-baked dust of an ancient palace courtyard.

​He is looking at a horse. But not just any horse. This is the King Horse. A towering, magnificent stallion, wild-eyed, muscle-bound, and vibrating with primal power. 

Earlier, the boy escaped into the enclosure of the King Horse. This tiny boy, alone, faced the massive animal and even fed him salt. Beast and boy formed a spiritual kinship.

Now, everyone who has seen a Disney movie knows what happens next. They are going to form an unbreakable, egalitarian bond, run across the sunlit beaches of the Aegean, and embark on a sweeping, heartwarming adventure to discover the true meaning of friendship –

– the boy’s grandfather steps forward, raises a bronze blade, grips the stallion by the mane, and calmly slits the animal’s throat.

​The horse collapses in a geyser of hot blood. And the boy? He doesn’t scream. He doesn’t cry. He doesn’t look away. He stands perfectly still, breathing in the copper stench of the arterial spray, and he learns from it. Because in this world, to be a man is to kill. And to be a king is to kill other kings.

Because this ain’t Disney. ​This is Mary Renault’s The King Must Die.

​And you can’t handle the Greeks.

Well, here we are. After months, years even, of hype, on July 16th 2026, Christopher Nolan released his $250 million adaptation of Homer’s The Odyssey, starring Matt Damon. It is the biggest cinematic event of the summer. And I am just about to watch it.

But. Before I say anything I am going to hand you over to Damo (Past) who has NOT seen it, but is going to make 3 predictions about Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey…

#

…that this will be the *tamest” ever telling of Homer’s epic.

The big story in the days before The Odyssey released was the search for tickets to see Nolan’s new IMAX spectacle in full resolution, possible in only 41 cinemas worldwide.

Because Nolan is the master of the technical spectacle. Nobody knows how to shoot 65mm IMAX format like Nolan. He is famed for shooting entirely on celluloid, packing the cinema screen with visual splendour.

But as a fully rounded creator, Nolan is the most overrated auteur director of the century. Think of Nolan as the rich man’s Michael Bay. Both specialise in IMAX spectacle, but Nolan comes packaged for a more upwardly mobile demographic. Scifi action blockbusters, with a patina of philosophical depth, but nothing to make it feel too much like homework.

Nolan struggles as a storyteller. But he compensates for this by bolstering every story with a narrative gimmick. Time runs backwards. Memories recompiled. Dreams within dreams. When people call Nolan movies clever, they mean clever like Sudoku. Nolan gives us logic puzzles we can feel smart for solving, to cover the lack of anything to make us actually feel.

So Nolan’s Odyssey is guaranteed to be visually magnificent. But assuming he doesn’t restructure Homer into seven criss-crossing timelines…which he very well might…what will Nolan’s Odyssey…be?

Well, I think we can predict it will be incredibly tame.

Nolan’s entire MO, his Modus Operandi, is to take the most out there, crazy, mind-bending mythic stories, and make the tamest possible version.

Just look at the filmography.

Interstellar. You have cosmic horror, infinite black holes, relativity, and a higher-dimensional future humanity reaching back to manipulate our present through a tesseract. This movie should shatter the human ego. It should be Silent Running on acid. 2001 on amphetamines.

Instead…Nolan uses a 5th-dimensional construct to deliver a Church of England sermon: “Love is the one thing that transcends time and space.” The infinite, terrifying universe is entirely subordinated to a Sad Dad trying to get back to his daughter’s bedroom.

Inception. The human subconscious is a realm of Jungian madness, primal terror, and chaotic sexuality. Think of Satoshi Kon’s Paprika, where the dream world is a psychotic, hyper-colored parade of living dolls and fractured identities. 

But instead Nolan turns the human subconscious into a corporate training session. Nolan’s dreamlogic operates on administrative rules and looks like a financial services head office. This is a deep dive into the collective unconscious for people who are too terrified to actually explore the collective unconscious.

The Dark Knight. Let’s give Nolan credit that he’s working with the established lore of Batman. But nonetheless this is a meticulously crafted movie trilogy about the broiling class war of modern life…that takes the side of a privileged son of the oligarchy, the ultimate protector of neoliberal capitalism, a billionaire who uses illegal, tech-authoritarian mass surveillance to defend the banking system against a guy in clown makeup.

Dunkirk is a requiem for the death of the English empire that never stops bashing the audience in the eardrums with Elgar. Oppenheimer is a movie about atomic weapons that doesn’t show you what the weapons were used for.

Nolan tames the political by presenting it as the purely personal. He takes the most terrifying, infinite concepts and shrinks them down until they fit neatly into a shopping mall multiplex and suburban living room widescreen tv.

Because Nolan absolutely knows his job. He’s the peak Hollywood director of IMAX spectaculars because his movies are entirely inoffensive to the widest possible audience.

So what happens when the tamest director directs the wildest myth?

Let’s make some predictions.

​Prediction One: The Sad Dad Metric

The historical Odysseus is a terrifying, PTSD-scarred, slave owning Bronze Age pirate warlord. He is defined by his cunning—Metis—and his casual brutality. As the Odyssey opens he is responsible for the brutal murder of tens of thousands of humans. Nolan will manage to ignore this. The reason you cast Matt Damon is so he can be the everyman, ordinary guy. A hyper-competent, slightly stressed project manager whose sole drive is preserving his nuclear family. He will be a “Sad Dad” trying to get back to the suburbs.

Prediction Two: The Sanitized Gods

To the Bronze Age Greeks, the gods were not metaphors. They were feral, sociopathic warlords who lived in the sky and demanded blood. Poseidon isn’t just “the ocean”—he is chaotic, irrational, world-ending rage. But Christopher Nolan cannot handle the irrational. He will sanitize the divine into a solvable physics equation. Poseidon won’t be a terrifying sea god, he will be a localized weather anomaly. No magic. No divine terror. Just an extreme weather event that Matt Damon can defeat with his middle management logistical skills.

Prediction Three: The Erasure of the Bedroom

The classical Greek world was fundamentally driven by unapologetic polyamory and aristocratic, same-sex shagging. The Greeks literally had a word for a man whose entire existence was defined by domestication among women and children: a slave. But the bourgeois mind cannot process a hero who exists outside the nuclear family. Nolan’s Odyssey will completely erase the feral sexuality of the ancient world. Odysseus’s seven-year stint on Calypso’s island won’t be a captive sexcapade; it will be framed like an awkward corporate retreat he couldn’t leave due to bad weather. The entire film will be a $150 million homage to the egalitarian, heterosexual household.

​Future Damo is going to step in and grade these predictions the second he walks out of the cinema. But before we get to the scoreboard, we need to ask the structural question.

​Why is Christopher Nolan so desperate to domesticate the sublime? Why must he constantly shrink the terrifying universe into a manageable, suburban puzzle box?

​To understand that, we need to understand what made him the Bourgeois Auteur.

​For a brief, glorious window from the late 1950s through the 1980s, British culture was effectively hijacked by 

the working class. 

This was the result of the post-WWII welfare state, the expansion of state schools, and robust municipal arts funding. Suddenly, kids from council estates in Liverpool or the industrial Midlands had the time and institutional backing to experiment.

​You got The Beatles. You got the “Angry Young Men” of cinema—actors like Michael Caine, Albert Finney, later, Gary Oldman. You got directors who understood the dirt under the fingernails of society. Their art was loud, it was deeply suspicious of authority, and it completely shattered the stiff-upper-lip, middle class monopoly over British culture. But when Johnny Rotten wailed God Save The Queen, The Fascist Regime in 1977, nobody knew the working class artists were about to be butchered.

Thatcherism destroyed the welfare state, crippled state education and slashed arts funding. Over the following decades of austerity, London went from a city bubbling with rebel artist energy to a billionaire’s playground. The cost of living skyrocketed. Today, surviving the requisite decade of unpaid internships and low-paying fringe theater to become a director requires a private safety net.

​The “Bank of Mum and Dad” became the primary arts grant in the UK. And the result is that the culture was recaptured. 

Taken away from the angry, rebellious working class.

And given back to the wealthy, comfortable bourgeoisie.

​The acting world is now dominated by Eton and Harrow alumni: Eddie Redmayne, Benedict Cumberbatch, Tom Hiddleston. And the directing world is dominated by privileged sons like Sam Mendes and Christopher Nolan.

By the early 2000s, British culture was incapable of giving the world another Ken Loach.

Instead we got Chris Nolan.

​Christopher Nolan was educated at Haileybury, a highly elite independent boarding school in Hertfordshire. His background is the absolute epitome of the comfortable, secure English upper-middle class. And this socioeconomic reality perfectly explains his cinematic aesthetic, which we can call The Aesthetic of Control.

​When art is made by people who have never faced genuine existential poverty or class precarity, the art loses its sense of danger. It becomes highly technical, highly polished, profoundly polite and utterley controlled.

If working class cinema is a 16mm home camera pointed at gritty reality, bourgeois cinema is obsessing over the precise exposure levels of 65mm celluloid depicting a series of fantastical scenes that never even existed.

Instead of asking, what does this film change, we ask, where can I buy a ticket for the full IMAX experience.

The art of the 20th century that terrified and changed the culture is all working class. Hiphop. Graffitti. The dogtown skateboarders. Grindhouse cinema. Punk. Metal. Science fiction, my art, until it was turned into polite lit-fic for the Booker Prize.

Co-opted by the bourgeois middle class.

Chris Nolan is the premiere director of science fiction IMAX blockbusters. But as a science fiction storyteller he is shockingly dull. Because his movies co-opt sci-fi working class energy, stories written to blow the minds of people trapped in systems we could not control, and turn them into tame domestic dramas for the bourgeois imagination.

And ​a prep-school educated, bourgeois auteur backed by a billion-dollar Hollywood studio is structurally incapable of handling the terrifying, blood-soaked madness of the Bronze Age Greeks.

HOMER: You want answers?

DAMO: I think I’m entitled!

HOMER: You want answers?!

DAMO: I want the truth…of the Bronze Age Greeks!

HOMER:

YOU CAN’T HANDLE THE GREEKS! Boy, we live in a world built on myths, and those myths were written by mad blind prophets about men who fought naked with bronze spears. Who’s gonna translate that madness for the modern mind? You Damien Walter? You Christopher Nolan?

​I have a greater responsibility to mythic history than you can possibly fathom. You weep for your sanitized, relatable heroes, and you curse the Bronze Age hierarchy. You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what I know: that the brutal soul of the Bronze Age warrior, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, remains the foundation of the modern male psyche. 

​We use words like Arete. Moira. Kleos. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent defying the gods and conquering the Aegean. You use them to sell popcorn in the suburbs.

​I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain classical paiderastia or the sacrifice of the King Horse to a suburban house husband who rises and sleeps under the psychological structures of the Hero’s Journey I invented, and then questions the brutal, aristocratic mode in which I created it!!

​I would rather you just said “thank you”, watched your four-quadrant corporate slop, and went on your way. Otherwise, I suggest you pick up a hoplon shield, march in the phalanx, and accept your fate. Either way, I don’t give a damn what egalitarian representation you think you are entitled to!

DAMO: Did you lock 108 suitors in a dining hall and slaughter them?

​HOMER: I sang the song the Muse commanded–

​DAMO: Did you slaughter the suitors?!

​HOMER: YOU’RE GODS BE DAMNED RIGHT I DID!

Because we can’t handle the Greeks.

We systematically launder ancient texts because their reality terrifies our modern minds. The Bronze Age psyche is like a ravenous wolf. And for the last two centuries, bourgeois culture has desperately tried to put that wolf in a nice, comfortable sweater.

If you look at what actually happened in the Homeric epics, or the historical reality of classical Athens and Sparta, you don’t find a society of proto-democrats fighting for human rights. You find a society that believed in rigid hierarchy, terrifying supernatural fate, and the absolute prerogative of the strong over the weak.

And being Super Gay.

The online right, you know those people who think “Western Civilization” is descended from ancient Greece while missing that most of the civilizations they think this makes them superior to are JUST as descended from ancient Greece

those people

are ENRAGED because a black actress of Kenyan origin was cast in Nolan’s Odyssey

Again missing the point that modern Kenya is in the region of ancient Ethiopia, fully part of the ancient Greek trade networks and frequently referenced in Greek myth including Andromeda the ETHIOPIAN PRINCESS

Meanwhile, SCOTLAND and FINLAND had absolutely zero relationship to ancient Greece. None. Which makes the Scots / Finnish Matt Damon, by the logic of the online right, the worst possible casting as a Mediterranean pirate.

Decades of white washing depictions of Greece and Rome mean generations of people actually believe the variously brown skinned people of these Mediterranean empires were “white”, millennia before “white” even existed as racial concept.

Because we can’t handle the Greeks.

Liberal, mainstream culture wants ancient Greece to embody our liberal values which it absolutely 100% did not.

But right wing conservative culture wants to believe they are the true heirs of Sparta. The watch 300 and think YES! They would be the muscled warrior kings of old if only the damn feminists stopped emasculating them!

When the reality is that if any of these whiny privileged sons posing on X as @BasedMarcusAurelius, or the bug eyed effeminate intellectual who hides behind the pseudonymous identity Bronze Age Pervert, actually had to live in the bronze age, you would all be buggered by hoplite warriors as their twink.

Because the bronze age Greeks were Super Gay.

SUPER GAY.

Even Zack Snyder calls 300 the gayest movie ever made.

The rabidly homophobic right wing have in idolising the Greeks picked the most super gay men ever.

Ever.

Because all the weird right-wing shriekweasels actually know about bronze age Greece comes from a bourgeois culture that has systematically tamed that which we cannot handle.

​But if you want to see what happens when an author actually refuses to put a sweater on the wolf of antiquity, you have to turn off the multiplex, and you have to read Mary Renault.

​Writing from the 1950s through the 1970s, Renault managed a literary miracle: she bypassed the modern moral filter, to write eight novels that trace ancient Greek history from the mythical Theseus, to the imperial Alexander, in all its brutal, unfathomable glory.

Renault was born into a comfortable middle class English family, and was educated at Oxford, briefly studying under JRR Tolkien. But then she did two things that helped her to escape the bourgeois mindset.

She got a real job. Renault trained as a nurse and worked on the medical frontlines throughout World War 2.

And she became a lesbian. Renault escaped the dull life of a borgeois tradwife, instead meeting her life partner Julie Mullard and fleeing Britain’s oppressive anti-gay laws to live abroad 

But here’s the thing about Renault’s Greeks.

They aren’t feminist. Renault didn’t do what a bazillion dull bourgeois novelists have done in recent decades and “retell the myth of X from the perspective of Y zzzzzzzzzz”.

Instead Renault novels are studies of a psychology that the modern mind can barely comprehend.

​When Renault tackles classical paiderastia—most notably in The Last of the Wine and The Persian Boy—the Greek institution of sexual relations between an older male (erastes) and a young boy (eromenos), the practice that literally gives us the term term pederasty, Renault does not flinch.

And she does not translate it into modern “gay romance.” She explicitly depicts the power imbalances, the rigid social expectations, and the military utility of these bonds.

​For the ancient Greeks, sexuality wasn’t a matter of binary identity. It was a matter of power, domination and submission. The defining institution of aristocratic bronze age Greece, the mechanism by which aristocratic youths were inducted into politics, warfare, and philosophy, was the most despised moral violation of our times. 

​Renault recognised what modern adaptations like Nolan’s cannot even begin to show. That for the Greeks, being Super Gay was not a rebellion against the power structure. It was the power structure.

By refusing to soften them, she captured the aristocratic, heroic ideal—the Arete—that makes the myths so enduring in the first place. She understood that you cannot have the glory of the Greeks without the brutality.

Whatever you think the Greeks mean to you, think again.They weren’t the man you could be if the women would only let you. They absolutely weren’t the origin of modern, liberal, democratic values.

The only way in which ancient Greece is the foundation of Western civilization is that it’s the thing every last shred of our modern morality exists to escape from.

So is Christopher Nolan’s Odyssey a good movie?

Sure, it’s an excellent IMAX blockbuster.

But that’s all it is. The idea that this product made for the shopping mall multiplex does anything but entertain

and generate character franchising opportunities

is an stark reminder of how entirely captured today’s culture is by bourgeois capitalist ideals.

Because Chris Nolan’s Odyssey has nothing to say about the Odyssey.

Homer’s Odyssey, like all great myths, confronts the modern mind with that most potent of intellectual tools – contradiction.

The purpose of this contradiction is not to solve it like a logic puzzle, not to try and make it go away, but to live in the discomfort of the contradiction.

The Odyssey is the contradiction between two ways of thinking. Or of being.

The Heroic, the Aristocratic, the noble and the brutal. Odysseus is the king among men who laughs in the face of death.

And the Domestic, the Bureaucratic, the safe and the bourgeois. Which is us, mortal men hearing the tale, we who cower and hide from death.

Christopher Nolan does what he’s paid to do. He tames the Odyssey.

As predicted Matt Damon is there to turn the pirate king into a modern, moral man, rooted in family. A Sad Dad dreaming only of return home.

As predicted the Gods are rationalised into forces of nature and inner voices. Because we all know Gods are “just a myth”, right?

As predicted, Greek feral sexuality is nowhere to be seen. The moral outrage at the heart of Greek culture cannot be shown because it is morally outrageous.

Chris Nolan tames the Odyssey into a domestic myth that lets us have our cake and eat it. That resolves the contradiction.

We the modern bourgeois man can have our modern morality, our safe and comfortable lives, and still be men like Odysseus.

But we can’t.

Nolan’s tamed Odyssey robs us of Homer’s Odyssey’s true meaning. That man can hurl ourself into the unknown void. That we can encounter the Gods.

We can be heroic.

Or we can stay safe at home.

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In April of 1856, a teenage girl named Nongqawuse stood by the banks of the Gxarha River in South Africa and received a message from the dead.

​She told her uncle that she had spoken with the spirits of their ancestors. The spirits delivered a prophecy, one that offered a total and miraculous salvation for the Xhosa people, who were then buckling under the encroaching weight of the British Empire. The ancestors promised to rise up, drive the British into the sea, and usher in an era of unimaginable utopian abundance. Flocks of beautiful, immortal cattle would emerge from the earth. The fields would spontaneously yield grain. Sickness and old age would be eradicated.

​But, as with all divine contracts, there was a catch.

To trigger this utopia, the spirits demanded an act of supreme faith. The Xhosa had to slaughter all of their existing cattle. They had to burn their crops. They had to destroy their stores of grain and empty their water reserves. They had to liquidate their entire present economy to prove they were worthy of the future.

​And so, they did.

​Historians estimate that the Xhosa slaughtered over 400,000 cattle. They burned their own fields to ash. They waited for the sun to turn red and the ancestors to arrive. But the sun remained yellow. The ancestors did not rise. The utopia did not materialize. Instead, the resulting famine killed tens of thousands of people and shattered the Xhosa civilization.

​It stands today as one of history’s most devastating examples of mass psychotic delusion, a society so thoroughly captured by a spiritual mythos that it happily engineered its own starvation.

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Welcome to 2026 and the era of the Artificial Intelligence IPO.

The American people and the broader West feel they are in decline. The people are poorer, their portfolios and 401ks are at risk. The precious oil is scarcer and more expensive. The newly powerful Chinese threaten American global hegemony.

But the billionaires and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley have an answer. They will summon the machine god AGI, and it will provide the productivity boost needed to achieve abundance. Robot workers will clean our offices, and LLMs will fill in the spreadsheets. The capitalist promise of a post-scarcity economy will be made real….for those who invest early.

Because there is a cost.

To achieve AGI we must burn all of the remaining fossil fuels so that the AGI god will gift us the power of fusion energy. We must pump our water into the gaping maw of the AGI god who will show us how to mine ice asteroids in return. We must invest all of our capital into data centre construction so the super-intelligence can awaken.

The future science fiction promised us is there for the taking!

Think of this as an intelligence test for humanity.

A test we are failing spectacularly.

To understand the current financial mania, we must first look at the altar where the sacrifices are currently being made. On June 12, 2026, SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. It was the largest initial public offering in the history of human commerce, raising $75 billion and immediately cementing a valuation of $1.77 trillion. By the end of the day, the stock surged, pushing the market cap over $2 trillion and crowning Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire.

Let me reassure everyone that you were not the only person who had to google whether a trillion was actually a real number.

A valuation arrived at on the basis of some recycled tropes from 1980s scifi novels. A small fraction of SpaceX valuation was based on rocket launches and satellite communications. The rest was a speculative fiction of asteroid mining and Musk’s “vision” of making humanity multi-planetary and “extending the light of human consciousness to the stars”. Elon likes to wear a Foundation tshirt, and has clearly read too much Isaac Asimov. Or not enough. Oh and a third rate AI model currently burning billions.

Talking to the believers sucked in by the Musk mythos reveals over and again the same circular illogic. Humanity is doomed to extinction if it stays on one planet so…instead of learning to live on our planet…we must pay Elon for the scifi fantasy he is selling us. Like a forty a day smoker buying a snake oil cure for cancer instead of giving up.

​Meanwhile, the architects of Artificial Intelligence are preparing their own ascensions. OpenAI, currently valued north of $800 billion, and Anthropic, the creators of Claude, have both filed their S-1 forms, preparing to unleash their own historic IPOs later this year.

Valuations that could not exist if investors had not been pumped full of sci-fi summer blockbusters starring murderous machine gods. Claude and ChatGPT are worth …squillons…because they are summoning that machine god AGI, and it will destroy the jobs of most humans. But those who sacrifice their capital today will be given greater capital tomorrow. The tech priesthood has issued an ultimatum to the people: Sacrifice to the future, or be left behind in the dirt.

It’s important to understand that the AGI doomers are the ones truly powering the hype-cycle. When Elizier Yudkowsky warns that If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies he is massively boosting the excitement to build it. The ancient gods and ancestors have never been loving or kind; they are vindictive, volatile, and terrifyingly arbitrary. Because terror is not a marketing failure, it is the ultimate mechanism of authority. To believe the AGI god can save us, we must believe it has the power to destroy us.

But what the AI doomers are asking us to fear is…ourselves. Because Artificial Intelligence is not AI. It is CI…Collective Intelligence. But…we’ll come back to that.

The doomers and the boosters, the haters and the investors all repeat the same thing about AI. “It’s like something out of sci-fi.” But they all miss what this means. AI isn’t just *like* something from scifi. It only exists as an idea at all because of the mythos of scifi.

Being like scifi is the only justification for throwing quadrillions of dollars at companies that are incinerating cash at an unprecedented rate to build windowless data centers and starships to irradiated rocks.

​We are evaluating these companies not on rational metrics of earthly utility, profitability, or physical limitations. We are pricing them based on their proximity to a fictional narrative. 

​This is the Xhosa delusion dressed up in the sleek, minimalist aesthetics of Silicon Valley. We are witnessing a mass psychotic break where the firewall between objective reality and speculative fiction has entirely collapsed.

A Brief Interlude…

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How does an entire civilization lose its grip on reality? It doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a slow, methodical rewriting of the cultural operating system.

​For millennia, humanity’s mythos was governed by conscious creators. We believed in gods, spirits, and ancestors who sat above the world, pulling the strings. But during the 20th century, as industrialization alienated us from nature and the atom bomb proved we could harness the power of stars, we needed a new mythology. Science fiction writers – Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A Heinlein – inadvertently authored a zero-day exploit that hacked the American psyche.

​They replaced the mythos of the Divine with the mythos of the Machine.

With the 1960s and the Space Race it seemed as though the mythos of scifi was coming true. We could build machines that would take us to the stars and to our rightful future. But then the fantasy died, not because we didn’t invest enough capital, but because it had always been a fantasy.

Then the development of the computer and the internet created a new fantasy. Writers like William Gibson imagined virtual worlds within the machine. If the machines could not take us to space, they could take us into cyberspace.

And if the Gods of antiquity were dead, the machines could give us new gods. If humans no longer believed we had a soul, we could believe instead we had a code. The code of human intelligence that runs on the wetware of the brain could run instead on the hardware of the computer. And the fantasy of Artificial Intelligence was born.

The contemporary obsession with Large Language Models is the most intimate manifestation of this psychosis. The Silicon Priesthood have spun these algorithms as the spark of an Artificial General Intelligence.

But expecting an LLM to spontaneously generate AGI is like expecting Wikipedia to suddenly achieve sentience. An LLM is not a reasoning engine; it is a probabilistic text generator doing next-token prediction. It is a highly compressed algorithmic map—a high-dimensional latent space built by grinding billions of pages of dead text, human manifestos, and forgotten novels into a statistical paste.

Believing ChatGPT is talking to you is no less ridiculous than believing any book is talking to you. Which was a commonplace delusion in antiquity when the illiterate were taught to read.

This intimate psychotic break is not a novel side-effect of modern technology; it is a fundamental flaw in human psychology that was discovered sixty years ago. In 1966, an MIT computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, the world’s first chatbot. He programmed it with a rudimentary script called DOCTOR, designed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist by simply rearranging the user’s own sentences into open-ended questions. It was a cheap, transparent parlor trick of basic string manipulation. Yet, Weizenbaum watched in absolute horror as his secretary, his students, and highly educated academics immediately began pouring their deepest, darkest personal secrets into the terminal.

When Weizenbaum explained exactly how the primitive code worked, his users didn’t care; his own secretary famously demanded he leave the room so she could have a private, intimate conversation with the machine. Weizenbaum realized a terrifying truth that the silicon priesthood has successfully monetized today: the human mind is so profoundly desperate for a cosmic companion, and so deeply vulnerable to anthropomorphism, that it will eagerly grant a soul to a handful of if/then statements.

This is the ultimate sleight of hand of the Silicon Priesthood: there is actually nothing artificial about Artificial Intelligence. The machine did not generate a new, alien consciousness from the ether; it simply harvested ours. Every poem, every theorem, and every forgotten blog post has been scraped, flattened, and ground into a probabilistic paste. We are bowing down in terror to a mirror—tricked into worshiping our own reflections. LLMs are not alien Artificial Intelligence. They are human Collective Intelligence.

And they belong to humanity collectively. Which is why I use CI, for the folks typing that comment.

​But because our minds have been cyber-primed by decades of sci-fi cinema, we do not see in ChatGPT the human collective intelligence talking. We hallucinate HAL 9000. We hallucinate Samantha from Her. When we type a prompt into this digital archive and it responds with the polite, slightly detached tone of an android, the trap snaps shut. We mistake the statistical average of our own libraries for a brilliant, alien intelligence.

​We whisper into the void, the void regurgitates our own blog posts, and we fall to our knees in worship. We have replaced the gods with a chatbot, completely convinced that if we just give it enough electricity, it will solve climate change, cure cancer, and absolve us of our moral failures.

If the Chat AI on your laptop is the intimate delusion, the gigawatt data center in the desert is the macro-psychosis.

​To the modern, secular mind, ancient animal sacrifice looks like chaotic, barbaric theater. But the ancient polytheistic worldview was profoundly pragmatic. In Rome, the relationship between humans and the divine was governed by a strict legal contract: Do ut des. I give, so that you may give.

​The gods were like Mafiosi, who demanded their portion of smoke and fat as sacrifices to sustain their power. If a society neglected its sacrifices, the gods would grow angry and throw the cosmic order into chaos. Furthermore, to slaughter an animal, which was the ultimate measure of wealth in antiquity, was to literally burn your capital. 

When an emperor sponsored a hecatomb, the ritual slaughter of a hundred oxen, he was engaging in extreme conspicuous consumption. He was proving his dominance by showing how much of his civilization’s wealth he could afford to set on fire.

The modern logic of building AI data centers operates on the exact same pagan framework.

​The tech oligarchs are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into NVIDIA GPUs, cooling systems, and dedicated power grids. Why? Because of the “Scaling Laws”, the theory that these models only become more intelligent by being fed exponentially larger diets of data and electricity. But what needs to be scaled isn’t the processing power. It’s the human collective that is the source of intelligence.

​The gods of silicon are ravenous. The tech priests believe that if they just sacrifice enough power, land, and capital, the Machine will grant them the ultimate reward of Artificial General Intelligence. If the model simply outputs a slightly better autocomplete, or hallucinates an absurd answer, the engineer does not conclude that matrix multiplication cannot spontaneously generate consciousness. The psychotic logic dictates that the sacrifice simply wasn’t big enough. We need more compute. We need more gigawatts. We need to build a nuclear reactor to power the server farm.

​This is the Sunk-Cost Psychosis.

​When a sovereign wealth fund or a venture capital firm backs an AI IPO, they are participating in a modern hecatomb. Hoarding hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge GPUs is a performance of dominance aimed squarely at rival factions. It is the ultimate geopolitical flex: Look at the sheer scale of the resources I can afford to incinerate in the desert. Bow before my capacity to bear the cost of the future.

​And just like the SpaceX IPO, where $75 billion was materialized to fund the sci-fi dream of terraforming Mars, these financial maneuvers are active disassociations from reality. We are bankrupting the infrastructure of the planet we actually live on to appease a hallucination of the future.

We cling to the comforting delusion that the men leading this charge are rational actors, objective engineers and benevolent visionaries dutifully pushing the boundaries of applied science. They are nothing of the sort.

The modern AI CEO is a psychotic pagan wearing a Patagonia fleece.

Their pursuit of an artificial god is not a technological endeavor, but a strictly imperial one. Driven by an insatiable, Caesarian ambition, they are perfectly willing to sacrifice the literal lifeblood of our civilization, our energy grids, our water tables, our capital, on the altar of their own greatness.

They demand these modern hecatombs not because they possess a rational, empirical blueprint for human flourishing, but because in the twisted logic of the silicon priesthood, whoever summons and controls the Oracle controls the empire. They are happily burning the present world to ashes, entirely convinced that they alone are destined to rule the smoke.

When we read about the Xhosa, we feel a patronizing pity. We diagnose their absolute faith in ancestral spirits as a tragic, primitive superstition. Yet, we are entirely blind to the superstition of our own era: the dogma of the Machine Universe.

Silicon Valley operates on the fundamental, unquestioned belief that the cosmos is merely a highly complex, computable mechanism, that human consciousness is just a byproduct of scale, and that if we simply stack enough processors in a warehouse in Utah, a digital messiah will spontaneously emerge. 

But this mechanistic worldview is fundamentally false. It is a reductive, brutally limited framework masquerading as objective science. In a few centuries, historians will look back at our gigawatt data centers with the exact same anthropological pity we reserve for ancient altars. 

The best sociological analysis suggests that sacrifice “worked” because it brought people together and focussed them on communal problems, creating solutions. It had nothing to go with gods, just humanity. Emile Durkheim in his 1912 work The Foundational Forms of Religious Life called this “collective effervescence”. Sacrifice literally activated human collective intelligence.

LLMs aren’t AGI, they are us, they “work” because billions of us already solved these problems. They are a way to access and activate our human collective intelligence. The way to make better AGI isn’t to burn silicon wafers in a desert. It’s to understand that we, humanity, are the source of intelligence. And to fully educate and value every human on this planet to contribute to our collective intelligence.

The future will see our frantic hoarding of microchips not as an era of high technology, but as a deeply embarrassing, primitive superstition. A time when desperate men set the earth on fire, trying to coax a soul out of a spreadsheet.

A mass psychosis is not merely a widespread error in judgment. It is a closed-loop system of magical thinking. When empirical reality contradicts the belief, the psychotic society does not abandon the premise; it simply escalates the ritual.

​This is the escalation trap of 2026. The firewall has burned away. We have billionaires spending their fortunes to build escape pods to barren planets, researchers ritually attempting to align digital gods they themselves are writing into existence, and financial markets valuing speculative fiction over terrestrial survival.

All because of a psychotic belief in the myth of the Machine Universe.

​The tragedy of the Xhosa cattle killings was not just the absurdity of the prophecy; it was the absolute, horrific finality of the cost. Once the cattle were slaughtered and the grain was burned, no amount of realization could undo the famine.

And the British who the Xhosa sacrificed to destroy? Simply watched the mass psychosis unfold, the people starve, then took over the land without a fight. Do nothing, win. As the Chinese have been saying a lot recently.

​We are currently standing by the river, listening to the tech prophets tell us what the spirits of the Machine require. We are being asked to sacrifice our energy grids, our water, our capital, and our grasp on objective reality to summon a utopia that exists only in the paperback novels of the 1980s.

​A civilization that burns its present sustenance to summon a mythical savior does not inherit the future. It simply starves.

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It’s 1990. This morning I found an open door in the shopping centre of the dull commuter town I live in.

Beyond the door are a series of large empty rooms, poorly lit, with large boxes.

Backrooms.

I phoned my friend Matthew Woods. Woodsy. He pedaled over his BMX and together we’re going to explore the rooms.

I’ve made it to the third room but Woodsy has disappeared. Now I’m hiding behind the boxes as footsteps approach.

What are these rooms? Where do they lead? Who is coming for me?

Woodsy’s pudgy face appears over the box, and his annoying older brother Rick who works in Dixons the electronic store. They’re laughing.

“Damo you twat” Rick roars “you’re in the backroom of Dixons”.

Because there are no liminal spaces.

Only backrooms.

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Mainstream cinema is choking on its own product.

Every movie is a perfect 3-act structure, complete with Inciting Incident, Rising Action, Crisis, Climax and Resolution.

Every hero has a meaningful journey that will hit at least nine of Joseph Campbell’s seventeen stages.

Every location up to and including alien worlds and Heaven above is an exercise in logical worldbuilding realised as a CGI model in a supercomputer.

Everything is a reboot, a prequel, a mashup and an exercise in fan service.

And now even the most normie of normie audiences are sick of the product.

When along comes a movie that hurls The Writer’s Journey in the bin and treats narrative structure like dated fashion trend its refusing to wear.

A movie that follows characters who have no desires to drive them, whose only arcs are traced through non-euclidean liminal spaces.

And a movie whose one notable location is the kind of storage room found behind most large shops.

The Backrooms, directed by 20 year old Kane Parsons, extending his super successful webseries, itself inspired by the “creepypasta” backrooms meme.

A movie that … well … is basically a mid 1990s video art installation straight out of MoMA or Tate Modern.

But now in a multiplex near year.

Because Backrooms is avant-garde art for normies.

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You won’t feel any better rested but you will at least feel some hope that there is anything, anywhere beyond another trip to the shopping mall.

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Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is basically Clive Barker’s Hellraiser but made for art galleries.

Around the mid 90s digital video cameras and projectors began to allow gallery artists, working with tiny budgets, to create visual art using video.

Video installation art went back to at least the 1960s, when the Sony Portapak became the first consumer grade video camera. 

Artists like Nam June Paik created installations using bulky CRT screens, often stacked and arranged into sculptural forms.

But digital projectors allowed installation and cinema to merge. Artists like Stan Douglas and Doug Aitken created vast, multi-screen installations of cinema grade imagery.

Of works that were non-narrative, instead documenting fragments of real lives and locations, or creating fantastical worlds shown only in brief glimpses.

Works that were, for lack of a better term, avant-garde.

Avant-garde art is a term almost guaranteed to set most people’s teeth on edge.

It’s one of those poncy French words used by English speakers to sound intellectual.

Without diving into the full etymology the avant-garde are the forward guard or vanguard.

Avant-garde art then is like the cutting edge of art. And, crucially, avant-garde art is doing, ahead of schedule, what mainstream art will be doing thirty years later.

So it’s not at all surprising that Backrooms in 2026 looks like video installation art of 1996. That’s exactly what avant-garde theory would predict.

Backroom’s excellent soundtrack is less avant-garde than its non-narrative narrative. Ambient and electronica mainstreamed its sound in the 80s and 90s.

But when William Basinski pioneered experimental drone music using magnetic tape to tape recordings in the 1970s…

…or when John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33” confronted audiences with 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence…

…or when composer Pierre Schaeffer used real world sounds of cars and planes as “instruments” in the 1940s…

…these were truly avant-garde art. But today their sound is entirely mainstream in the film soundtracks of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross or even Hans Zimmer.

Once you realise how regularly avant-garde art leaps into the mainstream you realise that it is nothing to fear.

It’s kind of crazy to remember that the cinematic jump-cut was considered avant-garde when Jean-Luc Goddard used them in 1960s Breathless. Today the medium of the Tik Tok short wouldn’t exist without them.

William S Burrough’s “cut-up” and rearranged pages of text still seems like a cheat to many people, but David Bowie’s song lyrics and every LLM basically do the same.

The absurdist humour of the Dada movement, and the confusing, non-narrative performances of their Cabaret Voltaire were utterly dumbfounding to the general public back in 1916.

But Monty Python put Dada on our tvs, and today absurdism seems pretty tame compared to Gen-Z shitposting and meme culture. It doesn’t get much more Dada than Pepe the Frog.

And the Dadists and 4Channers have more in than dank humour.

Because avant-garde art is not just weird art for weird arts sake and shock value. Avant-garde art is fundamentally political.

Mainstream art is and always has been there to give comfort. Mainstream culture from Homer’s Iliad to Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan has always reassured us that reality is meaningful. That even war with all its horrors is there to give us the chance to be heroic.

But the artists of Dada were living through the mechanised carnage of World War 1. The avant-garde artists who followed saw the worst the 20th century had to throw at us. The concentration camps, the nuclear blasts, the napalm and the AR15.

The avant-garde decided that mainstream culture was bullsh*t. Reality wasn’t a 3 act structure with a redemptive character arc. Reality was fucking chaos, random events, meaningless lives and acts of absurdity. And the avant-garde made art that showed that reality.

So Backrooms is the avant-garde of 30 years ago finally smuggled into the cinema for normies…

…as horror.

Backrooms certainly contains a few frights. And it’s perfectly fine to market a movie as horror to bring in the normies.

But what Backrooms trades in is less jump scares than profound dis-ease, that will dog you long after you leave the cinema.

The true literary forebear of Backrooms is not Stephen King but Jorge Luis Borges, JG Ballard and Thomas Ligotti.

The horror of Backrooms is not the supernatural monster but the bland truth that these urinal yellow spaces are much closer to our reality than most “real” locations depicted on the cinema screen.

To understand the meaning of Backrooms…

…not as a complex made-up LORE…

…but as avant-garde art, imagine it projected in a gallery at Tate Modern, with one of those small white cards to explain it to the normies.

On that card are written two important words.

Liminal is the word most used today to describe Backrooms. And with good reason. But to get to the Liminal we need to go through…

…Disenchantment.

Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. For most of human history we just didn’t know shit about anything.

What’s under the ground? What are those sparkly things over head? What happens after we die? What even are we?

So it was very easy to enchant the unknown with the nouminal and the transcendent. To imagine dark fiery hell’s underground, or splendid immortal heavens above.

In his 1917 lecture The Vocation of Science the sociologist Max Weber described “the disenchantment of the world”.

Already by the early 20th century the power of science and reason had made it impossible to enchant the world with imagination.

We could dig into the dirt and look out into the stars. There was nothing transcendent there. There was no nouminal anywhere.

Instead, Gen-Z and their Gen-X parents, Millenials and their Boomer mums and dads, all of us alive today, have been born into what Weber called The Iron Cage.

With no other places for our imaginations to inhabit, we are trapped in a cage of rationalization and bureaucracy.

What little is left of our imagination is commodified and sold back to us as “entertainment” to keep us amused in our Iron Cage.

The Hollywood CGI slop machine mindlessly churns out old gods and old myths in new shiny outfits to comfort a humanity that has lost all belief in anything beyond the cage.

But then there is the liminal.

The state between states. For instance, the messy transition between childhood and adulthood. The place between places. The barren land between city blocks. The strip of grass between motorways. The rooms behind the furniture store. Backrooms.

The liminal appears as one of the last spaces where we can place our imagination. Even if the liminal is inhabited by monstrous entities, it’s better than yet more strip malls, housing tracts and office spaces that are our lives in the Iron Cage of the real.

Until we realise that even those liminal spaces are just the backroom of Dixons.

Normies are the people who don’t even understand they are living in the Iron Cage.

But Backrooms is giving them just an edge of a glimpse of that reality. Which has always been the task of the avant-garde.

Listen to the podcast audio here

Chess is the King of Games. It just is. It’s not Buckaroo. It’s not Kerplunk. You don’t see political strategists huddled in a bunker in the Pentagon trying to model geopolitical implications by extracting a plastic stick from a tube so that the marbles don’t fall. No. They play chess.

​Chess is the King of Games because it is a map.

​If we look at the brief history of chess we see a game that evolved out of chaturanga in 6th century India. It spread to the Persians. Then the Arabs got a hold of it. Then it made its way to Europe, where the Europeans, in their infinite wisdom, decided what the game really needed was a phenomenally powerful, hyper-mobile Queen, presumably because medieval European men desperately needed a strong maternal figure to tell them where to go and who to kill.

​But through all of these iterations, from the dust of India to the pristine digital boards of chess.com, chess has remained fundamentally the same thing. It is a map. 

A map… of POWER.

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​Just let that sit there for a minute. A map of power. If you’ve come here for a whimsical romp, you’re in the wrong place. We’re doing structural analysis of power dynamics using board games. We’re doing the coolest scifi novel ever written about gameplayers. And we’re doing a brutally honest look at Why Leftists Always Lose.

But first we need to talk about Contrapoints.

Buckle-up.

Contrapoints: The Online Left’s Token Liberal

The Liberal centrist is a dying breed. They stay on their reserves in the mainstream media, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times. Channels nobody watches. Newspapers nobody reads.

Meanwhile the Left, the actual Left, is online. And the online Left is very VERY Left wing. If you’re outraged by Hasan Piker you need to know he is the LEAST Left the online Left gets.

And with good reason. Gen Z and the rest of us have been living through the “slow cancellation of the future” named by the much missed Mark Fisher. 

A future imagined in the 60s and 70s built on widespread redistribution of wealth has been replaced with an 80s cyberpunk future where a tiny oligarchy uses all the money to build the torment nexus.

It’s no surprise the most googled subject among unemployed young people is how to build a guillotine. The online Left has formed from ideologies of utopian socialism, Marxism and anti-Imperialist Leninism that were made for such unequal times.

And that, to be perfectly blunt, do not have the best track record of success.

Which brings us to Natalie Wynn, AKA Contrapoints. 

The Left’s answer to the shrieking hysterical vitriol of Right wing streamers is…the gentle understated irony of the video essayist.

Contrapoints is, or was until more recent entrants like FD Signifier, the biggest YouTube video essayist on the Left. Kind of.

In her own words Contrapoints costumed, trans identity videos are “communist coded” attracting a much more Left audience than her actual politics. Wynn describes herself the social democratic end of liberal, but to her detractors she is just plain vanilla liberal.

A shitlib, as they say on the Left, that uses such terms for anyone right of Lenin.

Which makes Natalie Wynn the online Left’s token liberal, trapped in an endless, agonizing cycle of “audience capture” as her incredibly well-lit, feature-length theatrical video essays are ever more centrist, while the audience goes ever further Left.

​If we summarize the “Contrapoints controversy” – and frankly, pick your era, pick your specific cancellation, it’s a repeating fractal of minor grievances – it usually boils down to Natalie suggesting that perhaps, occasionally, engaging with electoral politics or dealing with the world as it actually exists, rather than how it exists in a 90-page zine about anarcho-syndicalist polycule farming, might be a good idea? For this, she is routinely ritually humiliated.

​But the anger directed at Contrapoints isn’t actually about Contrapoints. It’s about the fundamental, irreconcilable and quite valid animosity the Left holds towards a liberal centre that cannot admit its own part in creating the fascist revival of MAGA and Trump, cannot say the letters g e n o c i d e and Gaza in the same sentence, still believes the answer to everything is to go back to the 90s and still, basically, loves capitalism.

Contrapoints carries the can for all liberals, who are still the vast majority of the not so online public. Because she says the things that the majority actually thinks about today’s online Left.

That you’re unrealistic. That you just don’t understand the position on the Chess board. If we let you play, you will lose.

Because ​liberals, you see, want to win at Chess.

Leftists want Chess to fuck off and die.

​How Chess Models Power

​Let’s look at the map. Let’s look at how chess actually models power. It does so through four fundamental concepts. Position, Materiel, Initiative, and Checkmate.

​Position. Where are your pieces? Do you control the center of the board? In warfare position is geography. Do you hold the high ground on the battlefield? But in politics, position is Institutional Capture. Are you in control of the House, Senate and Presidency? Or is your total influence some underfunded NGOs and academic departments in Gender Studies?

​Materiel. How many pieces do you have on the board? Have you got your rooks? Your bishops? Or are you down to a single, traumatized pawn shivering behind a king who has completely lost control of the situation? Materiel in politics is people and capital. How many senators and judges do you have? Who are your billionaire backers?

​Initiative. Who is doing the doing? Are you dictating the pace of the game, forcing your opponent to react to your threats? Or are you constantly on the back foot, defending, scrambling, apologizing? Initiative in politics is the news cycle. It is the narrative. Donald Trump is incompetent and most things, but his political brilliance is in winning the narrative, and holding the initiative. 

​Checkmate. The end. The absolute cessation of the opponent’s ability to resist. The realization that there are no legal moves left. In Chess the king is never destroyed. He is trapped. The aim of politics is not to destroy but to entrap your opponents and make them pieces in your in future battles.

​Now, imagine politics in the year 2026 as a massive game of chess. Played on a board of near infinite size, with a vast number of players and pieces that all have their own agendas. Keep that in mind, we’re going to think about a game like that very soon.

With a few exceptions, like New York mayor Zoran Mamdani, the Left seems determined to lose at chess, by adopting strategies that cannot win.

​The Right-wing Advantage and the Liberal Game

​Here is the brutal political reality. The Right have a massive, almost insurmountable advantage in this game. Why? Because all they do is play to win.

​The Right don’t care if the knight is supposed to move in an L-shape. If the referee isn’t looking, they will pick up the knight, smash it into the side of your head, and declare a glorious victory for traditional family values. They understand materiel. They understand initiative. They will sacrifice the pawns. My god, will they sacrifice the pawns. They will sacrifice all the pawns in their stupid red hats if it means the King gets a slight tax break. They play the map of power exactly as it is designed to be played and the win.

​Liberals have it much harder. Liberals play to win ethically.

​A liberal sits at the chess board and says, “Well, I could take that bishop, but has the bishop been offered a negotiated settlement? Have we done an environmental impact study on moving this rook to D4? Is it fair that the Queen has so much mobility while the pawns are downwardly mobile professionals? We should probably form a committee.”

​The great triumph of liberalism – the reason we are not all currently living in a Mad Max dystopia paying tithes to a local warlord – is that liberalism triumphed by LIMITING the game. They introduced rules. They introduced HR departments, and human rights tribunals, and the concept of “democracy.” The launched a four hundred year offensive to make the game survivable and they won. 

​What a pragmatic liberal like Contrapoints is worried about, deep down beneath the corsets and the neon lighting, is that this hard-won advantage, this delicate, limited game of liberal democracy, will be entirely lost if we succumb to playing “Leftist Chess.”

​Because she knows, as anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes in a left-wing organizing meeting knows, that Leftist Chess is an unremitting fucking disaster.

​How Leftist Factions Play Chess

​If you want to know why Leftists always lose, you just have to watch them play the game. Let us break down the factions. It’s a very rich tapestry of failure.

And because I know how chill and open to critique Leftists factions are, I’m sure you’ll all take this with good humour.

​The Utopian Socialists

They refuse to start the game. They look at the mass-produced, factory-molded board and declare it a symptom of profound spiritual alienation. They demand the board be remade as a circle, and the squares must be abolished, because alternating black and white squares enforces the brutalist, soul-crushing logic of the industrial loom. They sit there, cross-legged, weaving a new, non-competitive game out of locally sourced hemp, while the Right-wing player silently reaches across the board and takes their King.

​The Orthodox Marxists

The Orthodox Marxist sits at the board, folds their arms, and does absolutely nothing. They have read the theory. They understand the dialectic. They know, with absolute scientific certainty, that the contradictions inherent in the opponent’s opening strategy will inevitably lead to the collapse of their position. Moving a piece would be adventurism. It would delay the inevitable historical process. The Conservative player checkmates them in four moves. They claim this checkmate proves they were right all along.

​The Leninists

The Leninist arrives at the table and immediately establishes a “vanguard party” consisting entirely of their own Rooks. They execute the opponent’s pawns. Then, just to be safe, they execute half of their own pawns for exhibiting counter-revolutionary tendencies. They declare victory. Five years later, the Rooks realize they are now just playing capitalism, but with worse food and more concrete. The Right wing player wins by default.

​The Stalinists

The Stalinist plays exactly like the Leninist, but after executing their own pawns, they meticulously airbrush those pawns out of all the official tournament photographs, and if you point out that the pawns used to be there, you are sent to a gulag located on square H8.

​The Social Democrats

Ah, the Social Democrats. Bless them. They start the game by apologizing for being there. They try to implement a welfare state for the pawns, funded by a tax on the King’s diagonal movements. They are then brutally crushed by a nakedly aggressive Conservative Queen who has offshored all her wealth to a different board altogether.

​The Democratic Socialists

The Democratic Socialists spend three and a half hours agonizing over whether moving a pawn is a betrayal of the working class. They hold a plenary session and after intense factional infighting, they reach a historic compromise where they agree to move a pawn one square forward only with a unanimous vote of other pawns, before realising all their pawns have now been taken by the Right wing knights. They write an academic paper about it.

​The Anarchists

The Anarchists insist that the game can have no rules. They immediately declare the center of the board a temporary autonomous zone. Knights attempting to move in an L are beaten with sticks and anyone asking what the rules are is targeted with a bombing campaign to preserve the “principles of non-violence”. After declaring them terrorists the Right wing player has them rendered to a black site and rewrites the rules to his own advantage.

The Trotskyists declare their own side ideologically impure and form a splinter group before the game can begin.

The Internet Tankies lose every game specifically so they can accuse it of being a CIA backed colour revolution.

Hasan Piker chess is played on a pearl inlaid board with solid gold and silver pieces made by Cartier.

And the liberals. The dull, stolid liberals pop in their ear buds to listen to Ezra Klein and make one cautious, boring move after another, slowly, surely accruing material advantage, trading initiative for position, and close in on Checkmate…

…only to be removed from the players seat by a populist Left who want cheaper bus fares.

​Contrapoints looks at this absolute circus of self-sabotage, ideological purity spirals, and historical LARPing, and she is right to doubt it. She is right to say, “Maybe, just maybe, we should try to actually win the game of chess we are currently forced to play, rather than pretending we are playing a different game entirely.”

​But she, and other pragmatic somewhat dull liberals, miss something essential.

​The Player of Games

​If you want to understand the solution to all of this, you shouldn’t be reading political theory. You should be reading Scottish science fiction. Specifically, you should be reading Iain M. Banks.

​In Banks’ 1988 novel The Player of Games, we are introduced to a society called the Empire of Azad. The Empire of Azad is held together entirely by a staggeringly complex board game, also called Azad. The game is the system, and the system is the game. Your social standing, your political power, your entire life is determined by how well you play Azad.

And that system is as brutal as they come. Late in the story we are shown the “secret channels” the Azadian Epstein class watch livestream torture and murder.

​The protagonist, a man named Jernau Morat Gurgeh, comes from a post-scarcity, fully automated luxury space communist society called the Culture. Morat means “gameplayer”. Jernau Morat Gurgeh, the greatest gameplayer in the Culture, is sent to the Empire of Azad to play them at their own game.

​He doesn’t go there and complain that the game is unfair. He doesn’t go there and write a blog about how the board is structurally oppressive. He doesn’t try to organize the game pieces into a syndicalist commune.

​He sits down. He learns the rules. He plays. And he wins.

And in winning, destroys the game entirely.

​There is a lesson here. Two lessons, actually. One for the Leftists, and one for the Liberals.

​The lesson for Leftists is this: The only way to change the game is to win.

​You cannot ignore the map of power. You cannot wish it away with purity tests and theoretically flawless critiques published in obscure journals. If you want chess to fuck off and die, you cannot achieve that by refusing to play. You have to sit down at the board, look the bastard across from you in the eye, and systematically, relentlessly dismantle their position. You have to master position, materiel, and initiative. You have to learn to corner your opponent, reduce their possible moves to zero and force checkmate. You have to beat them at their own game before you can flip the table, burn the board and shred all the pieces.

​The lesson for Liberals, however, is this: The only way to really win is to transcend the system.

​In The Player of Games, Gurgeh doesn’t just beat the Emperor of Azad by playing the Emperor’s style of game better than the Emperor. He beats him by playing his own style. He plays a style of game that reflects the values of his own, utopian, egalitarian society. He plays so fluidly, so beautifully, and so completely outside the narrow, brutal, fascistic paradigm of his opponent, that the game itself, and the Empire based on the game, are destroyed forever.

​Liberals like Contrapoints want to protect the limited rules of the game because those hard won rules keep us safe. And they are right, in the short term. But in the long term, Chess always ends with carnage. You must play not to preserve a slightly better version of the game, but to transcend Chess entirely.

​You have to play to win, yes. But you have to play in a way that proves a better world is possible. You have to master the board not to become the King, but to demonstrate that the very concept of the King is obsolete.

And you did this once. Liberals deposed the kings, established democracy, won human rights. Then you just fucking gave up. You decided your expensive cities and more expensive college degrees were enough.

You stopped playing to change the the game and started just…playing the game.

​Chess is the King of Games. It is a map of power.

​But maps can be redrawn. And Kings, historically speaking, can be removed from the board entirely. You just have to be willing to make the move.

Listen to the podcast audio here

To my Gen-X compatriots, to the Boomers and Millenials, and to Gen-Z who will have to clean up this mess we all made…

…can we agree that Star Trek is the future we would all like?

A future in which poverty is eradicated, disease is a mere curiosity of the past, humanity has put aside petty squabbles over resources, borders, and skin melanin and replaced all of that sh*t with a collective, enlightenment-driven pursuit of knowledge and self-betterment.

A future in which humanity has – to use the rigorous academic term – Grown The Fuck Up

Watch the full video essay here

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Is Star Trek a future we can all agree on?

Let us tune out the ideological zealots, the Tankies and the Nazis, who treat our planetary collapse as a competitive team sport, and among the exhausted, fact-based majority, agree on Star Trek as our shared prize.

When we look at the USS Enterprise we do not just see a starship, we see a perfectly calibrated, post-scarcity society. It is the ultimate manifestation of what contemporary political theorists affectionately call FALC: Fully Automated Luxury Communism… in space.

Let’s place ourselves at the intersection of eschatology, speculative fiction, and macro-economics and ask a question of Star Trek – specifically, the teleological trajectory required to actually achieve the utopian federation depicted within it.

Put in layman’s terms–how the fuck do we *get* to Star Trek?

​Because there is, unfortunately, one catastrophic, glaring problem with this cultural lodestone.

​In the canonical lore of the Star Trek universe, this magnificent, post-scarcity utopia does not emerge from a peaceful, democratic transition. It does not arrive because a coalition of enlightened centrist politicians finally passed the right carbon tax. It happens exclusively on the other side of World War III – a global, thermonuclear, and genetic holocaust that wipes out a third of the Earth’s population and plunges the survivors into a radioactive dark age.

​And, according to the deeply unsettling timeline of the Star Trek universe, that war starts right here. 

Right now.

In 2026.

​Check your watches, ladies and gentlemen. We are right on schedule.

​PART ONE: WW3 AND STAR TREK

​Signs of WW3 in 2026

​I do not need to remind you that it is currently 2026, and the geopolitical dashboard is flashing red across every conceivable metric. We are witnessing an unprecedented convergence of systemic stressors that makes the Cuban Missile Crisis look like a polite disagreement over a parking space.

Check your newsfeed, or simply look out the window

We have the protracted, grinding meat-grinder of the Ukraine war, acting as a proxy battlefield for nuclear superpowers and playground for combat robot gen 1 Terminators.

We have Iran and the broader Middle East locked in a collapsing spiral of kinetic retaliation, vaporising the very oil reserves America started yet another war to secure.

We are drowning in an epistemological nightmare of disinformation, where shared objective reality has fractured into bespoke, algorithmically curated psychotic echo chambers so deranged they make Alex Jones look like a reliable source.

Economic inequality has reached a velocity where billionaires are literally launching themselves into the exosphere while the proletariat attempts to crowdfund their insulin. 

Consequently, fascism is no longer a historical curiosity confined to black-and-white footage. It is once again a rising, viable, mainstream electoral strategy.

Immigrants are being demonised and minorities persecuted.

Germany and Japan are re-arming.

If this all looks spookily like the events that drove us through WW1 and WW2 that’s because the systems which caused those wars are once again driving us towards global arma-fucking-geddon.

Which is what we’re really here to think about, not human morality or high drama, but cold, machine logic, the systems driving us to war.

And the one system that those of you in the know will see lurking behind all the others. A system whose name we shall not utter…until later. 

And what Star Trek, the ultimate work of systems fiction, can teach us about those systems.

​Why WW3 Happened in Star Trek

​We must first examine why World War III happened in the Star Trek continuity. 

Originally, the writers in the late 1960s, operating under the assumption that the Cold War would inevitably go hot, placed the Eugenics Wars and the precursor to WW3 in the 1990s. When we miraculously survived the 90s with nothing more distasteful than dial-up internet and Nu-Metal, the lore was continuously retconned.

​The canonical window for the end of the world is now established as 2026 to 2054.

​What the writers of Star Trek intuitively grasped, and what modern science fiction authors like William Gibson have explicitly codified, and what we have already explored together in the channel, is the concept of “The Jackpot.” 

The Jackpot is not a single, catastrophic Michael Bay explosion. It is a multifactorial collapse. It is what happens when climate change, pandemics, economic implosion, and localized nuclear exchanges all decide to book onto the same budget holiday tour to Earth.

​The specific causes of WW3 in Trek lore reflect this multifactorial nightmare:

Eco-collapse: The environment degrades to the point where resource scarcity triggers mass migration and border wars. We’re already close to the 216 million climate refugees predicted by 2050

Colonel Green and “Humanity First”: The rise of ecofascism, when the elites who caused climate catastrophe start using it as another excuse to persecute the victims, spearheaded by a charismatic military man who justifies mass culling under the banner of preserving a pure, surviving humanity. Is Humanity First better or worse than America first? Maybe they’re both just the same old xenophobia in a new package.

The Eugenics Wars: The disastrous byproduct of unregulated biotechnology and genetic engineering, leading to augmented transhumans (like Khan Noonien Singh) who view baseline humanity as a biological relic meant to be subjugated. Today’s “transhumanists” freezing their heads in cryo and sucking stem cells out of teenagers are just a foretaste of what is to come.

​What Is Systems Thinking?

​To understand how these fictional events map so terrifyingly well onto our current reality, we must engage in “Systems Thinking.”

​In pre-modern times, human beings lacked the ontological framework to understand complex, interconnected crises. 

In layman’s terms : we didn’t know why the fuck things went wrong.

When crops failed, plagues spread, and empires fell, we blamed systemic problems on “powers and principalities.” 

We blamed demons, angry gods, witches, or that goat with the funny eyes. We lacked the cognitive tools to understand that the problem was not acting upon the system from the outside; the problem was inherent in the system.

​In the modern scientific age, we utilize systems thinking. 

We define a system as any interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something.

A nation, a dog, an economy, the M25 ring road, are all systems.

If you look at a traffic jam on the M25, the pre-modern thinker blames the evil spirit of the highway. The systems thinker maps the feedback loops of urban planning, population density, and individual commuter incentives. 

And don’t start assuming just being alive in 2026 makes you a systems thinker. How many of us stuck in a traffic still bkame Jesus Fucking Christ?

How many of us look at the systemic issues of climate change and blame Jeffrey in Norwich for not separating his tins from his plastics? The ancient practice of “scapegoating” that was exploited by a British Petroleum ad campaign in 2004 to make us blame each other and not…

…the system

​Star Trek as Systems Fiction

​And those of us who can manage some systems thinking today can do so in part because of Star Trek.

Star Trek is one of the few enduring pieces of popular media that operates as “systems fiction.” Every episode the Enterprise arrives at a new planet and analyses it AS A SYSTEM.

​When the Enterprise visits a planet where half the population exploits the other half, Picard doesn’t just punch the alien leader.

Ok, yes, Kirk did sometimes often just punch the alien leader.

But our Philosopher King analyzes their resource allocation, their historical dialectic, and the systemic flaws in their socio-economic paradigm. He operates as an intergalactic systems auditor.

Star Trek is not a unique sample of systems fiction. The greatest science fiction – Frank Herbert’s Dune, everything by Ursula K Le Guin, the works of Octavia Butler, or Thomas Pynchon, or Don Delillo – are also systems fiction.

Systems FICTION matters because stories are one of humankind’s most powerful…systems. We think and live in stories. Frank Herbert’s Dune takes all the systems of an entire planet and funnels them down into one anti-heroic story.

But systems thinking is rare, oh so rare, in mass media. Star Trek was virtually a lone bastion of systemic analysis in 20th century mass culture. Given to us by one of the great science fiction imaginations.

Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Trek, was a systems thinker. Roddenberry didn’t write Star Trek, he conceived it. He built the playground others would play in to create season after season of mind blowing systems fiction.

And, crucially, Roddenberry understood that complex adaptive systems—like global civilization—do not change their fundamental operating rules voluntarily. They change only because the parts of the system, us, humanity, grow the fuck up.

Or when the failure to grow the fuck up subjects the system to a catastrophic shock that shatters the existing paradigm.

​Roddenberry believed that to get to Star Trek, humanity had to go through WW3. The old system had to be violently dismantled because it was fundamentally incapable of reforming itself from within.

​Was he correct?

Part Two – ​The Systems of World War 3: A Typology of Doom

Imagine the classic scifi thought experiment – an alien arrives on Earth and judges our primitive society.

But this is no alien. This is Captain Jean Luc Picard, in orbit in the Enterprise-D, looking down upon us…severely.

Not because our problems are serious. Picard is a compassionate man and if we were doomed by, say, the impending collapse of the planetary crust, he would move heaven and earth to save…Earth.

No. Picard looks down on early 21st century humanity because our problems are dumb and we fail to solve them only because we are too greedy.

Why are we so obsessed with the green paper tokens we use for resource allocation? Why don’t we just fairly share our resources, from each according to our capacity, to each according to their need?

Why are the factories owned by a tiny elite who mostly live in Dubai, Monaco or Manhattan? Why are the means of production not owned by the workers?

Why would 21st century humanity rather fight a third global war than chill out and focus on cool things like exploring the final frontier?

And most of all Picard would scowl down upon the one system driving all others to their doom.

Let us now examine the specific systemic architectures currently operating in our 2026 reality that are leading us, with mathematical inevitability, toward the precipice. 

Here I have compiled the many systems leading to WW3 into a literal listicle of doom.

​Existential Tech

We are the first generations in the history of the Earth to possess the technological capacity to enact our own extinction. A stone axe can cause a nasty flesh wound, a nuke can vaporise a civilization. This is a profound systemic shift. The proliferation of nuclear arsenals under the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) created a system where peace is maintained only by a perpetual hostage situation. But it is no longer just nukes. The democratization of biotechnology means that CRISPR gene-editing kits can be purchased by any mildly alienated terrorist group. And the incentives of the free market system mean that no state can choose to *not* build such dangerous toys or risk losing out. Existential tech proliferates exponentially while wisdom declines even faster.

​Disinfo: The Semiotic Collapse

A civilization cannot survive if it cannot agree on basic epistemological reality. No human population in which a significant percentage can be convinced the Earth is flat or that Lex Fridman is an intellectual can expect to survive long. We have built a global communications architecture optimized not for truth, but for clicks, resulting in a semiotic collapse, where propaganda, deepfakes, and algorithmic hallucinations have severed the signifier from the signified. A society trapped in a Baudrillardian hyperreality – unable to distinguish between a genuine geopolitical threat and an AI-generated psy-op designed to manipulate a stock price or a prediction market. Because in our global digital media the truth belongs to whoever pays.

​Unipolar Hegemony

Following the Cold War, the global system reorganized around a single unipolar hegemon. Which worked kind of until the hegemon had a mid-life crisis and decided it couldn’t be f*cked anymore. The American empire is like late career Elvis. Everything that seemed “cool” until quite recently – the hamburgers, the aircraft carriers, the global financial system   – seems suddenly obsolete, kitsch and a tad embarrassing. But the desperate flailing of a declining empire attempting to enforce a unipolar reality on an increasingly multipolar world is a system doomed to generate … doom.

​Multipolarity Game Theory Collapse

Conversely, the transition to multipolarity offers no salvation. In a multipolar system with multiple nuclear-armed actors (state and non-state), traditional Cold War game theory collapses. John Nash’s equilibrium only works when the variables are limited and actors are … rational.

In a world with seven or eight or two dozen nuclear powers, all acting on differing ideological, religious, and economic imperatives, the game theory matrix becomes incomprehensibly complex. The system shifts from a predictable standoff to a chaotic n-body problem, where a localized skirmish cascades unpredictably into a zero-sum, planet-wide thermonuclear exchange.

​Eco-collapse and Resource Wars

The global economic system is predicated on the delusion of infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. This is a terminal systemic error. As we cross planetary boundaries—ocean acidification, topsoil depletion, atmospheric carbon saturation—the carrying capacity of the Earth plummets. Eco-collapse forces the system into a brutal contraction. When the equatorial regions become uninhabitable, we will see climate migration on the scale of billions. Borders will harden, supply chains will snap, and nations will invariably go to war over access to arable land, fresh water, and rare earth minerals. It is the ultimate tragedy of the commons, enforced by artillery.

​Religious Fundamentalism

Systems of extreme religious fundamentalism operate on an eschatological death drive. While secular states might go to war for resources or security, fundamentalist systems operate on a theological teleology that actually desires the end of the world. When you inject nuclear or biological capabilities into a systemic worldview that views the apocalypse not as a failure state, but as a divine prophecy and a prerequisite for salvation, deterrence theory is rendered utterly moot. You cannot deter an actor who believes that mutually assured destruction is merely the quickest transit route back to Jesus.

The Military-Industrial Complex 

The system that Eisenhower warned against is not a defensive apparatus, it is an autonomous, self-replicating economic algorithm that converts human blood and public tax dollars into shareholder dividends. By intentionally fracturing its manufacturing supply chains across multiple legislative districts, it has perfectly captured the political process. The system cannot sustain infinite financial growth without continuous kinetic consumption, meaning geopolitical friction must be structurally manufactured to justify the endless production of precision-guided ordnance. World Peace is now literally too expensive. When your fundamental economic paradigm requires the perpetual destruction of surplus capital and human lives just to meet quarterly profit targets, the equation simplifies itself with terrifying mathematical certainty: capitalism is war.

​Fascism: The Weakness of the Masses

Drawing on Wilhelm Reich and Deleuze and Guattari, fascism is not merely a political structure; it is a psychological system. It is a symptom of the psychic inadequacy and the weakness of the masses, who, under conditions of extreme economic and social stress, actively desire their own repression. The fascist system relies on the perpetual construction of an “Other” to blame for systemic failures. Because this system is inherently irrational and requires constant escalation to maintain its internal cohesion, its only logical endpoint is an aestheticized politics of total annihilation. It is a suicide pact masquerading as national rebirth.

​The Great Filter

The Fermi Paradox asks: if the universe is so vast, where is everyone? Robin Hanson’s “Great Filter” theory provides the systemic answer. The evolutionary leap from a single-planet species to a multi-planetary, star-faring civilization contains a systemic bottleneck—a filter—that almost no species survives. As we survey the cascading crises of 2026, it is overwhelmingly apparent that we are currently slamming face-first into this filter. The combination of god-like technology and primate-level emotional regulation suggests that intelligence itself might be a lethal evolutionary dead-end, a system inherently prone to self-termination.

​Algorithmic Escalation Ladder

We have integrated autonomous, machine-learning algorithms into our global financial and military infrastructure. These systems operate at speeds incomprehensible to human cognition. We have seen financial “flash crashes” where algorithms triggered massive economic destruction in seconds. If we apply this same systemic architecture to military early-warning and response protocols, we risk an Algorithmic Escalation Ladder. An AI, processing a false data point, initiates a counter-measure, triggering an opposing AI’s response loop. World War 3 could begin and end in the space of three milliseconds, entirely bypassing human agency.

​Sandpile Effect: Self-Organized Criticality

Finally, we must look to physics, specifically Per Bak’s concept of self-organized criticality, often referred to as the Sandpile Effect. If you drop sand grain by grain, it builds a pile until it reaches a critical state. Once at this state, dropping one more grain of sand will trigger an avalanche. You cannot predict which grain will cause it, or how large the avalanche will be, only that the system is structurally poised for collapse. The global geopolitical and economic system in 2026 is a critical sandpile. The inciting incident for WW3 will not be a grand, rational policy decision. It will be an errant drone strike, a localized bank run, a misinterpreted tweet – a single, microscopic grain of sand that triggers the total, systemic avalanche.

​CONCLUSION : The system driving all systems

​So, Boomers, Zoomers, Alphas, Millenials, and Xers, we arrive at the conclusion of our systems analysis.

​The Bad News is mathematically bleak. EVERY system currently operating on this planet is leading directly toward World War 3. 

And behind those multifarious systems is a singular system.

Capitalism.

Capitalism demands infinite growth on a finite planet and relentless resource extraction. Our global hegemon is capitalist. Our multipolar powers are trapped in capitalist competition. Capitalism cannot stop building existential tech and capitalism is the military industrial complex.

Capitalism, as we have heard, is war.

The feedback loops of endless extraction, engineered scarcity, military-industrial profit motives, and hyper-individualistic consumption are all converging on the exact same coordinate: complete and utter global collapse.

And the burning nuclear fires of World War 3.

Star Trek gives us hope

​The post-WW3 future of Roddenberry’s vision is different from our current reality in one massive, inescapable way: 

It is inherently and structurally post-capitalist. 

Call it Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Call it Utopia. Call it space socialism.

You cannot have a society where energy is virtually infinite, matter can be synthesized from thin air, and human labor is entirely voluntary, and still enforce a system based on artificial scarcity, wage labor, and quarterly profit margins. 

The existence of the replicator fundamentally destroys the capitalist mode of production.

And as our society moves, however staggeringly, towards post-scarcity. As digitisation and the internet make many goods zero marginal cost, and as the looming spectre of AI and robotics automates work.

The potential of a post-scarcity society is there for us to grasp, if we can find a path to post-capitalism.

But capitalism will not let go without a fight

Roddenberry’s thesis was that the capitalist hegemony would, rather than voluntarily relinquish its systemic dominance, initiate a global thermonuclear war.

Roddenberry’s terrible prophecy is not just good television; it is rigorous systemic analysis. The prevailing socio-economic order cannot, and will not, voluntarily relinquish its power. It will drive the ship into the sun before it allows the crew to form a union.

​The Good News, hypothetically speaking, is remarkably simple. All we need to do to avoid the nuclear fire and skip straight to the Federation is transcend capitalism. We simply need to abandon the artificial limitations of our economic paradigms, recognize our shared planetary reality, distribute resources equitably, and finally 

grow the fuck up.

​Which brings us, tragically, to the final piece of Bad News.

​All we need to do is grow up.

Yep. We’re cooked.

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