“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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…because of the crushing weight of living in capitalist realism.

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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.

Get your NoClip mattress from BackroomBeds by walking through the wall of any good basement near you.

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.

Listen here

There is a single narrative technique that connects almost every multi-billion dollar science fiction franchise ever made. It is the invisible engine powering the most successful stories of the last century. And yet, if you ask ten working Hollywood screenwriters what it is, nine of them will give you a blank stare—and the tenth will probably try to sell you a $200 course on “worldbuilding.”

​Think about the heaviest hitters in science fiction today.

​Take Fallout. The reason that universe is so compelling isn’t just because Bethesda really loves 1950s aesthetics and dank radiation memes. It’s built on one specific, structural cheat code. Look at Jurassic Park. The terror doesn’t actually come from the CGI T-Rex; it comes from one, very isolated scientific premise. Or look at the box office juggernaut Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir didn’t write a sprawling space opera, he built a meticulous puzzle box around exactly one new rule of biology.

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​This isn’t just a modern blockbuster trend, either. This is the foundational DNA of science fiction.

​It is the exact same tool Mary Shelley used to accidentally invent science fiction with Frankenstein back in 1818 just because she was bored on vacation. It’s the same mechanism H.G. Wells used to absolutely terrify Victorian readers by showing them what it was like to be invaded by Victorian colonialists in The War of the Worlds. It is so deeply fundamental to the mechanics of creating a meaningful scifi world that every great from Arthur C Clarke to Ursula K Le Guin uses it without even giving it a name.

Even fantasy writers, when they can stop calculating the exchange values of the seven major currencies in their world, actually do this. Even if J.R.R. Tolkien would probably rise from the grave to write a strongly worded letter in Elvish denying it. It’s RIGHT there in Lord of the Rings. Like a One Ring of power.

Yes I did write that whole paragraph to make that pun. But it’s also true.

​Every great sci-fi writer is using this tool, whether they know the academic term for it or not. It is the ultimate storytelling power-up. And once you see it, you will never look at a “worldbuilding bible” the same way again.

Right now I can divide you all into two groups. Group A are the ambitious power hungry young writers who want to be the next Brandon Sanderson by using this one easy trick.

Group B are the creative purists who are recoiling in horror “NO! I will not sully my unique artistic vision with this HACK!”

But all I’m doing is putting a new, powerful, sonic screwdriver in your scifi toolkit. What you do with it is all about you. And if you have no interest in telling scifi stories, this is also just a great way to understand them.

Aaaand Group C…who already clicked ahead in the timeline to find out what the fuck I am talking about while muttering about getting to the point.

So let’s get to the point.

But before we get to the point of giving this thing its proper, intimidatingly academic name, let’s look at what screenwriters usually call it when they’re trying to sound smart in a pitch meeting.

​A lot of writers refer to it as the “One Big Lie.” This is the single, massive falsehood you demand your audience swallow right on page one, just so the rest of the story can function. It’s the author holding the reader hostage and saying, “Look, just accept that we can fold spacetime using spice addicted worms, okay? How do the warp drives *work*? Dilithium Crystamathingy. Do not look at the math, we have a socio-political metaphor disguised as a planet to get to.”

​Futurists and tech-adjacent folks like to call it the “Shock.” This is the specific piece of fictional technology that drops into a society and immediately shatters the status quo. Just take any William Gibson novel, extract the unique tech, that’s the Shock.

Meanwhile, the alt-history buffs call it the “Point of Divergence”—the exact moment on the timeline where the fictional world violently swerves away from our actual, exponentially more depressing reality.

​All of these are…fine? They vaguely point at the right idea. But the sharpest, most precise term for this tool—the one that will actually fix your broken script and stop you from wasting another three weeks designing the fictional tax code of a moon colony no one cares about—is The Novum.

​Latin for “the new thing.” It’s a term coined by literary scholars who desperately needed to sound rigorous while analyzing tentacle faced aliens wielding space lasers in the 1970s.

That literary scholar being Darko Suvin. The OG of the academic field of science fiction studies. Think of Professor Suvin as your Severus Snape, here to teach you Defence Against The Dark Arts…and we all know what that really means.

But we’ll come back to Cognitive Estrangement.

​Because in practical storytelling terms, the Novum is the scientifically plausible innovation, discovery, or historical shift that forces a society to completely rewire itself. It isn’t just a cool gadget your hero uses to shoot the bad guy. It is the inciting incident not just for your plot, but for your entire fucking universe.

INTERVAL: The Crucial Distinction (Or: Why a Novum is NOT a F***ing MacGuffin)

​Before we get to the master list, we need to clear up a massive misconception. Because right now, there is a very specific type of aging film student watching this who is confidently thinking, “Oh, I get it. The Novum. It’s just a MacGuffin.”

​No. Stop. Put the glowing briefcase down.

​Alfred Hitchcock popularized the concept of the MacGuffin. It is an object, a device, or a piece of information that all the characters desperately want. It exists solely to give everyone a reason to be in the same room. The Death Star plans in Star Wars. The Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction.

​But here is the defining trait of a MacGuffin: It is entirely, one hundred percent arbitrary.

​You can completely swap out the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction for a bag of blood diamonds, the nuclear launch codes, or a mint-condition holographic Charizard card, and the plot remains exactly the same. Vincent and Jules still show up at the apartment, they still shoot Brett, and they still go get breakfast. The MacGuffin only drives the plot.

​The Novum is entirely different. The Novum drives the world.

​You cannot swap it out. It is structurally load-bearing. If you swap the viable dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park for a bag of stolen diamonds, the entire universe collapses. There is no theme park. There is no catastrophic failure of a biological ecosystem. There is just an eccentric old billionaire staring at a shiny rock in a helicopter.

​If you swap the simulated reality of The Matrix for a stolen microchip, you don’t have a cyberpunk philosophical awakening; you just have a very confusing Keanu Reeves action movie where people wear too much leather indoors.

​A MacGuffin is just a lazy excuse for your characters to run around and shoot at each other. A Novum is the foundational rule of physics that dictates why they are running, how they are shooting, and the structural reality of the very ground they are running on.

TWO: The Kinda Complete List of Sci-Fi Novums

​The Blockbuster Novum

​Let’s start with the crowd-pleasers. This is the Novum distilled into pure, highly marketable adrenaline.

​The Blockbuster Novum doesn’t require the audience to hold a degree in sociology, and more importantly, it doesn’t require a studio executive to read past page one of the treatment. It is the ultimate elevator pitch. Instead of rewriting all of global human society, the Blockbuster Novum creates a highly isolated, extremely volatile sandbox where things can spectacularly blow up.

​Look at Jurassic Park. The Novum is perfectly constrained: Viable dinosaur DNA can be extracted from fossilized amber. That’s it. It doesn’t cure cancer. It doesn’t solve world hunger or alter global geopolitics. It just acts as the singular scientific catalyst for a standard, hubristic tech billionaire to build a theme park that immediately eats its own lawyers.

​Or consider Inception. The Novum is the PASIV device—a machine that allows for shared dreaming. Christopher Nolan doesn’t waste time explaining how this technology affects the global economy or the healthcare system. He just uses it to upgrade the standard corporate espionage thriller into a heist movie set entirely inside the human subconscious.

​When done right, this type of Novum is an instant engine for action. It’s the single “What If” that launches a billion-dollar franchise.

​Cue the rapid-fire action montage:

• ​The Terminator: A defense network achieves localized self-awareness and invents time travel strictly to clean up its own administrative errors.
• ​Minority Report: Three mutated humans can accurately predict murders before they happen, turning the justice system into an inescapable, pre-emptive bureaucracy.
• ​District 9: Aliens aren’t invaders or philosophers; they’re just working-class refugees whose ship broke down over Johannesburg, instantly creating a localized apartheid state.
• ​Avatar: A planetary ecology functions as a biological internet, which unfortunately sits right on top of the most valuable rock in the universe.
• ​Edge of Tomorrow: Exposure to alien blood physically resets the temporal day upon death, turning a galactic war into a lethal video game speedrun.
• ​Back to the Future: The Flux Capacitor makes time travel entirely possible, provided you have access to weapons-grade plutonium and a DeLorean that can somehow hit 88 miles per hour in a mall parking lot.

​These are the cash cows. They take one impossible thing, make it the law of physics for exactly two hours, and let the chaos unfold.

The Literary Novum

​Now we shift gears from the Hollywood executives to the authors who want to win Hugo awards and make the reader feel slightly inadequate about their intellect.

​The Literary Novum isn’t built to optimise action figure sales. You aren’t going to get a lot of space battles or laser swords here. Instead, these are pure sociological thought experiments. The author takes one fundamental, unshakeable rule of human existence or the physical universe, alters it, and then meticulously—almost clinically—tracks the psychological and cultural fallout.

​Take Ursula K. Le Guin’s masterpiece, The Left Hand of Darkness. The Novum is a biologically ambisexual human race. The inhabitants of Gethen only manifest a sex drive or specific gender characteristics for a few days a month. By removing fixed sexual dimorphism from the equation, Le Guin builds a complex society completely free of the patriarchal and matriarchal power dynamics that define our entire history. It’s a Novum so powerful it actually turns our own real-world gender constructs into the “alien” concept.

Don’t worry if you didn’t understand any of that. That is kind of the point of Literary Novums?…Novae?

​Or look at Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. The Novum is the titular three body problem: a neighboring star system with three suns that create an unsolvable, wildly chaotic orbital cycle. It forces the native alien civilization into a perpetual cycle of apocalyptic trauma. This single astrophysical fact perfectly and logically explains exactly why they would be so ruthlessly, coldly focused on stealing our boring, stable planet.

And it’s also a clear metaphor for the Capitalist powers that colonised China, when you think about it.

​This type of Novum is heavy, thoughtful, and usually leaves you staring at a wall for twenty minutes after finishing the book.

​Cue the montage of literary devastation:

• ​Dune: A narcotic dust called the Spice Melange allows for prescience and faster-than-light travel, instantly turning a miserable, giant-worm-infested sandbox into the ultimate economic choke point of a galactic feudal monopoly.
• ​The Handmaid’s Tale: A catastrophic global plummet in human fertility is immediately weaponized to build a theocratic nightmare.
• ​Fahrenheit 451: We figured out how to make all houses completely fireproof, so society logically repurposed the fire department to exclusively burn contraband literature.

That’s a joke. Do NOT leave that pedantic comment! Just checking you’re paying attention and haven’t been virtually lobotomized by hyper saturated media that destroys your capacity for critical thinking.

• ​Neuromancer: The invention of the cybernetic deck, which allows hyper-caffeinated hackers to jack directly into a visual, navigable consensus hallucination called cyberspace. Or…is cyberspace the novum? Hmmm.
• ​Children of Time: Spiders. Something about space spiders.
• ​Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Blade Runner: The invention of “replicants” who are more human than human, testing our capacity for empathy.

The Ideological Novum

​Now we move from sociology to pure politics. This is where the Novum stops being a fun thought experiment and becomes a weaponized worldview.

​The Ideological Novum bends the physical rules of reality into Attack Mode. The author is essentially rigging the game. By inventing a specific physical or biological law, they create a universe where their personal political philosophy isn’t just an opinion – it’s a mandatory survival tactic.

Look at China Miéville’s The City & the City. The Novum here is geographic and psychological: Two hostile cities occupy the exact same physical space, and the citizens are legally and mentally conditioned to “unsee” the other. If you acknowledge a building or a person from the other city, you are disappeared by a shadowy secret police. Miéville takes the very real, very mundane concept of urban inequality and class segregation and turns it into a physical, unbreakable law of physics. 

Or consider Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, a novum that rewrites the social contract: Political authority and the right to vote can only be earned through grueling, highly lethal Federal Service. Heinlein rigs the universe to prove his point. In the world of the book, this isn’t fascism; it is the only logical way to build a stable, hyper-competent society that doesn’t collapse under its own weight. To be clear Starship Troopers doesn’t just contain this novum, the entire book exists to present the case for Heinlein’s idea.

And power armour.

Mieville and Heinlein are political ideologues who know exactly what they are doing.

​But then, you get the fascinating category of Accidental Ideologue. This is when an author creates a Novum that completely exposes their own unexamined, unconscious biases, usually while trying to write something else entirely.

​Consider Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One.

Cline clearly thinks he is writing a punk-rock, anti-capitalist rebellion against a tyrannical mega-corporation. But look at his Novum: The OASIS, a fully immersive global VR utopia whose ownership is locked behind a Willy Wonka-style scavenger hunt of 1980s pop culture trivia. Cline’s Novum accidentally reveals a completely consumerist, neoliberal ideology. In this universe, the highest possible form of human achievement isn’t art, science, or empathy – it is furiously consuming and memorizing late-20th-century media. The “heroic” solution to this dystopia isn’t dismantling the horrifying techno-feudal monopoly; it’s just making sure the right kind of hyper-obsessive nerd is sitting on the corporate throne at the end. Klein accidentally wrote a glowing defense of late-stage techno-oligarchy, simply because his unexamined ideology is that pop-culture trivia makes you morally superior.

​When you start looking for the Ideological Novum, it is everywhere. Cue the politically charged montage:

• ​Foundation (Isaac Asimov): The Novum is Psychohistory—a mathematical formula that accurately predicts the future of large populations. It perfectly exposes Asimov’s unconscious, mid-century technocratic elitism: the belief that the masses are basically mathematical cattle, and true governance should be handed to a secretive elite of STEM majors doing advanced calculus.
• ​The Mote in God’s Eye (Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle): An alien species biologically trapped in a cycle of unstoppable overpopulation, making diplomacy mathematically impossible and neatly justifying a pre-emptive, imperial defense stance.
• ​Brave New World (Aldous Huxley): The Bokanovsky Process allows for the biological mass-production of cloned, predestined embryos, physically manifesting the rigid British class system into inescapable genetics.
• ​Roadside Picnic (The Strugatsky Brothers): Aliens visit Earth, but they don’t conquer us or share wisdom. They just stop on the side of the cosmic highway, throw their incomprehensible, deadly trash out the window, and drive off. ​
• Warhammer 40,000: Faster-than-light travel literally requires flying your ships through a dimension of pure, sentient Hell (The Warp), perfectly justifying the paranoid, hyper-fascistic, violently xenophobic Imperium of Man.

The Negative Novum

​​Finally, we arrive at my personal favorite. The Negative Novum.

​This is the ultimate exercise in subtraction. The author doesn’t invent a magical new technology, a faster-than-light drive, or a biological mutation. Instead, they just walk up to the historical timeline, firmly grasp one absolutely crucial Jenga block, pull it out, and watch human civilization warp itself around the newly created void.

​The most brilliant modern execution of this is the Fallout franchise.

​If you ask a casual fan what makes Fallout special, they’ll probably point to the Power Armor, the Vaults, or the relentless 1950s doo-wop music playing over a nuclear wasteland. But all of that is just window dressing. The actual engine of the universe—the Negative Novum—is incredibly simple: The transistor and the microchip are never invented. Or, at least, they are invented centuries too late to matter.

​Look at the ripple effects of that one missing piece of silicon. Because miniaturization never happens, the Information Age is completely aborted. Computers remain massive, clunky, room-sized monoliths running on vacuum tubes and dangerous atomic fusion. Because technology is bulky and terrifying, the cultural zeitgeist gets permanently trapped in 1950s atomic-age optimism and Red Scare paranoia. There is no internet to globalize the culture.

​And finally, the conflict: Without the micro-efficiency of the transistor, the world rapidly and violently burns through its remaining fossil fuels and uranium. This technological dead-end leads directly to the Resource Wars, and eventually, the inevitable nuclear fire of 2077.

​The apocalypse, the Vault-Tec experiments, the super mutants – every single iconic piece of that multi-billion dollar IP stems entirely from the premise of not inventing a tiny computer chip.

​When you remove something fundamental, the world has to desperately compensate.

​Cue the montage of things we desperately miss:

• ​Children of Men: The complete, unexplained cessation of human fertility. There are no zombies or aliens; the apocalypse is just the quiet, devastating absence of a next generation.
• ​The Road: The total death of the biosphere and a permanently blocked sun. No intricate lore, just the complete absence of ecology and hope, leaving only gray ash and cannibalism.
• ​The Difference Engine: The microchip isn’t needed because Charles Babbage successfully built his steam-powered mechanical computer in the 1800s. The absence of the electrical age gives us Victorian cyber-punks.
• ​A Canticle for Leibowitz: The “Flame Deluge” purposefully wipes out all modern scientific knowledge. Humanity violently removes its own understanding of the universe, causing an artificial return to the Dark Ages where electrical blueprints are venerated as illuminated holy texts.
• ​Never Let Me Go: The quiet, polite removal of basic human rights—and the philosophical concept of a “soul”—from a specific underclass of artificially created organ-donor clones.
• ​Station Eleven: The Georgia Flu instantly wipes out the global power grid and most of humanity. It’s the sudden, overnight absence of global connectivity, reducing modern civilization to a traveling Shakespeare troupe in the ruins of the Midwest.

The Exceptions of Why Star Wars is Fake Sci-Fi

​​If you really want to understand how a structural rule works, you have to look at the massive, billion-dollar properties that completely ignore it. And if you want to guarantee a thousand angry comments on your video—which the YouTube algorithm absolutely loves—you tell your audience the truth:

​Star Wars is not science fiction.

​Under the strict definition of the Novum, George Lucas didn’t write a sci-fi masterpiece; he wrote a high-fantasy fairy tale that just happens to have a very shiny, metallic coat of paint.

​Think about it. The Force is not a Novum. It is not a scientifically plausible point of divergence or a technological innovation that logically rewires the economics and politics of the galaxy. It is literally just magic. It is an ancient, mystical energy field that cares deeply about bloodlines, prophecies, and farm boys with grand destinies.

​A lightsaber isn’t a technological disruption; it’s just Excalibur with a D-cell battery strapped to the hilt. The Death Star isn’t a sociological thought experiment; it’s a dragon sitting in a dark tower waiting for the white knight to find its perfectly engineered, two-meter-wide weak spot.

​This is why Star Wars has more in common with Game of Thrones or Harry Potter than it does with Jurassic Park or The Left Hand of Darkness. They don’t operate on “Cognitive Estrangement.” They don’t want to make you uncomfortable about your present reality. They operate on Myth. They run on the Hero’s Journey, universal archetypes, and emotional resonance.

​And to be clear: That doesn’t make them bad. Space Fantasy is a glorious, highly lucrative genre.

​But if you are a writer sitting at your keyboard trying to build the next Matrix or the next Fallout, and you are using Star Wars as your structural blueprint, you are going to fail. You will end up with a messy, bloated universe full of lasers and aliens that doesn’t actually say anything.

​Because “fake” sci-fi just throws futuristic aesthetics at a standard fantasy plot. But real sci-fi fundamentally alters reality using the Novum

Ahk-tually, LotR is science fiction (it can be argued)

​Before the international Tolkien Society puts a bounty on my head and sends a strike team of Oxford philologists to my house, let’s entertain a highly structural, slightly dangerous thought experiment.

​If we strictly define science fiction by the presence of a Novum—a technologically or scientifically plausible disruption that forces a society to react—you can make a surprisingly aggressive argument that The Lord of the Rings is actually a science fiction story disguised in a trench coat of Elven mythology.

​To see it, you have to look at what Tolkien was actually reacting to. He wasn’t just daydreaming about fairies. He was a traumatized combat veteran writing a direct, visceral response to the mechanized slaughter of World War I and the aggressive, soot-choked industrialization of the English countryside.

​With that context, look at the One Ring.

​If you strip away the glowing Elvish script, the Ring isn’t a mystical, magical trinket. It is a piece of technology. Specifically, it is a machine of mass surveillance and absolute industrial control. Sauron isn’t just a dark wizard; he is a hyper-industrialist trying to establish a global, mechanized monopoly.

​The Ring functions exactly like a Novum. It is a concentrated technological leap (forged in the fiery R&D labs of Mount Doom) that fundamentally distorts the reality of Middle-earth. Whoever holds the Ring gains access to a network of absolute power, but the “technology” is so advanced and inherently corrupting that it overrides the operator’s free will, turning them into a slave of the machine itself.

​Look at Saruman. He doesn’t fall to “dark magic.” He falls to the allure of industry. He literally tears down the ancient forests to build foundries, replacing nature with “a mind of metal and wheels.” He is essentially a 19th-century robber baron who discovered the efficiency of strip-mining and genetically engineered super-soldiers (the Uruk-hai).

​Therefore, the entire plot of The Lord of the Rings isn’t a traditional heroic fantasy quest to secure a magical boon. It is a desperate, apocalyptic black-ops mission to decommission a weapon of mass destruction. The Fellowship is trying to un-invent the nuclear bomb because they realize their society is not morally equipped to wield that level of technological power.

​So, yes, it has wizards and goblins. But structurally? It operates on the exact same engine of “cognitive estrangement” as the best sci-fi. It takes the real-world horrors of the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization of warfare, wraps them up in a Novum called the One Ring, and forces the audience to look at their own factories and war machines with a deep, creeping sense of dread.

Wait, cognitive what-now? 

Oh right I didn’t tell you yet. Woops!

THREE: The Ultimate Novum (And How to Wield It)

​The Final Boss of Sci-Fi Theory

​Now it is time to meet the Final Boss of sci-fi theory. We’ve talked about the blockbusters, we’ve validated the literary heavyweights, and we’ve thoroughly alienated Star Wars fandom. Now, we drop the actual academic payload.

​In the 1970s, a Yugoslavian-born scholar named Darko Suvin officially coined the term “Novum.” Suvin was essentially an academic who desperately needed a rigorous, scholarly way to explain to his university colleagues that reading about time machines and android sex bots was actually a profound intellectual pursuit.

​But Suvin didn’t just name the tool. He identified exactly what the tool was built to do. He argued that the ultimate goal of science fiction is to achieve a psychological impact called Cognitive Estrangement.

​The Mirror, Not the Crystal Ball

​”Cognitive Estrangement” sounds like a legal defense for a messy divorce, but it is actually the secret engine of scifi.

​Let’s break the biggest myth in science fiction right now: scifi is not supposed to predict the future. It isn’t a crystal ball, and honestly, whenever it tries to be, it is usually hilariously wrong.

​The goal of a great Novum isn’t to show you what the year 2300 looks like. The goal is to take your present reality, alter one massive variable, and force you to look at your own society with fresh, uncomfortable, alienated eyes.

​”Cognition” means the premise is rational and scientific—it’s not magic. “Estrangement” means it makes you feel like an alien in your own home. It takes the mundane absurdity of our real-world economics, our politics, or our social norms, and makes them look utterly bizarre by contrast.

​The Ultimate Novum: The Monolith

​If Cognitive Estrangement is the ultimate goal, what is the most perfect, undistilled example of a Novum ever put on screen?

​It isn’t a time machine. It isn’t a cloned dinosaur.

​It is a featureless black slab of geometry from 1968.

​Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey features the absolute Ultimate Novum: The Monolith. Look at this thing. It does absolutely nothing. It has no buttons, no user interface, no glowing exhaust ports for a farm boy to shoot a torpedo into. It is the pure, terrifying, mathematical embodiment of the “New Thing.”

​And look at the ripple effect. When it drops into the prehistoric dirt, it doesn’t hand the apes a laser gun. It just provides the exact amount of Cognitive Estrangement necessary for an ape to realize that a femur bone can be used to crush a skull. It is the simultaneous birth of technology and murder.

​Fast forward a few million years. Humanity finds another one buried on the moon. Again, it does nothing but emit a signal. But its mere existence forces humanity into a new leap of cognitive estrangement, triggering the terrifying leap into deep space and the creation of artificial intelligence. The Monolith is the Ultimate Novum because it demands nothing but evolution. It forces the characters—and the audience—to instantly discard their previous understanding of reality.

​The Power-Up

​Which brings us to the final power-up. If you are a writer sitting at your desk right now, listen closely.

Stop. Worldbuilding.

Start world changing.

​Most amateur writers are permanently stuck at Level One worldbuilding. They spend four hundred hours mapping out the tax codes of a galactic empire, but their characters are just 21st-century middle managers complaining about space-capitalism. Their Novum doesn’t actually touch the human condition. It causes zero estrangement.

​Stop trying to build a universe from the top down. Put the worldbuilding bible away.

​Find your Monolith.

​Find the one, singular, disruptive idea that violently shatters the status quo. Drop it into the dead center of your story, and logically map out exactly how human politics, religion, and relationships must mutate just to survive the shockwave.

​Because when you use the Novum correctly, you aren’t just writing about a fantasy world. You are changing the real world. You are taking our ordinary cognition and estranging it to show us our world as a strange new world. You are writing the modern mythos.

​So pick your one big lie. And imagine harder.

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We by Yevgeny Zamyatin is a novel written at the beginning of the future.

It’s hard to remember today, after Logan’s Run, The Handmaid’s Tale and Hunger Games made “dystopia” an entertainment genre, but when Yevgeny Zamyatin was writing in the early 1920s, it was only beginning to dawn on humanity just how bad the future might be.

Or how splendid.

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Zamyatin’s science fiction novel invented the future we now think of as dystopia. A lone individual awakens to the oppressive system they are trapped within and attempts a rebellion. Sometimes they achieve liberation, but mostly they…do not. The details change, the dystopian future remains the same.

For most of human history there was no future. There was a date at a point ahead in time. But that date would be much like this date. Time was cyclical. Kings came and went, but there was always a king. The apocalypse or armageddon might strike, but those brought the end, not the future.

The future needs progress. Progress needs technology.

And technology needs science.

With the explosion of science and technology during what we call the Industrial revolution progress began to accelerate to rates perceptible within a human lifetime. And then far faster.

The future came into focus.

Through science fiction.

Philosophers, intellectuals and scientists began to speculate on what the human future might look like. From Johannes Kepler’s Somnium to Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, science fiction made new myths for new times.

At the heart of these speculations was the belief that the future could be made better with science and technology.

Early science fiction like Edward Bellamy’s Looking Backward, Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland and A New Amazonia by Elizabeth Burgoyne Corbet imagined futures of high technology and human equality, made possible with science and technology.

Utopias were the standard for early science fiction. It may surprise us now but optimistic visions were once the scifi standard. Such stories caught the imagination of ordinary people and gave birth to “utopian socialism”.

The dreams of early utopian socialism were bound up with the experience of early industrial capitalism. The workers in the factories could see the abundance their machines created. If that abundance were just shared fairly, not given away to the capitalists, a better world would surely be possible?

These dreams were given a basis in logic and reason with the “historical materialism” of Karl Marx. In his critique of capitalism, Das Kapital, Marx claimed a scientific model of human progress, persuading millions that the future could be shaped by mankind as a better world, with the power of “scientific socialism”.

So, as Yevgeny Zamyatin wrote We in 1921/22, he was reflecting on the decades-long dream of both utopian and scientific socialism that had suddenly become a reality.

The chaos of World War One had sparked the revolution in Russia, and the communist Bolsheviks lead by Vladimir Lenin were, at least in name, intent on making the dream of socialist utopia a reality.

The future long dreamed of had finally begun.

And went instantly and horrifyingly wrong.

Yevgeny Zamyatin was a revolutionary against the Russian Tsars who was arrested, tortured and imprisoned multiple times. We was written by a committed revolutionary to the socialist cause, who came very quickly to see that the revolution was going to succeed in creating a scientific socialist utopia.

And that it would instantly become a dystopia.

We was rejected for publication then became the first book banned by the Soviet state in the early 1920s. It was published in America in 1924 and from then on Zamyatin was persecuted by the Glavlit censorship board, until his exile in 1931 and then death in 1937.

But even after its US publication, We did not find an enthusiastic readership. The primary audience of educated elites and intellectuals who might have read and promoted We were still too infatuated with visions of scientific socialism to entertain any critique of the socialist utopia.

It was not until the wake of World War 2, as the US and Europe faced a heavily militarised Soviet Union, that the Western world found it needed reasons to hate its former ally, and We was “discovered”.

It’s now well known that George Orwell’s 1984 was to some extent influenced by We. Orwell thought it “not a work of the first order” but “certainly an unusual one”.

Orwell’s assessment of We is both accurate and biased. Its true that We is a didactic, one sided argument against scientific socialism. Orwell in 1984 sought to critique the Societ Union while retaining his argument first articulated in Animal Farm, that the socialist dream was possible, but had been subverted by the “pigs” of the oligarchy.

It’s also unclear just how much of an influence We was on 1984. Orwell’s more direct influences were HG Well’s socialist utopias like Things To Come, which Orwell perceived as proto-fascistic, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, which Orwell believed must have been influenced by We.

But Zamyatin’s We was, inarguably, the book which defined the dystopia of totalitarian control as the primary vision of socialism in the Western imagination. The dreams of utopian socialism were displaced by the dystopia of totalitarian socialism.

It’s no exaggeration to say that We was the book which destroyed the socialist dream.

So the value of We to today’s reader is in the asking and answering of this question: Is the socialist dream of a better world fundamentally delusional and corrupt? Or has it only been corrupted by the pigs?

Zamyatin weaves three symbolic threads into his fiction which can help us to find answers.

The first is the One State. Those early utopian socialist scifi visions had tended to imagine a socialist future of decentralisation and anarchy.

But Marx’s scientific socialism believed the state, controlled by the “dictatorship of the proletariat”, was the only institution powerful enough to make the socialist dream a reality

Zamyatin was among the first to see that the state, acting in the name of the people, would simply replace traditional social hierarchy with crushing social conformity.

We’s central critique of socialism is right there in the title. If you’ve heard right wing reactionaries like Jordan Peterson rail against “collectivism” then We is where that all started. Solzhenitsyn did it better, but Zamyatin did it first.

The Green Wall in We is a transparent barrier that separates the people of the One State from nature.

We moderns in our air conditioned condos and hermetically sealed shopping malls can instantly feel the pang of this separation.

Utopian socialists of today, captured in the visions of Solarpunk, dream of an idealised return to nature. Industry is now the enemy of socialism.

But for the largely peasant peoples of pre-Industrial Russia the idea of a world where you didn’t have to fight nature for every scrap was a major appeal of socialism.

Zamyatin saw that scientific socialism would leverage our impossible desire to escape nature as a tool of control. To escape hunger we would accept industrial agriculture. To escape sickness we would accept the medical industrial complex. To tame nature, more and more control would be centralised into the One State.

Zamyatin couldn’t have known the strange echoes his starship Integral would decades later conjure for readers.

Construction of the Integral is led by We’s central character, the snappily named D-503. Combined with the Integral’s mission to “subjugate to the grateful yoke of reason” all other life in the universe, it’s hard not to imagine the ship as a vast…cube

Of course it’s possible that the writers of Star Trek :The Next Generation were directly inspired by Zamyatin when writing conceiving Borg and its mission to “assimilate all life” in the face of which “resistance is futile”.

But it’s equally likely that the writers of Star Trek, when they decided to parody socialism in that tv show, arrived independently at the same conclusion as Zamyatin. That the logical fate of a society based on scientific socialism would be absolute totalitarian submission of all life to the collective.

And to the machine.

Science fiction has warmed of one future again and again. From EM Forster’s The Machine Stops to Arnie as The Terminator. From the Death Star to The Matrix, science fiction warns us of the machine.

The machine dominating and controlling the human is the central image of 20th century science fiction.

For Zamyatin this machinic domination is an expression of the terrors of the collective, and the inevitable outcome of the attempt to build a socialist utopia with the power of science and technology.

But.

Here in the capitalist Western world of the 21st century, swaddled in the concrete and steel of our cities, consuming the products of fully automated dark factories, being behaviour shaped by algorithms while AI automates our jobs, as we watch androids dance bebop…

…we can hardly claim to be raging against the machine.

Which somewhat cracks apart Zamyatin’s critique of utopian socialism.

The pathologies Zamyatin identifies in socialism — the crushing power of the state, the separation from nature, the Borg-like conformity, and the transformation of the human into the machine — would all manifest in every other political system as the 20th century unfolded.

If Zamyatin’s We falls short of the greatest science fiction it is because its critique of scientific socialism blames our utopian dreams for the dystopian failings of science and technology.

A hundred years later it seems clearer and clearer that the failure of our utopias was not caused only by the hyper-collectivism of socialism and too much We, but also by the erosion and collapse of our societies caused by hyper-individualism, a sickness of far, far too much I.

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Terminator is an Arnold Schwarzenegger movie

Arnold’s physique is the star of the film

The progressive decay of the Body into the Machine is his co-star

With the special effects that animated the Terminator as best supporting actor

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Imagine if Ron Perlman had passed his audition for Terminator?

You can’t. The movie is unimaginable without its leading actor.

Terminator’s leading actress gets stuck doing what leading actresses do in psycho-thriller movies

Scream. Runaway. Scream some more. 

It’s true that Gale Ann Hurd and James Cameron made a movie about a waitress who saves the world

by calling it Terminator and casting Arnie

But its only by the end of Terminator we see who Sarah Connor is going to become.

And get the hint that Terminator 2 is going to be a Linda Hamilton movie

There are only two Terminator movies

Sure, you may think there are more movies and books and games in the “franchise”, but these were all sent back by future Hollywood to terminate 

the Terminator

when all the time paradoxes are resolved

there are only two Terminator movies.

Terminator 1 and 2 are a unified by paradox

A saviour who sends his best soldier back to become the father of the saviour

Who carries a photo of the mother, that won’t be taken until after he dies

at a desert gas station

as a storm comes in

And words of fate that cycle in time

Skynet sets humanities fate “in a moment”

John Connor’s message to his mother is “the future is not set”

But when the young John repeats this to his Terminator protector the idea has developed “there is no fate but what we make”

Then as she decides to kill one man to save mankind, Sarah carves No Fate into wood

And we the audience are confronted with the question that Terminator carves into space and time

Is the fate of humanity determined by the iron cage of time?

Or can we determine our own fate…with the power of our will?

#

I’m not saying there isn’t a lot to like about Terminator 2

These bikers

Guns & Roses

This kid

That’s right kid fuck the cops

The famous “morphing” effect 

developed for The Abyss

that announced the new era of CGI in cinema and…has not aged well in places…but still looks great in others

Death by milk carton

This mini-gun somehow killing zero cops

And this dude hyperventilating

Arnie is back. Only 7 years have passed since Terminator in 1984, but when Terminator 2 released in 1991 it felt like more

Partly because Arnie is a little older and the physique is a little less sublime

And we the audience are starting to notice that the impassive Germanic persona that made the T101 so terrifying is…basically…all the Austrian Oak has got

Edward Furlong as an androgynous young John Conner is excellent. Why the girl’s haircut? Mostly because its the 90s, but also because audiences have less empathy for young men?

But let’s be clear. Terminator 2 is a masterpiece of action sci-fi cinema. Maybe even the greatest action movie ever. Good job James Cameron.

But what really sets fire to the cinema screen as we watch Judgement Day incinerate Los Angeles

is Linda Hamilton’s performance

The “Strong Female Character” is such a Hollywood cliché that the trope is now widely mocked and derided

And is nothing new

The archetype of the young, athletic, BEAUTIFUL, female fighter is as old as story itself. Just take a look at Artemis the huntress, among the most popular Olympian gods

And you’ll find the huntress archetype repeating in every mythos over the millennia right up to Wonder Woman 1984 and and a bunch of other sexy young female warrior types

Because men have always liked watching hot babes with spears. Even the most misogynist male is totally fine with chicks in armored bikinis 

But what would a woman who had really trained with mercenaries, who is raising her boy to save the world, and who crushed a fucking T101, actually BE like?

Oh, yes, that’s it

She’d look like this

crazy

b*tch

#

John Connor’s mom is heavily foreshadowed as we follow the young messiah through working class Los Angeles

We the cinema audience for T2 remember Linda Hamilton as the nice young woman from T1. And we’ve watched her in Beauty & the Beast. But she’s enigmatic, a elusive star who rarely appears on screen.

It’s been trailed in the media – this is the 90s and entertainment news media is entirely owned by the same corporations that own the movie studios – that Hamilton has been paid an unprecedented amount for a female star, a substantial chunk of T2s historic $100M dollar budget.

And that Linda got fit for the role.

#

Sarah Connor mark ii is not a sex symbol. 

Hamilton manages to capture the kind of  vulnerable toughness we see in female MMA fighters. Women who can fight because they had to be tougher than their tough life.

We’re going to catch up with Sarah as the two Terminators play cat and mouse. This is a lot of screen time for an action movie to spend building character.

And we literally get a psych-eval of our female hero. Through the work of this creep doctor who thinks he is doing good but is really on a powertrip.

Because if Terminator 1 was about a waitress escaping that abusive ex.

Terminator 2 is about a single mom trying to get back to her kid.

James Cameron’s great movies, back before he got lost making Avatars, spend.a lot of time on working class characters. 

The lower decks literal underclass who drown in Titanic. The blue collar Colonial marines sent to their doom in Aliens. The oil rig crew in the Abyss.

Because while the corporate sociopaths at White Star Line, Weland Yutani and Cyberdine are making the torment nexus to boost profits for the shareholder class.

It’s ordinary working people who end up having to save humanity from itself.

Because its a working waitress who has the strength of will

to show us that the future is not set.

#

Action sequences today

Really suck

I’m going to go a step further than Like Stories Of Old’s excellent video essay on the modern action set piece.

Because I remember when John Woo’s Hard Boiled made it out of Hong Kong cinema into the West.

I watched Chow Yun Fat pull the trigger until his hands cramped in one balletic action sequence after another 

over and over again

And I remember how exciting this action hybrid of martial arts and gunplay was compared to the standard

John Wayne shooting some guy in the gut who just fell over with a GRRARK!

I went to the cinema FIVE TIMES to see this new art form reach its apogee in The Matrix

But all good things get done death. I’ll fess up, I’ve only seen two John Wick movies. I gave up during the crescendo of Wick 2 because

as soon as they had to tell us how strong willed John Wick is

I knew these films would never really get the one thing essential for any great action sequence

The one thing without which, however fine the choreography or bloody the gore, action can never pack a punch

Now, absolutely, along the way, martial gunplay has produced some spectacularly good action set pieces. The final bank robbery from Michael Mann’s Heat. Every fight in Leon. Heck, I’ll even credit the road fight from Winter Soldier.

But if I have to pick ONE greatest action sequence of all time

it’s Linda Hamilton escaping a super-max using only a paper clip, a syringe

and the thing today’s action extravaganzas just don’t get

the thing that drives Terminator 2 through one powerful action sequence after another

sheer fucking force of will

#

The greatest action sequences are demonstrations of human will power

most of us most of the time are mere mortals

but every now and again we see a mortal driven by the power of will

Diego Maradona may have claimed it was the hand of god that gave that dirty lying cheat the world cup, but even us Brits have to concede it was sheer will power that made him such a great footballer

or that powered Michael Jordan every time his feet left the ground

but it’s not just athletes

what keeps a paramedic pumping a chest until life comes back

how does a poor kid get through four years of college while working while the rich kids drop out

why does a mother work shitty jobs year after year for kids who will never be able to repay her

every day, in every walk of life, we see the power of the human will

this power is rare, and real, and it’s the thing that makes us human

and we humans love to see its story told

but many people want to us to believe this thing does not exist

that there can be no free will

in a universe determined

by time

Human will is not free

It’s very fucking expensive

As we follow Sarah, John and Arnold into the dessert we learn the price Sarah has paid for her strength of will

Free will is one of today’s most frequent pop- sci talking points. Biologists like Robert Sapolsky present empirical evidence against the possibility, while modern gurus like Sam Harris tell us free will is impossible in a deterministic reality.

Determinism argues that reality is a machine. From the quantum scale to the galactic and beyond, the future is determined by the now which is determined by the past. Inescapable chains of causality that form the iron cage of time.

But the question of free will is very far from settled. Free will isn’t a question for science, it’s a question for philosophers, and the philosophers do not agree.

And. Look. Intellectuals and elites have always liked the idea that reality, and their privileged place within it, are predetermined. By fate. By god. By evolution. By time. It’s very convenient. And they’ve never really had to fight against reality.

But ordinary people earn our will at great expense.

So as Sarah Connor rockets out of the desert to begin her mission, is she just a super-determined actor in fate she cannot change?

Or has Sarah Connor earned the will

to save us all?

Of course there is another iconic action movie, also by James Cameron, about a strong willed woman

Sigourney Weaver in Aliens is another iconic mother saving her child

and she’s pretty damn great

Aliens is a story about the human conflict with the alien, or the other

Terminator is…something else

Brad Fiedel’s theme expresses the central conflict of T2

that melody in the high register is Sarah Conner, mother and hope of humankind

but that thumping bass, repetitive, grinding

that’s the thing Sarah Connor is fighting against

the Machine sent back from the future

to terminate us all

#

The machine is the central image of science fiction.

The Matrix. Blade Runner. 2001. Neuromancer. Robocop. Even the Death Star.

It would be easier to list the great science fiction that is not about the torturous relationship between Man and Machine.

But while James Cameron denies it, and it required an out of court settlement to get the credit, the works of Harlan Ellison are a clear influence on Terminator.

Ellison’s short story I Have No Mouth And I Must Scream is the origin of Skynet, about a supercomputer built for “defence” that awakens and destroys humanity.

And Ellison’s script for the Outer Limits episode Soldier introduces the traveller from an apocalyptic future travelling back to our present

through time

But Terminator takes time and the machine to a truly original and new place.

Until Terminator the machine was the creation of men, a manifestation of our hubris and pride and the self destructive nature of our will

But the machine that returns through time to make itself is no longer man’s creation but its own. 

We aren’t creating the machine in our image

the machine is recreating us in its image.

Sarah has already made the decision to kill Miles Dyson

the first shot is already fired

before she sees the man’s child in the firing line

this is the basic definition of character in drama…how do we respond to events

Sarah responds by going

full auto

and then reloading

the music riff and the call back to Terminator 1 make it clear

Sarah Conor has become the Terminator, who absolutely will not stop

she has become the machine

this is the greatest performance in action cinema

as we see Sarah Connor find the will power

to resist

the machine

Terminator is a mythos that emerges from our fear of a world dominated by the machine. The machines of the industrial revolution, then the machines of the information age.

Terminator is the story of our fear that determinism is true, free will does not exist, that reality is an empty grinding mechanism and that we are just “biological machines”.

But all of this is determined by time. It’s the causal chain of one event after another that forges the iron cage of time.

And Terminator is a story built on the paradox of time.

The Grandfather paradox tells you only one thing about time. Not that you can kill Elon Musk’s grandfather to stop the racist Nazi ever existing. But that the model of time which gives rise to the paradox

is broken

The door of the iron cage of time is unlocked

and a waitress, with a shotgun, three billion souls to save, and crazy bitch will power

can kick it open

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