In this circumstance, there is not so much a vacuum as a cloud of uncertainty. Everything is up in the air. Expectations, assumptions and intentions are scrambled. Fearing lost advantage in the face of these unknowns, worst-case scenarios drive the build-out of capabilities. Acting in the breach is a wild guess, the possible outcomes of which cannot be assuredly weighed.

That is the situation we are in today as we witness the nascent revival of Great Power spheres of influence being tested out in Venezuela, Ukraine and Taiwan.

Among the more shocking turns of the Trump administration is the unabashed throwback to the Monroe Doctrine, enforced by gunboat diplomacy in Latin America, replete with the remarkable claim that the national patrimony of Venezuela’s oil resources is rightly the province of U.S. oil companies.

As Trump himself put it over the weekend after Maduro’s audacious capture, “We built Venezuela’s oil industry with American talent, drive and skill, and the socialist regime stole it from us …This constituted one of the largest thefts of American property in the history of our country.”

It remains to be seen how that rationale for intervention squares with U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio’s claim that, under the restored tutelage of U.S. companies, the oil industry will be “run for the benefit of the people.”

Whether the plan now is to “run the country,” as Trump put it, or Rubio’s scheme of coercing the remnants of the regime to bend to U.S. will, both run entirely counter to the MAGA base’s aversion to global meddling, regime change and “forever wars.” What appeals to that constituency is the special military operation against drug cartels, though the robust demand to get high on the home front, which so lucratively drives supply, is rarely mentioned.

To be sure, Maduro was a bad seed. No love was lost for the repressive caudillo in Caracas among most of the other countries in the region. But few, especially Mexico, will forswear the nationalist identity that legitimizes their rule by welcoming the return of imperial imposition from the North.

After the Japanese prime minister said in November that an attack on Taiwan would be a national security threat to her nation and an end-of-year $11 billion U.S. arms sale to fortify Taiwan as a defensible “porcupine,” China conducted the closest and most aggressive war games ever in the seas surrounding the island democracy. It was meant to demonstrate the locked-and-loaded capabilities for achieving its oft-pronounced intent of bringing Taiwan back into the national fold by force if necessary.

Despite urgent and ongoing peace talks over Ukraine, it is hard to imagine that Russian President Vladimir Putin will ever negotiate away his vision of a reunified “spiritual Rus.” His response to U.S. and European proposals so far has been to feign interest while doubling down with vicious military attacks on civilians and energy infrastructure in the dead of winter.

Absent European resolve and ready military capacity as U.S. commitment wanes, why would Putin do anything other than dig in and wait things out while doing as much damage as possible until he gets his way?

When The Dominoes Fall

The outcome of these struggles will determine the nature of the next world order as it reverts to Great Power spheres of influence.

As it stands now, the norm of inviolable national sovereignty sanctified by the post-World War II order hangs by a tenuous thread that is further frayed daily by the unilateral transgressions of the world’s major players. When one moves, as Russia already has with the invasion of Ukraine and the U.S. has now with its ousting of Maduro, the falling dominoes of the old order are set in motion elsewhere. Is Taiwan the next in line?

If each gets its own way with impunity, how will the others respond?

Russia and China will surely see America’s intervention in Venezuela as permission, and even justification, to do as they similarly wish in their own domains. While Mexico’s dependence on U.S. markets will constrain its margins of maneuver, other large powers in Latin America, such as Brazil, will inevitably seek to strengthen ties with China as a buffer against the return of the old imperialism, making the continent another proxy battleground as during the Cold War.

When push comes to shove, will the U.S. really risk going to war with a rejuvenated, high-tech and nuclear-armed Middle Kingdom over Taiwan, or simply relent in the name of a pragmatic peace?

Will the U.S. finally tire of Europe’s carping dependence on American resources to defend Ukraine and just give in to Putin’s single-minded persistence as a fait accompli?

When all that is said and done, the logic of hemispheric hegemony will deem the annexation of Greenland and the Panama Canal as necessary on national security grounds because of Russia’s reach into the Arctic and China’s global assertiveness.

This unraveling string of eventualities over the coming years will cement the contours of what comes next.

Of course, successful resistance by the outgunned is always a possibility. In Ukraine, a prolonged armistice, as in a divided Korea, cannot be ruled out. But the “correlation of forces,” as the Soviets used to say, seems aligned against the fortunes of lesser powers who, in the end, may have little choice but to accommodate the might of the most powerful.

The post A Test Of Great Power Spheres Of Influence appeared first on NOEMA.

by Hélène Blanc

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The Languages Lost To Climate Change

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The Shrouded, Sinister History Of The Bulldozer

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For millennia before we showed up on the scene, social animals — those living in societies and cooperating for survival — had been creating cultures imbued with ethics.

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Khan is quite right that national champions are bad, if for no other reason than because they produce brittle public dependencies on unaccountable private power. But the supposed natural alliance between market competition and innovation is more American mythology than nearly everyone across the political spectrum — right, left and center — would like to acknowledge. In truth, those nimble startups are not competing in anything like an ideal market.

Markets have always required some form of protectionist intervention — like intellectual property law — to help foster innovation. In recent years, startups have innovated because of a rich symbiosis with tech giants and their monopoly-seeking investors. Startups are indeed hungry, but their hunger is not to serve consumer needs or the national interest; it is to join the happy ranks of the monopolists. The nature of technological innovation is that competitive markets, without being “managed,” do not inspire it.

Today, this may sound bizarre, heterodox and jarring. But it was once fairly mainstream opinion. In the middle part of the 20th century, many of America’s most celebrated economic minds taught that competitive markets cause technological progress to stagnate. During the neoliberal era that followed, from the 1980s to the 2010s, this idea was largely forgotten and pushed to the margins of politics and academia. But it never lost its kernel of truth.

Old Wisdom

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith taught in the 1950s that under highly competitive conditions, private firms invest little or nothing in research and development, because competition pushes their profit margins too low to afford it. In the 1960s, the economist Kenneth Arrow further explained that competitive markets provide little or no incentive to invest in information goods like science and technology, because when markets function efficiently, the fruits of research are instantly copied and widely disseminated. These arguments also apply to artistic breakthroughs, philosophical ideas, journalism and much more. Markets are good at serving clear consumer demands, but advancing knowledge just isn’t what they do.

Midcentury American policymakers largely accepted this fact, thereby recognizing that the much-ballyhooed market economy did not foreordain the United States’ technological superiority over the Soviet Union. On the contrary, no matter how efficient the American corporate sector was at producing cheap toothpaste, the Soviet Union’s ability to decree massive, focused, ongoing state investments in science meant it could always pull ahead technologically (and thus also economically and militarily). How else to account for Sputnik? To keep pace, the U.S. government had to do the same, investing heavily in nonmarket institutions like the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and the Department of Defense.

Yet the deep lessons of Galbraith and Arrow were never fully absorbed into the market-enthused mainstream of American political thought. And as California’s technology scene morphed from the hierarchical defense-contractor culture of the 1960s to the libertarian Silicon Valley culture of the 1980s and ‘90s, it was almost entirely forgotten. A new faith emerged, one that preached that markets would generate progress of their own accord, and conversely, that technological breakthroughs would create new markets, in a virtuous cycle.

This doctrine was ideologically convenient for almost all politicians. The center-right could lean on it to pitch bustling markets as a path to technological progress. And the center-left could use it to pitch state-driven technological progress as the key to a thriving market society. It fit the optimistic, end-of-history spirit of the age like a glove. But the insights of Galbraith and Arrow remained true. Information goods are the wellspring of technological (as well as economic and cultural) “progress,” but only limits on market efficiency and abridgments of perfect competition create incentives to produce them.

Examples of such abridgments of market competition include direct state investments and intellectual property rights, like patents, which amount to temporary monopolies on information goods. But crucially, another important abridgment of markets is simply regular old monopoly — cornering resources, swallowing up competitors and otherwise creating dependencies that can be turned into pricing power. Monopoly power places certain private actors in a unique position to profit from information goods, including technical progress. Consequently, it also induces them to invest in those goods.

New Folly

Few Silicon Valley investors would have been able to articulate this in 1990, but by 2010, the sharpest had grokked it. Their biggest wins came when they invested money not in the best technologies or those addressing clear and present market demands, but in those most conducive to achieving and retaining monopoly power: sticky software platforms, social media networks, and infrastructural chokepoints. Any contradiction between this strategy and the Valley’s pervasive pro-market ideology was abstract and easily ignored. After all, the neoliberal period was the era of sugar-free soda and dairy-free butter: Everyone was glad to believe they could have their cake and eat it too.

In a way, turning a blind eye to the discomfiting economics of technology was the “glue” in the neoliberal consensus. Socially permissive liberals were happy to imagine that rapid social change was not being bought at the expense of creating unaccountable private power concentrations, while the Chamber of Commerce was happy to imagine that all this technological progress was bubbling forth from free and fair markets.

Justice Antonin Scalia surely induced some cognitive dissonance for neoliberals when, in the 2004 decision Verizon v. Trinko, he drove antitrust doctrine into the jaws of this contradiction. Writing for a unanimous court, he announced: “The mere possession of monopoly power, and the concomitant charging of monopoly prices, is not only not unlawful; it is an important element of the free-market system. The opportunity to charge monopoly prices — at least for a short period — is what attracts ‘business acumen’ in the first place; it induces risk-taking that produces innovation and economic growth.”

Hardly shying from the paradox, the Supreme Court thus simply expanded the permissibility of monopoly, with all its associated incentives for technological development, over competitive markets that might subordinate business activity to the needs of society and its consumers. That case, along with many similar developments, gradually transformed the way American law conceived of private power and, step by step, rolled out the red carpet for it.

It is still politically awkward to acknowledge that the United States has remained a technological leader into the 21st century largely by tolerating monopolies. But it is hardly a secret. In public writings such as 2014’s “Competition is for Losers,” Peter Thiel states with real candor: “Americans mythologize competition and credit it with saving us from socialist bread lines. Actually, capitalism and competition are opposites. Capitalism is premised on the accumulation of capital, but under perfect competition, all profits are competed away. The lesson for entrepreneurs is clear: if you want to create and capture lasting value, don’t build an undifferentiated commodity business.”

Technology entrepreneurs seeking venture funding have eagerly followed Thiel’s cue, building technologies aimed at addicting, corralling and manipulating users, while trying to tamp down political and intellectual narratives that could threaten their monopolies. Driving down bread prices — that is to say, determining how best to efficiently provide consumers with the basic things they need to thrive — is no longer an “interesting problem” to American capitalists, even though it is quite far from being “solved.” And Americans feel the results: growing dependencies on cheap (but often harmful) technology products, paired with crushingly expensive food, medical care, housing, utilities and transportation. Cheap “innovations” and unaffordable, poor-quality necessities.

Plenty of readers will still be skeptical. To many, the cutthroat Silicon Valley startup ecosystem proves on its face that competition, not monopoly, produces innovative technology. But look closer. Silicon Valley startups are routinely valued at many multiples more than their revenue or profits straightforwardly justify. What explains that? Investors are betting that those startups will eventually either become monopolies or merge into existing ones through acquisitions or other forms of financial consolidation. In other words, technology startups are “competing” not to serve consumers’ needs, but to become — or join — monopolies. The aim for many of today’s Silicon Valley startups is a high-profile acquisition and a lucrative “exit.”

After uniting with monopoly power, erstwhile startups gain the ability not just to charge non-competitive prices, but to exert monopoly power in subtler ways. The social scientist Kean Birch and economist D.T. Cochrane have usefully classified these unconventional forms of digital monopoly power as “enclave rents” (power from controlling ecosystems of devices), “expected monopoly rents” (capitalizing expected future monopoly power in share values, thus allowing owners to accelerate growth and acquisition), “engagement rents” (behavioral insights into deeply dependent and/or surveilled users), and “reflexivity rents” (using market dominance to influence future (favorable) policy and enforcement).

Without an eye toward these and similar forms of monopoly power, one cannot fully understand the lofty valuations of startups. Thus, when they lose their trajectory toward uniting with monopoly, they also lose their access to capital — and promptly stop “innovating.”

Past Innovation ‘Champions’

The early 20th century is replete with examples of the close, uneasy kinship between monopoly and innovation. Take telecommunications. When Bell’s early patents expired in 1894, many new operators entered the market. Prices were driven down, and telecommunications became accessible. Every drop of possible use was squeezed out of the existing infrastructure, to the immediate advantage of consumers. In other words, the infrastructure was exploited efficiently. At the same time, technology stagnated. Operators did not invest in complex new long-distance infrastructure or switching technology, because to maximize the usefulness of such innovations, and also satisfy pro-competition local regulators, they would have had to provide connectivity to rival operators, without these rivals having to have incurred any of the upfront costs. Gradually, it became clear that although there were fairly obvious ways to improve telecommunications technology, no one was doing it.

The landscape shifted in the financial crisis of 1907 when AT&T, financed by J.P. Morgan, bought up many small telecommunications operators. This gave it an effective monopoly over long-distance lines, which it then swiftly improved, researching and developing many complementary technological upgrades along the way. All this put it in a position to charge consumers exorbitant prices, which it also did.

Threatened by the U.S. Attorney General with antitrust action, in 1913 AT&T agreed to the so-called “Kingsbury Commitment,” promising to permit smaller operators to buy the use of its long-distance lines. In the bargain, it secured what amounted to legal approval of its monopoly — and promptly accelerated its technological pathbreaking. In 1914, AT&T built the first coast-to-coast line.

With AT&T now in a comfortably exclusive position to profit from advanced telecommunications, it spent subsequent years investing in advanced automatic switching research. In 1925, AT&T founded Bell Labs, an incubator enabling top research technologists to work while insulated from market pressures, which eventually gave birth to the personal computing revolution. This overall picture is paradoxical, complex and discomfiting. It is simultaneously reasonable to doubt that AT&T’s monopoly served the public interest, and also difficult to dispute that it accelerated investment in knowledge.

The kinship between monopoly and innovation is structural and timeless. To put it in the simplest possible terms: information is valuable only as far as it can be controlled, and it is hard to control. As the writer Stewart Brand said, it “wants to be free.” This means that to transform information into profit, you need something like hard power. You need to have exclusive dominion over some part of the system. Being “just-another-vendor-in-the-marketplace” does not cut it.

When the Wilson administration effectively blessed AT&T’s dominance, it echoed an older way of thinking about corporations. In the early 19th century — hardly ancient history in 1913 — corporations could be created only by special legislative acts, and only for clearly defined, time-or-space-limited projects, such as building bridges or exploiting colonies. Even as recently as the late 19th century, corporations still had to enumerate their purposes for the state’s approval: They couldn’t simply be used as general vehicles for any profitable opportunity. Far from a minor bureaucratic detail, this older and more prescriptive understanding of a corporation’s telos reflected a recognition that chartering corporations constitutes an essentially hazardous delegation of a state’s responsibility to order society.

Wilson wanted AT&T to be dominant because he wanted it to develop telecommunications for the good of society. Inherent in this conception of the company as a national champion was a certain assumption of its subordination to the government’s authority to uphold the common good. But over the next century, this assumption was lost.

By the 1990s, private ownership of corporations that lacked any telos beyond enriching shareholders was considered the norm. Thus, when Boeing was permitted in 1997 to become the only domestic airplane producer with scant conditions, it simply exploited and squandered this privilege (however limited it might have been in light of continued competition from Airbus). Instead of using the luxury of temporarily reduced competition to innovate in the national interest, it extracted profits, slashed quality, created foreign dependencies and nonetheless fell behind Airbus in the commercial market.

Similarly, in the early 2010s, when the Federal Trade Commission approved Facebook’s acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp, it imposed minimal conditions. The Obama administration blithely fêted Silicon Valley’s ascendance, blessing its dominance without imposing any meaningful public responsibility. Big Tech and its investors interpreted this not as a grant of responsibility for civic infrastructure, but as a blank check to pillage the social fabric.

The Irony Of Open Source

The mixed results of the open-source movement serve as another case in point. Open source has been sold to the public as a means of dissolving monopolies and accelerating technological progress. Its effects on power are more complex than that. By diffusing certain bodies of technical knowledge, open source prevents those bodies of knowledge from forming the basis of a monopoly. Potentially, it also enables more people to work on them, so that new techniques can develop faster. But who then pays for such efforts to advance knowledge? In the long run, the answer is either (a) nobody; or (b) somebody with an upstream monopoly that benefits from the diffusion of the open-sourced knowledge.

We saw shades of this in the brief DeepSeek panic. Nervous AI investors thought, for a day or two, that DeepSeek’s powerful open-source model meant that the AI giants have no “moat.” Their panic subsided when they remembered that big tech companies do not necessarily need to own a moat around AI models so long as they control enough other moats, like access to uniquely large amounts of computing power, energy, financial capital, political capital and consumer attention. This means Big Tech remains in pole position to capture a huge share of the value that AI unlocks, even if Silicon Valley’s engineers ultimately prove incapable of keeping its frontier models dramatically ahead of those being built in Shanghai, Singapore, Lagos and St. Petersburg. For this reason, global markets continue to use the big tech companies as easy conduits for investing trillions in AI.

The Vexing Politics Of Technology

All this is achingly annoying to the ideology of the old American center-left, because it explodes the Clinton and Obama era narratives that private innovation serves the public interest. In fact, when innovation is funded by investors betting that they can exploit it via monopoly power, it’s unlikely to leave society better off. To be sure, an (entirely hypothetical) innovation economy owned and tightly managed by trustworthy public authorities might serve the public interest handsomely — but this was almost the opposite of recent Democratic administrations’ innovation agendas. And one can see why: To advocate for such a model, Democrats would need to abandon their accommodation of private markets and instead argue for state control of technology infrastructure to a degree that has been at odds with American culture since the late 1970s.

Nothing more is required to grasp why the Democratic establishment’s technology policy now feels pressure from a socialist wing advocating for public ownership of infrastructure; an anti-monopoly movement that rejects the accommodation of Big Tech, venture capital and private equity; and an interventionist Trump administration.

But the ideological inconvenience is no less severe for Republicans from the libertarian-leaning center-right. Were they to acknowledge that innovation does not truly arise from free market competition, logic would compel them to concede either (a) that their true goal is not really a culture of fair market competition, but of raw contestation for power; or (b) that they do not, in fact, value innovation unqualifiedly. Lo and behold, precisely this schism has emerged in the Trump-era American right, with the Silicon Valley “tech right” representing the former, and populists and cultural conservatives representing the latter.

Where to from here? Both sides of the battered American center must first face their mistakes. This will be painful, not only because their errors have resulted in profound and long-term mis-governance, but also because their blind spots are deeply entangled with old, hard-to-kick ideological habits. The center-left’s sunny techno-utopianism traces its roots back to the rationalism of the French Revolution, via Karl Marx and early 20th-century progressives. The center-right’s fervent market fundamentalism is equally a relic of bygone eras, reflecting the thought of Friedrich Hayek and Milton Friedman — idea-warriors who pitched competitive markets as a cure-all largely to one-up the utopian promises of their techno-optimistic progressive foes. Thus, today, center-right and center-left thinking both feel like artifacts from yesterday’s ideological trenches. A new form of centrism that wants to speak to 2026 would need to thoroughly clear the decks.

This reckoning dovetails with a complex broader reappraisal of China and the West’s relationship with it. In the 1990s, the West misjudged its China policy by insisting on what was then a politically convenient belief: that democratization is the natural result of material prosperity. We risk a disturbingly similar mistake if we now insist upon the belief that breakthrough technological progress is the natural result of competitive markets (or, just as tenuously, democratic society). Nothing prevents China from outracing Silicon Valley and the West in AI, infrastructure and more.

Hard Choices

The point is not that the West should copy China, but that it cannot afford to duck hard choices. Shall we entrust our shared destiny to a hyper-empowered private sector accountable only to investors? Or, perhaps, shall we build societies in which conventional technological progress is not paramount? Or shall we ask our governments to manage technological progress in harmony with some robust conception of the common good? A new political center needs to face this choice boldly, not sweep it under the rug.

If America continues to prioritize private-sector-led technology development, it will come at a foreseeable, devastating cost to the social fabric — a savage new chapter in the book of modern catastrophes. If, on the other hand, we prioritize citizens’ social and economic well-being — as Europe has since World War II — we risk sacrificing technological dynamism. This should not be dismissed too hastily, but it is viable only if accompanied by strategies to avoid geo-strategic eclipse by other means (e.g., post-war Europe flourished through decades of technological non-leadership, but with the help of an American security shield and a huge reserve of accumulated wealth and prestige).

There is a third option: If we further empower the state to steer the progress and deployment of technology, we may avoid the worst outcomes. For example, we might just be able to install a meaningful, accountable sense of the common good at the head of the vast technical enterprise. We might be able to use the law nimbly, shielding the most precious elements of domestic life, religious life, education and culture from technology’s too-rapid disruptions.

However, this balancing act raises other difficulties. Relevant state authorities would need rigorous and enforced ethics measures to ensure that private interests are weeded out. They would also need to be guided by a coherent and unabashedly moral-philosophical vision, rather than the now-prevailing mishmash of contradictory ideas about technology’s proper role in society. Achieving this coherence would likely entail softening old commitments to certain liberal conceptions of the government’s role in cultivating the good life.

The job of centrists is to accept this troubling trilemma and craft a reasonable way forward. For example, technological infrastructure can and should, in many contexts, be owned and developed by public-interested actors. There is nothing “leftist” about this, because it is conducive not just to individuals’ economic well-being, but also to tradition and social stability. Marx, after all, wanted technology to upend prevailing social relations, and thus might even have celebrated Silicon Valley’s wild derailments of old norms and institutions.

In 2025, public ownership of infrastructure carries almost the opposite cultural meaning it had in Marx’s day, when it was a strictly efficiency-enhancing and “accelerationist” proposition. Today, it can just as easily moderate as accelerate technology’s economic and cultural disruptions. In fact, public ownership arguably represents a new face of moderate social conservatism.

Further, intellectual property — which is to say, the thicket of old rights-based compromises between markets and monopoly — can and should be profoundly recalibrated. Simply abandoning intellectual property rules, or allowing them to lose practical relevance, serves no one except existing monopolists. The pattern of needed intellectual property (IP) reforms is complex, but it should tilt more or less gently toward social stability, cultural virtues and widely distributed welfare.

For example, copyright’s fair use exception should be clarified to exclude AI training, thus sharpening copyright as a sword for human creators of new works against economic expropriation by AI, as Republican Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Democratic Sen. Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut have proposed. But patents should be limited in scope and shortened in duration, to make it harder for companies and investors to corner markets and profit from old or relatively obvious inventions, like minor tweaks to well-understood drugs. And although legal protection of trade secrets and trademarks must continue, they should be counterbalanced with heightened responsibilities to the public.

The details of the needed reforms are technical, but the principles are not: When private actors use their IP to ends that society broadly condemns — advancing objectionable eugenic interventions, for example, or using trademarks to distort rather than clarify consumers’ perceptions of value — then society shouldn’t go out of its way to protect their investments. Such crucial conversations are long overdue.

Similarly, it is fashionable to dismiss data policy given the failures of the European Union’s strict privacy laws, known as the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR). After all, GDPR didn’t meaningfully protect people from having their information exploited. But emerging legal models of data ownership still hold promise. For example, it has long been considered unworkable to create new rights in data that entitle individuals to share in data’s downstream profits and influence future use of the information. This is because individuals’ interests in data “overlap,” so that as consumers seeking convenience and good deals, we will always pull each other into a race to the bottom.

(For example, when I agree to Gmail’s terms of use, I also compromise your rights, because copies of your emails to me are in my Gmail inbox. When I agree to share my own genetic information with 23andMe, I also compromise the interests of my parents, siblings, and children. Digital services trying to provide powerful and seamless experiences, and individuals seeking such experiences, are incentivized to ignore these negative externalities. Consequently, in the name of convenience, consumers tend to undermine one another’s interests in a dynamic similar to the prisoner’s dilemma.)

But what if data rights could only be exerted via large, carefully regulated associations, not signed away by individuals? This has not been tried, and it might work. Such a new class of rights could be a crucial new tool for restoring a modicum of power back to consumers and for bringing order to the digital economy.

Last but not least, a recalibrated antitrust doctrine could be centered as a unifying, coalition-building project. In a cruel irony, antitrust law currently operates to prevent the formation of needed coalitions among many actors who are now being crushed by our heavily monopolized and consolidated economy. For example, large consolidated businesses can negotiate lower prices with their suppliers, but if many separate small businesses act in “combination” to do the same, it is unlawful. Such perversions of the spirit of antitrust now pervade American society, so that the huge gains from economic consolidation are captured mostly by financiers who can buy up businesses and combine them. We should, cautiously and advisedly, find ways to direct these windfalls instead to smaller business owner-operators who, much more than financial owners, contribute “off the ledger” to the fabric of communities.

A guiding principle for the next generation of technology policies might be this: Entrepreneurship contributes to the public interest when it competes to solve ordinary people’s existing problems, but not when it competes to lock consumers into ecosystems, addict them to dubious novelties, augment unaccountable monopolies or disrupt values and traditions that enjoy broad support. Indeed, when investors and technologists who transform society for the worse are rewarded with indefinite ownership of the infrastructure upon which the transformed society depends, everyone else loses. In short, we should be open to the state and other, ideally, non-market-driven institutions like the arts, civil society and even religion, exerting more influence upon where technological innovation goes next.

By embracing the seemingly apolitical, private-monopoly-led model of technological advancement, American centrists inked a Faustian bargain with social and economic dissolution. The truth is that technology — like media and other forms of informational power — is inherently political. It is categorically different from other kinds of market activity. It develops under the auspices of states or monopolies, transforming the social and cultural contexts within which politics occurs. Centrists must come to grips with this if they ever want to find a path back to their traditional stabilizing role.

The post The Progress Paradox appeared first on NOEMA.

Even as so many nations appear to be going their own way, embroiled in historically familiar trade wars and military conflicts, the simultaneous emergence of AI-driven planetary-scale computation is disclosing the imperative of forging a common future.

The material basis of this evolving consciousness is the technological exoskeleton of satellites, sensors and cloud computation, which is expanding the heretofore limited scope of human understanding of the world and repositioning our place in the natural order. The climate crisis this apparatus has unveiled is a window into the realization that we are neither above nor apart from nature, but part and parcel of one interdependent organism comprised of multiple intelligences striving for sustainable equilibrium.

The unprecedented capacity for insight into the interface with Earth systems, made possible by frontier technologies, promises to enable our species and others not only to survive, but also to flourish on the only planet we know of with a livable biosphere. In the near term, it will also empower us to predict threats resulting from Anthropocene overreach and design adaptive responses.

‘Earth AI’ & ‘Aurora’

Two recent developments from Google and Microsoft are embryonic stepping-stones in this direction.

Last month, Google launched its “Earth AI” platform. As described in an explanatory paper, “Geospatial data offers immense potential for understanding our planet. However, the sheer volume and diversity of this data along with its varied resolutions, timescales and sparsity pose significant challenges for thorough analysis and interpretation … Earth AI, a family of geospatial AI models and agentic reasoning, enables significant advances in our ability to unlock novel and profound insights into our planet. This approach is built upon foundation models across three key domains — Planet-scale Imagery, Population, and Environment — and an intelligent Gemini-powered reasoning engine.”

The paper continued: “When used together, they provide complementary value for geospatial inference and their synergies unlock superior predictive capabilities. To handle complex, multi-step queries, we developed a Gemini-powered agent that jointly reasons over our multiple foundation models along with large geospatial data sources and tools. On a new benchmark of real-world crisis scenarios, our agent demonstrates the ability to deliver critical and timely insights, effectively bridging the gap between raw geospatial data and actionable understanding.”

As the Berggruen Institute’s Nils Gilman further explains, citing the paper: “The ultimate goal of Earth AI is to help users answer complex, real-world questions that require multifaceted reasoning across diverse models and data sources. Such queries can be categorized into a hierarchy of increasing complexity:

1. “Descriptive and retrieval queries involving fact-finding (e.g., “What was the highest recorded temperature in New York in August 2020?”).
2. Analytical and relational queries seeking to uncover patterns between different data sources (e.g., “How many hospitals were located in areas experiencing severe storm conditions in the state of Louisiana when Hurricane Katrina came ashore?”).
3. Predictive or inferential queries involving forecasting new information (e.g., “Which Indian cities have the most vulnerable populations at high risk of being impacted by flooding by Nov. 25, 2027?”).”

In May, Microsoft scientists unveiled Aurora, a large-scale foundation model trained on more than one million hours of diverse geophysical data. As described in a paper published in Nature, “Aurora outperforms operational forecasts in predicting air quality, ocean waves, tropical cyclone tracks and high-resolution weather, all at orders of magnitude lower computational cost. With the ability to be fine-tuned for diverse applications at modest expense, Aurora represents a notable step toward democratizing accurate and efficient Earth system predictions. These results highlight the transformative potential of AI in environmental forecasting and pave the way for broader accessibility to high-quality climate and weather information.”

These developments are taking place in tandem with other exciting leaps, most notably Google’s new “Suncatcher” plan for “space-based computing” that will draw the vast energy needs of data centers from low-orbit clusters of solar panels, thus enabling compute to scale without further depleting Earth’s resources.

From Disequilibrium To Planetary Homeostasis

The incipient capacities of Earth AI and Aurora hold out the evolutionary prospect that human, machine and Earth intelligences might one day merge into what Gilman calls “planetary sapience”, wherein a maturing technosphere restores and maintains a homeostatic planetary balance rather than fosters a “disequilibrated or disruptive” relationship with the biosphere.

If we manage to make it through our present Age of Upheaval, what settles on the other side of the Anthropocene will be a sensibility far more in sync with the ecology of existence.

As we have written often in Noema, this conceptual reorientation will, in turn, entail a redefinition of what realism means in geopolitics as we have known it. The new condition calls not for the exhausted “realpolitik” that seeks to secure the interests of nations or blocs against each other, but for a new planetary realism, or “Gaiapolitik,” aimed at securing a livable biosphere for all.

It is a paradox of the long trajectory of human endeavor that technological progress will, in the end, not have distanced us from natural systems but further embedded and entangled us in them.

The post The Infrastructure Of Planetary Sapience appeared first on NOEMA.

The exhibit comprised two of the 64 skeletons unearthed from the sands of Jebel Sahaba, in northern Sudan, in 1964. Believed to be over 13,000 years old, the bodies in this prehistoric cemetery were significant for what they revealed about how their owners died. Of those 64 skeletons, at least 38 showed signs of violent deaths: caved-in skulls, forearm bones with parry fractures from victims staving off blows, or other injuries. Whether a result of organized warfare, intercommunal conflict or even outright massacre, Jebel Sahaba is widely considered to be some of the earliest evidence of mass violence in the archaeological record.

According to Kemp, these shattered bones were a foreshadowing of another object in this room. Ten feet away, displayed at knee-height, was the Palette of Narmer. Hewn from a tapering tablet of grey-green siltstone, the item on display was an exact cast of the 5,000-year-old original — discovered by British archaeologists in 1898 — that now sits in Cairo’s Egyptian Museum.

At the center of the stone stands the giant figure of Narmer, the first king of Egypt. His left hand clasps the head of an enemy, presumed to be a rival ruler of the Western Delta. In his raised right hand he holds a mace. The image is thought to depict Narmer bludgeoning his greatest opponent to death, an act that solidified his sovereignty over all Egypt. Beneath his feet lie the contorted bodies of two other victims, while overhead a falcon presents Narmer with a ribbon, believed to represent the god Horus bestowing a gift of the Western Nile. “Here we have perfect historical evidence of what the social contract is. It’s written in blood,” Kemp told me. “This is the first depiction of how states are made.”

In the British Museum’s repository of ancient treasures and colonial loot, the palette is by no means a star attraction. For the half hour we spent in the room, few visitors gave it more than a passing glance. But to Kemp, its imagery “is the most important artwork in the world” — a blueprint for every city-state, nation and empire that has ever been carved out by force of arms, reified in stone and subsequently turned to dust.

Systematizing Collapse

When Kemp set out seven years ago to write his book about how societies rise and fall — and why he fears that our own is headed for disaster — one biblical event provided him with the perfect allegory: the story of the Battle of the Valley of Elah, recounted in 1 Samuel 17. Fought between the Israelites and the Philistines in the 11th century BCE, it’s a tale more commonly known by the names of its protagonists, David and Goliath.

Goliath, we are told, was a Philistine warrior standing “six cubits and a span,” or around 9 feet, 9 inches, clad in the alloy of copper and tin armor that would give his epoch its name: the Bronze Age. As the rival armies faced off across the valley, the giant stepped onto the battlefield and laid down a challenge that the conflict should be resolved in single combat.

For 40 days, Goliath goaded his enemy to nominate a champion, until a shepherd named David came forward from the Israelite ranks, strung a stone into his slingshot and catapulted it into Goliath’s brow, killing him at a stroke, and taking his head with the giant’s own sword. For centuries thereafter, the story of David and Goliath has served as a parable challenging the superiority of physical might. Even the most impressive entity has hidden frailties. A colossus can be felled by a single blow.

According to Kemp’s new book, “Goliath’s Curse,” it’s a lesson we would do well to heed. Early on, he dispenses with the word “civilization,” because in his telling, there is little that might be considered civil about how states are born and sustained. Instead, he argues that “Goliath” is a more apposite metaphor for the kind of exploitative, hierarchical systems that have grown to organize human society.

Like the Philistine warrior, the Goliath state is defined by its size; in time, centralized polities would evolve to dwarf the hunter-gatherer societies that prevailed for the first 300,000 years of Homo sapiens. Ostensibly, it is well-armored and intimidating, exerting power through the threat and exercise of violence. And, in kind with the biblical colossus, it is vulnerable: Those characteristics that most project strength, like autocracy and social complexity, conceal hidden weaknesses. (A more modern allegory, Kemp writes, can be found in the early Star Wars movies, in which a moon-sized space station with the capacity to blow up a planet can be destroyed by a well-placed photon torpedo.)

Kemp is, of course, by no means the first scholar to try to chart this violence and vulnerability through the ages. The question of what causes societies to fail is arguably the ultimate mission of big-picture history, and a perennial cultural fixation. In the modern era, the historian Jared Diamond has found fame with his theories that collapse is usually a product of geographical determinism. The “Fall of Civilizations” podcast, hosted by the historian Paul Cooper, has over 220 million listens. Perusing a bookshop recently, I spotted a recent release, entitled “A Brief History of the End of the F*cking World,” among the bestsellers.

What distinguishes Kemp’s book from much of the canon is the consistencies he identifies in how different political entities evolved, and the circumstances that precipitated their fall. A panoramic synthesis of archaeology, psychology and evolutionary biology, “Goliath’s Curse” is, above all, an attempt to systematize collapse. Reviewers have hailed the book as a skeleton key to understanding societal precarity. Cooper has described it as “a masterpiece of data-driven collapsology.”

Moreover, it is a sobering insight into why our own globalized society feels like it is edging toward the precipice. That’s because, despite all the features that distinguish modern society from empires of the past, some rules hold true throughout the millennia.

Becoming ‘Dr. Doom’

In September, Kemp traveled down from Cambridge to meet me in London for the day. Given his subject, I half-expected a superannuated and eccentric individual, someone like Diamond with his trademark pilgrim-father beard and penchant for European chamber music. But Kemp, 35, would prove to be the antithesis of the anguished catastrophist. The man waiting for me on the concourse at King’s Cross was athletic, swarthily handsome and lantern-jawed. He’d signed off emails regarding our plans to meet with a puckish “Cheerio.”

Kemp’s background is also hardly stereotypical of the bookish scholar. He spent his early years in the dairy-farming town of Bega in New South Wales, Australia, where cattle outnumbered people three-to-one. It was “something of a broken home,” he told me. His father was an active member of the Hell’s Angels, involved in organized crime, a formative presence that would later germinate Kemp’s interest in power dynamics, the way violence is at once a lever for domination and for ruin.

Escaping to Canberra, after high school, Kemp read “interdisciplinary studies” at the Australian National University (ANU), where he found a mentor in the statistical climatologist Jeanette Lindsay. In 2009, it was Lindsay who persuaded him to join a student delegation heading to COP15 in Copenhagen, where Kemp found himself with a front row seat to what he calls “the paralysis of geopolitics.”

At one stage, during a symposium over measures to curb deforestation, he watched his own Australian delegation engage in endless circumlocutions to derail the debate. Representatives from wealthier countries, most notably America, had large teams that they could swap in and out of the floor, enabling them to filibuster vital, potentially existential questions to a deadlock. “If you’re from Tuvalu, you don’t have that privilege,” Kemp explained.

Afterward, Kemp became preoccupied by “a startling red thread” evident in so many spheres of international negotiation: the role of America as arbiter of, and all too often barrier to, multilateral cooperation. Kemp wrote his doctoral thesis on how pivotal issues — such as biodiversity loss, nuclear weapons and climate change — had grown captive to the whims of the world’s great superpower. Later, when he published a couple of academic articles on the same subject, “the ideas weren’t very popular,” he said. “Then Trump got elected, and suddenly the views skyrocketed.”

In 2018, Kemp relocated to the United Kingdom, landing a job as a research affiliate at Cambridge University’s “Centre for the Study of Existential Risk” (CSER, often articulated, in an inadvertent nod to a historical avatar of unalloyed power, to “Caesar”). His brother’s congratulatory present, a 3-D printed, hand-engraved mask of the Marvel character “Dr. Doom,” would prove prophetic. Years later, as Kemp began to publish his theories of societal collapse, colleagues at CSER began referring to him by the very same moniker.

It was around this time that Kemp read “Against the Grain,” a revisionist history of nascent conurbations by James C. Scott. Kemp had always been an avid reader of history, but Scott’s thesis, which argued that the growth of centralized states “hadn’t been particularly emancipatory or even necessarily good for human wellbeing,” turned some of Kemp’s earlier assumptions about human nature on their head.

Such iconoclastic ideas — subsequently popularized in blockbuster works of non-fiction like Rutger Bregman’s “Humankind” (2019), and “The Dawn of Everything” (2021) by Graeber and Wengrove — would prompt years of research and rumination about the preconditions that enable states and empires to rise, and why they never last forever.

‘Hobbes’ Delusion’

“Goliath’s Curse” opens with a refutation of a 17th-century figure whose theories still cast a long shadow across all considerations of societal fragility. In “Leviathan” (1651), the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes proposed that the social contract was contingent on the stewardship of a central authority — a “Leviathan” designed to keep a lid on humanity’s basest instincts. Political scientists refer to this doctrine as “veneer theory.”

“Once civilization is peeled away, chaos spreads like brushfire,” Kemp surmises. “Whether it be in post-apocalyptic fiction, disaster movies or popular history books, collapse is often portrayed as a Hobbesian nightmare.”

For decades now, the predominant version of history has been beholden to this misanthropic worldview. Many of the most influential recent theories of collapse have echoed Hobbes’ grand theory with specific exemplars. Diamond has famously argued that the society on Rapa Nui, or Easter Island, unraveled due to self-inflicted ecocide before devolving into civil war. That interpretation, in which the islanders deforested the land in the service of ancestor worship, has since been held up as a species-wide admonition — evidence, as researchers John Flenley and Paul Bahn have written, that “humankind’s covetousness is boundless. Its selfishness appears to be genetically inborn.” In “The Better Angels of Our Nature” (2011), Steven Pinker estimated that 15% of Paleolithic people died of violent causes.

But Kemp was struck by a persistent “lack of empirics” undermining these hypotheses, an academic tendency to focus on a handful of “cherry-picked” and emotive case studies — often on islands, in isolated communities or atypical environments that failed to provide useful analogs for the modern world. Diamond’s theories about the demise of Rapa Nui — so often presented as a salutary cautionary tale —have since been debunked.

To further rebut such ideas, Kemp highlights a 2013 study by the anthropologists Jonathan Haas and Matthew Piscitelli of Chicago’s Field Museum. In what amounted to the most comprehensive survey of violence in prehistory, the authors analyzed almost 3,000 skeletons interred during the Paleolithic Era. Of the more than 400 sites in the survey, they identified just one instance of mass conflict: the bones of Jebel Sahaba. “The presumed universality of warfare in human history and ancestry may be satisfying to popular sentiment; however, such universality lacks empirical support,” Haas and Piscitelli wrote.

If there was any truth to the Hobbesian standpoint, the Paleolithic, with its absence of stratified social structures, should have been marked by mass panic and all-out war. Yet the hunter-gatherer period appears to have been a time of relative, if fragile, peace. Instead, conflict and mass violence seemed to be by-products of the very hierarchical organization that Hobbes and his antecedents essentialized. Cave art of armies wielding bows and swords dates only to around 10,000 years ago. “As soon as you start tugging on the threat of collapse, the entire tapestry of history unravels,” Kemp told me.

But if Hobbes was wrong about the human condition — if most people are averse to violence, if mass panic and mutual animosity are not the principal vectors of societal disintegration — what then explains the successive state failures in the historical record? Where or what, to mix metaphors, is Goliath’s Achilles’ heel?

What Fuels Goliath?

In seeking to disentangle a template of collapse from this historiography, Kemp turned to historical data, searching for traits of state emergence and disintegration shared by different polities. “When I see a pattern which needs to be explained, it becomes a fascination bordering upon obsession,” he told me.

A central pillar of his research was the Seshat Global History Databank, an open-source database incorporating more than 862 polities dating back to the early Neolithic. Named after the Egyptian goddess of wisdom, Seshat includes a range of metrics like the degree of centralization and the presence of different types of weaponry; it aggregates these to create nine “complexity characteristics” (CCs), including polity size, hierarchy, governmental framework and infrastructure.

Using this and other sources, Kemp set out to collate his own novel dataset, this time focusing on the common features not of complexity, but of collapse. In keeping with Seshat’s old-god nomenclature, he dubbed it the “Mortality of States” index, shortened to “Moros”, after the Greek god of doom. Covering 300 states spanning the last five millennia, the resulting catalogue is, Kemp claims, “the most exhaustive list of state lifespans available today.”

To some extent, Kemp’s data told a story that has become received wisdom: As Earth thawed out from the last ice age, we entered the Holocene, a period of warmer temperatures and climatic stability. This shift laid the terrain for the first big inflection point: the advent of agriculture, which encouraged our previously itinerant species to settle in place, leading to greater population density and eventually proto-city-states. These early states rose and fell, often condemned by internal conflict, climatic shocks, disease or natural disasters. But gradually the organization of human societies trended toward higher levels of complexity, from the diffuse proto-city-states, through the birth of nations, then empires, to the globalized system of today. The violent paroxysms of the past were merely hiccups on a continuum toward increased sophistication and civility, and perhaps someday immortality. Such is the tale that is commonly framed as the arc of human progress.

But trawling through the data in more detail also revealed unexpected and recurrent patterns, leading Kemp to an early realization: states observably age. “For the first 200 years, they seem to become more vulnerable to terminating. And after 200 years, they stay at a high risk thereafter,” Kemp told me.

The other glaring commonality concerned the structure of these societies. “The common thread across all of them is not necessarily that they had writing or long-distance trade,” Kemp said. “Instead, it’s that they were organized into dominance hierarchies in which one person or one group gains hegemony through its ability to inflict violence on others.”

Kemp argues that dominance hierarchies arise due to the presence of three “Goliath fuels.” The first of these is “lootable resources,” assets that can be easily seen, stolen and stored. In this respect, the advent of agriculture was indisputably foundational. Cereal grains like wheat and rice could be taxed and stockpiled, giving rise to centralized authorities and, later, bureaucracies of the state.

The second Goliath fuel is “monopolizable weapons.” As weaponry evolved from flint to bronze, the expertise and relative scarcity of the source material required for early metallurgy meant that later weapons could be hoarded by powerful individuals or groups, giving those who controlled the supply chain a martial advantage over potential rivals.

The third criterion for Goliath evolution is “caged land,” territories with few exit options. Centralized power is predicated on barriers that hinder people from fleeing oppressive hierarchies.

In Kemp’s telling, every single political entity has grown from one of these seeds, or more commonly, a combination of all three. Bronze Age fiefdoms expanded at the tip of their metal weaponry. “Rome,” Kemp writes, “was an autocratic machine for turning grain into swords,” its vast armies sustained by crop imports from the Nile Valley, its endless military campaigns funded by the silver mines it controlled in Spain. In China, the Han dynasty circumscribed its territory with its Great Wall to the north, intended both to keep Xiongnu horseback raiders out and the citizenry in. Europe’s colonial empires were built, in Diamond’s famous summation, by “Guns, Germs and Steel.”

For millennia, the nature of forager societies kept these acquisitive impulses to some extent contained, Kemp argues. The evolutionary logic of hunting and gathering demanded cooperation and reciprocity, giving rise to “counter-dominance strategies”: teasing, shaming or exile. With the advent of Goliath polities, however, the “darker angels of our nature” were given free rein, yielding social arrangements “more like the dominance hierarchies of gorillas and chimpanzees.”

“Rather than a stepladder of progress,” Kemp writes, “this movement from civilization to Goliath is better described as evolutionary backsliding.” Moreover, Goliaths “contain the seeds of their own demise: they are cursed. This is why they have collapsed repeatedly throughout history.”

In Kemp’s narrative, our retrograde rush toward these vicious social structures has been less about consensus than the relentless ascent of the wrong sort of people. Goliath hierarchies select for assholes — or, to use Kemp’s preferred epithet, “dark triad” personalities: people with high levels of psychopathy, narcissism and Machiavellianism. Consequently, history has been shaped by pathological figures in the Narmer mold, dominance-seekers predisposed to aggression. Reinforced by exceptionalist and paranoid ideologies, these strongmen have used violence and patronage to secure their dominion, whether driven by a lust for power or to avenge a humiliation. Several of the rebellions that plagued dynastic China, Kemp points out, were spearheaded by aggrieved people who failed their civil service examinations.

Wherever Goliath took hold, “arms races” followed, as other status-seeking aspirants jostled for hegemony. And Goliaths were contagious. The growth of “one bellicose city-state” would often produce a domino effect, in which the threat of an ascendant Goliath would provoke other regional polities to turn to their own in-house authoritarian as a counterweight to the authoritarian next door.

In this way, humankind gravitated “from hunting and gathering to being hunted and gathered,” Kemp writes. Early states had little to distinguish them from “criminal gangs running protection rackets.” Many of the great men of history, who are often said to have bent society to their will, Kemp told me, are better thought of as “a rollcall of serial killers.”

The 1% View Of History

Back downstairs, on the British Museum’s ground floor, we walked into a long gallery off the central atrium containing dozens of megalithic totems from the great ages of antiquity. The giant granite bust of Rameses II sat beatific on a pediment, and visitors peered into a glass cabinet containing the Rosetta Stone. Kemp, slaloming through the crowds, murmured: “The 1% view of history made manifest.”

Along both walls of an adjacent corridor, we came upon a series of bas-reliefs from the neo-Assyrian city of Nimrud, in modern-day Iraq. Depicting scenes from the life of the Ashurnasirpal II, who ruled Nimrud in the 9th century BCE, the gypsum slabs were like an artistic expression of Kemp’s historical themes: Ashurnasirpal sitting on a throne before vassals bearing tribute; Ashurnasirpal surrounded by protective spirits; Ashurnasirpal’s army ramming the walls of an enemy city, rivals dragging themselves along the ground, backs perforated with arrows. The entire carving was overlaid with cuneiform script, transcribed onto signage below, with sporadic sentences translated into English: “great king, strong king, king of the universe. … Whose command disintegrates mountains and seas.”

Across the atrium, in a low-lit room containing a bequest from the Rothschild family’s antique collection, Kemp lingered over an assortment of small wooden altarpieces, with biblical scenes and iconography carved in minuscule, intricate detail. Elite status could be projected in the imposing size of a granite statue, he said. But it could just as well be archived in the countless hours spent chiseling the Last Supper into a fragment of boxwood.

It is, of course, inevitable that our sense of history is skewed by this elite bias, Kemp explained. While quotidian objects and utensils were typically made of perishable materials, the palaces and monuments of the governing class were designed to be beautiful, awe-inspiring and durable. In the hours that we spent on the upper floors, we spied just one relic of ordinary life: a 3,000-year-old wooden yoke from Cambridgeshire.

Likewise, early writing often evolved to reinforce the “1% view of history” and formalize modes of control. The predominance of this elite narrative has produced a cultural blind spot, obscuring the brutality and oppression that has forever been the lot of those living at the base of a pyramid, both figurative and actual.

From all this aristocratic residue, Kemp sought to extract a “people’s history of collapse” — some means of inferring what it was like to live through collapse for the average person, rather than the elites immortalized in scripture and stone.

The Curse Of Inequality

If Kemp’s research revealed that historical state formation appears to follow a pattern, so, too, did the forces that inexorably led toward their demise. To illustrate how the process works, Kemp provides the example of Çatalhöyük, a proto-city that arose on the Konya Plain in south-central Turkey around 9,000 years ago, one of thousands of “tells,” mounded remnants of aborted settlements found throughout the Near East.

Excavations of the site’s oldest layers suggest that early Çatalhöyük was notable for its lack of social differentiation. Crammed together in a dense fractal of similarly sized mud-brick dwellings, the settlement in this period exhibits no remnants of fortification and no signs of warfare. Analysis of male and female skeletons has shown that both sexes ate the same diet and performed the same work, indicating a remarkable degree of gender equity.

This social arrangement, which the Stanford archaeologist Ian Hodder has described as “aggressively egalitarian,” lasted for around 1,000 years. Then, in the middle of the 7th millennium BCE, the archaeological record starts to shift. House sizes begin to diverge; evidence of communal activity declines. Later skeletal remains show more evidence of osteoarthritis, possibly betraying higher levels of workload and bodily stress. Economists have estimated that the Gini coefficient, which measures disparities in household income, doubled in the space of three centuries — “a larger jump than moving from being as equal as the Netherlands to as lopsided as Brazil,” Kemp writes. Within a few centuries, the settlement was abandoned.

The fate of Çatalhöyük established a template that almost every subsequent town, city-state and empire would mirror. Its trajectory resounds throughout the historical record and across continents. Similar patterns can be discerned from the remnants of the Jenne-Jeno in Mali, the Olmecs of Mesoamerica, the Tiwanaku in Titicaca, and the Cahokia in pre-Columbian North America.

Occasionally, the archaeological record suggests a fluctuation between equality and disparity and back again. In Teotihuacan, near today’s Mexico City, the erection of the Feathered Serpent Pyramid by an emergent priestly class in around 200 CE ushered in a period of ritual bloodletting. A more egalitarian chapter followed, during which the temple was razed, and the city’s wealth was rechanneled into urban renewal. Then the old oligarchy reasserted itself, and the entire settlement, beset by elite conflict or popular rebellion, was engulfed in flames.

Whether societies collapsed through gradual depopulation, like Çatalhöyük, or abruptly, as with Teotihuacan’s conflagration, Kemp argues that the triggers were the same. As Acemoğlu and Robinson explored in “Why Nations Fail” (2012), the correlation between inequality and state failure often rests on whether its institutions are inclusive, involving democratic decision-making and redistribution, or extractive: “designed to extract incomes and wealth from one subset of society to benefit a different subset.” Time and again, the historical record shows the same pattern repeating — of status competition and resource extraction spiraling until a tipping-point, often in the shape of a rebellion, or an external shock, like a major climate shift or natural disaster, which the elites, their decision-making fatally undermined by the imperative to maintain their grip on power, fail to navigate.

In almost every case, decline or collapse was foreshadowed by increases in the appearance of proxies of inequality. A rise in the presence of large communal pots indicates an upsurge in feasting. Deviation in the size of dwellings, preserved in the excavated footprints of early conurbations, is a measure of social stratification, as wealth accumulates among the elite. Graves of that same nobility become stuffed with burial goods. Great monuments, honoring political and religious leaders or the gods who were supposed to have anointed them, proliferate. Many of the most lucrative lootable resources throughout history have been materials that connote elevated social standing, an obsession with conspicuous consumption or “wastefully using resources,” that marked a break from the hunter-gatherer principle of taking only what was needed. (Kemp wears a reminder of the human compulsion to covet beauty as much as utility, an obsidian arrowhead, on his wrist.)

All the while, these signs of burgeoning inequality have tended to be twinborn with an increasing concentration of power, and its corollary: violence. War, often instigated for no more reason than the pursuit of glory and prestige, was just “the continuation of status competition by other means,” Kemp writes. On occasion, this violence would be manifested in the ultimate waste of all: human sacrifice, a practice custom-made to demonstrate the leadership’s exceptionality — above ordinary morality.

Better Off Stateless

As Kemp dug into the data in more detail, his research substantiated another startling paradox. Societal collapse, though invariably catastrophic for elites, has often proved to be a boon for the population at large.

Here again, Kemp found that the historiography is subject to pervasive and fallacious simplifications. In his book, he repudiates the 14th-century Tuscan scholar Petrarch, who promulgated the notion that the fall of classical Rome and Greece ushered in a “dark age” of cultural atrophy and barbarism. His was a reiteration of sentiments found in many earlier examples of “lamentation literature,” left behind on engraved tablets and sheaves of papyrus, which have depicted collapse as a Gomorran hellscape. One of Kemp’s favorites is the “Admonitions of Ipuwer,” which portrays the decline of Egypt’s Old Kingdom as a time of social breakdown, civil war and cannibalism. “But it actually spends a lot more time fretting about poor people becoming richer,” he said.

In reality, Kemp contends, Petrarch’s “rise-and-fall vision of history is spectacularly wrong.” For if collapse often engulfed ancient polities “like a brushfire,” the scorched earth left behind was often surprisingly fertile. Again, osteoarcheology, the study of ancient bones, gives the lie to the idea that moments of societal disintegration always spelled misery for the population at large.

Take human height, which archaeologists often turn to as a biophysical indicator of general health. “We can look at things like did they have cavities in their teeth, did they have bone lesions,” Kemp explained. “Skeletal remains are a good indicator of how much exercise people were getting, how good their diet was, whether there was lots of disease.”

Prior to the rise of Rome, for example, average heights in regions that would subsequently fall under its yoke were increasing. As the empire expanded, those gains stalled. By the end of the Western Empire, people were eight centimeters shorter than they would have been if the preceding trends had continued. “The old trope of the muscle-bound Germanic barbarian is somewhat true. To an Italian soldier, they would have seemed very large,” Kemp said. People in the Mediterranean only started to get taller again following Rome’s decline. (In a striking parenthesis, Kemp points out that the average male height today remains two centimeters shorter than that of our Paleolithic forebears.)

Elsewhere, too, collapse was not necessarily synonymous with popular immiseration. The demise of the extravagant Mycenaean civilization in Greece was pursued by a cultural efflorescence, paving the way for the proto-democracy of Athens. Collapse could be emancipatory, freeing the populace from instruments of state control such as taxes and forced labor. Even the Black Death, which killed as much as half of Europe’s population in the mid-14th century, became in time an economic leveler, slashing inequality and accelerating the decline of feudalism.

It’s a pattern that can still be discerned in modern contexts. In Somalia, the decade following the fall of the Barre regime in 1991 would see almost every single indicator of quality of life improve. “Maternal mortality drops by 30%, mortality by 24%, extreme poverty by 20%,” Kemp recounted from memory. Of course, there are endless caveats. But often, “people are better off stateless.”

Invariably, however, Goliaths re-emerged, stronger and more bureaucratically sophisticated than before. Colonial empires refined systems of extraction and dominance until their tentacles covered diffuse expanses of the globe. Kemp, never shy of metaphor, calls this the “rimless wheel,” a centripetal arrangement in which the core reaps benefits at the margins’ expense.

At times, such regimes were simply continuations of existing models of extraction. In 1521, when the Spanish conquistador Hernán Cortés unseated the Aztec ruler Moctezuma II, it was merely a case of “translatio imperi” — the handing over of empire. The European imperial projects in the Americas were an unforgivable stain, Kemp said. But, more often than not, they assumed the mantle from pre-existing hierarchies.

Endgame

In the afternoon, we walked north from the British Museum over to Coal Drops Yard, formerly a Victorian entrepôt for the import and distribution of coal, now a shiny vignette of urban regeneration. The morning rain had cleared, and Granary Square was full of tourists and office workers enjoying the late summer sun. Kids stripped to their underwear and played among low fountains; people chatted at public tables beneath a matrix of linden trees. Kemp and I found an empty table and sat down to talk about how it could all fall apart.

As “Goliath’s Curse” approaches its conclusion, the book betrays a sense of impending doom about our current moment. The final section, in which Kemp applies his schema to the present day, is entitled “Endgame,” after the stage in chess where only a few moves remain.

Today, we live in what Kemp calls the “Global Goliath,” a single interconnected polity. Its lootable resources are data, fossil fuels and the synthetic fertilizers derived from petrochemicals. Centuries of arms races have yielded an arsenal of monopolizable weapons like autonomous drones and thermonuclear warheads that are “50 trillion times more powerful than a bow and arrow.” The land — sectored into national borders, monitored by a “stalker complex” of mass surveillance systems and “digital trawl-nets” — is more caged than ever.

We have reached the apotheosis of the colonial age, a time when extractive institutions and administrative reach have been so perfected that they now span the globe. However, the resulting interdependencies and fetishes for unending growth have created an ever-growing catalog of “latent risks,” or accumulated hazards yet to be realized, and “tail risks,” or outcomes with a low probability but disastrous consequences. Kemp characterizes this predicament, in which the zenith of human achievement is also our moment of peak vulnerability, as a “rungless ladder.” The higher we go, the greater the fall.

Under a series of apocalyptic subtitles — “Mors ex Machina,” “Evolutionary Suicide,” “A Hellish Earth” — Kemp enumerates the existential threats that have come to shape the widespread intuition, now playing out in our geopolitics, that globalized society is sprinting toward disaster. After the post-Cold War decades of non-proliferation, nuclear weapons stockpiles are now growing. The architects of artificial intelligence muse about its potential to wipe out humanity while simultaneously lobbying governments to obstruct regulation. Our densifying cities have become prospective breeding grounds for doomsday diseases. Anthropogenic climate change now threatens to shatter the stability of the Holocene, warming the planet at “an order of magnitude (tenfold) faster than the heating that triggered the world’s greatest mass extinction event, the Great Permian Dying, which wiped away 80–90% of life on earth 252 million years ago,” Kemp warns.

The culprits in this unfolding tragedy are not to be found among the ranks of common people. The free market has always been predicated on the concept of Homo economicus, a notional figure governed by dispassionate self-interest. But while most people don’t embody this paradigm, we are in thrall to political structures and corporations created in that image, with Dark Triad personalities at the wheel. “The best place to find a psychopath is in prison,” Kemp told me. “The second is in the boardroom.”

Now, deep into the Global Goliath’s senescence, several of the indicators that Kemp identifies as having historically presaged collapse — egalitarian backsliding, diminishing returns on extraction, the rise of oligarchy — are flashing red. Donning his risk analyst hat, Kemp arrives at the darkest possible prognosis: The most likely destination for our globalized society is “self-termination,” self-inflicted collapse on a hitherto unprecedented scale. Goliath is more powerful than ever, but it is on a collision course with David’s stone.

Lootable Silicon

All of this seemed hard to reconcile with the atmosphere of contented civility in Granary Square on this sunny September afternoon. I proposed that an advocate for global capitalism would doubtless view our current circumstances as evidence of the Global Goliath’s collective, trickle-down bounty.

“We should be thankful for a whole bunch of things that started, by and large, in the Industrial Revolution,” Kemp said. “Vaccines, the eradication of smallpox, low infant mortality and the fact that over 80% of the population is literate. These are genuine achievements to be celebrated.”

Kemp argued that most redistribution has been a product of “stands against domination”; for example, the formation of unions, public health movements and other campaigns for social justice. Meanwhile, underlying prosperity still depends on the rimless wheel: the hub exploiting the periphery. “If we were here 150 years ago, we’d be seeing child laborers working in these courtyards,” he said, gesturing at the former coal warehouses that are now an upmarket shopping mall and that once served as a nerve center of the fossil fuel industry that built the modern age.

The same dynamics hold sway today, albeit at a further remove. Just south of us, across the Regent’s Canal, sat the London headquarters of Google, a billion-dollar glass edifice. At first glance, Kemp gave the building an enthusiastic middle finger.

Later, he explained: “The people sitting in that building are probably having a pretty good time. They have lots of ping pong tables and Huel. But the cobalt that they’re using in their microchips is still often dug up by artisanal miners in the Democratic Republic of Congo, getting paid less than a couple of dollars a day.”

Like much of the oligarchic class, the boy-gods of Silicon Valley still cleave to Hobbesian myths to justify their grip on wealth and power. Their techno-Utopian convictions, encapsulated in Bill Gates’ mantra that “innovation is the real driver of progress,” are merely a secular iteration of the divine mandates that Goliaths once used to legitimize their rule. Promises of rewards in the afterlife have been supplanted by dreams of a technological singularity and interplanetary civilization.

Another plausible eventuality, which Kemp dubs the “Silicon Goliath,” is a future in which democracy and freedom are crushed beneath the heel of advanced algorithmic systems. He is already at work on his next book about the evolution of mass surveillance, an inquiry that he told me “is in many ways even more depressing.”

Slaying Goliath

Toward the end of “Goliath’s Curse,” Kemp imagines a scenario in which the decision of whether to detonate the Trinity atomic bomb test in New Mexico in 1945 was made not by a Department of War but by a “Trinity jury,” an assembly of randomly selected members of the public.

In such a counterfactual, with the Nazis defeated, Japan already inches from surrender and Manhattan Project physicists warning of a non-zero possibility that the test could ignite the whole atmosphere and exterminate all life on Earth, Kemp contends that a more inclusive decision-making process would have changed the course of history. “If you had a random selection by lottery of 100 U.S. citizens and asked them, ‘Should we detonate the bomb?’ What decision do they come to? Almost certainly ‘No,’ he told me.

As Kemp sees it, the widespread adoption of such open democracy is the only viable route to escape the endgame. These citizen juries wouldn’t be free-for-alls, where the loudest or most outrageous voice wins, but deliberative procedures that necessitate juror exposure to expert, nonpartisan context.

Such assemblies wouldn’t be enough to “slay Goliath” on their own, Kemp told me. “Corporations and states … [must] pay for the environmental and social damages they cause … to make the economy honest again.” Per capita wealth, Kemp added, should be limited to a maximum of $10 million.

I challenged Kemp that this wish-list was beginning to sound like a Rousseauvian fever-dream. But seven years immersed in the worst excesses of human folly had left him in no mood for half-measures. “I’m not an anarcho-primitivist,” he said. There was no point trying to revivify our hunter-gatherer past. “We’d need multiple planet Earths!” Kemp conceded. And yet the urgency of our current circumstances demanded a radical departure from the existing status quo, and no less a shift in mindset.

His final demotic prescription, “Don’t be a dick,” was an injunction to everyone that our collective future depends as much on moral ambition as political revolution. Otherwise, Goliath won’t be just a Bible story. It could also be our epitaph.

The post Humanity’s Endgame appeared first on NOEMA.

This is precisely what Hui Huang has done brilliantly in a Noema essay that analogizes today’s global disruption from AI and synthetic biology to geopolitics with the transition from the waning stability of the Spring and Autumn period in ancient China to the tumultuous period of the Warring States, which realigned that world according to new realities. It was a period of destruction, but also of unprecedented innovation and creation.

Writing from Shanghai, Huang starts with the systemic shock of President Trump’s unilateral imposition of tariffs, the first move of his “warring states mindset.”

“Donald Trump announced sweeping tariffs on America’s major trading partners. For critics, it was a reckless act of economic warfare. For Trump and his allies, it was a long-overdue rejection of a naïve world order.

“In a striking historical parallel, in the Spring and Autumn period of ancient China, Duke Xiang of Song famously refused to attack an enemy before they had properly arrayed their troops, adhering to the codes of ritualized warfare. Predictably, he lost. Today, a similar accusation is hurled at the United States: that it has restrained itself with outdated moral expectations, while rivals such as China and Russia maneuver freely, unburdened by idealism. Trumpism, and the worldview of figures like J.D. Vance, represent a sharp rejection of the so-called benevolence of Xiang. Their message is simple: America must adapt to a world where restraint is no longer a universal virtue.”

Huang continues: “This is not merely a moment of disruption. It marks a paradigmatic shift in global logic. The world is moving from a system of mediated stability toward one of open rivalry.

“To understand this moment, China’s own history offers a useful analogy. In the Spring and Autumn period (770 to 476 BCE), warfare was ritualized, legitimacy symbolically upheld by the Zhou king. But as the old order weakened, the Warring States period (475 to 221 BCE) emerged, a time of intense competition, innovation and systemic transformation.

“Trumpism does not merely reject global liberalism; it reimagines the architecture of American power. Its core instinct is not isolationist or nihilistic, but fundamentally opposed to established diplomatic norms and rituals, a deliberate departure from the old ways of seeking consensus. In this worldview, legitimacy comes not from international approval but from output: industrial strength, cultural cohesion and strategic clarity. Rituals are not something to be respected, but to be bypassed.”

For Huang, this mindset did not emerge in a vacuum. “For much of the postwar era, the U.S.-led international order resembled China’s Spring and Autumn period — a fragile yet enduring balance, upheld by norms, rituals and symbolic legitimacy. Henry Kissinger, the era’s foremost architect, believed in ambiguity, restraint and equilibrium. Institutions like the United Nations played the role of a Zhou king, lacking hard power but commanding deference. Even amid Cold War tension, the world remained rule-bound. Red lines held, backchannels worked, deterrence was mutual.

“But the Zhou world is gone. Trumpism marks not an aberration but an inflection point, a recognition that fewer actors obey the old rites, and those who still do risk irrelevance. Like the Zhou order before it, today’s international system is fading not because of ideological rebellion but because its underlying conditions no longer hold. From Trump’s perspective, tariff wars were a response to these changing conditions. Institutions like the WTO, he argued, no longer ensured reciprocity, and growing trade imbalances reflected how the liberal economic order had failed to protect national interests.”

What is underway today, much like the transition from the Spring and Autumn period to the Warring States period, is about far more than a change in political climate. As Huang writes, that transition in China marked one of the most profound systemic shifts in its history, involving “a fundamental transformation that reshaped modes of production, social hierarchies and the very basis of legitimacy over centuries. It represented a deep pivot driven by new material and strategic realities that rendered the old Zhou rituals obsolete. This historical lens suggests that today’s global shift is not merely about changing alliances or rhetoric, but about a deeper, structural and potentially epochal turn.”

A Globally Synchronized Rethink

A wise student of the past, Huang does not regret the future. “What we are entering may not be a collapse, but a modeling epoch: a new Warring States world, chaotic and cruel, but also luminous. For those who think in systems and build in code, this is not the end of history. It is its recommencement.

“The Warring States era was not only an age of war. It was an age of brilliance. During the political upheaval of that period, Chinese civilization produced some of its greatest minds: Mencius, Zhuangzi, Han Feizi, and Mozi, whose frameworks still shape political and moral reasoning today. Karl Jaspers called this broader phenomenon the Axial Age, when societies across China, India, Persia, Judea and Greece simultaneously reinvented what it meant to be human. Philosophy, justice and law did not arise from peace, but from rupture.

“More than two millennia after the Axial Age, we may be entering another globally synchronized rethink. With no shared ideology and dwindling trust in inherited institutions, humanity is being forced back to first principles. What is justice? What deserves to endure? Questions of AI ethics, political legitimacy and governance are no longer academic. They are civilizational. The true contest ahead is between systems that adapt and systems that ossify.”

Huang concludes: “This is not a dark age. It is a time worthy of living.”

AI Helps Out

One note about Hui Huang’s essay “Welcome To The New Warring States” in Noema. Noema is transparent about the use of AI in any of its pieces. We publish original human-generated ideas but allow authorized, disclosed use of AI in certain cases. The initial submitted draft of this piece utilized ChatGPT as an editorial assistant and translator to help convey Chinese concepts more clearly in English, so as to express the author’s original, human-generated ideas more effectively.

Specifically, it was used to generate section headings, suggest transitions and reduce repetition, as well as for line edits to improve clarity and flow in the initial draft. It was not used to originate facts; all claims and examples are drawn from the author’s own notes and publicly available sources, and were reviewed and edited by the author himself first. This draft has since received multiple human edits. Noema verified the author’s identity and the piece’s conceptual originality using various scanners and review processes and conducted a detailed human fact-check. See our AI policy here.

The post Creative Disruption In The Order Of The World appeared first on NOEMA.

In April, Donald Trump imposed sweeping “reciprocal” tariffs on nearly all U.S. trading partners, expanding earlier pronouncements that targeted only major economies. For critics, it was a reckless act of economic warfare. For Trump and his allies, it was a long-overdue rejection of a naïve world order. In a striking historical parallel, in the Spring and Autumn period of ancient China, Duke Xiang of Song famously refused to attack an enemy before they had properly arrayed their troops, adhering to the codes of ritualized warfare. Predictably, he lost.

Today, a similar accusation is hurled at the United States: that it has restrained itself with outdated moral expectations, while rivals such as China and Russia maneuver freely, unburdened by idealism. Trumpism and the worldview of figures like J.D. Vance represent a sharp rejection of the so-called benevolence of Xiang. Their message is simple: America must adapt to a world where restraint is no longer a universal virtue.

This is not merely a moment of disruption. It marks a paradigmatic shift in global logic. The world is moving from a system of mediated stability toward one of open rivalry. To understand this moment, China’s own history offers a useful analogy. In the Spring and Autumn period (770 to 476 B.C.E.), warfare was ritualized, legitimacy symbolically upheld by the Zhou king. But as the old order weakened, the Warring States period (approximately 475 to 221 B.C.E.) emerged. It was a time of classic anarchy marked by intense competition, innovation, and systemic transformation. Legalism, meritocracy, military standardization and bureaucratic statecraft all took shape in this crucible. The end of ritual was also the beginning of modern governance.

Trump’s dramatic change to tariff policy signaled a clear turn to aggressive economic nationalism and demonstrates a worldview shaped by what I call “Warring States” logic. Trump’s trade policy bypasses multilateralism, instead compelling each country to negotiate bilaterally — on America’s terms. In doing so, Trump is not merely reacting to a broken global order. He is forcing others into an entirely new one.

This deeper shift reflects a redefinition of how power is structured and projected. It erodes the hub-and-spoke system centered on institutions like the United Nations and the World Trade Organization (WTO), replacing it with a peer-to-peer network of transactional relationships. In this emerging order, states act more like strategic actors in a fragmented landscape or rival feudal lords on a decentralized map of shifting power. Whether by design or instinct, this represents Trump’s Warring States-style realignment: direct, disruptive and structurally transformative.

Trumpism does not merely reject global liberalism; it reimagines the architecture of American power. Its core instinct is not isolationist or nihilistic, but fundamentally opposed to established diplomatic norms and rituals, a deliberate departure from the old ways of seeking consensus. In this worldview, legitimacy comes not from international approval but from output: industrial strength, cultural cohesion and strategic clarity. Rituals are not something to be respected, but to be bypassed.

This mindset did not emerge in a vacuum. For much of the postwar era, the U.S.-led international order resembled China’s Spring and Autumn period — a fragile yet enduring balance, upheld by norms, rituals and symbolic legitimacy. Henry Kissinger, the era’s foremost architect in foreign policy, believed in ambiguity, restraint and equilibrium. Institutions like the U.N. played the role of a Zhou king, lacking hard power but commanding deference. Even amid Cold War tension, the world remained rule-bound. Red lines held, backchannels worked, deterrence was mutual.

But the Zhou world is gone. Trumpism marks not an aberration but an inflection point, a recognition that fewer actors obey the old rites, and those who still do risk irrelevance. Like the Zhou order before it, today’s international system is fading not because of ideological rebellion but because its underlying conditions no longer hold. Perhaps from Trump’s perspective, tariff wars were a response to these changing conditions. Institutions like the WTO, he argued, no longer ensured reciprocity, and growing trade imbalances reflected how the liberal economic order had failed to protect national interests.

The transition from the Spring and Autumn period to the Warring States was far more than a change in political climate; it marked one of the most profound systemic shifts in Chinese history. Influential Marxist historian Guo Moruo characterized this era as involving a fundamental transformation that reshaped modes of production, social hierarchies and the very basis of legitimacy over centuries. It represented a deep pivot driven by new material and strategic realities — the spread of iron tools and weapons, mass-produced crossbows, horseback riding and large-scale irrigation — that rendered the old Zhou rituals obsolete. This historical lens suggests that today’s global shift is not merely about changing alliances or rhetoric, but about a deeper, structural and potentially epochal turn.

The Cold War is over. The Warring States have returned.

Who Is Qin?

Trump’s proposed purchase of Greenland, his threats to allies over defense spending and his unilateral withdrawals from major agreements are not anomalies. They reflect a worldview in which statecraft is no longer about upholding norms, but about renegotiating leverage. For Trump, NATO, the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) and the Paris climate agreement are not binding commitments but simply contracts subject to exit or revision. His across-the-board tariffs from April follow the same playbook. Last week, after Beijing moved to tighten export controls on rare-earth magnets, Trump threatened tariffs of up to 100% on Chinese imports. Trump’s method is not Cold War diplomacy but rather the logic of a fragmented strategic landscape: confront strategic peers, coerce smaller players and reconfigure the playing field.

China and the United States are now essentially accusing each other of being Qin: the hard, efficient, norm-breaking state that conquered six kingdoms to unify China in 221 B.C.E. And perhaps both are right. Each is gravitating toward a model that prioritizes internal control, technological dominance and narrative power over international consensus. This convergence reflects how great powers make cost-benefit choices under strategic pressure, especially when they begin to think with a Warring States mentality — focusing on their own survival in a low-trust environment.

The United States, drawing on its scale and historic dominance, is acting more like Qin than it admits. It rewrites rules, rebuilds industrial capacity at home and hints at conditioning alliances on alignment and great burden-sharing. Under Trump, the coercive elements of American power, once veiled in diplomacy, are now laid openly on the table. China, with its centralized authority and long-term planning, reflects Qin’s strategic patience. It has expanded its naval power, extended its geoeconomic influence via the Belt and Road Initiative and developed new mechanisms of control, including export controls on strategic materials and cross-border law-enforcement measures affecting diaspora communities.

Smaller Qins are emerging, too. Russia, though weaker, has adopted a similar logic: at times retreating from multilateral commitments, seizing territory and acting unilaterally. Israel, facing what it calls existential threats, along with reduced external restraint, has leaned toward unilateral action in pursuit of strategic depth and deterrence. Both follow the logic of structural siege: act preemptively before geopolitical space narrows. These states are not anomalies. They are structural products of a world without a credible Zhou. The new Warring States system incentivizes Qin-like behavior: preempt, absorb or consolidate rivals, and act decisively.

With the decline of American-led multilateralism, the symbolic Zhou order is fading. The U.N., WTO and Bretton Woods institutions no longer hold the unifying sway they once did. What remains is not Cold War-style bipolarity, but a polycentric contest of rival Qins.

To extend the analogy, today’s major powers can be loosely compared to states from the Warring States era (Qin to the far west, Chu to the south, Qi on the eastern coast, Yan to the northeast, and the central-plains trio Han, Zhao, Wei), each with a distinct strategic profile.

Europe resembles the partitioned remnants of Jin, a once-powerful north-central state whose collapse and subsequent division into three weaker entities (Han, Zhao and Wei) is often taken to mark the start of the Warring States period. Japan, diminished in geopolitical clout but resilient in technological and commercial infrastructure, plays a role akin to Qi, a wealthy coastal power in the east: militarily constrained yet indispensable for its salt, iron and trade.

The Islamic world mirrors the southern state of Chu: a sprawling, diverse civilization that was once seen by northern powers as culturally alien or inferior and labeled the “southern barbarian.” Yet it wielded immense cultural vitality, military strength and strategic depth. Likewise, today, Islamic countries remain underestimated by the major powers, but their demographic weight, ideological intensity and geographic centrality make them a latent force in shaping the global order. Other strategically pivotal actors, such as India, Canada, Australia, South Korea and Vietnam, resemble Yan: peripheral yet adaptable, and often playing outsized roles in shaping balance at critical junctures.

Contemporary populist strategists echo elements of Shang Yang, the radical Qin reformer who championed centralization and legalist discipline. Trump, in this analogy, resembles Lü Buwei — the ambitious merchant who rose not through aristocratic lineage but through bold maneuvering, opportunism and a shrewd grasp of leverage. Lü brought a trader’s instincts into a warrior bureaucracy, much as Trump injected transactional thinking into the strategic imagination of American statecraft. Both were disruptive, theatrical and instrumental in reshaping their respective systems, pursuing rule-rewriting to lock in future advantage.

In this light, the “Make America Great Again” movement is less a conservative restoration than a strategic recalibration rooted in the logic of the Warring States. It tends to favor unilateralism over consensus, conditional alliances over norms and the pursuit of dominance over the maintenance of the international order.

Shifting Powers, New Rules

The Warring States period was a quintessential case of international anarchy. With no overarching authority, each state acted according to its own survival calculus, much like today’s global order. Traditional balance-of-power theory suggests that weaker states will band together to check the rise of a hegemon. But history tells a more sobering story. The Qin did not rise because balance worked; it rose because it learned how to break nearly every alliance in its way. This historical irony has long haunted strategists. Political scientists like Henry Kissinger, Zbigniew Brzezinski and Joseph Nye each offered different answers to the problem of order without empire. But as multilateralism falters, their assumptions are under renewed strain.

Kissinger’s approach to diplomacy centered on maintaining global stability by balancing great-power relationships and avoiding open conflict. Rooted in realist thought, it emphasized equilibrium, restraint and the ritualized management of rivalry. In this sense, his worldview echoed elements of the Spring and Autumn periods in ancient China, when states adhered to formal hierarchies and codes of conduct to preserve a fragile peace amid recurrent armed clashes.

But in today’s emerging Warring States-like environment, with multilateral institutions weakening and great-power competition increasingly zero-sum, Kissinger’s framework may no longer be sufficient. The speed, intensity and asymmetry of modern rivalries demand more adaptive strategies. Brzezinski’s Cold War vision similarly relied on durable alliances to balance against adversaries like the Soviet Union. Yet in today’s world of fragmented power and shifting loyalties, alliances are proving more fragile.

As in the Warring States period, where diplomacy was often undercut by betrayal and realignment, collective security strategies are increasingly undermined by diverging national interests and strategic mistrust. The Hezong (“vertical alliance”) was a coalition of Qin’s rivals — principally Qi, Chu, Zhao and Wei — championed by the strategist Su Qin (no connection to the Qin state). Although Su Qin initially persuaded these states to unite against the Qin state, the alliance soon unraveled under pressure, as the state of Qin exploited internal divisions and picked off members one by one. The same logic plays out today, where coalition-building can struggle to withstand the strain of asymmetric interests and coercive leverage that is wielded by dominant powers. For example, within the Quadrilateral Security Dialogue (comprised of the United States, Japan, India and Australia), India’s posture toward Russia has at times diverged from that of its partners, testing the cohesion of the coalition.

The theory of complex interdependence, developed by political scientists Robert Keohane and Nye, posited that dense economic and institutional ties among states could diminish the utility of military force and make cooperation a more rational path to mutual gain. Nye later expanded this logic into his influential theory of “soft power,” emphasizing the ability to shape global outcomes through appeal and emulation grounded in culture, values and institutional legitimacy rather than coercion. These frameworks flourished during the high tide of globalization, when multilateralism and integration seemed to promise a more stable world order.

Today, however, those ideals are fraying. In a world increasingly marked by zero-sum rivalries, technological decoupling and hardened geopolitical lines, soft power alone is no longer sufficient. Even the United States, though still the leading exporter of soft power, has retreated from its interdependence agenda, dismantling the U.S.Agency for International Development (USAID) and shifting toward industrial policy, techno-nationalism, and hard-power deterrence. What was once a contest of influence is becoming a competition of capacity.

In contrast to Kissinger, Brzezinski and Nye, political scientist John Mearsheimer’s theory of offensive realism offers a starker lens through which to view today’s global dynamics. Mearsheimer argues that international politics is fundamentally zero-sum without a central authority, with great powers compelled to maximize their relative strength in order to survive and deter challengers. His framework calls for assertive strategies, a focus on hard power and a readiness to override existing norms when strategic advantage is at stake. In today’s unraveling international system, Mearsheimer’s vision appears increasingly prescient. Success depends less on restraint and more on agility, coercive capacity and the ability to project credible power.

This dynamic closely resembles the late Warring States period of ancient China. Although the Qin was widely recognized as the greatest threat, rival states failed to sustain collective resistance. Instead, they remained locked in short-term struggles, seizing cities from one another, shifting alliances opportunistically and undermining regional balance. In Mearsheimer’s framework, this behavior is not irrational but structural. In an anarchic order, even existential threats rarely override the drive for relative gains. Cooperation breaks down not because of a lack of foresight, but because trust cannot be enforced.

While neorealism explains the inevitability of great power rivalry, neoclassical realism helps us understand why systemic stress often leads not only to external conflict but also to internal experimentation. When institutional adaptation proves insufficient, states begin to turn to new ideas, redefining not just their policies but the very logic of governance. The Warring States period exemplifies this dynamic: it produced a fierce competition of ideologies such as Confucianism, Legalism and Mohism, each of which advanced a distinct incentive structure for political behavior. Rather than a static multipolar balance, the system resembled a multi-agent reinforcement learning environment in which states, operating under partial information, continuously adjusted their institutional strategies in response to both systemic pressures and the evolving moves of their peers. The result was not equilibrium but a turbulent ecology of adaptive innovation.

Through strategic deception, institutional coherence and a superior legal-bureaucratic framework, Qin systematically dismantled multilateral coalitions and neutralized each counterweight in its path. Its decisive edge lay not merely in military might, but in the Legalist system that enabled rule-based governance, standardized administration, consistent rewards for performance as well as harsh punishments for rule violation. This internal coherence allowed Qin to align incentives, scale innovations and integrate logistics at a level unmatched by its rivals. In a fractured and competitive system, such adaptability can overpower even the most coordinated balancing efforts, suggesting that long-term stability hinges not just on power distribution but on institutional innovation.

A similar dynamic may be unfolding in today’s fractured world. Rather than settling into stable multipolarity, the global system may tilt toward whichever model proves most adaptive and exportable. Just as the Qin model outlasted the dynasty that created it and shaped Chinese governance for two millennia, the dominant political framework of this era may survive well beyond the state or regime that first established it. In an age where distance no longer restrains influence and alliances are fragile, it is institutional design, not raw strength, that may determine the next global order.

The Return Of The Unrestrained State

One of the most widely accepted theories in postwar international relations has been the Democratic Peace Theory, which holds that democracies almost never war with one another. Some may argue that democratic institutions temper aggressive statecraft, holding leaders accountable and encouraging restraint, but in a Warring States world, strategic imperatives can override internal constraints.

In moments of heightened geopolitical competition, democratic institutions may still produce leaders who act unilaterally or coercively. The United States, for example, has shown renewed interest in direct asset acquisition and strategic control. Under Trump, the United States floated the idea of purchasing Greenland, questioned the neutrality of the Panama Canal and proposed reshaping alliances based on transactional compliance. These were not mere diplomatic eccentricities. They reflected a broader shift toward a hard-power mindset, even within a democracy.

In such an environment, the incentives for maximizing power begin to outweigh ideological constraints. The line between democracy and autocracy becomes less about internal governance and more about how a state pursues power abroad, as even democratic leaders, operating in an anarchic international system, may act unilaterally when opportunities arise. A Qin-like state is not distinguished by how it votes, but by how it competes — through coercion, innovation and the erosion of norms to secure advantage.

This points to a deeper structural argument. In an anarchic international system without a credible hegemon, all states, regardless of their regime type, may be drawn toward a realpolitik approach. Democracy may provide resilience and legitimacy at home, but it no longer guarantees moderation abroad. If the strategic environment rewards offensive action, even democracies will adapt.

In the end, democratic peace may have been a luxury of the Spring and Autumn era, the period preceding the Warring States, sustained less by the absence of war than by relative stability and shared norms. In a Warring States world, survival depends less on internal values than on external capabilities.

This shift has resurrected the centrality of the state. For decades after the Cold War, many believed that globalization and transnational institutions would dilute sovereignty. The political commentator Thomas Friedman declared the world “flat.” British political economist Susan Strange warned about the retreat of the state. But in today’s Warring States environment, the state is not fading. It is returning with force.

One of the clearest signs of this return is in the realm of technological sovereignty. Artificial intelligence, semiconductors, quantum computing and biotech are no longer seen as commercial frontiers alone. They are treated as instruments of national power. The United States’ CHIPS and Science Act and China’s Made in China 2025 plan exemplify this race for tech dominance. The ability to control data, compute and algorithms is increasingly analogous to the control of oil in the 20th century and of iron during the Warring States period. AI governance, once thought to be the domain of open collaboration, is now framed as a race among rival powers.

States are also reclaiming control over strategic supply chains. The pandemic, the war in Ukraine and rising tensions over Taiwan have exposed the fragility of economic interdependence. As a result, industrial policy has returned. Washington is subsidizing semiconductor manufacturing; Beijing is accelerating the development of its domestic tech stack. In an era when de-risking (and, in some quarters, decoupling) is no longer taboo, supply chains are no longer viewed as neutral pathways but as instruments of influence and resilience.

At the same time, the boundary between public and private power is shifting. Tech giants once saw themselves as stateless actors. Today, their infrastructures are increasingly regarded as national security assets. In the United States, firms like OpenAI and Nvidia are closely aligned with government strategy. This alignment became explicit when Washington converted previously committed CHIPS support into a 9.9% equity stake in Intel, making the government a significant shareholder. In China, companies such as Huawei and ByteDance operate under the scrutiny of the party-state. Both the U.S. and Chinese governments are now deeply involved in the proposed sale of TikTok. Meanwhile, nongovernmental organizations face growing constraints, including reduced funding, such as through the dismantling of USAID and increased scrutiny in countries like India, diminishing their global influence. This growing convergence between national policy and corporate capability suggests that the real unit of competition is no longer the company but the state.

In short, the world is not just becoming more fragmented. It is becoming more state-centric. Governance models, innovation capacity and strategic autonomy are no longer abstract policy goals. They have become conditions for survival. The return of the state does not signal a return to the past. It reflects a shift toward a new strategic landscape, where adaptability is the ultimate currency of power.

Survival Through Innovation

In the Warring States period, dominance came less from charisma than from scalable capacity: ironworking that enabled mass weapon production, discipline in drilled armies and institutional reform — including standardized laws and measures, county administration and merit-based ranks. These turned resources into deployable power, enabling rapid mobilization and battlefield wins. In the future, it may come from AI, not merely as a weapon but as an integrated system of perception, decision-making and governance.

If one nation builds an AI architecture a generation ahead of others, the resulting asymmetry could resemble the technological gap of the first Gulf War, when in 1991 U.S.-led forces used precision-guided munitions and satellite coordination to decisively overwhelm Iraqi defenses. But today’s stakes are far greater. The winner of the AI race could shape conflicts or entire systems of influence before others even grasp what is unfolding.

In the classical Warring States era, Qin unified China through force and reform. In the AI-driven world to come, dominance may not depend on territory, but on embedding systems and setting the standards that others must follow. Technology has redefined the physics of power. Distance no longer constrains influence. Data, infrastructure, finance and ideology now project power globally, at low cost and without physical presence.

Unlike physical empires, AI can cross borders invisibly. A sufficiently advanced governance system that combines language models, surveillance, predictive analytics and logistical control can dominate not through war but by embedding itself into the critical systems of other states. This is already taking shape, with examples including China’s LOGINK port-logistics platform, which aggregates port-call, vessel-movement, and cargo-flow data across participating hubs and has drawn U.S. government bans and warnings about data and operational dependencies, as well as the U.K.’s award of the National Health Service England Federated Data Platform to U.S. firm Palantir and its partners, controversial amid privacy concerns and the company’s long-standing U.S. defense and intelligence ties.

In such a world, the leading AI model may not need to fire a shot. It could preempt deterrence, distort communications and shape outcomes faster than human systems can respond. Retaliation becomes irrelevant if threats are neutralized before they are understood. What follows may not be a Pax Americana or Pax Sinica but a Pax Algorithmica. A world coordinated through a dominant AI system. States may retain flags and parliaments, but sovereignty may become symbolic.

That cooperative equilibrium, like the Zhou order before the Warring States, has begun to unravel. As technological stakes rise and AI becomes the new frontier, the contest is no longer about shaping shared standards but about securing unilateral advantage. What comes next resembles not protocol-driven consensus, but the logic of strategic rupture.

The first half of the contemporary technological revolution was defined by the internet and mobile connectivity, systems based on protocols that supported globalization and multinational organizations. This era was characterized by cooperation and interconnectedness, similar to the Spring and Autumn period in ancient China, where rival powers competed within a shared framework of legitimacy and norms. In telecom, major powers like China, the United States, Europe and Japan competed fiercely over standards and patents but did so within a framework of shared rules and procedural legitimacy. Influence was earned through participation, negotiation and adherence to common protocols. Legitimacy mattered, processes were followed and dominance came through consensus and protocol, not disruption. However, that equilibrium has now collapsed.

We are now entering the second half of this technological revolution: the era of artificial intelligence. This stage is characterized by intensified competition and ruthless rivalry. The AI race, particularly among large language models, is fragmented, unsanctioned and accelerating, resembling the Warring States period at its most elemental. States and firms no longer wait for agreement. They iterate, deploy and redefine the rules as they go. The race for AI supremacy will dominate future global power struggles, with AI emerging as the modern “iron,” just as it propelled Qin to power during the Warring States period. The nation that can out-innovate its rivals may rise to global preeminence.

In today’s global AI race, victory will not go to the nation with the most wealth or the largest chip reserves. It will go to the one with the most adaptive system — politically, institutionally and cognitively. Like the AI models they seek to build, states must be able to learn, iterate and self-correct. Political rigidity stifles innovation; responsiveness accelerates it. The countries that foster the best environments for experimentation, scientific discovery and continuous improvement will define the technological frontier.

The Warring States era serves as an apt analogy for what lies ahead, where different governance models must compete openly, just like competing AI models. Each of the seven major states ran its own political experiment, creating a vibrant laboratory of governance. Some focused on legal and bureaucratic reform: Qin implemented a rigid legalist order under its influential minister Shang Yang; Wei produced an early systematic legal code under the statesman Li Kui; and Han honed its statecraft using bureaucratic techniques developed by Chancellor Shen Buhai.

Others prioritized military innovation. The southern state of Chu experimented with military egalitarianism under the general Wu Qi, while Zhao’s King Wuling radically transformed his army by adopting the superior cavalry tactics of his nomadic neighbors. Still others focused on different strengths: Yan relied on the coalition diplomacy of its general Yue Yi, while the wealthy coastal state of Qi fostered intellectual pluralism by hosting thinkers of diverse schools at its famous Jixia Academy. Together, they formed the most concentrated political laboratory in ancient history.

Today, the contest has returned. States are competing to define the architecture of the future. For years, global discourse revolved around the Washington Consensus and the China model. Now, what prevails may not be the most admired but the most functional. And when one system pulls decisively ahead, others may not resist. They may convert. This was the logic behind Qin’s triumph. Its model outperformed the rest not because it was loved, but because it worked.

The most effective political systems in this new Warring States era may resemble AI models: adaptive, iterative and responsive to feedback. China once thrived on this flexibility during the Deng era of the late 1970s through the 1990s, when the country opened up its economy and encouraged experimentation, but now it struggles to balance centralization with innovation. The United States, long admired for institutional reinvention, now faces mounting internal gridlock, casting doubt on its capacity for renewal. In the long run, it is not ideology or force that will define the global order, but which model proves most adaptable. And in that race, history offers no guarantees.

The Most Luminous Of All Times

But adaptability alone cannot be the final measure of success. Even in a Warring States world, humans still yearn for what is just. Ancient thinkers like the Chinese philosopher Mencius believed that yi, or righteousness, was not merely a social construct but an intrinsic part of human nature.

Even amid ruthless competition, people retain what Mencius called a heart that cannot bear the suffering of others, which he identified as the “sprout of benevolence.” This is not a sign of weakness, but the foundation of righteous politics. Justice is not the opposite of effectiveness. It is what allows systems to endure beyond victory. History does not only reward the strong, but also those who can turn power into legitimacy. Strategic necessity may override sentiment, but it does not erase conscience. The next global order will not only need to function; it must also be fair.

In ancient China, the chaos of the Warring States period gave rise not only to dominant powers but to a new political class: the shi, wandering scholars, strategists and reformers who transcended their birth and borders to shape visions of governance, ethics and legitimacy. Rulers competed to attract these minds, and the era became the most fertile intellectual laboratory in Chinese history. Figures like political strategists Zhang Yi, Fan Ju, and the Legalist reformer Shang Yang, moved across rival courts and rose to Qin’s chancellorship, offering not just tactics but also new theories of rule. It was an age when ideas operated as instruments of power: alliance schemes, codified legal and administrative reforms and new military doctrines were proposed by itinerant thinkers and then quickly implemented, often determining war or survival.

Today’s fractured world may catalyze a similar emergence. As institutions erode and traditional elites falter, a new global shi class may rise, not bound by noble lineage or national borders, but drawn from technologists, policy thinkers, builders and founders who shape systems across sectors and geographies.

Yet the parallels are not perfect. Whereas ancient thinkers could traverse states freely, today’s world is defined by visa restrictions, classified research, ideological suspicion and growing techno-nationalism. Even as digital tools connect more people than ever, knowledge is increasingly fenced off by states — for example, U.S.–China scientific collaboration has declined since the pandemic amid tighter national-security controls, even as collaboration remains high in some other regions and fields.

The new shi will need more than brilliance. They must navigate ideological, institutional and computational systems to have political impact. These individuals may not cross borders to become prime ministers, as their Warring States predecessors did, but their ideas may travel through algorithms, protocols and networks to shape how societies govern and adapt. As these new shi shape ideas that travel beyond borders, their legacies may not be in their titles or offices, but in the systems they help design.

In the long run, the most hopeful outcome of this Warring States era may not be a new hegemon but a new kind of order, without kings and without emperors. Power may no longer lie in conquest but in coherence. Not in dominance but in design. Just as the last Axial Age gave us philosophies of virtue and justice, perhaps this one will yield protocols of resilience and coordination. The architecture of tomorrow may look less like an empire and more like a Transformer model, an AI architecture built on attention, alignment and self-organization. Perhaps a Web 4.0 — a speculative symbiotic web in which humans and AI co-evolve — will not merely replace platforms but reimagine politics itself.

This may sound distant or utopian, especially in a moment often defined by fatigue. In China, a saying has gained popularity: “This year will be the best of the next 10.” It reflects not hope, but exhaustion, a sense of decline and foreboding. But perhaps the diagnosis is premature. What we are entering may not be a collapse, but a modeling epoch: a new Warring States world, chaotic and cruel, but also luminous. For those who think in systems and build in code, this is not the end of history. It is its recommencement.

The Warring States era was not only an age of war. It was an age of brilliance. During the political upheaval of that period, Chinese civilization produced some of its greatest minds: Mencius, Zhuangzi, Han Feizi, and Mozi, whose frameworks still shape political and moral reasoning today. Philosopher Karl Jaspers called this broader phenomenon the Axial Age, when societies across China, India, Persia, Judea, and Greece simultaneously reinvented what it meant to be human. Philosophy, justice and law did not arise from peace, but from rupture.

More than two millennia after Jaspers’ Axial Age, we may be entering another globally synchronized rethink. With no shared ideology and dwindling trust in inherited institutions, humanity is being forced back to first principles. What is justice? What deserves to endure? Questions of AI ethics, political legitimacy and governance are no longer academic. They are civilizational. The true contest ahead is between systems that adapt and systems that ossify. The ruthless may win battles, but the adaptable win eras and the just endure. This is not a dark age. It is a time worthy of living.

Editor’s Note: Noema is transparent about the use of AI in any of its pieces. We publish original human-generated ideas but allow authorized, disclosed use of AI in certain cases. The initial submitted draft of this piece utilized ChatGPT as an editorial assistant and translator to help convey Chinese concepts more clearly in English, so as to express the author’s original, human-generated ideas more effectively.

Specifically, it was used to generate section headings, suggest transitions and reduce repetition, as well as for line edits to improve clarity and flow in the initial draft. It was not used to originate facts; all claims and examples are drawn from the author’s own notes and publicly available sources, and were reviewed and edited by the author himself first. This draft has since received multiple human edits. Noema verified the author’s identity and the piece’s conceptual originality using various scanners and review processes and conducted a detailed human fact-check. See our AI policy here.

The post Welcome To The New Warring States appeared first on NOEMA.

This could only be achieved, as he saw it, if his nation firmly anchored itself in “the West” through a liberal democratic constitution in a Federal Republic cemented by Atlanticist ties to America.

For Habermas, the way to detach allegiance from association with the ethnic nation and Volk was what he called “constitutional patriotism.” In other words, loyalty to democratic institutions and norms over and above any nativist appeal to the authoritarian tribal politics of us versus them. Though Habermas understood democracy could be improved through more deliberative practices, this baseline was for him what would make Germany “truly Western.”

It is therefore no small irony that, on the 35th anniversary celebration of the post-Cold War unification of Germany last week in Saarbrücken, the present chancellor, Friedrich Merz, was compelled to defend liberal democracy “as a way of life,” not least against the threat emanating from America these days.

In effect, the tables have turned: Once prodigal Germany now hopes America will remain anchored in the West as it steadily lurches toward illiberal democracy at home and wobbles on defending Ukraine and the rest of Europe from Russian aggression.

“The centers of power in the world are shifting to an extent not seen since the end of the Cold War,” Merz observed. “An axis of autocratic states that challenges the liberal order around the world is directly challenging Western democracies. That is why we must regain the ability to defend our freedom. … The radiance of what we in the West call liberal democracy is noticeably diminishing. It is no longer a given that the world will orient itself toward us, that it will follow our values of liberal democracy.”

Though obviously referring to Russia and China, previous comments by Merz leave little doubt that he also had America in mind. The U.S “has changed so fundamentally over the last few years, perhaps decades, that rules are no longer being followed, parliamentary democracy is under pressure, freedom of expression is being called into question, and the independence of the judiciary is being repressed,” he told a business conference in Berlin in September.

The Dark Enlightenment

French President Emmanuel Macron followed up Merz’s remarks in Saarbrücken with equal alarm about “the degeneration of democracy” across the West.

Beyond threats from the outside, he warned, “on the inside we are turning on ourselves; we doubt our own democracy. We see everywhere that something is happening to our democratic fabric. Democratic debate is turning into a debate of hatred.”

He continued: “We’ve been incredibly naïve, handing over our public democratic space to social networks owned by big American entrepreneurs and Chinese firms whose interests are not at all the survival and the good functioning of our democracy.”

Macron even raised the specter of “the return of the Dark Enlightenment” of authoritarianism. In the present-day context, the “Dark Enlightenment” refers to a movement that promotes an alliance of autocrats and Silicon Valley AI accelerationists to more efficiently run societies like corporations, with a decisive authoritarian CEO, algorithms that replace democratic deliberation and a belief in technological solutions to all of humanity’s problems.

The French president called on Europeans to mount a “resurgence” to “rebuild a 21st-century democracy” if “we want science, culture, education and learning to be at the heart of the public space.” Otherwise, he said, “we risk becoming a continent, like many others, of conspiracy theorists, extremes, noise, and fury.”

Patriotism In Diverse Societies

Habermas formulated his theory of “constitutional patriotism” as a historical response to an authoritarian ideology of racial superiority in what was then a largely homogenous society. It was conceived as a brake against any temptation to succumb once again to the siren call of the Volksgeist transmuted into aggressive nationalism.

Yet, the idea of constitutional patriotism that Habermas believed would make his nation “truly Western” could also serve today as a guiding political philosophy and rallying cry of the oppositional forces to the relentless creep of illiberalism in the most diverse of all nations: America.

If allegiance to individual rights, due process under the rule of law, the separation of powers, judicial independence and free expression are what constitute the West and distinguish it from the axis of authoritarianism, then defending constitutional rule is the most patriotic stance Americans from all walks of life can take.

That it is has fallen to Germans to remind America of what the West is all about suggests we have come full circle to a point where the most ardent pupils of democracy must now tutor their mentors who seem to have forgotten the lessons they once taught so well.

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What was true for France then is true today for the European Union, as China and America dominate AI. The continent cannot achieve strategic autonomy as a sovereign entity unless it joins the club with its own significant capacity.

American Big Tech already dominates Europe, which has struggled to start up its own industry, with the exceptions of the French company, Mistral AI, and the critical Dutch manufacturer of high-end chips, ASML. In the U.S., OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, DeepMind, Amazon, Meta and Nvidia are spending hundreds of billions on AI research and infrastructure. Driven by state investment, China is spending comparative billions and has shown its ability to compete globally through open-source AI models such as DeepSeek.

AI differs from nuclear weapons because it is a foundational technology that will transform all aspects of life. As such, it is not merely a technological achievement, but a cultural project. It is here that Europe’s precautionary temperament clashes with the accelerationist fever of Silicon Valley.

Does this place Europe at a competitive disadvantage that will fatally impede its advance in AI? Or will Europe’s deliberative vigilance save humanity from handing over the keys of the kingdom to intelligent machines?

The core conflict between America and its European geopolitical allies is their differing approaches to AI; the former seeks to “build first, regulate later,” while the latter seeks to “regulate first, build later.”

To explore this divergence within the West, Noema invited two top thinkers on technology to debate the topic. Benjamin Bratton directs the Antikythera project on planetary-scale computation. Francesca Bria is Barcelona’s former chief technology and innovation officer. Their exchange is more polemical than Noema’s tone usually accommodates, an expression of the passions aroused when the stakes are so high.

When The Precautionary Principle Backfires

Bratton maintains that Europe’s “regulate first, build later (maybe)” approach is backfiring, only resulting in “greater dependency and frustration, rather than any hoped-for technological sovereignty.”

As he sees it, “Europe choked its own creative engineering pipeline with regulation and paralysis by consensus. The precautionary delay was successfully narrated by a Critique Industry that monopolized both academia and public discourse. Oxygen and resources were monopolized by endless stakeholder working groups, debates about omnibus legislation and symposia about resistance — all incentivizing European talent to flee and American and Chinese platforms to fill the gaps.”

Bratton analogizes Europe’s present wariness of AI with how it killed the nuclear power industry in recent decades (outside of France), only to end up being dependent on Russian oil and gas for energy.

The lesson he draws for Europe is that it must not repeat its mistakes. “Do not ban, throttle or demonize a new general-purpose technology with tremendous potential just because it also implies risk. The precautionary principle can be literally fatal. And yet that is precisely what is happening around the newest emerging technological battleground: artificial intelligence. The same terms used to vilify nuclear power — ‘techno-fascist,’ ‘extractive,’ ‘existential risk,’ ‘Promethean madness’ and ‘fantasy’— are now regularly voiced by today’s Critique Industry to describe AI. …

“Europe surely can and should regulate the emergence of AI according to its ‘values,’ but it must also be aware that you can’t always get what you want. Europe is free to attempt to legislate its preferred technologies into existence, but that doesn’t mean that the planetary evolution of these technologies will cooperate. …It is up to Europe to decide. That is, Europe may have strong AI regulation, but this may actually prevent the AI it wants from being realized at all (again making it more reliant on American and Chinese platforms). Europe has the right to put its AI under ‘democratic control’ and supervised ‘consent’ if it wants to, but it does not have a right to be insulated from the consequences of doing so.”

In short, the accelerationists have all the momentum wherever the flow of capital is abundant and regulation is scarce. 

Digital Colonization & Infrastructure Dependency

For Bria, “Europe occupies a paradoxical position: a regulatory leader but an infrastructural dependent. We Europeans have set global standards through GDPR and the AI Act. Our research institutions remain world-class. Yet just 4% of global cloud infrastructure is European-owned. European governments, businesses and citizens depend entirely on systems controlled by Amazon, Microsoft, Google and other companies subject to the U.S. CLOUD Act’s extraterritorial surveillance requirements. When we use ‘our’ digital services, we’re actually using American infrastructure governed by American law for American interests.

“This dependency isn’t abstract — it’s existential. In the 21st century, those who control digital infrastructure control the conditions of possibility for democracy itself. Europe faces a choice: build sovereign technological capacity or accept digital colonization.”

Bria doesn’t hold back: “Many blame Europe’s digital paralysis on its critical intellectuals — those who push back against Silicon Valley accelerationism, crypto hyper-libertarianism and the rise of techno-authoritarianism. But this is misdirected. …The real choice facing Europe isn’t between criticism and construction but between authoritarian technological models or democratic alternatives.”

The European model, she argues, “differs fundamentally from Silicon Valley’s extractive optimization and Beijing’s state control. Europe should start from local demands and strengths, building AI as critical public infrastructure that serves democratic accountability, social purpose and citizen empowerment — rather than shareholder primacy or state surveillance. When critics dismiss this approach as inefficient, they only expose their ideological commitment to oligopolistic concentration.

“The difference isn’t capability but values and political imagination. Silicon Valley optimizes for extraction — how to capture maximum value from users. Europe optimizes for empowerment — how to distribute agency across society. These aren’t compatible goals, which is why importing Silicon Valley’s model would mean abandoning European democracy. …

“Critics present false choices: either embrace Silicon Valley’s model or abandon technological ambition. Either accept surveillance capitalism and digital colonialism or abandon digital transformation. Either submit to what some refer to as ‘planetary evolution’ or retreat to analog irrelevance. These binaries serve those benefiting from current arrangements by making alternatives seem impossible.”

Rather than becoming marginalized, Bria envisions that “Europe’s constraints will become competitive advantages” if AI infrastructure “operates within planetary boundaries while serving democratic rather than extractive purposes. When data centers must run on clean electricity, when water consumption faces strict limits and when carbon pricing reflects true costs.”

Europe’s Vocation

It is safe to say that Bria encapsulates the general European temper. Jacques Attali, the founder and first president of the European Bank for Reconstruction and Development, echoes her claims in more philosophical terms. AI, he has recently written, “is the most radical upheaval humanity has ever known: a shift from the logic of tools to the logic of minds. A moment where decisions are taken before we think, where desires are anticipated before they are born, and where the boundaries between freedom and prediction, between democracy and algorithm, blur into opacity.

“In this grand transformation of AI,” he continued, “the role of Europe is not to dominate, but to orient. Not to build the biggest servers, but to write the rules that will preserve our humanity. Not to chase others’ empires, but to become the guardian of meaning in a world flooded with data.

“Europe has always had this singular vocation: to think about the world before transforming it. In the face of artificial intelligence, it is once again Europe’s task not to slow down progress, but to ensure that progress remains human. …Its regulations classify risks, set boundaries, prohibit surveillance dystopias, and affirm that some technologies, however efficient, have no place in a democratic society. Thus, Europe sets a precedent: a civilization where machines are not above the law, and where the digital world adheres to the same moral imperatives as the physical one.

“AI systems learn, decide, recommend, and exclude — sometimes without anyone understanding why. Europe refuses this opacity. It demands transparency, explicability, and accountability — principles that seem philosophical, but are deeply political. What is at stake is the very notion of justice. In tomorrow’s world, a decision to grant a loan, assign a school, detect a crime, or prescribe a treatment may be made by a machine. The EU reminds us that a decision is only legitimate if it can be explained, challenged, and appealed. It affirms that freedom begins where comprehension begins. Elsewhere, AI is seen as a lever of supremacy. In Europe, it is — or should be — viewed as a means to serve the common good.”

America As A Check & Balance On Europe, & Vice-Versa

The issues raised by Attali, Bria and Bratton are being debated the world over as AI penetrates every society. Each is right in their own way. To stall when the U.S. and China are accelerating as a strategic objective, bolstered by immense resources and political will, is to fall so inexorably behind that catching up will be impossible. Yet, the more AI in the mold of the tech superpowers is firmly established, the harder it will be to ever make course corrections and challenge systemic hegemony.

The wise position, as in so much else, would be to not settle on zero-sum convictions but value the creative tension in their opposition. Technological advances, and the risks they always pose, are part and parcel of human becoming. But, so, too, “withholding from becoming” is what makes and keeps us human when the implications and consequences are unclear, but clear enough to raise reasonable concerns.

To date, a kind of division of labor appears to have evolved between relatively young America’s innovative impulse, always conquering new frontiers as the first mover, and Europe’s precautionary instinct cultivated throughout its long past of triumphs and catastrophes.

Diminishing this duality by more evenly sharing each other’s attributes would benefit both. Europe needs America to spur the unleashing of its strangled innovative potential and cannot serve as a counterweight unless it does so. America needs Europe to question and constrain the no-holds-barred hubris bent on moving fast and breaking things without considering how and where the pieces will scatter.

Together, they constitute a necessary check and balance on each other as the global center of gravity shifts East, where an altogether new set of challenges awaits.

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