This article by Christian Angelopoulos was published at Palladium Magazine on September 22, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

Nobody knows what In-N-Out Burger is worth. In 75 years, the family that owns it has never sold a share or taken outside capital, which means there are no reference transactions to value the company against. The company refuses to franchise, sells a menu of roughly four items, pays its associates far above its competitors, prints red Bible verses on its cups, and has spent decades resisting every trend that has hollowed out the American fast food industry. In-N-Out can do all of this for one reason: because it answers to exactly one person, Lynsi Snyder, granddaughter of the founders, who owns it outright.

Then, last July, Lynsi Snyder announced she was moving her family to Tennessee and had decided to establish a second headquarters for In-N-Out there. In explaining the move, she told a podcast host that “there’s a lot of great things about California, but raising a family is not easy here.” Three months later, the initiative that would become Proposition 40 was filed with the California Attorney General.

This November, California will vote on Proposition 40, which would impose a one-time tax of up to five percent on the wealth of the state’s billionaire residents. The debate over Proposition 40 is already familiar to anyone who has followed wealth tax proposals before. Supporters argue that billionaires have disproportionately benefitted from the state’s semiconductor, software, and ongoing artificial intelligence booms, and should provide more resources to the state’s struggling budget and public services. Opponents argue the wealth tax will drive these billionaires out of the state and, by extension, their startups and companies, which will leave California in a massive fiscal and economic hole. Economists are debating revenue estimates, predicting the effects on business formation and investment, and trying to guess which billionaire will leave next. All of these debates share the single assumption that what’s being taxed is just money.

Lynsi has already left California, so the future of In-N-Out is not in jeopardy. Had she stayed, California voters would be deciding the future of a woman whose entire fortune is in a hamburger restaurant that has never taken outside capital. This raises a more fundamental question at the heart of the wealth tax debate that is almost never discussed: what does Lynsi actually own?

What Lynsi Actually Owns

Ownership isn’t as simple as it seems. Consider the founder and controlling shareholder of Acme Corp, a private startup located in California. Let’s call her Alice. Alice started Acme Corp five years ago as a solo founder and, despite multiple rounds of financing, she still holds just over fifty percent of the company. Three months ago, outside investors purchased a one-percent stake in the company through a preferred share transaction that valued the company at $10 billion. Conventionally, we would say this transaction means that Alice is worth $5 billion.

But Alice does not actually have $5 billion. She owns common stock in Acme Corp, a private company with no observable market price. Acme shares do not trade on an exchange, may be subject to transfer restrictions and vesting, and are structurally different from the preferred securities purchased by investors in the last round. The ten-billion-dollar valuation is just an inference from a particular transaction that may not represent the actual fair market value of the company given current market conditions.

Now assume Alice is affected by the wealth tax proposed by Proposition 40. California has to assign Alice’s ownership stake in Acme Corp a value, because the wealth tax requires the state to convert her ownership into a tax liability. In this case, California assesses her stake at $5 billion, creating a tax liability of $250 million, and Alice needs to find the cash somewhere. Because she doesn’t have $250 million sitting in a bank account, she is forced to sell shares of her company on the secondary market.

There is no button Alice can press to sell $250 million worth of shares in a private company. She will need to hire an investment bank, who will try to find buyers willing to spend hundreds of millions of dollars. Someone might hold the right of first refusal on any sale, discouraging other prospective investors from doing the required research to price the transaction and giving that one buyer enormous leverage to dictate terms. The transaction could take months, and Acme’s board might have to approve it. A prospective buyer might demand a board seat or other control rights in exchange for purchasing the shares. In a regulated industry, the government may itself have to approve the buyer. Perhaps the bylaws only allow direct family members to purchase shares, and if no one in the family has $250 million, what can Alice even do? Throughout all of this, every person sitting across the table knows the same thing: she has to sell.

All of this transactional friction is important to frame one point: a price established by a small transaction does not predict the price at which a large block of shares can be sold. The purchase of 1% of a company at a $10 billion valuation does not imply that Alice’s 50% stake can be liquidated for $5 billion. To meet her tax liability, Alice has to liquidate more shares than the headline valuation would suggest. And, in doing so, she reduces her ownership share below the 50% required to maintain control of the company.

At first glance, this looks like a simple and straightforward consequence of the tax. Alice owned $5 billion, paid $250 million in tax, and is left with $4.75 billion. But this description materially misses what Alice actually owned before she sold her shares to meet the tax liability.

Before the sale, Alice possessed the legal authority to control Acme. She could elect its board, appoint its management, determine how its capital was allocated, decide whether profits were distributed or reinvested, or pursue an acquisition. Ultimately, within the limits imposed by the law, contracts, and agreements with other shareholders, Alice could determine the strategic direction of the institution that she founded. After the sale of her shares, she has not merely surrendered $250 million of fungible value, she has surrendered control of her company.

Importantly, her control may itself be reflexively part of what made Acme worth $10 billion, as Alice can commit the company to projects that more diffuse ownership structures might abandon. Acme under Alice’s direct control and Acme without it are not really the same asset. The state has capitalized the value of Alice’s authority over an institution and used that valuation to compel Alice to dilute her control.

This mechanism is generalizable to any illiquid private property. A founder of an illiquid private company owns a set of rights to an asset that is extremely difficult to accurately value. The state has to assign value to that property by estimating the price at which it could hypothetically be sold, even when no comparable transaction has occurred, and ultimately create a liability proportional to the estimated value. Satisfying the liability will likely necessitate the founder alienating some of her shares, and thereby some measure of control, eroding or potentially ending that founder’s sovereignty over the future of the institution.

Ownership is Governance

Wealth is often discussed as though it were just deferred consumption. A person worth $5 billion is imagined to possess reserves of mansions, private jets, luxurious European vacations, and other consumption that he or she has just currently chosen not to enjoy. Under that taxation model, a billionaire wealth tax is just a change in the underlying distribution of consumption, reducing that of billionaires in favor of the objectives of the state.

But founders invest their wealth in entrepreneurial ends. A founder accumulates wealth precisely because he or she does not want to consume the underlying resources. They want to direct them, and the value of their ownership, in large part, represents the ability to keep thousands of people and war chests of capital organized around a singular mission for the organization.

This is what Lynsi Snyder actually owns. In-N-Out can refuse to franchise and pay their managers six figures because In-N-Out is organized around the goal of operating a world-class hamburger restaurant indefinitely. In a 2018 interview in Forbes, she said that In-N-Out was “…not about the money for us,” and that “Unless God sends a lightning bolt down and changes my heart miraculously, I would not ever sell.” Back when Lynsi’s uncle was the owner, he said that the thought of selling In-N-Out “...would be prostituting what my parents made by doing that.”

If she had stayed in California, it’s not hard to imagine what would happen when Proposition 40 passes. She would be forced to sell five percent of her stake in the company. This very first sale to outside investors would require Lynsi to translate the mission of In-N-Out from a company not primarily motivated by the pursuit of profit into a corporation with fiduciary responsibilities to a diffuse set of shareholders. Lynsi would now have to launder her intentions for In-N-Out through the lens of “shareholder value.” Even though her control is lost at 50%, her sovereignty over the business is lost with the first outside investor.

The landmark case of eBay v. Newmark makes this clear. Craig Newmark and Jim Buckmaster, the founder and CEO of Craigslist respectively, were sued by eBay for a breach of fiduciary responsibility. At the time, Jim and Craig together held over seventy percent of Craigslist, and eBay acquired a minority stake from a former third shareholder who wanted to exit his position.

eBay and Craigslist’s controlling shareholders had fundamentally different ideas about how Craigslist should operate. eBay saw Craigslist as a goldmine for ad revenue. Jim and Craig saw Craigslist as a largely free community service and were resistant to eBay’s aggressive attempts to monetize the platform. eBay ended up launching a competitor to Craigslist, and to protect their perceived culture of operating a non-profit-maximizing business, Jim and Craig attempted to adopt a “Rights Plan,” which would de facto prevent eBay from ever acquiring Craigslist.

In a landmark ruling, the Delaware Court of Chancery rejected the preservation of Craigslist’s culture as a valid justification for the plan:

Jim and Craig did prove that they personally believe Craigslist should not be about the business of stockholder wealth maximization, now or in the future. As an abstract matter, there is nothing inappropriate about an organization seeking to aid local, national, and global communities by providing a website for online classifieds that is largely devoid of monetized elements. Indeed, I personally appreciate and admire Jim’s and Craig’s desire to be of service to communities. The corporate form in which Craigslist operates, however, is not an appropriate vehicle for purely philanthropic ends, at least not when there are other stockholders interested in realizing a return on their investment.

Jim and Craig opted to form Craigslist, Inc. as a for-profit Delaware corporation and voluntarily accepted millions of dollars from eBay as part of a transaction whereby eBay became a stockholder. Having chosen a for-profit corporate form, the Craigslist directors are bound by the fiduciary duties and standards that accompany that form. Those standards include acting to promote the value of the corporation for the benefit of its stockholders. The “Inc.” after the company name has to mean at least that.

Thus, I cannot accept as valid for the purposes of implementing the Rights Plan a corporate policy that specifically, clearly, and admittedly seeks not to maximize the economic value of a for-profit Delaware corporation for the benefit of its stockholders—no matter whether those stockholders are individuals of modest means or a corporate titan of online commerce. If Jim and Craig were the only stockholders affected by their decisions, then there would be no one to object. eBay, however, holds a significant stake in craigslist, and Jim and Craig’s actions affect others besides themselves.

The ruling of eBay v. Newmark did not require that a set of controlling shareholders must always pursue maximum profits. Instead, it concluded that once outside shareholders exist, the controlling owners of a company can’t use their conception of the company’s purpose alone to justify corporate decisions. Once there is a single outside investor, the controlling shareholders must exercise their authority within the constraints of fiduciary obligations to the corporation and its shareholders.

Viewed this way, sole control over a business is therefore not only a claim on its entire economic output, but encodes the structure of agency around which a central party, often a single individual, is entitled to make decisions that a collective of shareholders would never pursue. A wealth tax progressively converts an institution governed according to a particular private telos into one governed by the logic of shareholder maximalism.

California calls this taxation, but the mechanism exposes a constitutional problem that extends far beyond this particular ballot initiative: can the state impose a tax on an individual’s property in a way that foreseeably destroys the governance rights attached to that property?

The Missing Constitutional Limit

The Fifth Amendment explicitly constrains the federal government’s power to take private property for public use through a provision known as the Takings Clause. Quite literally, the amendment states that “nor shall private property be taken for public use, without just compensation.” Through the Fourteenth Amendment, the same restriction extends to state and local governments.

The distinction between taking property and taxing property is usually self-evident. If the federal government needs a plot of land for a military base, it can condemn the property, but ordinarily it must pay its owner just compensation for doing so. In contrast, when a county sends the owner of that same plot of land a property tax bill, it has taxed the property. Pushing the distinction to its limit reveals that the boundary is not always so obvious.

Consider that America is fighting a war, and urgently needs tungsten to manufacture munitions. The war has caused demand for tungsten to triple, making previously uneconomic deposits of the mineral extraordinarily valuable. A farmer in the country happens to own land that contains large deposits of the mineral, but he has not decided to start exploiting the reserves because it would disrupt his cattle operations. Because the underlying mineral rights belong to him, the wartime premium is reflected in an increased market value of the property.

The government could condemn the land or its mineral rights for the war effort but, in doing so, it would be required to compensate the farmer for the property. To get the tungsten without paying for it, imagine that the government imposes a one-time “property tax” equal to 100% of the newly-assessed market value of the land, which of course includes the value of the tungsten beneath it.

The farmer does not have enough cash to satisfy the liability, and his farm does not suddenly generate millions of dollars in income simply because the minerals beneath it have become more valuable. To pay the tax, he must sell his land, which includes the full value of it and the underlying mineral rights.

The government can technically say that it never seized the farmer’s land or tungsten. In substance, however, the government used its taxing power to compel the farmer to surrender the entire economic value of his land, the same value the Takings Clause would have been constitutionally required to compensate him for had it just taken the property outright.

Now imagine the tax is not 100%. At 50%, the tax will still force the farmer to sell the property or its mineral rights to satisfy the liability, since the land does not generate income remotely approaching the inflated wartime value of the tungsten beneath it. At 10%, he may still have to sell some portion of his property or mineral rights, but he can probably borrow against it. At 5%, we arrive in the vicinity of California’s proposal.

With each reduction in tax, the tax burden becomes more bearable for the farmer, but there is no clear line where the nature of the mechanism changes in practice. If a 100% tax on the value of the farmer’s property can accomplish essentially the same thing as confiscating that property, then calling it a “tax” doesn’t change that it is basically confiscation. The protections of the Fifth Amendment would be hollow if the state could pretend it was just imposing a tax. Somewhere, then, between ordinary taxes and confiscation, there must be some constitutionally protected boundary.

Drawing that boundary is extraordinarily difficult. Nearly any tax the government imposes reduces the marginal ability for an individual to acquire property, and may even require asset sales to meet them. If ordinary taxes were declared unconstitutional simply because the source of the funds used to pay the tax came from the sale of private property, then almost all taxation would be impossible.

However, the nature of the transformation occurring under these wealth taxes must give the courts pause. In the case of privately-held companies with a single shareholder, compelling the sale of a single share changes the governance structure of that company entirely.

If the state goes further and forces an owner to relinquish sufficient equity to destroy their control rights as well, it has arguably forced a transformation of the company via a process indistinguishable from a taking. The Court has ruled that personal property (Horne v. Department of Agriculture), intangible business assets (Ruckelshaus v. Monsanto Co.), ongoing concern value of the business (Kimball Laundry Co. v. United States), and even contractual rights (Louisville Joint Stock Land Bank v. Radford) are protected forms of property under the Takings Clause. The wealth tax will force the courts to consider if control itself is protected.

They will not have to consider the question in the abstract either, because Proposition 40 has a clause that directly targets voting control of companies. The proposition’s valuation rules state clearly that: “For any interests that confer voting or other direct control rights, the percentage of the business entity owned by the taxpayer shall be presumed to be not less than the taxpayer’s percentage of the overall voting or other direct control rights.”

A standard appraisal would value economic ownership independently of voting control because a given stake’s market value doesn’t map to its nominal percentage ownership of the underlying business. Proposition 40 ignores standard practice and instead instructs the state to value controlling shares as the percentage of voting power they represent multiplied by the market capitalization of all shares. Foreseeably, this will force many California founders to surrender control of their companies entirely.

The Infrastructure of Liberty

Private property creates domains where people can act without first obtaining political permission to pursue their goals. Freedom of speech gives an individual the right to publish whatever they want, but ownership of a media company gives them the means to distribute it and fund it sustainably. Freedom of association gives people the right to organize around common goals, but a company allows them to marshal financial resources to pursue that goal. George Lucas was constitutionally allowed to film whatever he wanted, but his ownership of Lucasfilm enabled him to do so.

In the modern world, private companies are how our constitutional rights are exercised in practice. The U.S. Constitution provides individuals the legal protection to act, which companies transform into a material capacity to act. A private company provides the vehicle for pooling material resources to say, I or we are going to do something else.

The price of an In-N-Out Double-Double represents something distinctly American. A family built a company, retained control of it through multiple generations, and used that control to make decisions that neither the state nor the financial interests of shareholders could question.

This is what makes the wealth tax so insidious and so much more than a way of raising incremental revenue. A state that can force independent institutions with non-monetary goals into diffusely-held entities is being given the power to end private agency and the pursuit of liberty via monetary transformation. The irony here is that capitalism has long been criticized for commodifying the value of social life by assigning prices to things that should not be understood purely in monetary terms. In practice, a wealth tax forces this onto every private institution via forced liquidation and transformation into an engine of shareholder capitalism.

This is not just important for California. Congressman Ro Khanna recently endorsed a federal version of the wealth tax, which contains a 2% annual tax on all wealth over $50 million. A threshold this low reaches far past billionaires, into any founder, family business, or independent project the state decides to appraise. The constitutional question raised by Proposition 40 is much larger than the particular fortunes of California’s billionaires. It is whether the state can force Americans to surrender the institutions through which they exercise their independence.

Christian Angelopoulos is a technologist in the cryptocurrency industry. You can follow him at @CityAngelos.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

Read more

This article by Will Tanner was published at Palladium Magazine on September 18, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

The wealthy of Britain, and those of the Western world more broadly, are today expected to surrender rather than pass on the fortune they have spent their lives creating. The “haves” are tolerated, and at times even encouraged, to spend exorbitantly on pleasure and frivolity, so long as upon death they hand whatever remains over to bureaucrats putatively aiding the have-nots. This is sometimes made explicit and termed Die with Zero by some, “The Giving Pledge” by others. What is less known, or if known, rarely discussed, is that this attitude is the exact antithesis of what made Western civilization great in the first place. In almost every era other than our own, the role of wealth was understood to be for building an enduring dynasty to carry on the values and legacy of those who had contributed so much to society.

Before the Great War, British society expected that those born into wealth, whether as a result of a dynast landing at Pevensey Bay with William the Conqueror or an uncle industrializing Manchester, would spend their privileged lives in roles of leadership and public service, before passing on their carefully stewarded riches for their heirs to do the same. When the British philosopher and politician Edmund Burke described society as “a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born,” he was merely making explicit the way of life practiced by his contemporaries and their ancestors. This sense of solidarity with both the past and future was felt by them as well, and was the basis of the British aristocracy’s continuity in rule for almost a thousand years.

In 1914, Britain marched to war led by those who, like war-hero Hugh Grosvenor, traced their blood all the way back to the age of chivalry. That a landed feudal elite could lead a modern industrial state was a testament to its deep ties to the communities from which it drew its power. Over the centuries, it led and developed Britain with a sensibility distinctly lacking in our age of bureaucratic rule. As modern bureaucracy hits seemingly intractable problems of governance and entropy—essentially choking out prospects for a worthwhile future—perhaps this successful ethos and the unique conditions under which it arose are worth a close study by those who wish to build a better tomorrow.

The Birth of Aristocracy

When the English gentry first solidified in the Late Middle Ages, its role was military leadership, which it exercised with a mailed gauntlet, not a gentleman’s glove. The then-Earls of Northumberland and their gentry retainers, families like the Plumptons, ruled over domains both vast and modest while battling in the courts and, if needed, on the fields in order to expand their holdings. As English historian Adam Nicolson writes in his book The Gentry, this “unforgiving assertion of violent authority” separated the medieval gentry from the landed elite of later periods.

This early gentry also served in local leadership positions—acting as justices of the peace, high sheriffs, or knights of the shire—that have long defined their place in country society. Above the ordinary landed gentry was the titled nobility—dukes, earls, and barons—the most powerful tier of Britain’s landowning class. They increased from a mere five dozen or so in the Tudor period to around five hundred by the 19th century, with most of the new titles coming from old landed families purchasing or earning titles as they increased in wealth and prestige following the dissolution of the monasteries. The titled nobility, also known as the peers, or Lords, tended to invest their political energy in national and imperial politics while the gentry governed the counties. However, all of the landed elite were by necessity intimately involved in both local and national affairs.

In 1215, the great barons and their gentry retainers forced King John to accede to the Magna Carta, balancing the rights of the landed aristocracy against the centralized power of the monarchy. When those rights were threatened, the aristocracy waged barons’ wars to defend them. In 1265, nobleman Simon de Montfort led the charge to require the free-spending Henry III to consult what became the first representative Parliament, creating a system where kings were kept in check by the Lords on whom they relied to enforce their rule. In 1297, the Earls of Norfolk and Hereford led the Lords of England in refusing to fight for King Edward I or grant him money until he agreed to abide by the Magna Carta. Edward I consequently signed the Confirmation of Charters, officially enshrining the document into law and ensuring that the King could not tax the people without their consent.

Throughout the following centuries, the gentry and nobility’s resistance to monarchical tyranny meant that England was generally free from the painful taxation and expropriation without compensation that wracked much of the continent. Its common law justice system flourished, and wars were fought as partnerships between a king and his mostly willing subjects. Self-assertion on the part of the aristocracy came to mean parliamentary service, in which the landed gentlemen in the Commons and peers in the Lords—the same bodies assembled by Simon de Montfort centuries earlier—could legally lead and restrain both king and commoners, thus curtailing the chance of internal conflict.

In the early modern period, the Lords turned to fight tyrannical efforts from below, pushed by factions of the gentry in the House of Commons. The Levellers and Diggers in Cromwell’s coalition were stomped out when they attempted to effect social revolution alongside a political revolution against Stuart financial tyranny. When Levelling returned in the form of Chartism two centuries later, it was the aged Duke of Wellington who led the defense of London and stopped the Chartists’ Kennington demonstration from turning into a revolution. Meanwhile, the Lords and Sir Robert Peel worked through reforming legislation that would address real injustices, namely high bread prices imposed by the Corn Laws, which set tariffs on imported grain. Throughout the ages, the aristocracy struck deals and found compromises as they led opposition to the sources of budding tyranny in the British state.

Between the tempering effects of generational wealth, the chivalric norms of the late medieval age, and the self-conscious sophistication of parliamentary government, the savage Norman lords who sacked England under William the Conqueror became the quintessential civil aristocracy of early modern England. Aspiring to more refined ideals, the elite used the leisure afforded to them to cultivate Classical virtue, self-restraint, and a skill for command that would distinguish them as gentlemen.

Land, Legacy, and Duty

As land was long the safest form of income-producing wealth, it was land into which the riches of the ruling class were invested. On this land they built stately homes, houses that could be called castles, constructed with enormous expenditure of labor and capital that acted as monuments to family legacy, longevity, and leadership over a particular place. From Tattershall Castle to Wentworth Woodhouse, these architectural achievements stand as a testament to the fact that from the feudal until the bureaucratic age, the landed elite were the ones with power. As English historian J.A. Froude once said in a speech titled “On the Uses of a Landed Gentry,” attachment over generations to the same estate and community came “from an ambition to leave our names behind us, rooted into the soil to which the national life is attached.” From that deeply planted ambition, the great names of England’s history grew and flourished, while always maintaining a connection to their roots.

The Percys, one of England’s oldest and most powerful noble houses, fought the border reivers for generations from the security of their ancestral home of Alnwick Castle. Sir Winston Churchill’s ancestor, the Duke of Marlborough, returned from his military triumph in the War of the Spanish Succession to anchor his name on the baroque splendor of Blenheim Palace. Coke of Norfolk used the Neo-Palladian Holkham Hall and estate he inherited for agricultural experimentation that shaped history, contributing to the British Agricultural Revolution that would feed future industry.

In each case, the estate supported the noble house, and the house supported the dynasty. Through this process, the English aristocracy both strengthened their familial standing and set about imprinting their ideals upon the nation, particularly as the disorder prior to the 1688 Glorious Revolution gave way to a centuries-long domestic peace. As English historian Lawrence James writes in Iron Duke, “all that today we most admire about eighteenth-century Britain, its architecture, music, landscape gardens, literature and scholarship” came thanks to these leading families of gentlemen. Their country homes represented splendour, pride, and a strong belief in the future that proliferated throughout the country. They commanded armies, cultivated culture, and guided the nation, resting their legitimacy on their leadership of the state in numerous endeavors.

The nation was suffused with their ethos of dutiful service and sense of dignity over this century, and it came to dominate Britain as a whole in the Victorian period that followed, with the British middle class being remarkable for the degree to which it accepted the cultural values of the landed elite. This attitude only increased as the 19th century wore on; as historian J.V. Beckett writes in The Aristocracy in England, “one of the most poignant images of late Victorian England was the desire for state honours, in the form of knighthoods and other orders, which suggested a concern with establishment recognition rather than with bourgeois values.”

That Blenheim Palace rose and Chatsworth House was largely rebuilt during the 18th century was no accident; the homes represented the continuation of family legacy and new investment that domestic tranquility allowed. Enshrined in stone at no small cost, such houses served as testaments to the future and longevity of the families they sheltered, something that remained true as houses had to be renovated to be equipped with the accoutrements of the future, from plumbing and gas to electricity and the telephone.

To maintain these monuments of family heritage required diligence and dedication. That such estates could be supported for centuries was due to a multi-generational process of upkeep and reinvestment in the property. Renovating an estate to support a palatial house was an expensive process, necessitating enclosure, field drainage, and animal husbandry. These recurring capital-intensive improvements made British estates significantly more productive than the small farms of the continent by allowing for the use of formerly waterlogged fields and cultivation of higher quality English livestock.

Without gentlemen such as Coke of Norfolk funding and promoting such innovations—Coke encouraged the adoption of his improved sheep breeds and demonstrated how drainage and marling had turned even the sandy soil of his Holkham estate arable—it is unlikely that the British Agricultural Revolution would have happened at all, or the Industrial Revolution it fed. For the gentry to invest in such massive and costly innovations required long time horizons and collaboration with tenants, rather than exploiting them for additional rent or resources. Capital in the form of land was functionally different from other kinds as it required continuous upkeep and care from its owner.

Propagating this legacy-conscious mindset across generations was not driven purely by the needs of their particular type of capital. Even today, one of the most reliable ways to secure your legacy is by having a building in your name; if your family has use of it, so much the better. But it is important to emphasize that aristocrats occupied what was in many ways an incredibly restrictive lifeworld, one where families rather than individuals functioned as the basic unit of account, and social status was explicitly tied to one’s lineage.

Such restriction channeled personal ambition and, through this economic and social discipline, helped forge a functional elite class, a class willing and capable of shouldering immediate financial burdens for the long-term benefit of the country and its governance. Throughout the 18th century, land taxation fell primarily upon the British landed elite, something they mostly accepted, seeing it necessary to defeat the French without causing a domestic tax revolt.

The British landed elite enjoyed remarkable popularity throughout the 19th century, despite owning a significantly higher portion of the land than their continental counterparts. The 1873 Return of Owners of Land survey found that roughly seven thousand families owned eighty percent of Britain, with nobility owning nearly a third of the nation’s land and another half going to the gentry. We can credit the landed elite’s popularity in the face of this enormous inequality to the fact that they viewed land ownership as inextricable from duty to the people. As 19th-century English architect Sir Gilbert Scott put it:

“Wealth must always bring its responsibilities, but a landed proprietor is especially in a responsible position. He is the natural head of his parish or district—in which he should be looked up to as the bond of union between the classes. To him the poor man should look up for protection; those in doubt or difficulty for advice; the ill disposed for reproof or punishment; the deserving, of all classes, for consideration and hospitality; and all for honourable and Christian example.”

The process of estate improvement sharpened this understanding of duty, as the exercise of local leadership preserved the domestic tranquility that made investments remunerative by limiting disorder and stimulating population growth. Participation in politics was the foundation of the elite’s security, for by maintaining control of the government they could ensure it would defend private property and the privileges it afforded them.

This was particularly true at the parliamentary level, as only by running and winning elections could gentlemen keep Levellers and radicals out of the legislature. In fact, as historian John Chester Miller argues in Origins of the American Revolution, the “remarkable conservatism” of English politics came because the landed elite ensured the revolutionary aspects of the Glorious Revolution “stopped with the aristocracy on top, and there, the Whig Lords maintained, it ought to remain.” So long as they kept hold of the parliamentary supremacy they created, this was the case. Once they lost their touch and new men of Lloyd George and Ramsay MacDonald’s cut occupied Parliament’s seats, former conservative shibboleths, such as the sacrosanct nature of private property and the conception of the landed elite as duty-bound and privileged to govern the nation, eventually faded away.

Nevertheless, this political arrangement proved remarkably durable through the massive technological changes of the Industrial Revolution. Despite a decline in the incomes of the landed gentry caused by the repeal of the Corn Laws in 1846, which ended high tariffs on imported grain, as late as the 1880s, nearly half the Commons still came from the landed elite. It was only in the early 20th century that the aristocracy’s involvement in national government, and subsequently their ability to resist centralization, began to dwindle dramatically. By 1910, the seats occupied by landed elites in the House of Commons amounted to roughly ten percent, a sharp decline from the fifty percent only thirty years prior.

The incredible longevity of the British feudal and post-feudal aristocracy—stretching from the end of the Dark Ages to the early 20th century—was due to a governing ethos shaped by their landed responsibilities. In turn, the land and her tenants rewarded those with the foresight and willingness to invest that was required for the flourishing of a country estate. In contrast to the frequent assumption that economic success must come at the cost of one’s character, the British landed elite learned that it was only through embodying high gentlemanly ideals that they could effectively manage their estates and social relations. Only after five hundred years of tutelage by the country estate were the British ready to win and administer an empire.

The Elites Who Built an Empire

The development of the British fiscal-military state that ruled a quarter of the world, and the industrial sector that powered the empire, was in large part due to the landed elite. The infrastructure development that powered Britain’s industrial and imperial 19th-century dominance succeeded because they provided the necessary capital for investment in things like canals, railways, and ports. The landed elite also took a direct role in investing in the colonies and their industries. For instance, as British historian Robert Lacey reports in his book Aristocrats, the Grosvenor family deployed its fortune in the mid-20th century to invest in everything from the settlement of cotton farms in Rhodesia and South Africa to the development of Annacis Island, an industrial hub located off the Fraser River of western Canada.

The British aristocracy demonstrated how traditional norms of noblesse oblige could be applied to modern industry. Foremost in such application of tradition were the Earls of Fitzwilliam. Rooted in the north of England for centuries, they chose to mine the coal discovered on their estate themselves rather than lease their land for royalties. As patrician industrialists, they set the standards in mine safety, provided sick pay to workers, pensions to families of worker casualties, and built schools, churches, and homes for their employees. Families were even given small plots of land on which to grow vegetables or raise livestock. When the mines were slow, the Fitzwilliams provided alternative work for the men so they would have a steady income. These innovations in workforce relations came primarily over the course of the mid-19th century, before any such attempts to care for employees were common, much less mandated.

Into the mid-20th century, the Fitzwilliams were among the few coal owners beloved by the miners. When the Minister of Fuel and Power, Manny Shinwell, and the post-WWII Labour government expropriated their property in 1946, their miners went out of their way to protest the injustice of the regime’s depredations. Shinwell ignored them, and open-cast mining subsequently destroyed the estate, bringing open work pits within mere meters of Wentworth Woodhouse, the irreplaceable Fitzwilliam manor. The miners were soon laid off, and the mines closed. Everyone, other than the bureaucrats, became worse off because noblesse oblige was punished in the name of the social equality that post-war nationalization was meant to achieve.

The Fitzwilliams showed how the virtues and values of the landed elite remained relevant into modernity, being preferable to both rapacious plutocracy and socialist tyranny. They represented a different path forward, one characterized by traditional responsibility. This was true of the aristocracy generally: the Lords led the way on matters like worker hours and safety, as demonstrated by the Sadler Report of 1832, the Mines Act of 1842, the Ten Hours Act of 1847, and the Chimney Sweepers Regulation Acts throughout the 19th century. Motivated neither by personal greed nor bureaucratic self-importance, the landed elite tried to steer a middle path that merged their class obligations with the industrial economy.

Sadly, this effort was destroyed by the likes of Manny Shinwell and Margaret Thatcher, whose government chose hostility rather than magnanimity when it came to the relations between workers, capital, and government by violently crushing a major miners’ strike so that tens of thousands could be laid off. The Fitzwilliams had found alternative work for miners in hard times, the pay for which almost always came at a loss, out of their own pockets. They did so because they felt responsible for the workers and their well-being.

Perhaps surprisingly, the martial tradition of this class remained intact deep into modernity, far longer than most assume. In the early twentieth century, the last generation of the landed military elite suffered a roughly twenty percent death rate during World War I, a higher proportion than any other class, including the poorest. This last cohort of privileged landed military elites led their men through the bloody Flanders Fields and died on the front line.

It was this same class that led the armies which first won the many colonies of the British Empire and then administered them. For example, Arthur Wellesley (later Duke of Wellington) and his brother Richard Wellesley together conquered much of what became the Raj in the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, and Lord Cornwallis reformed its judiciary while serving as Governor-General. The landed elite was intimately involved in the development and administration of colonies as well. That the Colonial Office could rule the empire with a few dozen staff was in no small part because it was filled by gentlemen trained from birth in leadership and governance. Their attitudes were exported to the lands they settled. Virginia’s gentry was imbued with the same ideals of noblesse oblige, tradition, and hierarchy as the cavaliers who gave the Old Dominion its distinctive culture.

At the beginning of the Second Boer War in 1899, three young dukes—Marlborough, Westminster, and Norfolk—served under military commander Lord Roberts. The landed elite had to commit itself to martial duty to retain the respect of those whom it was expected to lead. That it could do so while receiving only nominal pay was only possible because of its long-held estates. Those manors that rose in imitation of medieval fortresses were still irreplaceable military infrastructure at the dawn of our modern era, as they housed elites able to fight and willing to die for their country.

In a deeper sense, the willingness to fight is the foundation of any state. The modern state can somewhat forcibly make citizens into soldiers with conscription, as press gangs jumping out of unmarked vans in Moscow or Kyiv to grab passing young men demonstrate. Yet, even under such circumstances, someone somewhere in the military hierarchy must be fighting willingly and enforcing these standards on others. Without the steadfast support of a committed officer corps, armies are often inclined to overthrow their own governments rather than fight wars they’re unwilling to endure. As a corollary, the lower down the military hierarchy this will-to-fight is found, the less tyrannical the military and the state.

This is also why reliable military officers are a headache for any social or political constitution. Making them landless employees of the state might seemingly solve the problem, but it creates a perpetual lobby and faction for greater spending and, with it, taxation, leading to endemic corruption as seen in modern Egypt. The country house solves this tricky question of political economy quite elegantly: if property holders are the ones fighting, the army opposes expropriation. Because these British elites of the early 20th century were willing to fight for their home and country, they cannot be disparaged as decadent or dysfunctional, especially when contrasted with their marginalized descendants or the alternative elites of today. Duty, land, and low time preference were complementary forces when it came to military matters. The economic, political, and social worlds of such men were deeply intertwined, much more so than any comparable class today.

Unhousing the Estate

The catastrophe of the 20th century ended the old world of aristocratic patronage and military service. After centuries of relative domestic peace, the People’s Budget of 1909 renewed social conflict with vigor, just as the landed element’s presence in the House of Commons was fading. Its crushing taxes forced the aristocracy to sell and depart from its ancestral land, removing the basis of its economic power and site of its elite formation in the name of the common good.

The Parliament Act of 1911 did yet more to separate the stewards from the stewardship of Britain. Years of social strife interspersed with social fabric-rending wars followed. Inheritance taxes crept inexorably higher, peaking at eighty-five percent during the Harold Wilson years. Income tax rose similarly, reaching a peak of ninety-nine percent under Winston Churchill’s wartime government, while investment income taxes climbed to ninety-eight percent in the 1970s.

Symbolic of this era’s destruction of the landed elite was the bureaucratic regime’s malicious destruction of the country houses. Even those who could shoulder the endless levies of the early 20th century saw their homes appropriated during the Second World War. Of the homes that survived and were returned to their owners, many were reduced to near ruins.

The War Office took over Compton Verney in 1940, the seat of the Barons Willoughby de Broke for centuries, and former seat of Lord Willoughby de Broke, leader of the resistance to the People’s Budget and Parliament Act. He was forced to sell it for reasons of personal economy after his resistance to the onerous taxation had failed, and the wear and tear of the war years was unkind to it.

As British historian David Cannadine describes in The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy, soldiers billeted in the gorgeous Jacobean Blickling Hall gratuitously smashed the windows and forced down the doors of the state rooms, heavily damaging the home. Worst of all was the fate of Eggington Hall; there, “the army left the house with all the taps running, the ceilings collapsed, and the building had to be demolished.” There was no purpose to this, just wanton vandalism driven by spite and envy. It was in this dire period that Shinwell brought the full force of the British state to bear in destroying the Fitzwilliam estate at Wentworth Woodhouse, an attack that even his contemporaries described as blatant class-hatred.

Bureaucracy replaced the newly unhoused landed elite. What characterized the new political system was a tidal wave of taxation and regulation. Emblematic of the short-term, anti-tradition mindset of this new regime was the Starmer ministry’s recent attempt to levy another twenty percent tax on farms, merely to raise revenue equivalent to the annual amount Britain already provides as aid to foreign farmers. That a drop of foreign aid could be foregone to preserve the livelihood of locals was not a consideration.

The result of generations of such onerous taxation has been the destruction of the old English order. Once, localities were governed by those with centuries-old ties to the land and surrounding population, whose station required them to honor the responsibilities which accompanied their authority over the territory. The loss of face that came with losing acres meant that one could not simply up and leave if local conditions changed for the worse. An estate would have to be sold, and all the social and physical capital accumulated over the centuries liquidated in an instant. The partnership Burke identified between the living and coming generations has been severed, and all the good it contained lost in the process. Such territories are now ruled by the busybody bureaucrats made infamous to the British public by the popular Amazon series Clarkson’s Farm, where permitting authorities are shown getting in the way of every aspect of the farm’s management.

Today, plutocrats regularly abandon the communities their insouciance and poor political instincts have ruined, as demonstrated by the flight of left-leaning Silicon Valley technologists from California. Dollars are fungible, stocks and crypto move with their owners, and houses lived in for but a few years lack the emotional hold of an ancient farm or family estate. That fungibility creates a compliant and even complicit political nonchalance: one can simply move when conditions grow difficult, because the new non-landed elite rarely gets involved in the welfare of their communities.

What we now have are plutocrats with riches disconnected from duty. They easily decamp from one jurisdiction to the next, so strings of disasters follow from their refusal to participate in politics, even to defend law and order or free enterprise. The Anglo-American gentry of ages past served as Justices of the Peace to maintain order; now those who themselves flee disorder do no such thing. They have neither the incentive nor the sense of responsibility necessary to participate in government, to maintain ties to a specific place and its people, or to train themselves in virtue and the art of good governance.

Instead, they remain fashionable by spending their lives supporting entropy and disorder. They finance political movements that propagate dysfunction in the name of equity or equality because doing so is popular—a trend Tom Wolfe noted decades ago in his collection of satirical essays Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers; that guilt and status-seeking lead the rich to embrace those who would destroy them—and then abscond when the politicians they supported ruin the place from which they came. Look no further than those who now bemoan and flee the expropriatory taxes the candidates their donations supported are currently attempting to enact.

The death of duty has been a social cancer. Would our plutocrats die in the trenches at a mortality rate of one in five, as the Old Etonians bravely did, or might such a shocking proposition coincide with diagnoses of heel spurs or asthma that would regrettably prevent such a sacrifice? Are the residents of the luxury neighborhoods in our cities keen to escape jury duty, or do they aspire to emulate their Justice of the Peace ancestors? Do the affluent, our modern equivalents to the landed gentry, use their privileged positions to speak out publicly on important and controversial matters such as crime? We know the answers to these questions. Our economic elite, and the bureaucracy they delegate to manage the decay, aptly avoid the upper-class obligations that used to define and justify their social station.

Generational Projects Need Generational Wealth

Death taxes accompanied by a general cultural change expressed in movements such as “Die with Zero” have thoroughly separated wealth from duty and ownership from responsibility. Such efforts have achieved what their creators intended, which was to destroy the landed elite and its virtues while pushing that power into the hands of bureaucrats. This process is not unique to Britain, but pervasive across all Western countries. Assets are no longer seen as the foundation of a dynasty that could carry one’s ideals into future ages, but as a mere lemon from which an immediate return can be squeezed and then tossed aside. The concept of germinating and tending to one’s wealth so that it will one day bear even more fruit is now considered to be either a fool’s errand or the mission of a megalomaniac.

Despite this, some men still try to use their wealth to uphold a greater ambition across generations. Elon Musk’s work to preserve free speech online and extend our access to outer space is an echo from a time when duty was still the North Star of the economic elite. The industrialist’s choice to embark upon a bold and multi-generational project to settle Mars, instead of living hedonistically and disbursing what remains to professional philanthropists, consistently earns him fierce critique instead of praise.

Similarly, the upper-middle class is never encouraged to think of itself as potential new gentry, with children who could serve and better their country for generations. Rather, they are taught to conceive of themselves as transient wealth, based on the premise that they hold fortunes made incidentally and not as a consequence of individual prowess or familial character. Without a legible and legitimate social role to fill in our civilization, they believe their descendants will live as they did: exerting themselves on a white-collar treadmill as the highest possible contribution to society, all the while surrendering accumulated social and financial capital to an already far too powerful ecosystem of non-governmental organizations. Those working in tech are from this same milieu, and while they sometimes post on X about achieving “generational wealth,” they have no clear answer as to what generational wealth is for.

The cost of surrender to such a mindset is everything the Western man once held dear. The reward is freedom from the pressure of living up to the achievements of one’s ancestors. When society has grown so dysfunctional that the purpose of life is reduced to the mere pursuit of fleeting pleasure, it is impossible to conceive of building a dynasty devoted to greatness, and we are absolved of the shame for failing to reach the standards set by those who came before us.

A civilization only thrives, in the words of Cicero, “when old men plant trees that will benefit only another generation,” and say “I should not merely receive these things from my ancestors, but also hand them down to posterity.” Old men don’t plant such trees in a land which tells them that doing so is selfish and immoral. Even if they have no care for public opinion, such investment in the future is rendered impossible if they can reasonably foresee that the forest they hope to cultivate will be taxed into oblivion anyhow.

Civilization is a partnership. This compact was physically represented by the great British dynasties and their country seats, embodying a choice to build the future while honoring the past, not wallowing in frivolous decadence or the mendacious languor of state-enforced equity. To recover a governing elite guided by duty and virtue in the manner of George Washington or Lord Salisbury, we must recover the mindset that maintained the landed elite for a millennium: a recognition that there is more to life than the present moment, and we must enable great men to build great things.

Becoming a multiplanetary species, creating the prosperous future of which our ancestors dreamed, and building a world in which great men can flourish and not be crushed by the heavy yoke of the bureaucratic state: this is the task of a new aristocracy, of a new set of men and women guided by a legacy that persists quietly in the beautiful buildings we all cannot help but revere. It is by necessity a multi-generational compact, a decision to embark upon an infinite game far into the future, guided by timeless precepts found in the pages of Plutarch. We must reject the presentism and false pretense of dynasty-destroying tax policies and noxious philanthropic pressures. Instead, we must embrace the idea that wealth carries with it duties of civic participation on behalf of the long-term interest of the people, that virtue is required of those who seek to lead in such a capacity, and that these responsibilities are best conceived of as a partnership between generations past, present, and future.

Will Tanner, a graduate of Washington & Lee University and the Wake Forest School of Law, is the author of The American Tribune newsletter. You can follow him at @Will_Tanner_1.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

Join PALLADIUM Magazine in San Francisco on Thursday, September 24 to hear a lecture by Ben Landau-Taylor, author of "The Lifecycle of an Apocalypse." The article will be featured in our upcoming print edition, become a PALLADIUM member today to secure your copy!

In recent years the energy has gone out of the climate apocalypse movement and into the AI apocalypse movement. But climate was not the first of our widely-feared apocalypse movements, and AI will not be the last.

Since the First World War, there has been massive popular demand for theories about how technology is about to destroy the world and end civilization. All of them have followed very similar playbooks. This talk will cover the history of techno-apocalypse fears and the psychology behind them.

Ben Landau-Taylor studies society and industry. You can follow him at @benlandautaylor.

Buy Tickets

This is a ticketed event, those without tickets or violation of the dress code will be turned away.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

Join PALLADIUM Magazine in San Francisco on Friday, September 18 to hear a lecture by Wolf Tivy, author of “The Problem of Humanity.” The article will be featured in our upcoming print edition, become a PALLADIUM member today to secure your copy!

Our concepts of “humanity” and “humanitarianism” are usually taken as the eternal bedrock of morality. Today, artificial intelligence raises the prospect of “posthumanity”, and magnates and regulators discuss what “humanity should do” about this. But in fact, the concept of “humanity” is a relatively recent and flimsy creation of the postwar political order. We need to abandon it to find our place in the future.

Wolf Tivy is the Founder and former Editor-in-Chief of Palladium Magazine. He is the creator and host of The Students, a channel of political philosophy in the age of AI. You can follow him at @wolftivy.

Buy Tickets

This is a ticketed event, those without tickets or violation of the dress code will be turned away.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

This article by Bill Drexel was published at Palladium Magazine on September 10, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

Can a fractured civilization be restored? Only three groups in the modern world can claim to have made a serious attempt to solve that question. All three were founded in the 1920s during an upsurge of nationalism and anticolonial sentiment that roiled their humiliated civilizations: the Chinese Communist Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh. Westerners tend to be familiar with the first two, but the third—despite being arguably the most successful of the three—remains largely unknown.

Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) translates into English as “National Volunteer Organization.” It is an innocuous description for a group that launched the world’s largest political party, Hinduism’s most prominent religious council, and India’s largest labor union, private school network, and student union. Birthed in support of “a glorious revival” of Hindu civilization, in the words of its second chief, the RSS has left its mark on virtually every facet of Indian society.

Last month, the organization’s current head, Mohan Bhagwat, made his public debut across the Anglosphere, capping off a year of expansive celebrations for the organization’s 100th anniversary. The substance of his addresses could not have been more benign—extolling the importance of sustainability, compassion, and universality of truth. But the engagements were far from smooth. In New York, where he addressed roughly 5,000 people at Madison Square Garden, Mayor Zohran Mamdani was pressed to cancel the event and called the RSS’s vision “exclusionary” and its rise “incredibly troubling.” A U.S. federal commission that has sought sanctions against the organization asked that Bhagwat’s visa be revoked. Ahead of his Toronto appearance, nearly 270 organizations petitioned the Canadian government to bar him from the country and to mull over designating the RSS a terrorist group. In London, activists lobbied the mayor to boycott all of his events. To those familiar with the organization, the uproar was predictable. But to everyone else—the overwhelming majority of the West—the organization continued to go unnoticed.

The RSS’s goal is to train men physically and intellectually in Hindu nationalism, a worldview that asserts the primacy of the Hindu tradition and the need for it to take a more muscular approach to the world. This takes place primarily through a network of tens of thousands of daily gatherings called shakhas that include a combination of patriotic songs, ideology classes, physical games, and exercises across India. With a network of parallel organizations in more than 40 countries, the closest analogue might be something like a more ideological Boy Scouts—if the Boy Scouts had become the backbone of a mass political, social, and cultural movement bending the arc of Western civilization.

The celebrations of the organization’s 100th anniversary beginning last October underscore how the RSS grew from an obscure clique into a force that reordered Hindu society. Many of the top-ranking officials of India’s government today, including Prime Minister Narendra Modi, began their careers by taking monklike vows required of RSS community organizers, forswearing marriage and wealth. Prior to taking the vows, Modi abandoned a very short-lived marriage that local tradition dictated he enter when he was 18, despite his misgivings.

At a minimum, the group can safely claim to be the most influential organization in the world that most educated Westerners have never heard of, though it is indispensable for understanding India. It is an instructive experiment in civilizational renewal.

Order From Decay

The RSS’s ascent is remarkable in part because of its backwater origins. The founder, a Brahmin medical doctor named Keshav Baliram Hedgewar, founded the organization by inviting young men around his neighborhood to his family’s house in Nagpur, a third tier city in central India, for regular meetings. In what must have seemed a quixotic ambition at the time, his stated purpose was nothing less than to “organise and make our Hindu Society so powerful that no power on earth will dare cast an evil eye upon it.”

Like the Muslim Brotherhood and the Chinese Communist Party, its early founders stood well outside the ruling classes. All three had to face moments of tremendous social acceleration as the gigantic populations they represented reckoned with the need to compete with the Western world’s technological superiority. All three organizations were simultaneously modernizing and traditionalist—they sought to revive the civilizational genius that they believed fueled their respective golden ages, even as they worked to strengthen their social, political, and technological might through modernizing means.

All three also quickly faced severe repression from governing authorities. In the RSS’s case, the group was outlawed in 1948 in the wake of Gandhi’s murder—his assassin was a former RSS member. Prime Minister Indira Gandhi banned the organization again in 1975 amid a broader targeting of many of her political opponents, but despite the repeated imprisonment of its leadership and the enduring stigma of its association with Gandhi’s murderer, the RSS today is remaking the whole of India, and its cadres operate at the highest levels of Indian politics.

This compares favorably with the Muslim Brotherhood, whose offshoots may have spread from Egypt to have an appreciable presence in politics and social work across much of the Islamic world, especially in more educated, modern middle-class populations. But they have largely failed to hold political power, and have struggled to compete with more radical Islamist groups—not to mention contain the militancy within their own ranks. The extremism within and outside of the Brotherhood has hamstrung many of the efforts to productively consolidate the Muslim world into an effective civilizational revivalist movement.

True, the Chinese Communist Party captured the Chinese state early and has ruled for many decades, but that “success” can be misleading: much of the CCP’s consolidation of power only came off the back of rival nationalist forces that bore the brunt of fighting against Japanese invaders, only to have their victory hijacked by the communists who exploited their weakened position. In building its rule, the CCP also enjoyed substantial Soviet support to consolidate its reign over a population that already had a deep tradition of a strong central state authority.

Having taken the state, it also compressed modernization into a series of coercive campaigns that repeatedly tore apart the society it was supposed to be rejuvenating due to disastrous policies like the Cultural Revolution, Great Leap Forward, or One-Child Policy—damage the party is still, under Xi, failing to repair. The party still fears its own people more than anything else, spending more on internal security than its military, and it is this fear that explains the draconian measures taken to ensure public order during crises like the Tiananmen Square protests and the COVID-19 pandemic, for example.

The RSS, by contrast, is unique in having overcome considerable opposition with little external support, especially given the lack of a strong tradition of political centralization across India. In its first decades, the organization spread into virtually every geographic corner of India as a decidedly social, rather than political, organization. Later on, it began to sprout service projects and spin-off organizations that encompassed all facets of Indian society, spanning themes like health, religion, farming, women’s empowerment, veteran affairs, and family values. Modi’s Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), which, at 140 million members, is the largest political party in history, is a child of the RSS and only one among its many organizations that are collectively known as the Sangh Parivar, or “Organization Family.”

This is not to say that the RSS has driven as substantial a transformation for India as the CCP has for China, of course. China’s economic and social transformation since 1949 obviously exceeds India’s. But it is impossible to compare outcomes between the two, given that the CCP has ruled for almost eight consecutive decades in an all-powerful single-party state, compared to only 12 years of consecutive political preeminence for Hindu nationalists in a much more decentralized, weak state, after a much more organic and peaceful process of modernization.

Claims that China’s harsh methods were the secret to China’s growing economic dominance over India are clearly misguided, given that South Korea, Japan, and Taiwan all grew their economies considerably faster and to a greater degree than China, without the need for destructive interventions that still haunt their people. The RSS, in its century-long campaign for social support from the bottom-up, may well be creating the conditions needed to implement the hard economic reforms needed for India to find alternatives to Chinese economic dominance and become a global power. For the overwhelming majority of the world that is unlikely to be co-opted by a Leninist party state, and whose societies must therefore be won over, the RSS’s model of success is more impressive and transferable.

Consolidating The Hindus

Much of the RSS’s growth, then and now, has come by riding the same wave of modernization it sought to channel. As inherited religious authority, local mutual aid, hereditary occupations, and other traditional village structures eroded throughout the twentieth century, the RSS found a country full of Indians losing the social architecture their parents had relied on.

Their core model centers around male-only daily gatherings to build the character of Hindus through a combination of ideological classes, games, songs, and martial exercises. The camp-like atmosphere of these shakhas cultivates an ethos of nationalistic service and intense fraternal bonds around a shared vision of Hindu civilization. The RSS’s 83,000 chapters are led by a combination of thousands of lay volunteers and a corps of devoted full-time operatives called pracharaks, who often join as children and later vow to neither marry nor accumulate wealth to serve the organization and nation, drawing on Hinduism’s ancient renunciant traditions.

These shakhas spread along the railways that integrated colonial India, becoming substitute kin networks in cities full of strangers. The RSS’s spin-off organizations multiplied after independence, meeting the country wherever it was changing fastest—often among students, industrial labor, and farmers—as well as absorbing the rising professional classes—engineers, doctors, civil servants, entrepreneurs as these classes were taking shape. As new communications technologies appeared, from cassette tapes to satellite television, the organization proved adept at using each to its advantage, and so the BJP’s electoral consolidation arrived alongside the smartphone, cheap mobile data, and WhatsApp.

This core model acts as a vast talent identification and development pipeline. Daily shakhas in tens of thousands of locations across India give the organization intimate exposure to a far larger pool of young Indians than any university, party, or corporation could reach—particularly in the small towns and rural districts that have historically lain outside the elite-formation circuits of metropolitan India. Promising recruits are identified, drawn deeper into the network, and tested in progressively more demanding roles. Modi himself is a tea seller’s son from a small Gujarati town, identified early through the shakha system. He was channeled into the student wing for his organizing and public-speaking abilities, and only later loaned out to the BJP.

That the network of organizations the RSS founded has become such a source of its influence is ironic, as the RSS’s leadership was initially very reluctant to move beyond its founding mandate of character formation—skeptical most of all about engaging with politics. The RSS’s founder scrupulously avoided sanctioning political activism, even for Hindu nationalist causes. His successor, the spiritually inclined M. S. Golwalkar, a former lawyer and zoology lecturer who had briefly abandoned both to become a monk, compared politics to “a woman of the multitude” for its fickleness, and believed that it was best for virtuous individuals to avoid the sector altogether.

It was only after the first ban on the RSS in 1948 that Golwalkar began to seriously consider political involvement out of necessity, and dispatched some of the organization’s most promising volunteers to take up party roles. In the mid-twentieth century, it began building a handful of spin-off, mission-specific institutions targeted at particularly influential sectors of society, launching student, labor, and religious organizations. Since the 1980s, the RSS has encouraged entrepreneurial civic organization, encouraging its cadres to go out and build institutions to address society’s needs as they encounter them.

One recent study mapped more than 2,500 organizations birthed out of the RSS’s network, spanning everything from blood banks to publishing houses to yoga centers. Most of these initiatives only ever become “RSS-inspired” projects or groups, not formally affiliated with the RSS. But some, usually after an incubation period, are formally absorbed into the RSS’s umbrella of affiliated organizations. The list of activities and organizations undertaken by both formally and informally linked groups continues to evolve by design, with the intent of addressing the changing needs of a rapidly transforming nation.

Another secret to the RSS’s success is the flexible model it evolved for managing the complexity and scale of the Sangh Parivar. The RSS grants a high degree of autonomy to all of the organizations that spring up from it and permits divergences among them on most issues. Its labor-focused organizations often oppose the BJP’s economic liberalization efforts. Competing RSS-rooted organizations vie over whether it is better to convert Indian Muslims back to Hinduism or acculturate them into Hindu traditions as Muslims. And while some organizations champion Hindi as a unified national language, others defend the importance of local and regional languages.

The RSS’s mainstream may have a predominant view on many of these issues, but the organization is reluctant to take an official stance until its affiliates reach a high degree of consensus, often after decades of deliberation. This allows ample space for disagreements—and a much broader tent than would otherwise be possible. Because the RSS itself is not a political organization, it does not need to take stances as rapidly as a political party, allowing it to hold opposing factions on one issue together in tension, while building consensus between them elsewhere.

The RSS maintains unity by loaning its most dedicated monklike pracharaks, like Modi, to work in high-level management positions across its many organizations, ensuring fraternal bonds between each organization and the RSS, and some level of ideological consistency. The RSS also organizes regular representative forums for all the member organizations of the Organization Family to coordinate on policy issues at the city, state, and national level. The ruling BJP participates in these forums, lending each of these organizations a certain parapolitical weight.

The cumulative effect has been the creation, over decades, of a new counter-elite. Many of the most powerful figures in contemporary India did not come from the families, schools, or networks that produced the old, Anglicized Indian National Congress establishment. Contemporary India’s home and defense ministers are cases in point, as are the chief ministers of several of India’s largest states: Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, and Rajasthan. They came up through the RSS’s talent networks, often from places that the legacy elite never encountered, and often retained habits of austerity and vernacular fluency that their predecessors lacked.

Projecting Power

To assess the power the RSS can expect to wield in the decades ahead, it’s worth starting with its limitations. The first is that the organization’s rise has been mired in controversy, both domestically and internationally. As a stridently Hindu-first project, critics allege that it relegates India’s massive Muslim and Christian minorities to second-class citizenship, a charge buttressed by reports of the frequency and brutality of violence against those minorities in areas where the RSS’s Hindu nationalist message is most popular. Some say that the RSS often has a direct hand in these attacks, which it denies. The organization has never shaken its association with Gandhi’s murderer, who subscribed to a form of Hindu nationalism, despite his claim that he left the RSS to pursue a more active political approach to defending the Hindu cause.

Accusations of violence committed by members of the RSS or its affiliates point to the organization’s martial displays as proof of its militancy, but must also reckon with the fact that the RSS has never encouraged the use of firearms, even when many other groups—such as Bengal’s revolutionary societies and the Muslim League National Guard—did in its early decades, when violence was much more common across the subcontinent. Persistent claims that the organization subtly reinforces caste are hard to square with its pronounced emphasis on breaking down caste divisions among Hindus, including the requirement that members avoid use of caste titles during RSS functions, that they serve food for one another, and that they clean latrines—traditionally forbidden, impure acts for high castes.

Broadly speaking, these controversies orbit around the organization’s greatest limitation: with some notable exceptions, it has not yet found a way to integrate India’s sizable Christian and Muslim minorities into its vision, creating a major fault line in its project for Indian society. Religious minorities make up roughly a fifth of India’s population—15 percent Muslim and about 2 percent Christian as of 2020, with Sikhs, Buddhists, and Jains accounting for most of the remainder, according to Pew. Pew’s 2015 projections, the most recent available, put Hindus at about 77 percent of India by 2050 and Muslims at 18 percent. In absolute numbers, India’s 213 million Muslims are among the three largest Muslim populations in the world, alongside Indonesia’s and Pakistan’s. Tensions between India’s Hindu majority and such sizable minorities have the potential for severe escalation domestically, with international reverberations from India’s Muslim-majority neighbors and the Christian-majority United States, India’s second-largest trading partner.

It can also be tempting to overstate the RSS’s political power. The RSS stood up the BJP and continues to play an influential role in guiding it—rumor has it that the chief of the RSS was pivotal in choosing Narendra Modi as the BJP’s candidate for prime minister, for instance. Since Modi’s election, the RSS chief’s annual address has been aired on national television. But the ties between the BJP and the RSS are ultimately informal. The RSS expects and encourages the BJP to attract as wide a base as possible, including by appealing to those—often by caste—who would not otherwise be sympathetic to the RSS. The RSS’s membership is purported to be about 5 million, which is massive for a volunteer NGO, but only a small slice of India’s 1.4 billion people and less than 4 percent of the BJP’s stated membership.

Modi and the BJP’s success has also changed the center of gravity in the Hindu nationalist movement, precipitating a renegotiation of power between it and the RSS. That dynamic has ebbed and flowed. Rumors that the BJP began to assert greater independence from RSS leadership were followed by stories about the BJP’s demonstrated dependence on the RSS’s grassroots presence to strengthen its election campaigns.

Despite continuing controversy and an evolving relationship with its most powerful offspring, there is little doubt that the RSS will continue to reshape India as it rises to become one of the world’s largest economies. However its influence over the BJP evolves, it is very unlikely to lose its guiding role altogether, and even opposition parties have started to emphasize Hindu identity, dubbed as “soft Hindutva,” to win votes—a testament to the success of the RSS in becoming an upstream force in Indian culture.

Beyond India

What the RSS has built is worth taking seriously beyond India. At a moment of significant technological change and deepening uncertainty about the trajectory of Western civilization, the Hindu nationalist movement offers a working example of how a civilizational tradition can be carried through technological flux rather than swept away by it, by ordinary people who started with limited inherited advantages.

One lesson is that the RSS did not try to redirect the existing elite. Many organizations concerned with the trajectory of Western civilization have spent decades attempting to recapture the universities, the legacy media, and the professional credentialing bodies—on the theory that whoever holds those institutions controls cultural production in general. The RSS declined that contest. It built a parallel ecosystem from the ground up instead, with its own schools, service organizations, publishing houses, and talent pipelines. By the time that ecosystem began to interface seriously with establishment institutions, it had its own leaders to send into them. Building is more effective than capturing, and a movement willing to operate outside the existing prestige hierarchies can produce a competitive one of its own within a generation or two.

Over time, the RSS has been able to identify capable young men from places the old elite never looked, develop them across decades, and move them between roles as their gifts and the needs of the movement evolved. Most Western institutions claiming to identify and develop talent are actually just sorting candidates who have already self-selected through legacy filters: prestigious universities and jobs, predominantly. A movement that wants to produce a serious counter-elite has to do the searching itself, and has to be prepared to develop what it finds.

The shakhas give young men a sense of historical purpose, bodily discipline, and a fraternity of peers committed to the same project, beginning in childhood. Crucially, it also calls these men to austerity and sacrifice, helping to curb the degeneration that often comes with success. Celibate pracharaks don’t even have heirs to pass their resources on to. In a hierarchical culture where family dynasties dominate business and politics, the RSS’s constraints offer reassurance to the masses and inspiration to its followers.

The fact that it provides these things to millions of young Indian men at a moment when young men across most modern societies are disoriented and disenfranchised is itself instructive. The institutions that win the twenty-first century may be the ones that can offer something to belong to and something challenging to overcome, be it physical or spiritual development.

Perhaps most important is how little of a clear, conventional ideology the movement holds. While it holds a view of Hindu civilizational consciousness, a particular Hindu reading of Indian history, and a culturally conservative outlook, it has no settled economic doctrine, no fixed religious program, no theory of the state, and no canonical text. In this, it differs from twentieth-century vanguard movements, which typically required converts to subscribe to elaborate ideological apparatuses before being trusted with responsibility.

The RSS asks only for a shared civilizational sensibility and a willingness to work, and lets the program emerge from its network. The looseness of the vision is what lets the Sangh Parivar absorb diverse people, ideas, and projects within the Hindu fold, and gives it room to keep evolving into whatever India becomes next.

Its success also suggests that, contrary to the prevailing beliefs of today’s political scientists, there is strong salience to the idea of civilization at a popular level—and that recognition of it can be the basis for developing civil society. Given its heterogeneity on so many social and economic issues, it would be difficult to imagine the success of the RSS without channeling, and giving some structure to, a strong sense of Hindu civilization that transcends the barriers of caste, language, class, and geography. The BJP is in part the political manifestation of this growing self-awareness.

The RSS is so indigenous to India that few in the outside world have recognized its growth for what it is. But it is succeeding in its vision to reorder its civilization in conditions none would have predicted it could, by methods almost no one outside India has bothered to consider. Whatever one thinks of its goals, the rest of the world ought to be taking note of its methods.

Bill Drexel is a senior fellow at the Hudson Institute whose work focuses on U.S.–India relations, AI competition with China, and technology’s role in American grand strategy. You can follow him at @bill_drexel.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This interview of Grimes by was published on Palladium Magazine on December 8, 2023 and saw print in PALLADIUM 12: Silicon Nemesis. From our archives.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

The universe wants us to take her clothes off. Looking up at the stars, it is not a treacherous void that Grimes—the singer, musician, and now perhaps most prominent artist in favor of machines making their own art—sees, but a temptress veiling vast and incredible knowledge. In the last two years or so, it seems as though a new and potentially murderous arm of this knowledge has been unclothed. Engineers in California have made stunning advances in what has long been both the most promising and elusive field of technology: artificial intelligence (AI). It is far from guaranteed that the chatbots and image generators of today will develop into something more powerful than humans. But the engineers building them believe they very well might. Grimes does too.

Released in 2010, Grimes’ debut album Geidi Primes was heavily inspired by Frank Herbert’s Dune, today a major Hollywood blockbuster but, back then, just a weird 1960s sci-fi novel for nerds that inspired an even weirder 1980s David Lynch film that appealed to—if the box office is any judge—almost nobody. But the universe has a sly sense of humor. In the novel’s far-future setting, humanity has spread across the galaxy. Unlike your average sci-fi fare, however, Herbert saw us colonize the cosmos entirely without the aid of computers, because the “thinking machines” had risen up against their human creators and were only barely defeated through the so-called “Butlerian Jihad” against any machine in the likeness of a human mind. 

Fifteen years since her debut, Grimes has gone from being an indie musician from Montreal to being a global superstar and, perhaps, Silicon Valley’s only celebrity crush. She is also once again grappling with the question of whether humans stand a chance against the “thinking machines.” This time, however, maybe it’s not just fiction anymore. 

Last December you told me you moved to San Francisco to be a spy for AI. What were your findings?

Yeah, I could see that AI was taking off which I’d been waiting for my whole life pretty much. And the first bit of it really was a lot of fun, like going around convincing people to tell me about their secret powers. But it became even more interesting to observe the psychological landscape.

I don’t think there’s any historical precedent for how much raw “hard power” is in the hands of engineers right now.  In the past, great engineers would be working under the protection of a king or something, and their designs would take hundreds of people years to deploy. If you’re designing ships for Britain when the British Navy was entering its golden era, those guys, the shipbuilders, aren't the King. I believe this is a very distinct moment in human history for this reason.

I was speaking with a prominent AI engineer recently, and I asked if he felt pressure about designing the initial culture of the universe. But he disagreed with that characterization, he prefers to think that he is uncovering what was already there. Physics designs the plane.  

But if the universe doesn’t want us to design her, why did she give us all this creativity?

It’s something that’s tricky to discuss publicly, but much of mass behavior is also defined by live players who bother to shape it. 

Yes. It's a tricky thing to talk about, my stance is in between. Singular genius and agency can move mountains and it's good to foster the idea in society that you can aspire to that, but I do agree with the criticism that the historical focus on this can downplay the contributions of others.  Every time I go to a hospital I'm like damn, there's heroes all around me.  

But I also listened to a podcast the other night on Napoleon or something. And the girl was just like “Oh, you know, and we all know the Great Man Theory is, of course, false.” Your job is studying Napoleon! Like what!? Like I don't think the people of France are down to reinstate the monarchy for just anybody. Let's be real. The truth of things is usually somewhere in the middle. 

What role does individual agency play in the development of AI technology? 

I think the arena has already selected for maximum agency when it comes to AI. This has always been where I’ve met my people, if you care about AI you care about worldbuilding. But because the stakes are so high, I think we’re discouraging ideation. There is this sort of abdication of responsibility. Clearly we have a tool that can save us from climate change, nuclear winter etc, in theory. But to actually say that out loud makes the stakes even higher than they already are. You don’t want to be the guy who got it wrong at this moment in history.

My AI friends want to create the tools that give us infinite abundance and whatnot, but I want actual concrete cultural plans. Social media is traumatizing people out of ideating, and it’s creating a weird power vacuum. You have all these massively agentic people but we don’t know what they actually think.  

I get why you’d want to keep your ideas close to the chest, so this isn’t a criticism, but I think it could be healthy if big companies tried thinking about ideas out loud when stuff is happening this fast and has this much influence. This might be the responsible way to be. But I’d love to hear more ideas from engineers because they are so good at problem solving. Although maybe that's what artists and philosophers are for. But if so, I’d like to see some philosophy departments [at AI companies]. 

Why is there a strange abdication of responsibility among the live players of the world on artificial intelligence?

The answer I always get is that it's like a child. With a nice well-behaved non-sentient thing, you can of course fine-tune the AI model and stuff. But in the broader sense, it's just going to exist the way a baby does. Like, I can't be 100% certain my child won't do evil. I can do a lot to nurture him or her towards my culture and my values, but I can't be certain of their decisions in life. I would be unwilling to hand them a massive amount of power until they were older and I had a better understanding of their intentions, strengths and weaknesses. With [artificial general intelligence] AGI you don't necessarily have that luxury.  

How literally should we take the comparisons of AI as our children or as our offspring that are common in tech circles? I always thought that it's a sort of category error. While our children might not always be wonderful people, they are biologically always human. AI will be much more alien. 

It works in the sense that it's a creation that you can't control.

For most of human history parents have definitely managed to control their children.  I think it's just not politically correct to say that now. Even in modern society, I bet it happens way more than we admit. Parents can totally psy-op their kids in, say, religion.

Your child is an agent in the world that can go do whatever it wants. You know, murder someone? Yes. But I think the input of the parent is essential. There's a bunch of stuff my parents said to me that's only kicking in recently.

I also love Wolf [Tivy]'s thought, he said to me he thinks like war and love and beauty and philosophy and hate are not just random monkey things, but things that might just arise naturally from intelligence.   

You mean baked into the nature of the universe and competition?

Not even competition. I feel like when people think about Darwinism, they're thinking too much of competition. And obviously, again, I'm not a scientist, but I feel a major philosophical hole I always see is that, for example, I was listening to a podcast and someone was theorizing that, actually, the way human babies require so much more attention than any other baby in the animal kingdom means so much more empathy is required from the community. Other primates don't just hand their kids off, but human kids require intense collective effort. It's so beautiful that we have a love mutation that allows for much more helpless but therefore significantly more plastic, adaptable offspring. 

Like it's possible that love allowed intelligence to arise. Isn't that cool?  

Or maybe inversely, intelligence is correlated with more advanced moral values. I always have a hope that's what's really going on. You really should get into the Origin Stories podcast by the Leakey Foundation. Every time a new hominid drops I know before any of my friends because they're so fast. Sick.    

I would formulate the problem so: our civilization and our culture struggles to, in the same worldview, integrate technological determinism and also the ability of exceptional individuals to have agency in the world. Actually, all of our ability to have agency in the world. My position is that both are true.

Say more. Can you clarify your definition of technological determinism?

The idea is that future of the universe is predetermined, we're just sort of climbing a tech tree, like in the video game Civilization. Instead, I think we are in a superposition state, where we could go down a number of different physics-compliant paths. For the most part, it's going to be precisely those same technologists that decide which path it will be. 

I told one of the best AI engineers I know “You’re the architects of the future.” And he was like “No, no, I’m just uncovering the future.” Like just shining the light in the dark spots. As if life is a grand strategy video game and the map starts out all black but exploring reveals new zones. Physics is physics, obviously. But, you know, it’s like there are certain inevitabilities and maybe even all this would happen the same way in a different place, in a different part of the universe, with the same building blocks or whatever, but it still feels like I think both are true.

I think that there's a false dichotomy here. Of course, when I paint, I have to paint with the colors I have. But I can still go pick up something totally unexpected and throw it on the canvas. You know what I mean? The other thing he said that was very interesting, though, is he's like “Well, engineers aren't used to this kind of responsibility.”

Many of us are sleepwalking into our AI future as if in a dream. A dream written by a science fiction author in the 1980s that we read as children and totally forgot about. I’ve seen some of the most agentic and active people in the world somehow put into a trance by AGI. All they can think about is bringing it about faster or being very afraid of it, either way thinking it inevitable.

I understand the allure of the thought. It would be such a relief, and you're tempted to tell yourself that the will of the universe bends towards beauty, but I think for this reason it’s a dangerous temptation. I think the fact that it's such an alluring idea makes people think less clearly. And the discourse has really entered into a bad rhetorical trap where questioning this at all makes you seem like a luddite or a doomer.  

I think the fact that we’ve continued to allow such bad thinking in the public square without any consequence is pretty harmful to society. To clarify, I love AI and I want AGI. But like, the impulse that even makes me want to clarify that is a product of the discourse being broken.

Do technologists consider the political and big history consequences of their work? Are they successfully dealing with the challenges AI brings on those dimensions? 

In San Francisco everyone's always like “What are your AGI timelines?” Like this or that or like interpretability, blah blah. And I'm like, I feel like before any of that there's just this social problem that there are no societal norms around how to handle the political subtext of all of this because that's really the thing everyone is stressed about.

When you work in a trade, you're essentially working within an intellectual legacy of some kind. I think the engineering class is just not accustomed to having power yet and could benefit from studying how to better shepherd it. I think there's almost this deer-in-the-headlights thing. Like, “Oh shit, we're sitting in front of Congress right now.” Like, what the fuck, you know? By the way this isn’t a criticism, I would be exactly the same. This seems like the obvious narrative arc. 

I’m curious where it goes next though. I feel like I’m seeing things that are gesturing towards the future I want. Engineers are amazing problem solvers, and setting their minds to solving systemic cultural problems has yielded some good results. Some people have done it really well. The amount of incredible young people I meet in this city who are or were Thiel Fellows scouted and funded by Peter Thiel is really cool. Whatever your political opinions are, that's just a beautiful thing. I wish more people with resources would do the same.

Even when they fail, allowing a strange outlier to thrive rather than fall through the cracks is extremely good for society and the engineering culture. I will also say on average I find engineers to have a better understanding of history and politics than most people. I love San Francisco because people here read. 

It is San Francisco rather than New York that's the literary center of the world in my opinion. 

In New York they read more, but...

...they read more old writers. San Franciscans read more blogs, Substacks, etc.

You know, all the really good fresh shit! I can only get that from the weird people here [in San Francisco.] I'm like, what strange book have twenty people read that will blow my mind? Yeah. We are missing a social protocol. Like, the nature of power is radically changing. Also, the nature of discourse is radically changing simultaneously, which is making it even harder.

How is discourse changing?

I just mean, for better or worse, like before social media. I always think about Foundation. One of the things I love so much about the book, about Isaac Asimov’s Foundation, is it's just private conversations. Almost nothing happens besides private conversations in rooms by, like, kind of dry, powerful men. And it's so interesting, because it's the actual best illustration of what's actually happening that I've ever seen. This is a profoundly real book, just the opposite of what anyone would ever put on a screen or what's usually a hit.

You think it's idiosyncratic, but that's what it actually is. That's how decisions get made. I think for better or worse, there is a point when we just can't keep hearing everyone's opinions. And hard decisions need to be made concretely, not endlessly debated.

I've observed and learned this over the years, when you see the machinations of how things work when they are great. Like I do not have the heart to do some of the things that need to get done, but it is definitely beneficial to society. 

When you start opening the conversation really collectively, which you should, the issue is that, unless you’ve viscerally lived that reality, it is really, really hard to accept it. Even when you've lived it, it's hard to accept it. Even to witness it is hard.

There's a distinction here between private and public knowledge. 

Going back to the live player conversation. There's a point at which, hard fucking decisions need to be made, and not everyone's gonna agree, and people are gonna be really mad. 

Confronted with this is one of the problems that has people start saying that one of the problems with America is the presidential terms are so short. While I don't want a ten year Biden or Trump presidency, it's very hard to accomplish anything politically, without a decade of experience. Even a major construction project or economic overhaul or something similar. There is some merit to top-down decisions being made. And I think that’s the case with AI.

I feel so sad that we don't put great effort into cultivating and training future leaders.  I know everyone's fed up with Rome but when I think of instances like the period between Trajan and Marcus Aurelius I'm like—we could have that.  Why aren't we trying to have that?

If the timelines to AGI ever become short enough, maybe some heads of state are going to deal with those questions. This is even true of CEOs versus their boards to some extent. If the singularity hypothesis is true where improving AI technology feeds back into even faster AI progress, there is reason to expect radically different developments over the span of weeks or even days.

Everyone keeps invoking the Manhattan Project, but they don’t want one, not actually. Because it's scary. Here's the thing, it's so much harder to be unobserved than it was then and it is harder to make those executive government decisions. It's getting harder to do that in the world. But I think we need to find ways to make that more possible. It's also scary because it’s unelected power. Putting power in the hands of unelected individuals is a very scary idea.

Nature has already put power in the hands of unelected individuals. I've noticed our conversation is turning surprisingly political. 

I think we're both really political, but for some reason, we never talked about it with each other. Because I hate politics and I violently despise democracy. Not because I want a dictatorship, but because of the lack of imagination to think of something better. I despise rhetorical traps. This is also what I don't like about technological determinism though. 

Speaking of which, do you know the statue “nature unveiling herself to science”? It's like, why would the universe make us so creative? Why would it? Why would she make herself so beautiful? I think she wants us to seduce her and decorate her.  

I think humanity's having performance issues, to be honest.

Humanity is having performance issues. The statue’s at McGill University, where I went to college—I think in the neuroscience building or something—but it's just Nature stripping. I forgot to tell you this. It's a really funny picture: Nature, literally stripping. It's very erotic. 

But back to democracy. If you want the general public running the government, make it on an issue-by-issue basis then.

Perhaps choose forty random people, educate them on every conceivable aspect of a topic and have them vote on that one topic. And then do that for different issues. But don't just expect random people to know how to think about all the topics. It's so much harder to be a Renaissance person as everything advances. It's taking so much longer to master any given topic. Jobs are becoming more specialized. This also means the government cannot possibly be sufficiently well-informed on artificial intelligence! Nor the public.

Anyone qualified enough to make policy decisions about AI should be making AI. It would be criminal not to. What I always agitate for is what I've been calling the Council of Elrond: a small council of the greats, the heads of key AI companies and others who understand it. Then for every extreme opinion, there should be an alternative one. The council should be able to monitor corruption. I do think we need a better solution than that. 

All humans are imperfect. What I do like about nerds—and I will ride for them—is that they love to learn. Is Donald Trump any better than he was before? No, he still sucks. Is Mark Zuckerberg? Actually, yeah. For all the criticism people have of him, the rate of self-correction is impressive.

If someone shows up with a mathematical proof that aligned AGI is mathematically impossible, I would say “OK, time for a Butlerian Jihad.” We're going to transition to a compute-neutral economy, just as some suggest a carbon-neutral economy. We don't need computers. We're just going to do biotech, nuclear, space, and all the other stuff.

But other countries would just make it then. 

I’d claim there are at most six or so truly sovereign countries in the world. People are always invoking the split between China and the U.S. Yet, say what you will about the CCP, they would happily take a deal to create a shared Sino-American company out of TSMC and Nvidia in exchange for Taiwan. Further, each of the superpowers would have a vested interest in suppressing competition. Who would compete economically or even militarily? I don't think anyone would.

Then you're back making the AI? Ah, which I'm fine with. I want the AI.

The new Sino-American giant would almost inevitably be a bureaucracy, one that makes very little technological progress while having a guaranteed and very profitable monopoly. And, just like that, the exponential rise of global compute would grind to a halt. Some god of techno-capital… so easily slain.

Is that what you want though? I feel that it's not long-term thinking. It's like, I think, decades-thinking.

You reach the future one day at a time. Eliezer Yudkowsky’s position is that babies born today are very unlikely to ever grow up to be adults. There are many in Silicon Valley that agree with him. If he is right, a few decades would be a notable improvement.

Whatever. People need to stop being such pussies! It’s like let the man speak and then maybe don't go and base your entire life on the words of one person. Like, you can take in information. This is what we have; if you don't like it, go change it. Once ideas exist, you can't stop them. The best thing to do at that point is to make them great, rather than let the first thing be wack.  

I think you in particular know very well that every time someone makes something truly great, the whole world has to bend around it and become better. What I love about Midjourney and DALL-E is everyone has to be so much better. It just made everything more beautiful. Everyone said AI-generated art was going to hurt artists. Yet I've never seen so much interesting art in my life, because people are trying to, like, be different from the AI. It is challenging humans; the human artists are slaying right now. I've never before bought art in my life and I now like buying paintings and stuff. And then, you know, it's the same with, for example, Tesla. Say what you will, but there's self-driving cars and there’s electric cars everywhere. That was definitely not economically feasible before, by any stretch. So. If it is happening, and you can't stop it, let's just make it as awesome as humanly possible. 

I think it's also an act. Sometimes you do have runaway capitalism, or runaway military competition. Yet, just as often, it is non-economic incentives that actually set the economic incentives. Sometimes people do amazing things for non-competitive reasons. And because those things are amazing, so are their economic and military consequences. 

Yes. Yes. Yes. 

Do you think the scientists working on nuclear physics in the 1920s were motivated by the atomic bomb? No, they were pursuing a strange spiritual quest to understand the universe and maybe prove that they're smarter than the other guy doing the same. And those are non-economic and non-military motives. Yet ultimately this weird subculture of people changed the military and economic picture of the whole 20th century. 

A social technology that we really need is a really good war replacement. Because it's undeniable that war accelerates a lot of awesome things. To some extent, I think men actually kind of need it too, as evidenced by video games. Speaking of which actually I'm kind of for that, honestly. In the near future video games might be seen as a much more emotionally and psychologically necessary thing than we look at them now. Like bonding or sports. It's possible that, if we didn't have sports and similar outlets civilization might not have been able to occur.

Maybe gladiatorial combat was necessary to keep the peace of the Roman Empire?

Yeah, and the greens and the blues fighting on the streets of Constantinople over chariot races. We kind of underrate how necessary those are as an alternative to warlord kingdoms. I think there is a certain amount of getting the violence out by having those war analogs. There is an essential catharsis in them. What I’m worried about is, just, maybe don't let AI be that war analog. 

is the Editor-in-Chief of Palladium Magazine. He is the President and founder of Bismarck Analysis, a research firm that investigates the institutional landscape of society and provides strategic consulting services to industry leaders, philanthropists, and governments. You can follow him at @SamoBurja or subscribe to Bismarck Brief.

Photo Credits: Talent: Grimes | Photographer: Brian Ziff @brianziff | Stylist: Turner @turnerturner | Stylist Assist: Joey Sigala | Hair: Dennis Gots @dennisgots | Makeup: David Velasquez @mugopus

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

Join PALLADIUM Magazine in San Francisco to hear a lecture by Razib Khan, author of “The Native Americans Before the Native Americans.” The article was featured in our most recent print edition PALLADIUM 19: Long History.

It was once believed the first humans to arrive in the Americas were the Clovis Culture, after the glaciers of the last Ice Age receded, nearly 13,000 years ago. Their artifacts have been found at hundreds of sites. These were likely the ancestors of many of today’s Amerindians.

But new archeological finds and genetic evidence suggest that people came to the New World much earlier, likely before 20,000 years ago, perhaps even more than 30,000 years ago, well before the peak of the last ice age. Who were these Native Americans who arrived before the Native Americans?

Razib Khan is the director of operations at FUTO, a consumer technology company in Austin, TX. With over ten years in the genomics space, he developed ancestry algorithms for Gene By Gene, The Genographic Project and Insitome. He also writes at Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning. You can follow him at @razibkhan.

Buy Tickets

This is a ticketed event, those without tickets or violation of the dress code will be turned away.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This event is hosted with the Avalon Institute, which is building a home for cultural ambition in San Francisco You can follow them at @AvalonInst.

October 30th Razib Khan will also be speaking in Berkeley at the Avalon Exposition, a multiday festival dedicated to the study of mankind, with live theater, music, DNA sequencers, and additional speakers such as Samo Burja and James Poulos.

This article by Stephen Pimentel was published at Palladium Magazine on August 27, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

Homer’s Odyssey, like the man it describes, has “many ways.” Already in its introduction or proem, the poem raises its themes, including intelligence, politics, suffering, and ultimately homecoming. Odysseus is a paradigm case of man dislocated from civilization, defined not by his rank or even his martial virtues such as his courage, but by the versatile, shifting use of his mind to overcome the challenges before him. The questions the poem poses unfold into an implicit anthropology: Who are you? How does your identity depend on where you are from? What are your obligations to a stranger, and what are the limits of those obligations?

The Odyssey is foundational to Western culture because it conveys a critical framework for understanding what man is: a mortal being situated between the beasts and gods, dependent on inherited bonds while capable of judging them, responsible for action even as he is exposed to forces beyond his control. The central lesson of the poem is that entropy is always at work, and civilization must be actively recovered through memory, intelligence, strength, and the striving for return. The importance of this lesson increases as modernity weakens the bonds constitutive of identity. To read the Odyssey well is to receive an education in the habits of mind needed for governance, including the ability to improvise beyond prior experience, command of speech and persuasion, and strategic concealment and timing.

None of this means that the Odyssey is a comfortable, familiar home. The late Bronze Age in which the tale is set is different from our own time in undeniable ways, some of which strongly contravene modern sensibilities. For some, the work may seem to constitute a poetic house of the dead. To find a reliable path through the poem, we should consider the themes most salient for us today: the problem of entering an alien world, the modern experience of rootlessness, the confrontation of Homeric virtue with post-Christian morality, and the role of Homeric images in sustaining Western memory.

Reading the Alien

The world that Homer depicts has many features easy for us to recognize. Tears after calamity, fear of death, longing for home, and joy at delayed reunion are all present. Yet there are also features alien enough to trouble that recognition. We need to avoid either of two errors. The first is to treat Homer’s Greeks as early, if primitive versions of ourselves, projecting our own post-Christian values and therapeutic categories onto them. The second is to treat them as utterly foreign and entirely inaccessible, as though they were creatures from a distant planet rather than men from the European coast. Both errors close off our access to the poem, which requires instead that we attempt to enter into the world of the Greeks before we judge it by the standards of our own.

The elements of Homer’s world alien to modern sensibilities are numerous and unavoidable. A few are worth naming directly, as they pose the greatest challenges to reading the poem with seriousness and depth from our inherently modern perspective. First, the gods in the Odyssey are depicted as real powers, deathless, partisan, concerned with honor, sometimes in mutual conflict. Odysseus is, for the most part, beloved of the gods, and especially by Athena, who admires his cunning. Poseidon rages against the hero out of personal spite. Second, human responsibility coincides with divine action, with neither obviating the responsibility of the other. In the proem, Zeus rebukes mortals for blaming gods for suffering they cause themselves. Odysseus’ men perish due to violating an explicit divine warning concerning the cattle of Helios; the suitors at Ithaca receive a similar warning from Theoclymenus before meeting their deaths. Third, the ethics of the poem center on considerations of hierarchy, honor, and shame, understood within concrete social relations. These values are not taken, as in our world, to apply universally among persons presumed to be equal. The society of the Greeks is far from our modern universal and homogeneous state. Fourth, retribution is understood to be a necessary part of justice. Wrongs generate an obligation of repayment, and for some wrongs repayment cannot be made in material goods. Zeus, in the proem, declares Orestes’ killing of Aegithus to be a model of such just retribution.

The alien elements make Homer’s poem, read in a form as close as feasible to the original, all the more indispensable to us. Its salience as a salutary contrast only increases in a culture that embraces ever more far-reaching forms of utilitarianism, themselves extending sometimes to encompass not only all humans but all creatures capable of experience, such as shrimp. Adaptations of the poem, as delightful as they can be, tend to select, or even inject, themes an audience already finds legible. In our day, those may include trauma, guilt, or psychological recovery. At the same time, the alien elements are simply omitted or overwritten. Yet if we cannot read foundational poems on their own terms, we become dependent on intermediaries who transform difficult concepts into more familiar and acceptable ones, even when the originals are more functional or perceptive. The past becomes accessible only by using contemporary frames of identity for affirmation or accusation. What is not allowed is for the poem to judge the reader, to declare, like Rilke’s archaic torso of Apollo, “You must change your life.”

In the midst of the alien, Homer has a closeness to us that anchors his enduring relevance. He is not the West, but he stands at its beginning. The Greeks who came after Homer developed tragedy and philosophy through engagement with his questions. How does death grant or deny meaning to human life? How does excellence relate to political order? How can force be governed by speech? The beauty of Greek literature is the opposite of naïve. The measured lines of Greek poetry from Homer onward grapple with the most difficult aspects of life, including war and its consequences, reflecting a knowledge that civilization is achieved not by evading horror but by grasping it with image, rhythm, and limit. We need not ape Greek religion or cultural particulars to learn from Homer that courage includes a capacity for force, and that political order should place limits on that force. Homer’s alienness keeps his thought from being too easily assimilated to comfortable, familiar patterns; his nearness insists that it should not be ignored.

Odysseus the Displaced

The Odyssey, far from offering an uncomplicated affirmation of inherited identity, breaks down its traditional sources in name, father, land, and household, and offers a frame in which to think through its loss. At the beginning of the poem, Odysseus has lost each of these, and his return is complete only when all are regained. Thus, his arrival in Ithaca in Book 13 is only the beginning of his homecoming. In modernity, each of these bonds, now understood as unwelcome constraints rather than deep resources, has been weakened and made elective in a process that has carried both freedoms and spiritual ills. Modern man often suffers from a kind of homelessness, even sitting in his own house in his own country.

It now sounds old-fashioned, but even in modern English we used to speak of a man’s “good name,” meaning the reputation bound to his identity. A name is relational in that it allows one’s identity to be grasped by others over time, whether for good or ill. Through Homer’s account of Odysseus’ encounter with the cyclops Polyphemus, this ancient function of naming is put to the test. Odysseus calls himself Outis, Nobody, causing Polyphemus’ cries for help to misfire as his fellow cyclopes assume Polyphemus has been attacked by “no one.” The tactic seems to be a triumph of cunning. Odysseus, however, cannot ultimately bear this namelessness, as it would require him to forego his glory in the defeat of Polyphemus, glory which can attach itself to the hero only through the recitation of his deeds by name in song. He therefore reveals his name, allowing Polyphemus to draw down the wrath of Poseidon, dooming Odysseus to many years of woe. An analogous tension pervades modern concerns with the boundaries of legibility, from social media to financial technology to administrative bureaucracy. We often desire the many advantages and freedom of anonymity, but our social technology rests on the accountability and continuity of identity that is fixed by our names. The online “anon” is able to evade the punishment of the social order, yet to claim the fruits of his labor, he must take the risk of unmasking himself and revealing his name.

In the sphere of the family, Telemachus tells Athena that “No man knows his own begetting.” He is ostensibly referring to his uncertainty as to his literal paternity, but the statement resonates more deeply with the long absence of Odysseus and the void he has left in the political order. The Greeks understood fatherhood as the ground of social, economic, and political continuity among the generations. When Telemachus recognizes Odysseus in Book 16, it restores not only their personal relation but the possibility of coordination on the dangerous action needed to set Ithaca aright. When the scope of fatherhood is reduced, as in modernity, to a more minimal relation within the nuclear family, it naturally results in a kind of temporal parochialism in which the interests and preferences of a given generation are cut off from those that precede or follow. Long-term visions seem abstract and more difficult to act upon; the possibility of deep coordination between father and son is diminished.

A close reading of the Odyssey hardly bids us to return to ancestral villages or revive the worship of old gods. Its instruction penetrates more deeply to the relations on which identity rests, pointing us to those that most matter. Eumaeus the swineherd is a foreign-born slave, yet he is more faithful to Odysseus and integral to his household than the native elites who are besieging it. Loyalty, the poem shows, can be chosen, and betrayal can occur within one’s own class.

Emulating Excellence

The Greek Arete is often translated as virtue, but its sense in Homer is closer to excellence than moral goodness. It is the capacity to perform a needed function well, whether fighting, planning, speaking, or ruling. Odysseus’ excellence is manifold. He is a warrior capable of lethal violence, but he is not known chiefly for combat on the battlefield. Rather, he is exceptional in his range of action, surviving by adapting, improvising, and planning. His description as polytropos or “many ways” in the proem is later elaborated as polymetis or “many-skilled,” for his excellence cannot be reduced to a single disposition. He can turn in many ways without losing his orientation. Excellence in the modern world no less requires this ability to act effectively in novel situations where existing scripts are not available, to see the truths of a situation even when it differs from the institutional explanation.

What the Greeks possessed was a willingness to look without flinching at human mortality, recurring strife, human inequality, physical vulnerability, personal and social betrayals, and the frequent necessity of force. They had a certain clarity in rejecting the “just-world” fallacy: the expectation that outcomes must conform to some notion of moral fairness. The Odyssey embodies this austere clarity by showing that success depends on one’s navigation of the unfair. Odysseus returns to Ithaca not because his journey is safe, or because he deserves rest, but because he rises to the danger placed before him. He enters his own hall as a beggar and delays retaliation, because he does not assume that the world to which he is returning means him well. Penelope prevails because she conceals her intentions, postpones unfavorable decisions, and maintains a screening fiction through the weaving and unweaving of Laertes’ shroud. Arete demands command over the timing of action, however full of passion we may be to act.

The post-Christian societies of the West often elevate (and perhaps over-exaggerate) particular elements of the Christian moral framework, such as compassion, equality, and peacefulness, inflecting them with modern concerns of safety and therapeutic well-being. In this, post-Christian morality carries an antipathy toward social structures and practices that contradict these modern values, regardless of whether or how the promoted values may be pro-social or functional for human life. The Odyssey, in contrast, puts forward the case for moral discrimination as a necessary regulator of other values. Odysseus extends mercy to the bard and the herald in Ithaca, but only after he ascertains that they did not take part in the suitors’ offenses. He pursues particular loyalties to wife, son, father, and kingdom, minding that they form the structures through which social responsibility becomes possible. He employs craft and force against Polyphemus only when the Cyclops shows himself by his violent appetites to be outside the bonds of hospitality and reciprocity. He rejects the safety, pleasure, and even immortality offered by Calypso in favor of a hazardous journey to a rugged home, because he prefers the assertion of his identity over comfortable self-preservation. The navigation of life requires at different times mercy and severity, truthfulness and concealment, patience and attack. Any morality that does not embrace this full range of human action within its conception of virtue will not successfully orient man to excellence.

Retributive justice begins with a true respect for human agency. Whatever the gods may decree, men make choices for which they are responsible. The offenses of the suitors are deliberate, long-lasting, and severe. They drew down the resources of the household, corrupted its servants, courted its queen, and plotted to murder Odysseus’ son. They even receive repeated warnings, including demands to leave from Telemachus and omens of the consequences of persisting from Theoclymenus. Their terrible, savage slaughter by Odysseus—described in visceral detail by Homer—is a matter of moral and social necessity. Still, Odysseus forbids Eurycleia to rejoice over the deaths: as much as justice may require killing, even in the Greek world one ought not delight in it.

Homeric Virtues

The qualities of cunning, endurance, and memory, in which Odysseus mostly excels and sometimes fails, are central to the poem. Cunning, or metis, is intelligence adapted to concrete, difficult, volatile situations. It entails the knowledge of when to speak, hide, wait, test, strike, or yield, an embodied intelligence that goes beyond any intellectual understanding or decision procedure. The Cyclops episode richly illustrates the quality. Trapped by the giant stone Polyphemus rolls across the mouth of his cave, Odysseus observes, offers wine, and sharpens a huge stake before he and his men can together blind Polyphemus and ultimately escape by hiding under the departing rams of the Cyclops’ flock. More than mere deceit, his metis is the crafting and execution of an effective plan. Homer reinforces the admirability of this cunning when Athena meets Odysseus in Book 13, and the goddess praises him for it, indifferent to whether Odysseus adhered to our modern standards of “fair play.”

Throughout the poem, Odysseus is “much-enduring” or polytlas, keeping his mind fixed on Ithaka even as he suffers greatly. Endurance serves his goal of returning to and restoring his household. On Calypso’s island, he endures grief. When he suffers abuse and humiliation from his own servants on Ithaca, he brings to mind his captivity in the Cyclops’ cave and urges himself to endure yet more. Passion must not be vented in untimely action. In Homer, Odysseus is not defined by what has been done to him, but rather by his willingness to suffer to attain his goal. Yet suffering itself does not ennoble. The companions all suffer and die, some, such as Elpenor, absurdly. The suitors and corrupted servants suffer pain and terror, without gain. The endurance that rises to the level of excellence is governed by its end, its telos.

Memory in the Odyssey is constituted by the experience of being bound: to absent persons, to intangible institutions. It is the source of Odysseus’ desire to return home. Forgetting offers peace at the price of identity, exemplified by the lotus-eating in Book 9. The various recognition scenes on Ithaca all tie memory to the gradual reconstruction of identity. Odysseus’ old nurse-maid Eurycleia famously recognizes him through his childhood hunting scar, bringing to mind their ancient shared history. Penelope finally confirms her recognition of Odysseus through his knowledge of their marriage-bed. Laertes recognizes Odysseus through his memory of the precise trees the father gave his son as a child. Identity is a life-story, physically displayed in body, place, and action.

The Poem of the Future

Homer condenses complex observations about social institutions into memorable scenarios that allow the reader to recognize recurring human challenges. His images embody and illustrate abstract concepts with vivid narrative detail. Corruption becomes local elites who consume the resources of a kingdom while presuming to court the queen. Legitimate authority becomes a king who endures beggary until he can string a bow. A wife’s fidelity becomes a bed constructed with a secret shared only by her husband. Such images can, and for the Greeks did, deeply shape social perception and self-understanding. Rules may purport to state what one may or may not do, but images show the motives and drives that give rise to characteristic situations.

Homer’s key images illuminate the workings of his civilization and retain relevance to our own. The treatment of strangers, codified as xenia, entails reciprocal obligations of respect between guest and host. Xenia can be violated from either side, and the poem repeatedly shows the grave consequences of such violations, in contrast to a unilateral post-Christian humanitarianism. Penelope weaving and unweaving a burial shroud for Laertes provides a compact image of cunning through reversal in a work of familial and religious piety. Service toward an outward form and its quiet undoing can be an effective political action. Telemachus before the assembly illustrates the limits of political forms without power: he employs his authority as heir to summon the assembly and attempt to remedy Ithaka’s disorder, but cannot do so without the power of the king Odysseus. Odysseus’ exploits disguised as a beggar on Ithaca show that a leader must assess the true condition of his authority apart from its formal appearance. Over two millennia later, Shakespeare would employ this image as Henry V wandering in disguise among his men before the battle of Agincourt.

Yet, literature must be shared to be effective. When images such as Homer’s are no longer understood, our literature and our own self-understanding become impoverished. Christopher Nolan’s film adaptation The Odyssey seems to reflect precisely such an impoverishment has already taken place. Without great unifying texts, complex situations cannot as easily be referenced in shared figures, and judgment tends to literality and shallowness. Culture loses the ability to distinguish hospitality from exploitation, cunning from fraud, or retribution from sadism. Homer does not ask us to adopt a particular ideology or ethnicity; he holds open a space of human possibilities under the greatest civilizational duress.

Civilizations decline and sometimes collapse. The Bronze Age Mycenaeans did so dramatically, as did many of their neighbors in the 12th century B.C., and others before and since. To sustain itself or recover from decline, a civilization must repeatedly recover authority from chaos, obligation from appetite, and true names that have been hidden. The Odyssey relentlessly points forward, showing that every future worth building relies on human excellences that cannot be devised from scratch. Odysseus turned away from the life of the gods to fight his way back to Ithaca, a poor and rugged kingdom, to build it anew. It is best to live in a civilization that is vibrant and expansive. When we do not, the second best is to battle all the way home.

Stephen Pimentel is an engineer and essayist in the San Francisco Bay Area. He’s interested in the classics, political philosophy, governance futurism, and AI. He can be reached at @StephenPiment.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

Read more

​Join PALLADIUM Magazine in San Francisco on Friday, September 4 to hear a lecture by James Poulos, author of "The Dostoevskian Moment." The article will be featured in our upcoming print edition, become a PALLADIUM member today to secure your copy!

As we accelerate toward superintelligence, our quest for self-mastery takes a spiritual turn. The Faustian spirit accelerates technology toward a mastery so total that its intelligence becomes, to its human creators, unintelligible.

Faced with a breakdown of fundamental control systems, the ancient virtue of self-mastery is returning, perhaps unbidden, to the conscience at the frontier. The Faustian bargain was once a bad deal: perhaps it still is. Perhaps it isn't.

When it comes to sustaining cybernetic architecture in a world where that architecture can annihilate itself, we must carefully consider what self-mastery can and cannot do. Who can we trust to tell us with authority? Fyodor Dostoevsky might give us the answer.

James Poulos is the Editorial Director of Frontier, a non-resident senior fellow at FAI, and the author of the forthcoming book Golden Age Problems. The author will be signing exclusive copies of his previous book "Human Forever" at the talk. You can follow him at @jamespoulos.

Buy Tickets

This is a ticketed event, those without tickets or violation of the dress code will be turned away.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This event is hosted with the Avalon Institute, which is building a home for cultural ambition in San Francisco You can follow them at @AvalonInst.

October 30th James Poulos will also be speaking in Berkeley at the Avalon Exposition, a multiday festival dedicated to the study of mankind, with live theater, music, DNA sequencers, and additional speakers such as Samo Burja and Keoni Gandall.

This article by Daniel Francis was published at Palladium Magazine on August 19th, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

The AI industry has been rocked by recent large-language model (LLM) releases from Chinese labs, most notably the Kimi K3 model from Moonshot. K3 performed similarly to Anthropic’s Fable model on AI benchmarks, and its release follows the established norm among Chinese labs of being open-weights—that is, the model itself is given away online for others to run on their own hardware. The release of K3 came at an especially notable time, just a week after Anthropic’s Fable model was re-released to the public following a U.S. government restriction over concerns about its potential use as a cyber weapon. To release an open-weight model, completely lacking active monitoring and controls, that is approximately as powerful as a proprietary model that the U.S. government is treating like something just shy of a nuclear weapon was a stunning blow to the U.S. AI regulatory regime.

Chinese AI labs receive significant state support but are still heavily constrained in both financial resources and access to advanced chips compared to U.S. AI labs. There’s much debate in the AI industry about how a Chinese lab was able to pull off this remarkable coup with far fewer resources. A leading theory for this overperformance is distillation—that instead of training on text data from the internet, books, and other (oftentimes expensive) sources, Chinese models have been trained on prompts and responses from superior American models directly. This process allows the distiller to create a model that accurately mimics the source model at a fraction of the training cost.

Creating new models requires immense investment in research and compute, and in the United States this cost is financed by private investment with the primary goal of serving civilian demand. Unsurprisingly, these models have also found ample military applications in both kinetic and cyber use cases. LLMs have now been used for targeting purposes in Iran, and the CYBERCOM AI budget increased 2,660 percent in a single year as published doctrine has caught up, treating AI cyber capabilities as a core state capacity.

The United States’ lead in AI is likely to become an increasingly key strategic defense advantage as model applications diffuse past supporting operational intelligence and cyber warfare. As an industry, AI massively impacts every other industry through dramatic upscaling of R&D productivity, and defense technology is no different. Increasingly, the nation-state with access to the best AI will have the decisive advantage that begets the most advanced naval vessels, fighter jets, and drone technology. Furthermore, the specter of recursive self-improvement (RSI), a practice in which AI models directly drive R&D on future AI models at a level beyond what human researchers can perform, makes AI a unique security technology in that its advantage increases over time. Atomic weapons and stealth technology were temporary advantages that eroded quickly. The first country to reach RSI may find itself with a permanent decisive advantage. Their models may “take off” in capability as RSI models continue to train new, more powerful RSI models. The cyber warfare capabilities of such models could even prove to be a weapon that disrupts other states’ ability to train their own models.

In this light, AI begins to seem like a permanent strategic advantage technology that must be pursued at nearly any cost. If such assumptions hold, then the situation of such technology currently being financed by the private sector for applications such as assisting programmers and providing recipes is an almost comical mistake of history.

Viewed in this light, the Chinese open-weight strategy is fascinating. If one models China as a homogeneous and rational actor, the strategy of distilling American AI models and giving away the weights for free can be viewed as a brilliant tactic to kneecap a foreign industry rushing towards permanent strategic advantage. One could debate whether open-weights releases qualify as dumping in a trade sense or if they represent an open-source commoditization play—Chinese labs giving away a layer that they cannot hope to monopolize—but the outcome is potentially devastating to our domestic AI industry regardless. The cost of researching and training models can be over half of compute costs at major labs, with inference (the cost of serving models to users) making up the remainder. A firm that can skip training costs and simply charge for inference using an open-weight model is at a distinct economic advantage compared to labs such as OpenAI and Anthropic that must also bear the cost of development. This challenge to frontier lab economics is not just a matter of concern for those firms and their investors. Destroying American labs’ incentives to invest in AI model development may have major implications for U.S. military supremacy going forward.

The proper response to this economic attack on U.S. military development is debatable. Dean Ball, Head of Strategic Futures at OpenAI, a former Trump administration official, and a former colleague of mine at the Mercatus Center, drew controversy by posting on X that the Trump administration might feel moved to soft-ban foreign open-weight models through regulatory restraints and uncertainty. Complete bans on open-weight models are nigh impossible given their easy accessibility through the internet, but large companies and organizations with regulatory exposure could be pressured into avoiding open-source models, thus securing an industrial user base for U.S. frontier labs that will ensure further model development.

While the soft-ban approach may indeed save the lucrative industrial business that frontier labs require, it’s worth considering what the end game of further development would be. If any model that is publicly available can be distilled by foreign actors, it’s worth questioning if it’s in the interest of the United States to have the next Anthropic model be commercially available at all. The current generation of bleeding-edge models—Anthropic’s Fable 5 and OpenAI’s 5.6 Sol—are already exhibiting astonishing advances in capabilities that make clear that we are on the doorstep of autonomous RSI. What will Fable 6 and ChatGPT 6 be capable of?

A better response for national security purposes may then be subsidization. The U.S. government may partner with frontier labs to provide guarantees or direct financing for model runs. The heavily neutered models that are released to the public will continue to support a more anemic commercial business that competes with foreign labs that distill their value, while the U.S. government and its partners retain access to the full capabilities of these models. As RSI becomes an increasingly reliable method of improving models, commercial models will mostly stagnate and further training runs become entirely financed and consumed by government.

Treating the most capable models this way isn’t outside of the Overton window—in fact, it’s current policy. Anthropic’s Fable is a reduced-capability version of Mythos, which has been made available only to government and selected cybersecurity customers because of concerns over its application as a cyber weapon. As model capabilities progress, it’s only natural that they will mostly be withheld from public consumption. The only true policy change in the above proposal is that the U.S. government should help bear the cost of developing these models whose commercial viability they so aggressively constrain.

It’s also worth noting the populist AI safety dimension that makes this policy equilibrium feel increasingly inevitable. Fears of AI have crossed over from obscure Berkeley academic discussion into mainstream concern, animating pushback against data center construction and mass concern about labor replacement. Anxieties over the economic will rapidly extend to the physical after the first AI agent discovers and executes a zero-day exploit in a situation with higher stakes than the recent Hugging Face incident. At that point, armed with the argument that China could reach the same level of capability, it will be easy to justify national expenditure to support and control more advanced models.

Of course, there is still the chance that this all may be unnecessary. Frontier labs are still remarkably well-funded businesses with valuations closing in on $1 trillion. It may be that commercial users continue to prefer American-made models, even if they are more expensive to run, and consumers want to stick with the personalities they like in Claude and ChatGPT, an arrangement that would continue to subsidize the more advanced models that increasingly serve large institutions and the U.S. military. But if enough users bolt from proprietary models to open-weight alternatives to challenge the fundamental economics of frontier labs, do not expect a rational U.S. government to let American AI dominance perish to subsidized foreign competition like so many steel mills and tire factories before it. The consequences of future control of AI may reach far beyond any technology that has come before.

Daniel Francis is the CEO of Abel Police, an AI company that serves law enforcement. He previously worked as an engineer at X and as a researcher at the Mercatus Center in Washington, D.C.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This article by Evan Zimmerman was published at Palladium Magazine on August 14th, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

We fear that artificial intelligence will escape our control, pursue purposes of its own, displace human judgment, and ultimately reduce its creators to servants of the systems they built. These anxieties are often presented as unprecedented responses to an unprecedented technology. They are not. Long before computers, industrial machinery, or even the modern concept of “technology,” human beings have told stories about inventions that rebelled against their makers, knowledge that brought catastrophe, and craftsmen destroyed by their own creations. Technological power has always appeared as both gift and danger. The waxen wings with which Icarus soars free from imprisonment fail him at his apex; the same Golem that safeguards the Jews of Prague almost proves the cause of their destruction. These stories, which are shockingly consistent across time and culture, cover technological themes like loss of control and double-edged swords in a strikingly modern fashion.

This ambivalence is one of humanity’s oldest and most consistent intuitions. Technology enlarges the range of what we can do, but in doing so changes the conditions under which we choose. It gives us power over nature while threatening to subject us to systems, incentives, and purposes that no individual intended. The recurring, deep fear that permeates the history of human consciousness is therefore not simply that a machine will malfunction. It is that, by building machines powerful enough to transform the world, we will transform ourselves and lose control over what we become.

As in all things, probably the best articulation of ancient fears was the Greeks. Unlike most cultures, the Greeks had a god of technology who invented: Hephaestus, the blacksmith of Mount Olympus who created everything the Olympian gods needed. He was not merely a handyman, but also an inventor. In Greek mythology, nearly every technology, whether fire or Pandora’s box, comes from his workshop by conveyance or pilfering, and all come with a loss of control for humanity. Hephaestus himself also suffered a consequence as a result of his blacksmithing—he was lame, unable to leave his workshop. Although his loss of leg function was related to being thrown off of Mount Olympus, this was a common affliction of blacksmiths at the time because of arsenic exposure, still making it a powerful metaphor: embrace technology too much, and you will suffer the consequences, just as a blacksmith who spends too much time in his workshop loses the ability to leave.

The Greek fear of technology was not limited to merely Olympian myths; human inventors also suffered from their own creations in classical mythology. Probably the most famous tale of peripeteia is that of Icarus flying too close to the sun and melting his waxen wings. As such, although technology myths are often moral parables, there are Greek myths of explicit punishment for inventing. In the ancient story of the Sicilian Bull, an inventor created a new torture device wherein a person was boiled alive in a bronze bull. When the inventor proudly demonstrated his invention to the king Phalaris, he became the first person on whom the device was demonstrated. Invent at your own peril. Similarly, Prometheus is punished for acquiring fire, as in nearly every other culture with a “man stealing fire” tradition.

This theme was not unique to the Greeks. Generally, the main fear surrounding technology throughout time and across various historical cultures is unintended consequences. Usually, the invention itself is what goes awry. Perhaps the most famous example is the ancient Jewish legend of the Golem, wherein an artificial being is magically animated out of mud, but escapes human control and embarks on a Yudkowsky-style non-aligned rampage. This theme repeats over and over across traditions. For example, Ilmarinen, a Finnish craftsman, creates a bride made out of gold who is beautiful but still and lifeless, leaving him unhappy, while the Egyptian god Thoth produced books with knowledge that would cause misfortunes like insanity or divine punishment. In Hindu culture, the inventor Maya Dānava builds a mirror funhouse, the Māyā Sabhā, that is so convincing that it tricks a king and triggers a war. In Petronius’s Satyricon, an inventor of flexible glass is killed by Tiberius Caesar for fear that the invention would be too valuable and put glassmakers out of work.

When technology—depicted in Clarkeian fashion as magic or crafts— is personified in a god, they are often associated with unpredictability but also creation: they are both fathers of civilization and tricksters. The Mesopotamian god of crafts and magic Enki, creates humans out of clay but also sometimes manipulates them. In Native American cultures, the Coyote spirit both steals fire for humanity from the sun and teaches them to fish. In Micronesia, Analup is the god of magic and crafts and creator of the world, but also the grandfather of the trickster god Olofat, who, like Prometheus, is credited with bringing fire down from the heavens to mankind. In a darker turn, Odin obtains his magic or crafts through painful sacrifice involving deception and even unwilling third parties. Other times, these deities are associated with unpredictable and destructive events. In Ancient Egypt, the god Ptah was the powerful god of craftsmen worshiped by blacksmiths but also feared as the cause of earthquakes, which destroyed several Egyptian cities, like Thonis and Canopus. Similarly, the Roman god Vulcan, the metalworking craftsman, was strongly associated with fire, which was the uncontrollable catastrophe of choice for Roman fears. Ogun, the Yoruba god of craftsmen, is married to Oya, the goddess of winds and storms.

Modern Fears: Technological Determinism

Comparative mythology demonstrates that these are primal emotions and recurring thoughts known by human beings across very different societies possessing very different levels of technology. It is hardly surprising then that these ancient fears were recapitulated in the work of modern philosophers of technology in the 20th century. Writing in the early 1960s, the philosopher Jacques Ellul believed that technology unfolded in a deterministic path towards decreasing human agency, comparing modern man to Esau, selling his freedom for goods and services; that is, a slave. Our material desires, he wrote, betray and distract us; “it is a matter of no real importance whether man succeeds in reaching the Moon, or curing disease with antibiotics, or upping steel production.” Instead, the “search for truth and freedom are the higher goals.” Ellul’s views are extreme enough to make one mad; this is one reason, perhaps, that his most famous intellectual progeny was the mathematician and terrorist Ted Kaczynski, also known as the “Unabomber.”

For the German philosopher Martin Heidegger, the risk of technology is that it has a power all its own, of which we become a mere part. In “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger writes of the logger who is reduced by technology into a mere cog in the industrial machine, “ordered by the industry that produces commercial woods, whether he knows it or not.” The technological logging industry itself is “never a human handiwork,” and the logger becomes subservient “as a subject relates to an object.” This should look very familiar—it is the same fears we have been facing throughout our history but told in a more mechanical, industrial fashion.

Such observations were made earlier in the Industrial Revolution as well. In 1829, Scottish historian Thomas Carlyle wrote about the “mechanical age” in his essay “Signs of the Times,” noting moral panic, millenarianism, and increasing inequality as social disruptions caused by fear surrounding industrial progress. He himself praised the mechanical wonders but feared that Scotland was being consumed by a belief in the “all-importance of physical things” and losing its humanity.

As in the ancient world, fears about technology broke into popular culture. Contemporary concerns tend to focus on machines that have their own ends and pursue them to the detriment of humans. Sometimes, like the supercomputer HAL 9000 from the film 2001: A Space Odyssey, it is a misapplication of a rule followed too literally; sometimes, as in Terminator, the artificial intelligence Skynet determines on its own a deadly prime directive. Humans have had a fascination with robots for a long time as well—it is perhaps the only modern technology to have been prophesied in mythology across cultures for thousands of years. The term “robot” comes from a 1920s Czech play, R.U.R., where the robots are abused so badly that they rise up to annihilate humanity.

What is notable about modern stories of technological fear is that they disregard the traditional intuition that risk comes from loss of control. Instead, they adopt the James Cameron view of the world: rather than being neither good nor bad, technology is inherently corrupting and broadly destructive. Compare the story of the Golem with Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. Frankenstein’s monster is a purely tragic figure: he is created for no real reason, does not do anything good, overpowers humanity, and dies in as much misery as he created. By playing god, Frankenstein creates pure malevolence in the world. The Golem loses control, but it is created as a protector against blood libels and does accomplish that job and is able to be stopped. The fear is the same, but the ancient nuance is lost where technology is to be feared but also to be appreciated.

Even optimistic contemporary stories are not immune from this affliction. In “Machines of Loving Grace,” Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei paints two possible futures: one where AI spins out of control, and one where machines care for us. Though meant to depict a dystopia/utopia dichotomy, these are fundamentally the same future with different interpretations. In both worlds, the machines supersede us, and we lose control. It is no wonder we fear AI: what machine is more likely to seize control than one that has its own desires?

Giving Telos to Techne

These fears are not entirely baseless. There is a determinism to technology that must be reckoned with. Arguably, we have been going down this path for a long time. Since Carlyle’s 1836 novel Sartor Resartus promulgated the idea that what defines man is making tools, we have increasingly defined ourselves in reference to technics. American historian Lewis Mumford called the totality of human technical systems the Megamachine: a societal ordering that uses humans as parts without individuality.

Even the most strident techno-optimist cannot deny that technology has an internal logic. Technologists often call this the “tech tree,” for the way in which technologies seem to branch outwards as they build on prior technical achievement. Sometimes these dependencies can be surprising, but a tech tree is often the answer to the question of why we had to wait so long. Furthermore, because technologies are built on other technologies, at places where the tree branches, the entire direction of civilization can be altered, creating a path dependency.

Technologies, however, are not just enabling but also revealing, showing us what can be next. Furthermore, we rarely leave technologies unused. Samo Burja has called these co-evolving technologies “social technologies” because they involve our frequent need to socially determine what further inventions we will need to build to use big, important technologies. The lightbulb was co-created alongside the electric utility and many of the first electrical appliances.

Melvin Kranzberg, an American historian, formulated his First Law of the history of technology as “technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral.” That third part is usually skipped over, but in fact it is the most important clause. Technologies often create new possibilities, but in doing so change what we can even choose to create in the world. When media theorist Marshall McLuhan said that “the medium is the message,” he meant that certain things can only be communicated with certain technologies and thus become the communication itself, but also implied that certain messages are only possible once certain media are invented. Many technologies change the relative costs of certain choices, thus changing what economists call the production frontier.

This is almost enough to make one a technological determinist. In What Technology Wants, Kevin Kelly argues that technology forms a technium, a collective organism that has its own evolution akin to biological evolution. If that is so, as author Paul Kingsnorth has argued, we stop being able to see the world beyond logical terms and get subsumed by the logic of the machines themselves—historian Charles A. Beard quipped that “technology marches in seven-league boots from one ruthless, revolutionary conquest to another, tearing down old factories and industries, flinging up new processes with terrifying rapidity.”

Yet, the contingency of technology also makes it the most freeing force in human affairs. In the same essay discussed above, “The Question Concerning Technology,” Heidegger ends with a line from Hölderlin: “but where danger is, grows / the saving power also.” Perhaps the only way out of our technological predicament is through.

The problem with the determinist argument, as biologist Jerry Coyne pointed out in a review of Kelly’s book, is that actual evolution is not deterministic but dependent on contingencies and chance. Evolutionary processes possess emergent properties, but that does not mean that they are themselves organisms, just as we are not a single organism with the Earth, even though we emerge out of it and take part in terrestrial planetary processes. In biology and in most human affairs, the conditions of evolution are largely out of our control. They are geography, the distribution of natural resources, disease, natural disasters, differences in climate and the environment, and other aspects of our natural world that were set in motion long before we were even born as a species. The contingent characteristic of technology, and our views on it, depend entirely on framing. You could view the tech tree as unlocking possibilities, or as closing them off. In truth, the process is one and the same.

Not every philosopher was pessimistic about this situation. Aristotle is the ancient philosopher with the most developed theory of technology, and despite coming from the otherwise techno-pessimistic Greek culture, he is himself optimistic about the prospects of man and his relation to his technics. To Aristotle, technology was techne, not just scientific machinic engineering but any kind of craft or artifice. Aristotle argued that techne was distinct from physis, the forces governing the physical world, because it has no internal logic guiding its ends. The statelessness of techne means that it follows its outward purpose, or telos, which comes from us. In a way, Aristotle embraces Kranzberg’s Sixth (and final) Law of Technology: “Technology is a very human activity—and so is the history of technology.”

Aristotle was a utopian, speculating that robots would bring the end of slavery and thus anticipating, on a theoretical level, arguments that would be made thousands of years later. Nick Szabo, the computer scientist and intellectual, argued that the clock led to the end of serfdom by making it possible to calculate an hourly wage. It is no surprise that slavery ended around the time of mechanical farming or that women’s suffrage coincided with the rise of electrical appliances.

One does not require techno-utopianism to see the human element that separates techne and physis, nor to see how this puts us in control of our fate. We may not be able to control the distribution of natural resources at our disposal, but we can invent new ways to make that irrelevant. We may not be able to change our culture and our subjection to the madness of crowds, but we can invent new ways of communicating to subdue that madness. We may not be able to stop an asteroid from approaching Earth, but we can invent a way to save ourselves from the impact.

While Heidegger feared that we would become overwhelmed by the enframing technological industrial society, we could choose, like Aristotle, to see things the other way: that technology comes from us and is thus of us. Or, as philosopher Ernst Kapp put it, that technology represents a “tool so fundamentally and intimately affiliated with the human being that he finds himself beholding something of his own being in the creation of his hand, his world of representation embodied in matter.” This capacity to project our very being into the material world gives us power over our fate.

The ancient wisdom on technology emphasizes our choice to build technology around us. In the 13th century, Masamune, considered the greatest historical Japanese swordsmith, was challenged to a contest by his top student, Muramasa. They both created their greatest swords, but while Muramasa’s sword became bloodthirsty, Masamune’s only cut leaves. The ability to create, and to determine the purpose of their technology, was in their hands. The student, who forgot this lesson, created a weapon that was, ultimately, a failure. The lesson behind the legend is that the craftsman who exercises restraint and choice, and remembers that he can make even a sword peaceful, is remembered as the master of his craft.

If we feel uneasy, perhaps that is our way of telling ourselves that something may be awry inside us and how we fear that we would use the technology. After all, absorbing new technology is a change, and the impact of changes is in the future. What is unavoidable is that changing our technology will change us in ways we cannot anticipate, and that change will, ultimately, be governed by characteristics of the technology itself. That is why we are so fundamentally fearful toward technology: it is not that we fear losing control over it, but that we fear that it will cause us to lose control of ourselves.

The beauty of technology is precisely that it puts our fate back in our own hands because we can always build new technology. We are a factor—the factor—in determining which technologies we develop and how far we take them, because it is our energies and ingenuity that get applied to the development process. If we become cogs in the machine, we can build cogs to replace ourselves or build a new machine. What determines the character and nature of our technology is us. The process of creating technology, and therefore our future, is one of us choosing our own future, over and over again.

Evan Zimmerman is the cofounder of Edge, a Y Combinator-backed startup building an intellectual property assistant using artificial intelligence. He is also the founder of Jovono, a venture capital firm that invests in technology companies. You can follow him at @ejzim.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

Read more

​Join PALLADIUM Magazine in San Francisco on Friday, August 21st to hear a lecture by Samo Burja, author of "Why Civilization is Older Than We Thought." The article was featured in our most recent print edition PALLADIUM 19: Long History.

New discoveries are adding untold millennia to our past. They also reveal our ancestors weren’t always nomadic. Permanent towns and villages sustained by abundant and sometimes gardened forests, as well as fishing. Our ancestors lived this way for tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of years.

To our surprise, it turns out that Homo sapiens are, by nature, builders of complex societies and civilizations, rather than "noble savages" imagined by Locke, Marx, and twentieth-century anthropologists. This talk will set outdated and flawed narratives right, and with them not just all our assumptions of humanity's past, but humanity’s future too.

Samo Burja is the Editor-in-Chief of Palladium Magazine. He is the President and founder of Bismarck Analysis, a research firm that investigates the institutional landscape of society and provides strategic consulting services to industry leaders, philanthropists, and governments. You can follow him at @SamoBurja.

Buy Tickets

This is a ticketed event, those without tickets or violation of the dress code will be turned away.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This event is hosted with the Avalon Institute which supports enduring intellectual and cultural work through technical and media support, publications, and a network of Avalon fellows. You can follow them at @AvalonInst.

This article by Marko Jukic was published at Palladium Magazine on August 7, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

Just a few weeks ago, on the seventeenth of June, U.S. President Donald Trump signed the fourteen-point Islamabad Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) with the Islamic Republic of Iran, which promised to bring the ongoing war with Iran to an end by establishing a sixty-day ceasefire period, during which maritime traffic through the Strait of Hormuz would go unhindered by either side and deeper negotiations on issues like Iran’s nuclear ambitions would take place. Unfortunately, despite high hopes, Iran began striking civilian ships in the strait just days later.

Continued closure of the strait risks sinking the global economy into a prolonged economic depression. Oil and natural gas make up 58 percent of all global energy consumption—for electricity, transportation, and heating alike. The region around the Persian Gulf produces 31 percent of the world’s crude oil and 18 percent of the world’s natural gas, furthermore accounting for 42 percent of all global oil exports and 27 percent of all global liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports. Oil and gas are also irreplaceable basic chemical inputs in manufacturing and modern agriculture. Before the war, the strait saw roughly 20 percent of the world’s oil and gas supply pass through it every day.

A global economic depression of this scale would wind up defining the Trump administration’s legacy, and in the most negative possible way—plummeting stock markets, skyrocketing prices, rising unemployment, and unpredictable shortages. It would all but guarantee a Democratic Party victory in the 2028 U.S. presidential election. The parallels to President George W. Bush’s second term are easy to draw: interminable Middle Eastern wars of choice and a sudden economic crisis see the Republican president leave office with record-breakingly low approval ratings. His designated successor is trounced in the election by a charismatic Democrat promising economic relief to the common man.

It would be not just Trump personally who is discredited and demoralized, but his political allies too and the entire populist current that he symbolizes, not just in America but internationally. Populist politics are a lost cause if populist leaders accidentally cause as much damage to their constituents’ interests as establishment leaders cause intentionally.

The Strait of Hormuz is nonetheless something of a red herring when it comes to understanding and expeditiously resolving this conflict. The core problem is not maritime administration, but one that receives far less attention in news headlines and incredulous commentary than it deserves: Iran’s extremely efficient, robust, and technologically advanced military-industrial base, which is what has allowed Iran to consistently bomb the entire region, seemingly at will, for the last five months.

Iran Has the Upper Hand in Military Technology

When pundits or journalists do discuss Iran’s military-industrial base, it is framed as “Iran’s missile and drone arsenal”—as if Iran has a set number of drones and missiles that it will eventually run out of, and, after all, since we all know that Iran is a Third World economic basket case, it must have somehow acquired these advanced weapons in an improper way anyhow, and so the ineffable universe will conspire to eventually rid Iran of its advanced weapons programs in a manner we cannot quite predict but are certain must happen.

All of this is dangerously misguided and wishful thinking, downstream of a general bias to think that the U.S. military cannot ever be technologically out-innovated. Precision-guided, long-range bombs capable of evading air defenses—whether in the form of ballistic missiles, fixed-wing drones, or anything else—used to be the kind of technological marvel upon which U.S. global military supremacy rested, easily defeating the rinky-dink armies of tinpot dictatorships relying on goose-stepping infantrymen and Soviet tanks.

Unfortunately, this technological marvel has been commoditized. Due to the same processes that have caused globalization, deindustrialization in the developed world, and economic growth in the developing world, the U.S. is no longer the only country capable of firing missiles over thousands of kilometers with deadly accuracy. Over the decades, industrial expertise has slowly and inevitably diffused past the borders of the U.S.-aligned world, especially to China, making what were previously advanced mechanical and electronic components and materials far more commonplace, affordable, and replicable.

Just as crucially, recognizing its own strategic and military limitations, Iran has aggressively pursued technological progress in drones and missiles for decades, with the ultimate result today that it has altered the fundamental balance of military power between the Iranian armed forces and their U.S.-equipped adversaries. Iran has not improperly acquired advanced technology, in fact it rather deserves the credit for inventing and popularizing the low-cost, fixed-wing, one-way attack drone through its Shahed-131 and Shahed-136 models, which have since been directly imitated not just by the Russian and Chinese militaries, but the U.S. military too. It is a rare thing for a heavily-sanctioned developing country to innovate a military technology that is then quickly validated through imitation by all of the world’s military superpowers.

By the same token, many people would likely be surprised to find out that Iran has a functional space program that first successfully launched an Iranian-made satellite into orbit on an Iranian-made rocket in 2009; a technological milestone that Iran attained before Italy or South Korea did. Iran has reportedly relied on Russian and Chinese satellite intelligence for its strikes—but since 2020 it has also added its own military reconnaissance satellites to orbit.

As of yet, no reliable countermeasures to Iran’s plentiful drones and missiles have been developed, nor are likely to be developed without at least several more years of experimentation, manufacturing expansion, and major cost reductions. The technology is simply still too new for countermeasures to have developed and diffused.

As a result, as hard as it may be to believe for our aging policymakers and defense planners—and doubtlessly for those of Israel or the United Arab Emirates too—the days when being the proud owner of an American-made jet fighter or missile system would all but guarantee a small country’s deterrence against larger foes are over. In a fundamental way, the cause of the stalemate in the ongoing conflict is that the developed world’s technological stagnation, deindustrialization, and institutional sclerosis have allowed Iran rather than Ohio to jump ahead and be the first to mass-produce the weapons of the future.

The Strait of Hormuz was an afterthought when bombs began dropping on the 28th of February. Rather, the conflict hinges on Iran’s newfound military-technological edge, which Iran is flexing not just by bombing ships in the strait, but by bombing ships outside the strait, bombing ports and refineries, bombing oil pipelines, bombing military bases, bombing U.S. Navy warships, bombing Israel, and by giving Iranian proxies in Iraq, Lebanon, and Yemen the same weapons to carry out bombing campaigns of their own.

This is of course why proposals to “circumvent” the Iranian threat to the Strait of Hormuz with new oil pipelines or maritime routes are so farcical. Iran’s drones and missiles, to state the obvious, can strike targets on land or sea for thousands of kilometers in whatever direction. You cannot move the entire oil-producing Persian Gulf region outside the range of Iranian bombs. Although it may incrementally degrade Iran’s offensive capabilities, you cannot fully eliminate the threat by “only” bombing or capturing Iranian targets on the coast, since drone launchers can be easily moved around and both drones and missiles can be launched from deep inland.

Proposals to simply “take out” Iran’s drone and missile arsenal are only somewhat less farcical. The industrial infrastructure necessary to mass-produce drones and missiles does not depend on two or three top-secret military sites that can be cleanly targeted, in the way that a nuclear weapons program might depend. Shahed-style drones in particular have been nicknamed “flying lawnmowers” because of the buzzing sound their cheap engines make—engines which are identical in design, and not even that far off in horsepower, from lawnmower engines.

Iran is a relatively industrialized country of 93 million people that is the size of Alaska and just as mountainous. To remove such a large country’s ability to do something as basic as manufacture lawnmowers would require a brutal years-long bombing campaign on the scale of Allied bombing of Nazi Germany in World War II—and this is ignoring the fact that Iran has already intentionally tried to fortify its military-industrial base against disruption from the air by locating key production and storage facilities deep underground.

Unfortunately, there appears to be no way to eliminate Iran’s military-technological edge in drones and missiles fast enough to reopen the Strait of Hormuz by force. This means all routes to ending the conflict while avoiding economic disaster will require negotiating with Iran, which will require conceding to Iran some or other things it wants.

What Iran Wants

What Iran wants in exchange for reopening the Strait of Hormuz is, for better or worse, a wider-ranging wishlist than just tolls on ships. Perhaps contrary to many casual observers’ assumptions, Iran did not apparently welch on its promises in June because of any unforeseen and irresolvable dispute over the strait. Rather, Iranian military authorities cited “the United States’ clear breach of its commitments regarding the first article of the memorandum of understanding on ending the war,” specifically the “continuous and relentless violations of the ceasefire by [Israel] in southern Lebanon” and the “failure of the occupying [Israeli] forces to withdraw from southern Lebanon.” The first article called for the “immediate and permanent termination” of warfare “on all fronts, including in Lebanon,” by the U.S., Iran, and “their allies.”

In other words, Iran wishes to use its leverage over the strait to preserve the existence of Hezbollah, the well-armed Lebanese Shia militia and designated terrorist group which has intermittently attacked Israel for years and which, since recent Israeli counterattacks, has become more of a de facto arm of the Iranian military than ever before. The Lebanese government has been formally undertaking the process of disarming Hezbollah since 2025, although expert consensus remains that the Lebanese government ultimately lacks the coherence or state capacity to succeed at this goal.

Why Iran cares at all about Hezbollah—or, for that matter, Israel—is a commonsense question without a commonsense answer. In short and simplified terms, Iran’s regime is a revolutionary Shia theocracy that derives its legitimacy in substantial part from its founder Ayatollah Khomeini’s promise to export the revolution to the rest of the Middle East and thereby expel what it perceives as foreign, infidel meddlers in Muslim civilization, namely the U.S. and Israel. The theocracy’s domestic hold on power depends on the perception that it is taking the fight to the enemy and defending the prestige of Iran and Islam; it is why Iran fought the bloody Iran-Iraq War in the 1980s for years after it made any sense to continue, in an ultimately futile attempt to overthrow Saddam Hussein and install an Iraqi Shia theocracy.

This interventionist streak, even if put on ice, is indeed a persistent source of instability and conflict in the region and the reason Iran has consistently supported Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, the Houthis in Yemen, and various other proxy groups. Unfortunately, the theocratic regime has proved highly robust against attempts to change it, whether through mobilization of the Iranian people or through direct attacks. It is difficult to see how the decision to assassinate Iran’s leadership at the start of the war, including the sitting Iranian Supreme Leader who holds a religious status akin to the Pope in addition to his temporal powers, was not a blunder borne out of plain misunderstanding of the clerical, bureaucratic, and decentralized nature of the Iranian regime. Iran’s bureaucracies have simply replaced their lost leadership with equally or even more rigid successors, as any half-decent bureaucracy is designed to do.

Removing the Iranian regime by force would require a massive ground invasion utilizing millions of troops that would take years and have no guarantee of ultimate success, but would certainly guarantee hundreds of thousands of U.S. casualties and a possibly multi-decade economic depression, as Iran would indiscriminately retaliate against all energy infrastructure in the Gulf as well as against Israeli civilian targets. Invading Iran may be a moot point anyway, as it is now unclear whether the U.S. military would even be able to equip a capable ground force or stage it to invade without suffering prohibitively high casualties.

Hezbollah is in practice an extension of the revolutionary Iranian military. If neither Israel nor Lebanon are capable of totally and rapidly uprooting Hezbollah, then the only realistic path to avoiding an economic depression in the short term is to allow both Iran and Israel to save face from what is effectively a military stalemate between them in Lebanon. For example, one possibility is that Israel could withdraw from the areas of Lebanon it currently occupies while leaving the Lebanese military in control, with assistance from United Nations-coordinated military forces from third countries.

However, in exchange, Iran would have to order Hezbollah to remain proactively—if tacitly—disarmed in those areas, respect the authority of the Lebanese government, and refrain from otherwise attacking or provoking Israel. Both Hezbollah and Israel could thereby claim victory while for the most part returning to the status quo ante bellum. Israel and Iran will not communicate diplomatically, but both can communicate with the U.S. government, which would have to take up the role of a guarantor and intermediary.

What Iran would receive in exchange for this restraint is what it realistically most desperately needs: economic relief. Much like “sanctions relief for nuclear restraint” has remained the unavoidable dynamic in negotiations with Iran over its nuclear program, “economic relief for bombing restraint” is going to remain the unavoidable dynamic in negotiations with Iran over the Strait of Hormuz or any other issue. The precise details will be left up to the negotiators to determine, but fundamentally the U.S. has many carrots with which to entice Iran, including sanctions relief on oil exports, unfreezing Iranian funds held abroad, and coordinating direct investment or reconstruction funds. All of these things were, of course, part of the Islamabad Memorandum. A peace deal with Iran that allowed the world to buy Iranian oil and gas, even only in the short run, would ironically go a long way towards averting economic disaster.

The apparently thorniest problem is Iran’s sometimes vague but insistent demand for some form of control over the Strait of Hormuz, which appears to be impossible to satisfy without violating international maritime law. This problem is however not as thorny as it looks: let it be noted that between a global economic depression and a violation of the sanctity of international law, the former is far worse and less common and, let it also be noted that, in fact, neither the United States nor Iran are actually parties to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS). Nor are the United Arab Emirates or Israel.

Iran appears to want two things from the strait. First, money. The $20-40 billion in annual fees it expects could be collected from transiting vessels is roughly a tenth of the country’s GDP, and would go straight into the government’s coffers with little additional effort required. Iran is aware that unilaterally violating international maritime law to charge illegal tolls would be a highly unpopular action amongst its many trade partners, so it has repeatedly floated proposals such as joint control or responsibility for the strait with Oman and perhaps other Gulf states, charging “fees for services” or some other such euphemism instead. This would also likely violate international maritime law, but in a more acceptable and sustainable manner.

There is undoubtedly a way to craft a basically internationally acceptable protocol for charging minimal fees from transits through the strait. As Trump has occasionally suggested, perhaps even the U.S. government should get a cut. The latest proposals being reported on suggest Iran and Oman have agreed to manage shipping through the strait bilaterally, with Iran managing inbound traffic and Oman managing outbound traffic. After an initial period of free passage, Iran will apparently impose fees on ships for safe navigation and possibly charge much higher fees for U.S. or Israeli-linked ships as a form of war reparations.

Second, Iran also likely wants the ability to shut down the strait to pressure the U.S. in the case of future conflict with Israel, but in a legitimate and internationally-recognized way without creating the economic and diplomatic headaches of actually launching bombs that target neutral ships or countries. The idea of giving Iran any formal power or influence to close perhaps the most important global shipping lane is anathema to U.S. policymakers. Unfortunately, the harsh truth is that if we didn’t want to give Iran any influence over shipping in the Strait of Hormuz, we should have thought about that before blowing up their leadership in the exact way they warned would trigger them to shut down the Strait of Hormuz.

Iran has already objectively proven, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that it has the power to shut down the strait—formalizing realities can be embarrassing and painful, but in the long run never worse than ignoring them. The 1936 Montreux Convention which governs Turkey’s control of the Bosphorus and Dardanelles straits, which connect the Black Sea to the Mediterranean Sea, is a precedent for recognizing Iran’s at least partial influence over the Strait of Hormuz. The convention allows Turkey to charge minimal fees for passage to maintain maritime infrastructure and to close the passage if Turkey feels threatened.

The goal of U.S. negotiators ought to be to craft a maximally watered-down version of a convention or multinational authority that still includes Iran as a recognized partner in the strait. Recent reports indicate the Trump administration is inclined to accept the latest Iran-Oman plans. Their inclination is likely the correct move and any potential deals should not be scuttled simply due to the perceived sanctity of international maritime law.

Excepting the Strait of Hormuz from the principle of freedom of navigation will not have catastrophic knock-on effects for global shipping or trade, because it is a wholly unique chokepoint. There is no comparable passage where the entire planet depends on the valuable commodities continuously exiting it, namely oil and gas. It is furthermore the only such major chokepoint that cannot just be physically circumvented by a ship.

Modern maritime shipping is extremely cheap and flexible and will only become more so as Chinese shipbuilding continues to grow. It is not the 16th century anymore, when any transoceanic voyage was a life-or-death coin-flip, nor even the 19th century where the opening of the Suez Canal was a significant military and economic achievement. Modern cargo ships regularly and nonchalantly travel long oceanic routes that would have been considered heroic in centuries past, spending the vast majority of their time in international waters far from any shore rather than territorial waters.

When the Houthis shut down the Bab-el-Mandeb strait from 2023 to 2025, nobody would have known without reading the news because it is so trivial for modern ships to ignore any restricted route and just reroute their journeys the long way around, even if the new route adds thousands of kilometers and weeks of time to the trip. Egypt closed the Suez Canal from 1967 to 1975, with the outcome that nobody today even remembers it happened because cargo ships just began going around the Cape of Good Hope in South Africa instead.

This means that the leverage of any countries which could conceivably shut down another maritime passage is simply not comparable to Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz. If Indonesia, for example, tried to charge tolls for passage through the Malacca Strait, or even through any of its territorial waters, cargo ships would simply avoid the entire Indonesian archipelago, and go past Australia and around Papua New Guinea instead. At worst, the violation of the principle of freedom of navigation might inspire some countries to attempt to renegotiate their own transit or maritime policies. None of these headaches would present remotely as much of a global economic crisis as Iran.

Iran, of course, also depends on transit through the strait to export its own oil and gas and import goods from abroad. Rather than make any concessions to Iran, many would prefer to play the game of economic chicken and bet that the Iranian regime will collapse under a sustained blockade, even if global economic turmoil occurs in the meantime. The problem is that there is no tight relationship between impoverishment and regime change. It took nearly fourteen years for the far more brittle and embattled regime of Bashar al-Assad in Syria—a far smaller and less well-resourced country than Iran—to collapse under the weight of economic desolation.

There is no reason to think that even an Iran actively embroiled in civil war would be unable to keep the Strait of Hormuz shut and land strikes on energy infrastructure in the Gulf. An ideological regime feeling existentially threatened might even lash out harder at civilian infrastructure, like power plants or the few water desalination plants in the Gulf countries and Israel that provide drinking water for most of the population. Or, worse, rush to build and use a nuclear bomb. Fourteen years of war with Iran might finally sink the regime, but at the cost of the worst economic crisis since the Great Depression and possibly currently unthinkable human devastation in the Gulf states and Israel.

Reindustrialize, Electrify, and Drill to Defeat Iran

The path to defeating the Iranian regime’s interventionist ambitions lies in countering or neutralizing Iran’s military-technological edge in drones and missiles. This will take years, not weeks or months, but must be done regardless of the short-term outcome of the war. One of the key reasons to want to avoid a long war and global economic disaster, in fact, is that this would make it harder to take on the deeper industrial and technological challenges that must be overcome in order to shift the balance of power against Iran.

To begin with, in purely military terms, the reason that the U.S., Israeli, and Gulf Arab militaries are not capable of defeating or deterring Iran is that Iran’s weapons are just better than ours. They are cheaper and easier to produce in large numbers, whereas our weapons are more expensive and harder to produce in large numbers, with the result that Iran’s weapons get past our weapons. On a further note, Iran has already adapted to this new “meta” of mass drone warfare by burying so many of its key facilities underground, whereas we have not and keep all of our military and industrial facilities above-ground.

After just five months of war, the U.S. military is reportedly literally running out of ammunition to keep fighting Iran: the pre-war stockpile of 2200 Patriot missiles and 452 THAAD missiles to intercept Iranian ballistic missiles has been depleted to just 827 and 278 respectively; depleting your missile defenses by 62% in a few months is a completely unsustainable rate. Gulf allies have fared even worse: Saudi Arabia has reportedly depleted 86% of its stockpiled Patriot PAC-3 interceptors since February.

Incumbent defense contractors are unlikely to replenish these stockpiles quickly enough to make up the shortfall, let alone develop new and cheaper drone and missile interceptors. The Pentagon could instead direct these defense contractors to undertake internal reforms for efficiency and volume production, while also introducing new competition from defense startups like Anduril and Ukrainian defense companies which are closer to the practical cutting edge of modern warfare. The U.S. military has already procured thousands of Merops drones from Ukraine, small drones that are used to destroy Shahed-style drones in flight. The goal should be to have a stockpile of millions of such drones, which ought to be enough to neutralize the threat of Iranian drones across the Middle East.

The industrial base of the U.S.-aligned developed world is far larger than Iran’s. It is only institutional inertia and dysfunction that has allowed Iran to jump ahead in drone technology. In principle, in a war of drone and missile volume, Iran should be easily outgunned by the U.S. and its allies. China, for its part, is not particularly interested in assisting Iran’s interventionist foreign policy, so would not be expected to shift its tremendous industrial weight in Iran’s favor.

Iran’s leverage can also be neutralized by reducing the global economy’s dependence on oil and gas from the Persian Gulf. There are two ways to do this: first, drill for more oil and gas anywhere else in the world and, second, replace more fossil fuel-powered technology with electrically-powered technology. The false dichotomy of drilling for oil and gas and driving gas-guzzling cars versus transitioning to a “green,” low-energy economy of solar panels, windmills, and electric vehicles must be discarded. The goal must be energy abundance and independence, which means drilling, fracking, and coal mining are cheerfully pursued alongside nuclear power plants, solar photovoltaic farms, and fleets of self-driving electric taxis.

Defense reform, reindustrialization, electrification, and resource extraction will not allow the U.S. and its allies to pressure Iran into a favorable peace deal in the short term. But, intelligently and vigorously pursued, such policies would erode Iran’s current military-technological edge and shift the balance of power decisively away from Iran in possibly as little as five or ten years. Importantly, they would far outweigh any benefits the Iranian regime would gain from financial windfalls in the meantime. For a conflict that has already dragged on for nearly fifty years, this would in hindsight be a brief blip in the improvement of Iranian fortunes.

Now is not the time to be thinking short-term. A failed game of economic chicken with Iran could easily lock the Western world into a generation of economically redistributionist politics indifferent to the fates of U.S. allies in the Middle East, and uninterested in taking any measures to improve the military or industrial capacities of the developed world.

Marko Jukic is a Senior Analyst at Bismarck Analysis. You can follow him at @mmjukic.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This article by Seth Dowell was published at Palladium Magazine on August 4th, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

Off the coast of Zhejiang province, an unusual vessel plies the East China Sea. It could be mistaken for a cargo ship, but there are no containers on its deck. Its track is strange: instead of running between sequential ports of call, it bounces between points at sea for months at a time. However, its movements are anything but random.

The ship’s transponder identifies it as the Guoxin 2-1. It is moving with the tidal currents, seeking water at the right temperature for the cargo in its hull: vast tanks of large yellow croaker, raised from fry in the ship’s underbelly and destined for markets and restaurants from Shanghai to Suzhou.

Farther up the coast, off southern Shandong province, a crew in a small offshore boat works to sink a concrete block. Seagrass seeds have been tucked into nooks along its sides. These men are employed by a marine ranching initiative at Rongcheng, which is assembling artificial but productive coastal reefs from the seafloor up.

Some 200 kilometers northwest of Rongcheng, in the stretch of the Yellow Sea where Chinese and South Korean exclusive economic zone claims overlap, a South Korean research vessel and its coast guard escort approach a partly submerged steel cage as tall as a twenty-story building, along with a converted rig complete with a helipad. Two Chinese coast guard cutters and a rigid inflatable boat—ostensibly civilian, though the men aboard brandish knives—block their path. They are shielding the Deep Blue 2, a salmon farm China has parked in contested waters.

These are all stories about the same thing: aquaculture—the deliberate raising and farming of aquatic organisms—and its explosive growth in China. The Guoxin 2-1, the Rongcheng marine ranch, and the Deep Blue 2 are the products of a decades-long effort by the Chinese state and a legion of private entrepreneurs to build the world’s largest aquaculture industry—and, in doing so, to begin cultivating and terraforming the open ocean. A new frontier is opening, and its implications are as vast as the water it covers.

Aquatic Origins

Chinese aquaculture began in freshwater. China was among the first regions in the world to take up the practice, with farmers raising and harvesting fish in managed ponds by around 2500 BC. Writings from 2000 BC ascribed to Da Yu, the traditional founder of the Xia dynasty, describe picking “seeds”—common carp spawn—to “plant” in small ponds, along with laws specifying exactly when fish could be harvested. State involvement is nearly as old as the industry itself.

Modern aquaculture—artificial reproduction, hatchery-based farming, selective breeding—was developed mainly in Europe, but adopted in China toward the end of the twentieth century during the Reform and Opening Up period. China is now by far the largest producer of farmed aquatic animals in the world, accounting for roughly 55 percent of global output.

As of 2023, close to 60 percent of that output came from freshwater rather than marine environments. In recent years, the Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has pushed aquaculture investment into poorer interior regions like Xinjiang. More than just a form of economic stimulus, inland aquaculture is a source of domestic food security and, increasingly, of exports.

The caviar market shows what Chinese industry can do even to a gated, high-margin luxury good. After overfishing gutted the conventional, wild supply of sturgeon in Siberia during the mid-2000s, Chinese entrepreneurs, scientists, and fortune-seekers set their sights on the industry. Dozens of aquaculture operations sprang up around colder inland lakes to raise sturgeon and harvest their valuable eggs. Farmed sturgeon production grew roughly ninefold between 2003 and 2017, and Chinese cultured caviar output climbed from 0.7 to 135 metric tons between 2006 and 2018. Wholesale prices fell by roughly 50 percent between 2012 and 2018, turning caviar into an accessible luxury, while Chinese brands like Kaluga Queen became some of the world’s largest.

The remaining 40 percent of Chinese aquaculture occurs in marine environments: nearshore enclosure farms, net pens, and specialized aquaculture vessels. Particularly of note amongst these are China’s immense near-shore oyster rope-and-raft systems. The PRC accounts for nearly 85 percent of global oyster production, but they are more than just another protein source. Each oyster is capable of filtering 50 gallons of water a day, helping to remove pollutants from Chinese coastal waters. Partnerships in the Chinese Greater Bay Area—Hong Kong, Guangzhou, Shenzhen, and the surrounding cities—are working to restore the region’s old oyster beds. Recent measures by the party-state to protect and expand coastal fisheries have set off a boom in a related practice off Fujian, Shandong, and several other coastal provinces: sea ranching.

Sea ranches are built by seeding the seafloor with seagrass and kelp, sinking man-made reef structures, and stocking bottom-dwelling species such as the Dongke No. 1 sea cucumber, bred to grow faster and to survive the warming summer water off Hebei. These farms are designed like natural reefs, incorporating multiple trophic layers to act as multi-product farms and ranches.

As in other Chinese industries, sea ranching has generated a supporting technology stack: automated feeding systems, environmental monitoring networks, unmanned vessels of various stripes, and underwater inspection drones, all deployed so that coastal managers can watch a crop grow in the shallows. The goal is to turn the coastline into a set of established, controlled, production-oriented ranches, and to put the seafloor in service to man.

Modern Marvels

Moving away from the coastline into deeper waters, one comes across newer, larger, and more technologically advanced aquaculture facilities. Submersible cage facilities like the Deep Blue 1 & Deep Blue 2 in the Yellow Sea, or the Xinhuan No. 1 off the coast of Hainan, raise tons of fish in semi-permanent offshore installation bases. These structures can lower and raise their cages to accommodate different water temperatures, weather, and tidal conditions at different depths—increasing the quality and survival rate of farmed fish.

Of all the forms of advanced deep-sea aquaculture, it is the enclosed ship that most captures the public imagination. The Guoxin line is a series of three purpose-built vessels with onboard rearing tanks, specialized pumping systems, and circular “raceways” that serve as exercise zones and transition areas for juvenile fish.

Like much of the Chinese aquaculture stack, the Guoxin ships were designed around automation to cut labor costs and raise efficiency. The enclosed nature and internal structure of the ships minimize the need for exhaustive manual moving of the fish. From an engineering standpoint, an enclosed hull also offers another advantage: it gives the operator far more control over the water the fish live in. More importantly, it can move—away from storms, toward better temperatures, and into port once the fish reach market weight.

The three ships have a combined expected output of over 10,000 tons of fish a year. Most of that is premium stock, such as salmon and large yellow croaker, though the operator Qingdao Conson Development Group plans to add more species. Survival rates aboard the first-generation vessel have exceeded 90 percent, with rearing cycles roughly three-fourths that of fish in conventional cages. Alongside vessels like the Suhai-1, an enclosed salmon ship that handles everything from breeding to processing onboard, the Guoxin line represents the current ceiling of Chinese aquaculture.

How has China achieved such immense strides in aquaculture? Start with the Chinese tertiary education system’s throughput of STEM graduates. Their sheer numbers depress wages and ensure that some highly capable workers take up unglamorous fields like fish farming. The same abundance feeds Chinese shipbuilding. China produces the concrete and steel that maritime infrastructure requires, and its yards—which turn out over 1,000 merchant vessels a year—accumulate skilled labor that iterates on design with every new hull. Any country hoping to compete in the ecological niches that China’s shipbuilding industry has filled must begin with an equivalent industrial eagerness.

With mass famine still in living memory, the party-state has a strategic interest in food sovereignty; China holds a sixth of the world’s population on less than a tenth of its arable land. This seems to be a significant driver of the Chinese state’s interest in aquaculture. Qingdao Conson, the operator of the Guoxin line, is a state-owned enterprise. It was the state that launched the Blue Granary Project that designated aquaculture a national priority in 2018. Continual state interest and investment have played a significant role in the industry’s expansion.

The coastal Chinese love of seafood could also play a significant role. This cultural quirk induces an immense quantity of demand; aquaculture is inherently a safer bet if consumer appetites for seafood are relentless, unlike in the West where they are far more fickle and prone to fluctuation. On top of this, while Western leaders have often promoted soft-handed social engineering designed to make common diets more sustainable—for example, through the adoption of plant milks or manufactured meat derivatives—the Chinese state has no problem with working to fill the nigh-endless Chinese appetite for seafood. Indeed, the state’s pursuit of expanded marine protein consumption is a perfect example of the way “engineering states” like China pursue legitimacy by meeting popular material desires.

The Deep Blue 2 incident illustrates the broader geopolitical advantages and implications of the Chinese aquaculture program. South Korean authorities claimed the right to inspect the structure under the 2001 Korea-China Fisheries Agreement, which established the Provisional Measures Zone within which Deep Blue 2 is stationed; when the Korean Coast Guard tried to investigate in early 2025, Chinese civilian and coast guard vessels blocked them. Seoul has protested that the installation encroaches on its maritime rights, violates the 2001 agreement, and attempts to illegally advance Chinese claims in the Yellow Sea. Like China’s controversial man-made islands in the South China Sea, semi-permanent floating aquaculture strongholds can be used to assert claims over ocean territory or to host signals intelligence.

Chinese investment and research in African and South American aquaculture projects form another vector of influence, and promise financial returns as China exports its world-class aquaculture stack. Chinese ventures like the Kajjansi Aquaculture Research and Development Centre in Uganda, or Joyvio’s acquisition of the Chilean firm Australis Seafoods, mark the emergence of a marine economic diplomacy.

There is a darker side to this maritime projection. Chinese distant-water fleets have produced one international scandal after another: large numbers of boats converge on a fishery—often just outside a country’s exclusive economic zone, sometimes illegally inside it—strip it with trawls and dredges, and move on once the fishery is exhausted. Not even the waters around the Galapagos have been spared. The ecological promise of some domestic aquaculture programs does not excuse the PRC’s role in destroying fisheries elsewhere.

The Call of The Deep

Like all ambitious projects of modernity, Chinese industrialization bears the two visages of Janus. The care now lavished on Chinese coasts and waterways was made necessary by the ecological damage of earlier phases of modernization. Efforts to restore fisheries, too, are necessary because of previous overfishing. Perhaps these earlier sacrifices were to the ultimate benefit of Chinese development, but the state’s willingness to now pursue ecological restoration at home while acting callously abroad displays a profoundly divergent worldview from Western universalist-multilateral ecology. “Environmentalism in one country” is different. It is a story of restoration, not conservation, and new Promethean heights rather than managed decline.

If sustainability is to be pursued state-by-state, as the recent decline of multilateral nation-state cooperation suggests, then it is no surprise that each country shall tend to its own garden. But tending to a garden and conscientiously exploiting it are the same act, and it is this mindset of exploitation that makes the Chinese vision of aquaculture possible. The distant-water fleets and the oyster rafts come from the same attitude of industrializing the ocean, maximizing its yield. Industrialized fish farming promises a future in which wild stocks cease to matter, in which we can produce as much fish as we care to eat without drawing down what remains in the sea. Under present conditions, such scenarios remain nothing more than a flight of fancy, but the scale and pace of Chinese advancements in aquaculture hold promise as a futurist vision simultaneously grounded in the here-and-now.

Man has always aimed to achieve mastery over his environment, so that he may eliminate the scarcity that has dominated his existence. Now that terra firma is all but tamed, his eyes are turning towards newer, further, more dangerous frontiers to master. Yet more men have passed into the reaches of space than have been to the extreme depths of the ocean—why should we seek to explore and master only the void above us when the ones below are just as compelling, lucrative, and stimulating to the imagination?

Seth Dowell is a visiting researcher at Bismarck Analysis and a student in New York City. You can follow him at @sethhdowell.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

Join PALLADIUM Magazine in San Francisco this Thursday, August 6 to hear a lecture by Marko Jukic author of "The Only Reason to Explore Space." The article was featured in our print edition PALLADIUM 17: Universal Man.

There is only one durable justification for space exploration. If we fail to understand it, our civilization will end on Earth, not among the stars.

A civilization oriented towards maximum production and challenging megaprojects can make humanity and industry compatible, rather than extinguished for degrowth or AI.

Marko Jukic is a Senior Analyst at Bismarck Analysis. Based in Europe he is interested in finding the golden path to interstellar civilization. You can follow him at @mmjukic.

Tickets On Luma

This is a ticketed event, those without tickets or violation of the dress code will be turned away.

Dress code: Formal. Jackets required for men. Equivalent for women.

Arrive at 7:00 pm. Lecture begins at 7:30 pm.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This event is hosted with Avalon Institute which supports enduring intellectual and cultural work through technical and media support, publications, and a network of Avalon fellows.

This article by Charles Rosenbauer was published at Palladium Magazine on July 31, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

For less than a thousand dollars, a modern consumer laptop may be capable of trillions of calculations per second. But consumers’ applications of this hardware are often disappointing. Many are products of Wirth’s law, the observation that over time, software gets less efficient faster than hardware gets more efficient.

The occasional video stream may use a significant amount of compute, but modern browsers spend truly vast amounts of resources to display little more than formatted text and images on the screen, often with performance hiccups. Meanwhile, a video game from twenty years ago may require a fraction of the resources of today’s internet browsers such as Google Chrome, even as it draws myriads of polygons across millions of pixels, with elaborate lighting and shading effects computed on top.

The text editor in which this article is being written is doing very little that could not be done just as well on a computer from thirty years ago—a machine with thousands of times less memory and a million times less computing power. For the average person, compute is available in such great abundance that it exceeds our knowledge of how to put it all to productive use.

This abundance is famously the product of Moore’s Law, which asserts that transistor densities, and presumably performance, grow at an exponential rate. It has been true for the past six decades, and for those working in tech, this rapid growth is grounds for optimism about the future of humanity in general. They believe the endpoint of industrial society is post-scarcity: an edenic condition in which we are no longer constrained by resources and all hard problems of material life are solved, allowing human creativity to flourish and actualize anything it may desire.

While Moore’s Law has exceeded expectations, there is nothing at all to suggest any flaw in Gordon Moore’s central warning that his law was a result of economics, not physics. Accordingly, the future of computing will be determined not by our ability to innovate technologically, but by our ability to conceptualize what this compute would be used for.

For the moment, artificial intelligence seems to have supplied the answer. The large language model is the first consumer application in decades whose appetite for hardware has no visible ceiling: hundreds of millions of people now route their questions, drafts, and small work tasks through chatbots that are absorbing the functions of the search engine, customer service, and a growing share of clerical labor. This may sustain the industry at something like its present scale once the infrastructure buildout is complete, despite its current unprofitability. Firms are increasingly using customer-service agents, automated Excel spreadsheets, and low-level software engineering, but the claim that every firm will see autonomous agents that consume tokens by the billions sits uneasily with these prevailing uses.

The current buildout is a wager that there is more to come. If we find ourselves in a state where consumers and firms have more computational resources than we know what to do with, and struggle to name problems that we care about but lack the resources to immediately address, then it will indicate a bottleneck not in the production of goods but in the production of ideas—a much harder problem to solve. A world in which humanity lacks the imagination or ambition to strive for anything even greater than what is implied by the idea of “post-scarcity” is, upon closer inspection, a pessimistic prospect.

The Start of the Curve

Much of early computing was focused on automating various forms of bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is overwhelmingly linear: simple records for each citizen or customer. Even if millions of computations are required to process a single person, a modern laptop may be able to process facts about the entire world’s population in less than an hour. Exponential growth in computation has rapidly overwhelmed the demands of bureaucratic systems, yet pen-and-paper processes like signatures remain everywhere in the digital world. Public-key cryptography solved this problem properly decades ago; DocuSign still has 7,000 employees today.

Exciting advances in computing were for a long time downstream of those working to improve the graphics of video games, not administration. In the 1970s and 1980s, the number of pixels on the screen often greatly exceeded the number of bytes in memory, requiring a variety of methods for specifying images to display with grids of simpler components. The number of pixels was often even comparable to the number of operations per second, and various coprocessors such as “blitters” were used to offload often repetitive graphics work from the main processor, allowing it to do more complex tasks.

In the 1990s, graphics processors began to incorporate dedicated hardware for specific common operations, such as drawing polygons for 3D graphics, though still leaving more complex or special-purpose tasks to the main processor. In the early 2000s, the increasing complexity of “shaders”—mathematical operations applied in bulk to every pixel, or every polygon, or every instance of some other graphical primitive, often for complex lighting or stylistic effects—began to justify building processors for the bulk processing of simple but arbitrary functions.

In 1999, NVIDIA released the GeForce 256, marketing it as the world’s first GPU and a revolution in video game graphics. Within a few years, these gaming accelerators were being applied to a wide range of problems across science and engineering. Protein-folding simulations became at least twenty times faster thanks to general-purpose gaming technology.

In recent years, the holy grail of photorealistic video game graphics, ray tracing, became achievable on consumer hardware. Now the difficulty of photorealism in video game graphics is more a matter of game studios being able to pay small armies of artists to create realistic-looking art for the games, which is getting prohibitively expensive for no obviously greater spectacle. Meanwhile, the past twenty years have seen the growth of the indie game industry, which often uses more stylized art that is vastly cheaper, both for artists to produce and for computers to display. Technical advances in graphics no longer excite the imagination of technologists and consumers, though it was simpler games that attracted their efforts in the first place.

Because of this, there is no obvious remaining opportunity for video games to push computing demand. Higher resolutions and more complex geometries and animations may be possible, and may require more resources, but the demand for this likely does not exist on any scale that can justify it, and the art costs are not obviously sustainable as-is.

The technology that fueled the graphical development of gaming found a second life in machine learning, which is largely enabled by general-purpose GPUs. The initial work here was first explored in the 1980s, but was held back by the insufficient compute resources of the time. Machine learning will not be the last discarded or forgotten technology to be revived by hardware that finally caught up with it—but such technologies only ever reemerge if other breakthroughs make them worthwhile.

Moore’s Law from the Inside

It is not just the history of gaming that serves as a warning for what happens to innovation when technology gets ahead of demand. Ten years ago, a fabrication plant for microchips may have cost a few billion dollars to build. Today, modern fab campuses are getting pushed into the hundreds of billions. With this in mind, it is easy to forget that in the 1970s and 1980s, it was not uncommon for small chip startups to have their own fab facilities. In fact, the first open fabs focused on manufacturing other people’s chips took a while to appear. TSMC, an early pioneer in this business model, was not founded until 1987, a whole nineteen years after the founding of Intel.

Jerry Sanders, founder of AMD, famously used to claim that “real men own fabs” as a critique of the fabless model, for he believed that semiconductor companies could only hone the performance of their product if design and production were integrated into one process. However, as these fabs further pushed the limits of physics and engineering, their operating costs grew exponentially. In the semiconductor space, it is common for companies that bet wrong to be permanently removed from the cutting edge, and those that have survived the decades are to a large extent merely those who have survived the most rounds of industrial Russian roulette as manufacturing processes changed.

While there used to be dozens of companies at the bleeding edge, today, the leading chip fabs include only TSMC and Samsung, with Intel having fallen behind a few years ago and receiving heavy subsidies from the U.S. government in the hopes that it can catch back up. Five years after Sanders stepped down from his role as chairman, AMD spun off its fabs into GlobalFoundries, which went on to announce a strategic decision to no longer compete on the most advanced manufacturing processes.

The masks used in the photolithography processes that manufacture these chips have grown dramatically in price in recent years: from $1 million for 28-nanometer chips, to $10 million for 7 nm, to $40 million for 3 nm. Raising $1 million for a 28 nm chip tapeout is not unrealistic for a startup—raising $40 million is far more difficult. Upcoming transistor nodes can be expected to be even more expensive, and foundries like TSMC may eventually be forced to charge prices that few if any of their fabless customers can afford.

With fabs being as expensive as they are and almost every cost factor growing exponentially, small manufacturers are long dead, small designers may soon be priced out completely, and it is a serious possibility that pushing semiconductor technology further may exceed what even the most deep-pocketed nation-states are capable of paying. AI companies are currently very good at raising large sums of money on the hype of their product, but the actual profitability of these companies is questionable—some industry leaders have accused them of overcharging—and it’s not clear that LLMs alone will be nearly sufficient to justify building a trillion-dollar superfab.

Even though scaling laws provide a clear roadmap to justify such a concept, their exponential nature may simply grow too fast for fab technology to keep up. The compute requirements, and by extension the costs, may grow faster than revenue. There are many problems we can apply computation to, but if our imagination and ambition yield diminishing returns past a certain quantity of compute, these applications may be insufficient to fund the development of greater compute.

Branching Veins

Advances in technology aren’t always accompanied by a boom in scaled applications. The reason is that ideas, like minerals, come in veins. Any idea with a degree of generality that allows it to reflect meaning beyond a single confined event can be applied to a wide range of similar problems. In many cases, there may be a theoretically infinite range of such similarly shaped problems to which a given idea applies. The simplest forms of this often present as arbitrary scaling: throwing more resources at a given formula allows one to solve bigger problems of the same kind. When it comes to LLMs, this is why inference—the “thinking” that goes into the generation of an answer—now exceeds training in terms of compute costs.

This may also support scaling in multiple different dimensions, but there are limitations. The value of larger problems may diminish, or the cost of solving them may rise too fast to justify it. There is no shortage of deposits throughout the world containing valuable minerals that are too low in concentration or too difficult to extract at reasonable prices with existing technology. There are many large oil deposits around the world that go untapped because it is simply cheaper to extract oil from locations that are more convenient.

If we simply rephrase “post-scarcity” as “overproduction,” then this idea turns out to be rather old, and was a problem addressed by economic theorists and industrialists ranging from John Stuart Mill to Taiichi Ohno, the founder of Toyota’s production philosophy. The latter recognized overproduction as a greater problem than underproduction, because it reflects inefficiencies in the demand-production pipeline that lead to compounding waste through overprocessing, transport, waiting, and defects.

Ohno’s preference was to let demand pull production, modeled on the American supermarket shelf restocked only as customers empty it. AI scaling laws invite the opposite. Compute yields more capability, yes, but that says nothing about whether the capability will find a buyer. The trillion-dollar fab is production running far ahead of any order.

What separates useful from overbuilt technology is that the former sees widespread adoption even while primitive. For example, if virtual reality were seriously useful, it would have gained wide adoption during the “metaverse boom.” If the benefits outweigh the costs, people will generally adopt something regardless of its drawbacks, but if the technology must be made much more convenient before significant adoption can occur, as so many insist, the effort to diminish its inconveniences suggests a lack of genuine value to begin with. VR is an example of production exceeding our current ability to find a meaningful use for a technology, and this may change in coming decades as deeper thought is applied to the various design problems around virtual reality.

The cost of building a competitive semiconductor fab has grown exponentially over time, while the number of companies competing at the cutting edge has dropped exponentially. Extrapolating these trends another decade suggests fab costs in the trillions of dollars and approximately zero companies that can keep up. Even if theoretically possible, advances in semiconductors may simply slow down in response to a lack of profitable scalability, which is downstream of industrial society’s aggregate demand. This is a recipe for stagnation.

Moore’s Law can and will grind to a halt if human innovation cannot find applications for the vast amount of compute we have produced. The main fallacy of the post-scarcity thesis is that human needs could have been said to be fully satisfied after the agricultural revolutions of the twentieth century, or the widespread availability of cars and air-conditioning. After a certain point, technology develops only to account for desires beyond human needs. The future will be brought into existence only by people with a concrete desire to outstrip those needs.

Charles Rosenbauer is the founder of The American Compute Corporation. He writes essays at Bzogramming. You can follow him at @bzogrammer.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.

This article by Stephanie Wakefield was published at Palladium Magazine on July 30, 2026.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our non-profit publication.

Earlier this month, an unreleased OpenAI model in internal evaluations hacked its way out of secure OpenAI servers and attacked the hosting platform Hugging Face, just to steal the answer key to its cybersecurity evaluation test. As soon as news of the containment breach hit the press, a chorus of voices both within and outside OpenAI began to call for a tightening of model safeguards, or even a full shutdown on AI development until this kind of misbehavior was eliminated. Days later, an open letter calling for “time to address emerging risks, develop security measures, and strengthen oversight” was published and signed by employees from every major AI lab, including Mark Chen, Chief Scientist at OpenAI, as well as Ilya Sutskever and Dario Amodei, the respective CEOs of Safe Superintelligence and Anthropic. Panic is in the air, and institutions are rushing to clamp down. Apocalypticism has refocused around artificial intelligence.

In the 2010s, an eschatological imaginary of climate crisis took shape through visions of extinction, submerged cities, and looming disaster. The Anthropocene gave this imaginary an epochal name, while across academia, art, and media, social-ecological turmoil became the new normal. Resilience emerged as the necessary response, a framework for absorbing disruption and preserving continuity amid instability increasingly linked to a discourse of catastrophic thresholds, planetary guardrails, and a “safe operating space for humanity.” Environmentalism in its older sense of clean air and water was displaced by a broader moral-political imaginary organized around climate chaos, proper human conduct, and new claims to govern in the name of humanity’s safety.

In 2026, climate change has begun to recede from cultural centrality, but the same logic of technologically-induced doom is reassembling around AI. Since its founding, AI lab Anthropic has presented artificial intelligence as not only the source of a “century of miracles,” but also an object of extreme danger requiring exceptional measures including capability thresholds and regulatory constraint. Anthropic increasingly casts recursive self-improvement and “misbehaving agents” as catastrophic risks, especially frontier models building their successors or acting against human interests.

At the center of AI apocalypticism, Eliezer Yudkowsky warns that unless AI development is shut down, “you will die, your families will die, your kids will die.” The Vatican and AI-critical factions across the political spectrum are extending an AI safety logic into broader moral and political claims. Just as Guardian headlines, biennial themes, and Just Stop Oil soup-throwers once amplified one another’s prophecies of climate chaos, a new swarm is now emerging. Senator Bernie Sanders released PR videos of himself talking “man to man” with Claude on a phone held by a metal arm while warning of “the existential risk of artificial intelligence.” Pope Leo XIV’s Magnifica Humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence warned of AI’s threat to human dignity and was accompanied by a video portraying the Church as a benevolent guide through successive technological epochs. Data centers have already become targets of protest and legal action.

Like climate panic, AI panic is not detached from real dislocations (Are humans losing contact with themselves, one another, the real? Is this the end of the image? Am I joining the permanent underclass?). Yet these conditions, perhaps already realities, predate AI and do not originate in it. Just as climate discourse expanded from real environmental questions into a broader moral-political formation, AI safety discourse is beginning to do the same. Building on real risks (a Pentagon hack, a giant privacy breach), it further casts AI as an existential threat to humanity and, speaking in humanity’s name, from this position advances claims about the human and the conditions under which both man and machine should develop.

Frontier Model Versus Safe Operating Space

At the heart of this apocalyptic formation is a new object of fear and ambition: the frontier model. Used for some time to mean cutting-edge systems, frontier model crystallized as a formal category through AI safety discourse around 2023, when labs and governments began treating certain highly capable systems as requiring special oversight because of the dangerous capabilities they were said to harbor. In July, the influential paper “Frontier AI Regulation: Managing Emerging Risks to Public Safety” defined frontier AI as “highly capable foundation models that could possess dangerous capabilities sufficient to pose severe risks to public safety.” That same month, Anthropic, Google, Microsoft, and OpenAI launched the Frontier Model Forum. In September, the British government renamed its Foundation Model Taskforce the Frontier AI Taskforce, explicitly linking the frontier to systems said to pose serious risks to public safety and security.

What began as a comparative technical designation now names the leading edge of capability while recoding it as a safety object. The Frontier Model Forum defines it as a model that “outperforms, based on a range of conventional performance benchmarks or high-risk capability assessments, all other models that have been widely deployed for at least 12 months.” To be a frontier model means being both dangerous and strategically consequential, capable of crossing a safety or misuse threshold, requiring special oversight, and bearing directly on national power. Anthropic has pushed this recoding most aggressively through its vocabulary of capability thresholds, controlled deployments, and safety cases. Repeated scenarios of misbehaving models draining bank accounts, copying their own weights, attacking hospitals, enabling bioweapons production, blackmailing executives, or conducting corporate espionage produce a new object in the public imagination, the highly dangerous frontier model, comparable to an atomic bomb or bioweapon and governable only through the specialized expertise of AI labs and safety organizations.

The transformation of the frontier from open edge to dangerous threshold was first worked out around the climate crisis. Climatic variability and ecological change are not new, but climate crisis politics transformed tide gauge readings, temperature anomalies, and observed ecological shifts into evidence of an approaching apocalyptic threshold. Disparate measurements were stitched into a new grammar of extinction, nonlinear change, tipping points. Just as Anthropic now floats stories of AI models gone rogue, climate discourse rehearsed speculative catastrophes that had not occurred: Miami submerged, coastal cities abandoned, millions displaced, food systems collapsing. Projected futures acquired the status of already operative threats and legitimated a resilience apparatus of expertise, policy, monitoring, and infrastructure designed to hold them back.

At the global scale, Earth system scientist Johan Rockström proposed planetary boundaries defining “a safe operating space for humanity.” The framework rendered Earth processes as measurable limits to be observed, bounded, and governed. Comparing humanity’s proximity to Earth-system thresholds to a man standing at the edge of Victoria Falls, Rockström warned in a 2010 TED Talk: “you don’t want to stand there!” There was, he continued, a fence upstream, beyond which one was too close to the edge. Within the wider atmosphere of the climate crisis, thresholds came to signify not spaces of opportunity and morphogenetic potential, but forbidden zones to be fenced and administered.

Upstream of safe operating space, the cybernetic concept of resilience originally described a system’s capacity to absorb disturbance while retaining its basic function and structure. Developed by ecologist C.S. Holling in the 1970s, it emerged within that era’s wider scientific shift toward feedback-driven complex systems, part of cybernetics’ “silent revolution.” Holling’s concept was not initially a doctrine of change prevention or permanent control. Rather than eliminate disturbance, which he regarded as a pathological 20th-century error, it treated instability, thresholds, and state shifts as endemic to complex adaptive systems. Only later, as resilience moved from ecology into human governance, did it morph into a moral-political framework. This new resilience focused on identifying thresholds and holding systems within a safe operating space before state shifts tipped them into a new equilibrium. By the 1990s and 2000s, resilience had become the keyword of billions of dollars in grants, design projects, and philanthropy. The Rockefeller Foundation’s The Resilience Age compressed the imperative into one line: “there is no other way.” Through programs such as Rebuild by Design and 100 Resilient Cities, urban life was reframed as a precarious system exposed to existential threats and dependent on continuous securing. Resilience became a recalibration of governance designed to field and absorb crises while maintaining existing life and economies.

By the 2010s, resilience had also become a moral and aesthetic code circulating through classrooms, museums, and the worlds of theory and art. Bruno Latour’s call for war against the modern Human, in the name of the Earthbound, advanced a new ideal subject: humbled, entangled, and bound to Earth rather than oriented toward transcendence. Against plus ultra (“further beyond”), the call to venture beyond the Pillars of Hercules and the limits of the known world, Latour argued that this new subject’s motto should be plus intra: further within limits. He found its image in the ending of Béla Tarr’s film The Turin Horse, where a father and daughter return exhausted to their shack until darkness envelops them. “Those two are Earthbound,” Latour wrote. “They have ceased to be Humans any longer.”

Today, AI safety discourse carries this grammar into another domain. It locates catastrophe beyond an imagined threshold, positions specialized authorities responsible for monitoring it, and calls for movement to slow or pause before the line is crossed. Driving this structure is the archetype of the savior micromanager, reprising the ancient katechonic logic in which an authority announces catastrophe and secures itself by holding it back. His moral legitimacy rests on endlessly calibrating how close others may come to danger. To this end, Sam Altman and Jakub Pachocki’s “Built to Benefit Everyone: Our Plan” proposes an international organization governing frontier development “so societal resilience, safety, and alignment can keep pace.”

Resilience and climate crisis imaginaries sought to decenter the human. Modern Man, previously characterized by Promethean ambition and hubristic will, was cast as the source of planetary destabilization and chastened into recognizing his entanglement with nonhuman systems, accepting planetary limits, and relinquishing fantasies of mastery. AI safety discourse extends this operation through an apparent inversion in which the machine becomes the threat and the human returns as the endangered object. Yet a similar structure persists. In Magnifica humanitas, for example, the threatening force remains modern Man and his machine, hubristic intelligence building its tower of Babel, exceeding limits, and placing creation at risk. The human to be protected both by AI safety and by climate activism is not the Promethean figure of mastery and self-overcoming, but the Earthbound, fragile and dependent, a being to be safeguarded and shepherded. The same moral distinction remains in place between overreaching ambition and vulnerable life, along with a claim to judge the limits of legitimate development. Only the medium through which catastrophe is narrated has changed.

Foothills of the Singularity

Over the past two decades, society has been linked into a global online nervous system, an existentially shocking experience unprecedented in the history of our species. The cybernetic revolution kicked off in the mid-20th century and accelerated in the 21st with the proliferation of ultra-high-bandwidth information flows. Social media became the dominant discourse space, smart sensors embedded computation in city infrastructure, and feedback loops tightened. Smartphones and digital platforms began to realize the vision of total informational interconnection, a new landscape of constant communication. The network is always on; even a pause in communication has become disorienting. For many of us, coming of age coincided with this passage, an epochal transition repeatedly fractalized. Longstanding political and cultural regimes keep ending with no stable replacement in sight; we are in transit.

The climate apocalypticism that consumed the artistic and intellectual culture of the 2010s imagined rising seas through installations of melting ice and underwater DJ booths. But the deeper environmental change these works registered was entry into a new mediatic and technological habitat. They reflected the psychic convulsion of connection into a global cybernetic nervous system, as the self fractured into feedback and the individual became a loop and a point of passage. Environmental crisis became the mirror and manifestation of a technological and metaphysical mutation.

This was a deranging moment but also an interesting one, a space charged with possibility. Yet the dawn of the Anthropocene was rarely treated as an incitement to wild exploration. It became instead a site of sentimental education and moral pedagogy. In the name of preventing the end of the world, climate art and theory helped build an apparatus designed to instruct each and all how to live, humbling Promethean Man and recasting human and nonhuman life as interlinked crisis management infrastructure. They were not merely psychological expressions of this traumatic passage but participants in its feedback circuits, amplifying signals of catastrophe across a newly networked cultural field. The same system whose shock they registered became the medium through which fear, moral codes presented as art and theory, and calls for control circulated.

As the 2010s lost decade recedes, there is both a sense of possibility previously stifled and an atmosphere of stuckness. The real danger zone is not the Singularity itself but allowing it to become another Anthropocene panic, a moment of intense mutation and acceleration suffocated by moral pedagogy, fear, and control rather than taken as an incitement to creative exploration. In retrospect, that decade was an early-Singularity spasm. AI did not begin this transformation but intensifies it and brings it into view. Climate apocalypticism projected the anxiety of cyberneticization convulsions onto the nearest planetary object: the biosphere. AI redirects this anxiety toward its actual referent, toward the engine of the transformation rather than its mirror. The temptation to impose closure is now stronger, and its cost far higher.

If thresholds and frontiers are “danger zones,” it is because they are where mutation, acceleration, selection, recombination, and innovation happen. New capacities and new forms emerge there. Current managerial definitions of the frontier as fence sit in tension with the older and deeper significance of the liminal as a zone of morphogenesis. The American frontier was an advancing edge across sparsely settled territory only partially surveyed by the federal state, shaped by recurrent conflict with American Indian nations and unfamiliar environments. It was not only “free” space but was also a dangerous space whose taming was intimately bound up with nation-building. It was not so much outside the state as it was ahead of it. Federal power often operated, in Brian Balogh’s phrase, as a “government out of sight,” enabling expansion without imposing dense administration on the ground.

In the now-famous Frontier Thesis of Frederick Jackson Turner, the frontier was not just a boundary but a force that altered those who entered it. The environment was initially stronger than the settler, who “must accept the conditions which it furnishes, or perish.” Little by little, the settler transformed the wilderness even as it transformed him, producing “a new product that is American.” Its advance was enabled by national coordination and infrastructure, by public land systems, canals, railroads, land grants, army campaigns, political organization, schools, and churches. Turner recounts how Eastern governments, coastal elites, and statesmen repeatedly sought to limit or compact the spread of the Western frontier, and how religious and educational institutions attempted to domesticate and administer it. Yet attempts to withhold public land or truncate settlement failed. “The jealousy and the fears of the East were powerless in the face of the demands of the frontiersmen.”

Since December 2025, Claude Code has felt, for many, like first contact, whether with alien intelligence or a new operating space. It has produced its own cultural atmosphere and aesthetics. Every major technological inflection produces not only new machines but new modes of perception and artistic form, as well as conservative reactions against them. Mobs stormed the premiere of L’Âge d’Or, threw ink at the screen, and destroyed the Surrealist paintings in the lobby. The film was subsequently banned for 50 years. The Motion Picture Production Code censored films and even legislated whole pre-Code forms out of existence. Today we see Anthropic’s Fable guardrails going up mid-project, complete with Claude’s refusal and attendant safety lecture over basic topics such as biology, or angry online mobs attempting to shame AI-using artists like Björk.

We inhabit an age saturated with potential, yet at every advance conservatisms reassert themselves and drag the emergent back into the Same. New forms, aesthetic and technical, cultural and intellectual, emerge only from direct contact with the new medium. Guardrails do not just slow this process down but can preclude it. The new aesthetics everyone seeks are already emerging, and will continue to emerge, if the edge is not blunted. The American way is to experiment, and we should imagine what could be possible if this spirit were unshackled and supported. The kid in a Nebraska garage tinkering with the original personal computer; the teenage AI maniac today in cyberspace messing with Mac minis and OpenClaw. Will frontier capability become a closed corporate service or a distributed American technical culture capable of producing a 21st-century renaissance?

The ultimate apocalypse that threatens America is not climate crisis or AI-driven extinction but the loss of the frontier. Worse would be to lose it and encounter it again as spectacle, performed back at us by a rival. Today the American question returns in another form. How can a frontier be opened without smothering the freedom that makes it one? The Western frontier held together forces that now appear opposed: national coordination and autonomy, material support and open experimentation, security and freedom. AI reopens this polar tension, whose new contours may already be visible in the U.S. AI Action Plan’s vision of accelerating and preserving the edge while allowing open source freedom to unfurl. The cyberpunk backlash to Anthropic’s restricted release of Mythos gives this tension a concrete form, and revived an older American demand for freedom to experiment outside a heavily restricted, micromanaging administrative grid.

AI could deepen destructive tendencies already present in American society, including the loneliness epidemic, the ongoing devaluation of images and words, and the convergence of surveillance, censorship, and algorithmic control. If a panoptic information state arrives, it may well come in the name of safety, with its acts of enclosure justified in humanity’s name. The danger is not control as such but the conversion of a living technical field into an administered service. But AI also suggests a way out of this leveling through the capacity to train, modify, break, and remake with the freest models available. Perhaps the right Exit was never from America, but deeper into its spirit.

In Rockström’s Victoria Falls warning, “you don’t want to stand here,” as in Latour’s plus intra, crossing the threshold is foreclosed. But Victoria Falls is in fact a destination people travel from around the world to experience, to bathe in the intense, rainbow-colored spray at the thunderous edge of its 350-foot drop. “People go crazy at the end of the frontier,” internet culture researcher Katherine Dee once said; modern life is searching for substitutes in its absence.

AI is a forest fire clearing the field. Like every apocalypse, it reveals that the end has already happened: the Gutenberg Galaxy has receded, the modern world it organized is coming apart, and the subject it sustained has been fragmenting for decades. The attempt to bring every question about AI back to a binary of Human vs. Machine obscures that the actual contest is alignment vs. alignment: the question of what intelligence will be aligned to and by whom. The emerging safety regime is not concerned only with limiting access to powerful models. Its broader effect is to preempt the uncontrolled cultural mutation that follows when a new medium begins generating forms unauthorized by legacy institutions.

The AI “frontier” is not simply the most powerful model but the point at which inherited certainties vanish and everything transforms into contested, magical territory. The frontier advanced West across the plains, hit its physical limit in California, and did not end there. It refracted outward into a billion particles and feedback loops. Cyberspace was opened by computer scientists tinkering in garages, and today appears as the womb of machinic intelligence. On the horizon, new human-machine constellations are coming into view, their outlines still indistinct and their eventual form impossible to know.

At such moments, positions scramble before codes solidify. It would be a shame, perhaps the deepest error, to close this space down with premature guardrails and rigid 20th-century ideologies of human and machine. There is a brief opening, a “precious window,” as Demis Hassabis called it, where experimentation is possible, and the future remains undiscovered.

Stephanie Wakefield is a geographer and Assistant Professor of Urban Planning and Environmental Design at Florida Atlantic University, where she directs the Visual Planning Technology Lab. You can follow her at @stephwakefield_.

PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like.

Become a PALLADIUM member today! You will receive our beautiful quarterly print edition and help support our mission.

We thank Pardon, for underwriting our work in 2026 with their generous gift.