China’s talented message board theorists crafted an industrial vision now embraced by Xi. Will their successors tear it all down?
Our society has abandoned the industrial revolution, along with entire frontiers of progress. Our future depends on understanding its moral logic and creating a new industrial ecosystem.
The Industrial Revolution stopped before it was ever completed. The aftermath is not a clean and developed world, but lost knowledge and civilizational decline.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss cults as society’s real foundation. Cults are not a luxury that societies indulge when all other needs are met. They are the first-movers, setting the stage for everything else that follows.
Atomic physicist Leo Szilard thought that scientists could rule the world better. The insiders who pushed him aside demonstrate what it actually takes to run the show.
Existential problems confront our society. Our response will be the foundation of a new golden age of governance.
Our governments will fail to respond effectively to climate change. A new world order will arise through the coming period of climate chaos.
Early liberal thinkers did not just propose a philosophy, but a type of regime. When power acts with liberality, the result is a stronger society of dynamic individuals.
The late Qing scholar Yan Fu saw liberalism as a grand project to create virtuous people and a dynamic society. His ideas failed in China, but could succeed in America.
The GameStop rebellion started and ended as an outburst. The coordinated deals behind power prevent it, and most rebellions, from ever achieving more.
A journey through Armenia reveals a country on Russian life support. With Azerbaijan and Turkey in ascendency, the country’s lack of allies is its most existential threat.
Industrial visionaries tend to have chaotic and disruptive personalities. Their goals don’t neatly fit the social ladder. But societies that make room for them reap immense rewards.
Humans are irreversibly reshaping Earth, and neither degrowth nor green energy tweaks will stop it. In the long run, we will have to use our power to create a thriving garden planet.
In the early 1990s, the UN intervened in Cambodia in a show of liberal democratic state-building. Its failures foreshadowed the hubris which would follow the liberal world order from Yugoslavia to Afghanistan.
Mike Solana joins Wolf Tivy to discuss how San Francisco’s governance works, how it has gone wrong, and what he thinks it would take to fix it.
Sociologist and design theorist Benjamin H Bratton discusses how our ongoing technologically-driven terraforming will remake the world order, and how technology reveals and creates human destiny as much as enabling it.
Wolf Tivy and Ash Milton discuss accumulative versus developmental orientations to industry, and the necessity of a class with interests beyond individual finance.
The biggest threat to America’s world order is not China, but the country’s own deepening dysfunction. Its grand strategy must go beyond containment and transform the basis of U.S. power.