Professor Thorne has spent decades helping to measure and understand our changing climate, serving in multiple author roles within the IPCC and contributing to the scientific assessments that inform governments around the world.

“We are the generation that knew. We are the generation that could have. We are the generation that did not.”

Whether you’re deeply engaged with climate science or simply trying to understand one of the defining issues of our time, I hope this conversation helps separate evidence from opinion.

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While I do not agree fully with Zizek that happiness is for idiots, I do see an unjust optimism that is blind to the reality of where we are, and where we seem to be headed. Without an interest in despair, from which we can form a path that reflects reality rather than aspiration, towards building a future worth living in, we risk happily marching to our own demise.

Before you dismiss my pessimism as simply the existential dread of an over-thinking philosopher, consider that those at the cutting edge of technology give us stark warnings.

In 2023 a statement was signed by experts working at the cutting edge of AI in the hopes that some form of regulation would take place. Perhaps an implementation of Azamov’s rules or some similar fundamental principles. As of yet there are zero international legally binding regulations on AI. Here is a list of signatories to that statement in 2023 which states “Mitigating the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority alongside other societal-scale risks such as pandemics and nuclear war.”

1. Geoffrey Hinton- Emeritus Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto

2. Yoshua Bengio - Professor of Computer Science, U. Montreal / Mila

3. Demis Hassabis - CEO, Google DeepMind

4. Sam Altman - CEO, OpenAI

5. Dario Amodei - CEO, Anthropic

6. Dawn Song - Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley

7. Ted Lieu - Congressman, US House of Representatives

8. Bill Gates - Gates Ventures

9. Ya-Qin Zhang - Professor and Dean, AIR, Tsinghua University

10. Ilya Sutskever - Co-Founder and Chief Scientist, OpenAI

11. Igor Babuschkin - Co-Founder, xAI

12. Shane Legg - Chief AGI Scientist and Co-Founder, Google DeepMind

13. Martin Hellman - Professor Emeritus of Electrical Engineering, Stanford

14. James Manyika - SVP, Research, Technology and Society, Google-Alphabet

15. Yi Zeng - Professor and Director of Brain-inspired Cognitive AI Lab, Institute of Automation, Chinese Academy of Sciences

16. Xianyuan Zhan - Assistant Professor, Tsinghua University

17. Albert Efimov - Chief of Research, Russian Association of Artificial Intelligence

18. Alvin Wang Graylin - China President, HTC

19. Jianyi Zhang - Professor, Beijing Electronic Science and Technology Institute

20. Anca Dragan - Associate Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley

21. Christine Parthemore - CEO and Director of the Janne E. Nolan Center on Strategic Weapons, The Council on Strategic Risks

22. Bill McKibben - Schumann Distinguished Scholar, Middlebury College

23. Alan Robock - Distinguished Professor of Climate Science, Rutgers University

24. Angela Kane - Vice President, International Institute for Peace, Vienna; former UN High Representative for Disarmament Affairs

25. Audrey Tang - Digitalminister.tw and Chair of National Institute of Cyber Security

26. Daniela Amodei - President, Anthropic

27. David Silver - Professor of Computer Science, Google DeepMind and UCL

28. Lila Ibrahim - COO, Google DeepMind

29. Stuart Russell - Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley

30. Tony (Yuhuai) Wu - Co-Founder, xAI

31. Marian Rogers Croak - VP Center for Responsible AI and Human Centered Technology, Google

32. Andrew Barto - Professor Emeritus, University of Massachusetts

33. Mira Murati - CTO, OpenAI

34. Jaime Fernández Fisac - Assistant Professor of Electrical and Computer Engineering, Princeton University

35. Diyi Yang - Assistant Professor, Stanford University

36. Gillian Hadfield - Professor, CIFAR AI Chair, University of Toronto, Vector Institute for AI

37. Laurence Tribe - University Professor Emeritus, Harvard University

38. Pattie Maes - Professor, Massachusetts Institute of Technology - Media Lab

39. Kevin Scott - CTO, Microsoft

40. Eric Horvitz - Chief Scientific Officer, Microsoft

41. Peter Norvig - Education Fellow, Stanford University

42. Joseph Sifakis - Turing Award 2007, Professor, CNRS - Universite Grenoble - Alpes

43. Atoosa Kasirzadeh - Assistant Professor, University of Edinburgh, Alan Turing Institute

44. Erik Brynjolfsson - Professor and Senior Fellow, Stanford Institute for Human-Centered AI

45. Mustafa Suleyman - CEO, Inflection AI

46. Emad Mostaque - CEO, Stability AI

47. Ian Goodfellow - Principal Scientist, Google DeepMind

48. John Schulman - Co-Founder, OpenAI

49. Wojciech Zaremba - Co-Founder, OpenAI

50. Dan Hendrycks - Executive Director, Center for AI Safety

51. Baburam Bhattarai - Former Prime Minister of Nepal, Society of Nepalese Architects

52. Kersti Kaljulaid - Former President of the Republic of Estonia

53. Russell Schweickart - Apollo 9 Astronaut, Association of Space Explorers, B612 Foundation

54. Andy Weber - Former U.S. Assistant Secretary of Defense for Nuclear, Chemical, and Biological Defense Programs, Council on Strategic Risks

55. Allison Macfarlane - Former Chairman, US Nuclear Regulatory Commission

56. Nicholas Fairfax (Lord Fairfax) - Member, House of Lords

57. Mark Beall - Former Director of AI Strategy and Policy, Department of Defense

58. Lord Strathcarron - Peer, House of Lords

59. Stephen Luby - Professor of Medicine (Infectious Diseases), Stanford University

60. David Haussler - Professor and Director of the Genomics Institute, UC Santa Cruz

61. Ju Li - Professor of Nuclear Science & Engineering and Professor of Materials Science & Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

62. David Chalmers - Professor of Philosophy, New York University

63. Daniel Dennett - Emeritus Professor of Philosophy, Tufts University

64. Peter Railton - Professor of Philosophy at University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

65. Peter Singer - Professor, Princeton University

66. Sheila McIlraith - Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto

67. Victoria Krakovna - Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

68. Mary Phuong - Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

69. Mariano-Florentino Cuéllar - President, Carnegie Endowment for International Peace

70. Lex Fridman - Research Scientist, MIT

71. Sharon Li - Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Wisconsin Madison

72. Phillip Isola - Associate Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, MIT

73. David Krueger - Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Cambridge

74. Jacob Steinhardt - Assistant Professor of Computer Science, UC Berkeley

75. Martin Rees - Professor of Physics, Cambridge University

76. Nando de Freitas - Director, Science Board, Google DeepMind

77. Hongwei Qin - Research Director, SenseTime

78. He He - Assistant Professor of Computer Science and Data Science, New York University

79. David McAllester - Professor of Computer Science, TTIC

80. Vincent Conitzer - Professor of Computer Science, Carnegie Mellon University and University of Oxford

81. Bart Selman - Professor of Computer Science, Cornell University

82. Philip Torr - Professor of Engineering Science, University of Oxford

83. James Mickens - Professor of Computer Science, Harvard University

84. Michael Wellman - Professor & Chair of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan

85. Luis Videgaray - Senior Lecturer, MIT; Former Minister of Interior and Exterior Relations of Mexico

86. Jinwoo Shin - KAIST Endowed Chair Professor, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology

87. Alice Oh - Professor at The School of Computing, KAIST and Director, MARS AI Research Center

88. Dae-Shik Kim - Professor of Electrical Engineering, Korea Advanced Institute of Science and Technology (KAIST)

89. Edith Elkind - Professor of Computing Science, University of Oxford

90. Ray Kurzweil - Principal Researcher and AI Visionary, Google

91. Frank Hutter - Professor of Machine Learning, Head of ELLIS Unit, University of Freiburg

92. Alexey Dosovitskiy - Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

93. Jaan Tallinn - Co-Founder of Skype

94. Vitalik Buterin - Founder and Chief Scientist, Ethereum, Ethereum Foundation

95. Adam D’Angelo - CEO, Quora, and board member, OpenAI

96. Simon Last - Cofounder and CTO, Notion

97. Dustin Moskovitz - Co-founder and CEO, Asana

98. Shane Torchiana - CEO, Bird

99. Thuan Q. Pham - Former CTO, Uber, Board member, Nubank

100. Scott Aaronson - Schlumberger Chair of Computer Science, University of Texas at Austin

101. Max Tegmark - Professor, MIT, Center for AI and Fundamental Interactions

102. Bruce Schneier - Lecturer, Harvard Kennedy School

103. Martha Minow - Professor, Harvard Law School

104. Gabriella Blum - Professor of Human Rights and Humanitarian Law, Harvard Law

105. Kevin Esvelt - Associate Professor of Biology, MIT

106. Edward Wittenstein - Executive Director, International Security Studies, Yale Jackson School of Global Affairs, Yale University

107. Sonny Ramaswamy - President, Northwest Commission on Colleges & Universities

108. Laurie Zoloth - Margaret E. Burton Professor of Religion and Ethics, University of Chicago

109. Karina Vold - Assistant Professor, University of Toronto

110. Victor Veitch - Assistant Professor of Data Science and Statistics, University of Chicago

111. Dylan Hadfield-Menell - Assistant Professor of Computer Science, MIT

112. Samuel R. Bowman - Associate Professor of Computer Science, NYU and Anthropic

113. Mengye Ren - Assistant Professor of Computer Science, New York University

114. Shiri Dori-Hacohen - Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Connecticut

115. Miles Brundage - Head of Policy Research, OpenAI

116. Allan Dafoe - AGI Strategy and Governance Team Lead, Google DeepMind

117. Helen King - Senior Director of Responsibility and Strategic Advisor to Research, Google DeepMind

118. Jade Leung - Governance Lead, OpenAI

119. Jess Whittlestone - Head of AI Policy, Centre for Long-Term Resilience

120. Sarah Kreps - John L. Wetherill Professor and Director of the Tech Policy Institute, Cornell University

121. Jared Kaplan - Co-Founder, Anthropic

122. Chris Olah - Co-Founder, Anthropic

123. Andrew Revkin - Director, Initiative on Communication & Sustainability, Columbia University - Climate School

124. Carl Robichaud - Program Officer (Nuclear Weapons), Longview Philanthropy

125. Leonid Chindelevitch - Lecturer in Infectious Disease Epidemiology, Imperial College London

126. Nicholas Dirks - President, The New York Academy of Sciences

127. Hongyi Zhang - Research Scientist, ByteDance

128. Marc Warner - CEO, Faculty

129. Rob Pike - Distinguished Engineer (retired), Co-Creator of Golang, Google

130. Clare Lyle - Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

131. Nisarg Shah - Assistant Professor, University of Toronto

132. Ryota Kanai - CEO, Araya, Inc.

133. Tim G. J. Rudner - Assistant Professor and Faculty Fellow, New York University

134. Noah Fiedel - Director, Research and Engineering, Google DeepMind

135. Jakob Foerster - Associate Professor of Engineering Science, University of Oxford

136. Michael Osborne - Professor of Machine Learning, University of Oxford

137. Marina Jirotka - Professor of Human Centred Computing, University of Oxford

138. Nancy Chang - Research Scientist, Google

139. Tom Schaul - Research Scientist, Google DeepMind

140. Daniel Cer - Research Scientist at Google Deepmind

141. Roger Grosse - Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto and Anthropic

142. David Duvenaud - Associate Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto

143. Daniel M. Roy - Associate Professor and Canada CIFAR AI Chair, University of Toronto; Vector Institute

144. Kanjun Qiu - CEO, Generally Intelligent

145. Chris J. Maddison - Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto

146. Tegan Maharaj - Assistant Professor of the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto

147. Florian Shkurti - Assistant Professor of Computer Science, University of Toronto

148. Jeff Clune - Associate Professor of Computer Science and Canada CIFAR AI Chair, The University of British Columbia and the Vector Institute

149. Eva Vivalt -Assistant Professor of Economics, University of Toronto, and Director, Global Priorities Institute, University of Oxford

150. Jacob Tsimerman - Professor of Mathematics, University of Toronto

Now, I hope you are reasonably convinced of the problems we face from an AI dominated world, so what follows are my observations.

“The Hamptons are not a defensible position” Professor of international economics and public affairs, Mark Blyth, once offered this line as a reminder that wealth is tied to the social world that sustains it. The supremely wealthy, still rely on the rest of us. History shows, when people are oppressed enough, revolution becomes inevitable. And no gilded enclave can keep the outside from coming in. However, Mark Blyth spoke before the rise of artificial intelligence, before the oligarchs imagined seceding from Earth to Mars, or from the human body to an uploaded consciousness, before attitudes in western democracies became so extreme and politics so polarised, And back when Climate change was the futures problem.

Today, the Hamptons or their equivalents in New Zealand bunkers, fortified compounds, and private arcologies may indeed become defensible. Not because society has become fair or resilient. Not because each is safe and happy. Not because flourishing liberal democracies have ushered in the end of history where revolt is not required. The Hamptons are defensible because the technological advances exploding onto society over the next few years, mean that the infrastructure needed for a comfortable survival may no longer depend on other humans to run it. AI doesn’t need to have conciousness or reach General Intelligence for this dystopia to come into being. It seems the trajectory we are on in the west is leaning towards a sytem where a Tech Aristocracy could justify using AI to keep “us” safe from the “others”.. As yet, the “others” are not defined, but many minorities are in the running. The vague label of immigrant may once again be enough to form the requisite “other”.

The most credible scientific bodies like the IPCC, NASA, the Potsdam Institute, and others warn of looming ecosystem breakdown. This means multi-breadbasket crop failures, AMOC slowdown, the crossing of multiple climate tipping points, catastrophic heatwaves approaching wet-bulb limits, mass migration triggered by drought, sea level rise, and collapsing freshwater systems. These disruptions threaten to undermine the basic infrastructures that modern societies rely on such as food supply, electricity, transport, communications, and stable governance. So much new energy is required to sustain AI and its future iterations, that unless technology itself solves climate change, we are heading for an ecological collapse. Against this backdrop, the automation of production, surveillance, persuasion, creation and curation of information, and even control of coercion, transforms not just work or politics, but the future shape of human survival.

Revolutions then and now

Historically, revolutions emerged when three conditions aligned, material grievance, shared narrative, and collective coordination. The French Revolution had pamphleteers and salons, the American Revolution had committees of correspondence, labour movements had unions, meeting halls, and print culture. The Arab Spring relied on physical squares where bodies gathered to create political possibility. Ireland’s own struggle for independence relied on dense networks of organisers, newspapers, Co-op farmers, secret meatings, and volunteer militias that brought scattered grievances into coordinated action. Revolt was never just anger. It was infrastructure, attention, and a shared sense of what was real.

Today, the material grievances remain and are set to intensify as ecological collapse disrupts food, water, energy, and stability. What is disappearing are the other two pillars. Shared narratives have fractured, and coordination has become difficult in an information landscape designed for distraction and outrage rather than deliberation. The historical conditions that made revolt viable are being replaced by architectures that dissipate rather than concentrate political energy.

The end of mutual dependency in a destabilising world

The industrial era created a mutual dependency. Capital needed labour, and labour needed wages. Liberal Democracy, social welfare, and the public sphere emerged in this tense balance. But in a world buckling under ecological strain, that relationship changes. Millions of workers who drive, deliver, sort, code, moderate, and service the digital economy are already being replaced by systems that do not sleep, strike, care, or starve. Autonomous vehicles move freight, AI governs warehouses, and robots perform tasks that once required subtle human judgment as virtual agents soothe customers with synthetic voices.

The old idea that technology frees humans for “higher” work assumes such work will exist. When AI writes, designs, diagnoses, and instructs more efficiently than we do, what is left for the intelligence of humans when its primacy as the entity of utility no longer holds. If food production becomes completely automated, if energy systems become AI-managed microgrids, if conflict is waged by drones and autonomous targeting systems, the powerful may no longer need the masses for labour, defence, or legitimacy.

As ecological collapse accelerates resource scarcity and state instability, the able may turn even more aggressively to automation as a buffer against a world becoming harder to live in. Retreat into a Golden Dome becomes a pragmatic response for those who can.

The automation of protection

Blyth’s warning assumed that revolt was materially possible. Guards, soldiers, and pilots were human beings capable of refusing, defecting, or joining the crowd. But as security becomes automated, political possibility narrows. Private security firms already deploy autonomous sensors and counter drone systems. Conflicts from Gaza to Ukraine show the growing dominance of algorithmic targeting. Armed drones require no loyalty. Surveillance networks identify faces, patterns, and movements with increasing accuracy.

Premeditated and targeted violence, once rooted in human judgment, is becoming computational. Historically, the question of protection has always revealed the true nature of power. Since the days of the Roman Empire, leaders relied on a Praetorian Guard whose loyalty determined whether a ruler lived or died. The guard could be persuaded, bribed, or turn against the very person they were sworn to protect, a reminder that no amount of wealth or authority could fully secure a leader against human will. Today, that once taken for granted element of our social contract is quietly disappearing. In elite enclaves, protection can be provided not by people who might reconsider, but by an AI praetorian guard, automated, networked, unpersuadable. Revolt becomes not only dangerous but technically impossible.

Information as pacification

If machines defend the walls, information pacifies the exterior. Revolutions once relied on shared narratives that united people behind a common injustice. Today’s digital architecture fragments, isolates, and overwhelms. Social media was once imagined as a democratic amplifier, it has become an attention extraction machine tuned for outrage and distraction.

People no longer look upward toward structures of power, but sideways toward scapegoats. Migrants, minorities, climate refugees, the very people displaced by ecological breakdown and war, become convenient targets. Outrage becomes entertainment. Dissent becomes content. A population trained by algorithms to react rather than reflect, loses the cognitive and emotional foundations needed for critical thinking, and thus, we lose the political agency necessary for a healthy liberal democracy.

Attention shrinks. Imagination flattens. Isolated individuals get disparate information feeds curated just for them. The psychological and social conditions that could produce collective action erode.

The rise of the tech oligarchy

Fukuyama theorised that the end of history (in a Hegelian sense) would be the global dominance of liberal democracy. Instead we have the consolidation of a new aristocracy of technology. Musk, Thiel, Zuckerberg, Andreessen, and others do not simply have wealth, they command and hugely influence the informational, political, and info-structural systems through which contemporary life is mediated.

Thiel’s admiration for strong-state governance and his engagement with neo-reactionary thinkers like Curtis Yarvin reveal an ideological shift. Democracy for Theil is too slow, too chaotic, too beholden to the masses. Musk’s empire spans media, satellites, rockets, transport, AI research, and neural interfaces. Zuckerberg governs the social nervous system of billions. Andreessen bankrolls the ideology of techno-solutionism that dismisses democratic oversight as obstruction.

They control the distribution of information, the platforms for public discourse, and increasingly hold sway over the machinery of state power. They hold epistemic power, as in the power to define reality for many people through social media feeds. Earlier societies could revolt through shared symbols and collective physical presence. Now the very medium through which dissent could organise is owned and ordered by those who benefit from preventing it.

Meanwhile, many of these elites are preparing for collapse. They buy fortified compounds in New Zealand, build private energy systems, and store cryptocurrency as post-collapse liquidity. They expect the world to fracture, they know the science, and they intend to be on the inside of whatever remains defensible.

Politics in the age of unreality

By “unreality” I mean the widening gap between the material conditions we face and the mediated world we perceive. A condition in which the signals needed for democratic self-understanding are drowned out by noise, distortion, and engineered distraction.

Ecological crisis intensifies our unreality. Heatwaves, megafires, and floods expose fragilities of infrastructure and governance. Environmental Scientists persistently ring bells as we exercise a kind of collective work avoidance, put our headphones on, and go about our day.

Reality deteriorates, public understanding becomes more fractured. Political energy is diverted into culture wars and conspiracies rather than the structural causes of collapse.

The end of history may be the slow neutralisation of political possibility.

The fading pathways of resistance

Part of the danger we now face is that none of this requires artificial general intelligence. The dystopia forming at the edges of our political and ecological reality is orchestrated by human actors equipped with increasingly powerful tools. We are not facing AI overlords, but human techno overlords supported and protected by AI. This is not a threat from a non-human conciousness, but from humans doing what they have always done. However, many old failsafes relied on humans being embedded in the structure itself, and made revolt, dissent, rebellion, and resistance an ever-present possibility.

The shift toward a future where machines do most of the work is not inherently troubling. In fact, it could be liberating. But without strong political institutions, without what Ibn Khaldun called asabiyyah, the social cohesion that binds people together,and without a narrative that values compassion and cooperation over hyper-individualism and competition, we risk building a society where automation entrenches inequality rather than relieves it. A world where the Hamptons become defensible is possible only when inequality has been allowed to grow without the counterbalance of collective power.

Are the Hamptons defensible?

In the literal sense, yes. AI-driven security, climate-adapted estates, privately owned infrastructure and info-structure, give a few unprecedented insulation, from the turbulence ahead.

Seen against the long curve of political struggle, the moment we are entering does not represent the end of conflict or the end of desire, but something more subtle and more disquieting. History has always depended on the belief that collective action can alter the trajectory of human society. What makes this moment feel like another end of history is not that change is impossible, but that the very conditions that once made it imaginable are eroding.

Without a renewed sense of asabiyyah, without a narrative that refuses resignation to helplessness, and without institutions capable of rebuilding common purpose, the future narrows. Have we fallen into the confortable traps Fukuyama warned us of:

“But supposing the world has become “filled up”, so to speak, with liberal democracies, such as there exist no tyranny and oppression worthy of the name against which to struggle? Experience suggests that if men cannot struggle on behalf of a just cause because that just cause was victorious in an earlier generation, then they will struggle against the just cause. They will struggle for the sake of struggle. They will struggle, in other words, out of a certain boredom: for they cannot imagine living in a world without struggle. And if the greater part of the world in which they live is characterized by peaceful and prosperous liberal democracy, then they will struggle against that peace and prosperity, and against democracy.”
Francis Fukuyama

History’s darkest moments were not driven by superhuman monsters, but by ordinary people with bureaucratic power and dehumanising stories. At Wannsee in 1942, senior Nazi officials sat around a table and calmly discussed the logistics of genocide. They did not need advanced technology to commit atrocities, they needed only a murderous ideology and enough administrative capacity to carry it out. The uncomfortable truth is that we are the same species that did these things. We are the animals that annihilated Indigenous peoples, that enslaved, lynched, tortured, imprisoned, and dropped atomic bombs on civilians. The belief that “we” have transcended such impulses because we live in technologically advanced liberal democracies is a comforting story, which we decorate with optimism, but clearly this picture is not the End Of History.

What is different today are the tools available to those in power. As AI, bio‑engineering, and precision surveillance advance, the scale and speed at which harm can be inflicted expands dramatically. This does not mean such horrors are inevitable, nor that new technologies predetermine their misuse. But it does mean that the stakes of political decay are far higher than before. When democratic norms erode, when dissent is criminalised, and when whole groups are cast as threats, the machinery that could be turned toward repression or exclusion is faster, more powerful, more decisive, more opaque, and less accountable than any bureaucracy in the past.

In a political environment where opposing authoritarianism is reframed as subversion, the moral compass of a society begins to spin loose. This is the world into which we are introducing AI and automated power structures. If a future Wannsee‑like meeting were to occur, the options on the table for a final solution to the Nazi’s Jewish problem, would be far more sophisticated and far more final. And all this as the space for coordinated resistance gets far smaller.

Dreaming again

If hope remains, it lies not in resisting technology but in reshaping the story we tell with it. The ecological crisis cannot be solved by automation alone, it requires renewed forms of coordination, solidarity, and meaning. Remember that language shapes perception. We need vocabularies of interdependence, ethics of care, and structures of governance suited to a heating world in stark need of healing.

AI can be a part of that. It could support empathy, cooperation, and resilience, but only if guided by human purposes larger than profit, convenience, efficiency, dominance, and control.

Until then, the Hamptons may indeed become defensible at the other end of history..

This was more than a scientific discovery, it was a philosophical revelation. Out of chaos, we glimpsed order. Yet today, the inverse seems true. Out of our obsession with order, we are breeding chaos, cognitively, socially, politically, and economically.

From Chaos to Code

Our modern world is built on feedback loops, the mathematical descendants of chaos theory. Algorithms learn by iterating, by adjusting to the minute fluctuations of human attention and behaviour. We have, in effect, coded the butterfly effect into machines.

Each notification, video, or trending outrage is a micro-disturbance, pulling attention from one attractor to the next. Individually, it feels trivial. However collectively, it constitutes a new cognitive climate of overstimulation, fragmentation, and emotional volatility.

Social media’s architecture mirrors the mathematics of chaos. It’s a system with sensitive dependence on initial conditions, a single post, phrase, or catchy slogan can cascade through the network, igniting waves of tribal outrage. But it is not only the initial spark that matters, it’s the feedback loops that follow. Every microscopic hesitation, each moment you pause over a post, hover on an image, or re-read a line becomes data. And it all feeds back into the system’s learning process, refining its ability to capture attention and amplify emotion.

What began as an experiment in connection has become a machine for behavioural prediction. An all knowing but zero feeling psychologist that exploits our heuristics, rewards our biases, and scripts our moods. It hunts, tirelessly and impersonally, for the most valuable resource we have, human attention.

The latest data shows that 93.8% of the world’s internet users, regardless of age, now use social media each month, spending an average of 18 hours and 36 minutes per week scrolling for dopamine’s flicker of stimulation. In total, humanity now devotes 15 billion hours every day to these platforms. Thats the equivalent of 1.7 million years of human life traded daily for the promise of connection, and the illusion of control within the chaos of the feed.

Cognitive Chaos

Psychology teaches us that when cognitive load exceeds capacity, the mind seeks shortcuts. Under pressure, complexity feels intolerable. We grasp for coherence, any coherence. In interrogation, this principle is used to expose deception. In the attention economy, the overload is ambient, continuous, and totalising.

Faced with overwhelming input, the mind grasps for reduction. Hence the rise of binary thinking and conspiracy logic, not because humans are less intelligent, but because we are more stimulated. “’We have invented happiness,’ say the last men, and they blink.” (Nietzsche). Whilst the cognitive resources needed for critical thinking get whittled away by endless novelty, the modern psyche is stretched between too much information and too little meaning.

As Hannah Arendt warned, “the ideal subject of totalitarian rule is not the convinced Nazi or the convinced Communist, but people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.” In a world of algorithmic feeds, that distinction is not erased by censorship but dissolved by noise.

Political and Social Chaos

Politically the world now runs on feedback effects. Hypersensitive, recursive, and volatile. An advert, a rumour, or a tweet can trigger global convulsions, but so too can a trending narrative. The algorithms that once promised stability now feed geopolitical turbulence.

Across continents, right-wing and nationalist movements surge, each fuelled by algorithmic reinforcement loops that reward outrage, fear, and identity affirmation. The more a post provokes, the more it circulates, the more it circulates, the more it shapes the political landscape. Each nation becomes an echo chamber of its own anxieties. Militarisation follows naturally from this feedback. When fear and polarity are the engines of engagement, governments learn to mimic the same logic, escalation as signal, not solution.

Socially, the feedback loop exerts a subtler, deeper pull. With 93% of humanity now using social media, participation itself becomes a kind of civic obligation. To be offline is to be socially invisible. Yet even those who abstain are caught in the algorithmic wake, living in cultures whose moods and narratives are set by the digital tide. The social atmosphere is now ambiently online and shaped by trends, rhythms, and moral panics that spill far beyond the screen.

Paradoxically, conformity and rebellion share the same circuitry. The demand to signal, to perform, to belong. The emergent chaotic collective consciousness generates a psychic exhaustion Nietzsche would have recognised. When order becomes suffocating, when reason and data bleach life of its Dionysian pulse, the human spirit revolts in search of meaning. “We have art,” he wrote, “in order not to die of the truth.” Today, we have algorithms of Apollonian order to shield us from the anxiety of uncertainty, yet beneath the shallow and shiny our anxiety grows, louder, faster, and more chaotic than before.

The Algorithmic Psyche

The algorithm does not need to coerce, it only needs to mirror our patterns until we mistake recognition for truth. They learn what we fear, love, and hate, then return it to us at higher volume.

This is not coercion but instrumentarian power, the persuasion of behaviour without awareness. It does not tell us what to think, but it shapes what we notice, which in turn shapes what we think about. We are not forced, we are nudged, until our worldview feels self-generated.

Economically, this logic is brilliant, attention is harvested, quantified, and sold. Psychologically, it is ruinous, attention is also the medium of meaning. By quantifying and selling it, we reduce consciousness to market logic, attention is monetised, and chaos externalised.

The Moral Error

When misinformation spreads, societies look for culprits, scapegoats. We blame the believer, the angry commenter, the “irrational” crowd. We blame tripartite personalities. We tighten laws on hate speech or misinformation, hoping to cure pathology by punishing expression.

But this moral framing mistakes effect for cause.

It is not primarily that humans are becoming irrational, it is that the environment of thought has been rendered chaotic. We are holding individuals responsible for behaviour emerging from systemic design. Like blaming fish for swimming erratically in polluted water.

Free-speech debates, though vital, target the wrong axiom. The real moral frontier lies not in what people can say, but in what digital architectures make salient. The algorithms are free to manipulate, while humans are punished for responding to manipulation.

Are we to change humans to suit technology, or should we not be creating technology to better suit humans, and the rest of nature?

Reclaiming the Narrative

Charles Taylor reminds us that meaning arises only when we locate ourselves within a story. The story we now inhabit is written by feedback loops. It has no author, only optimisation parameters. Its “moral space” is engagement; its “good” is retention.

The remedy is not to renounce technology but to re-humanise its narrative to restore ambiguity and moral depth to our digital architectures. This begins with recognising attention as a commons, not a commodity.

Policing algorithms, not criminalising individuals, is the ethical pivot required. Cognitive order cannot emerge from systems that profit from disorder. As long as chaos remains economically valuable, meaning will remain scarce.

A New Balance

Chaos theory taught us that order and disorder are not opposites but partners in creation. Life itself depends on the delicate interplay between stability and turbulence. So does society.

Our challenge now is not to eliminate chaos but to situate it. To build systems that respect the limits of human cognition and the rest of nature. To do otherwise is to mistake control for understanding, and order for wisdom.

“One must still have chaos in oneself to give birth to a dancing star.” (Nietzsche)

Across history, burgeoning authoritarian regimes have leaned on myths of strength, virility, militancy, and conquest to call for and justify violence against perceived “others.” At the heart of these myths is the warrior archetype, a figure who embodies masculine power, discipline, and loyalty to the tribe. On the surface, such figures seem to stand for courage and order. In practice, they are often reanimated by political movements as tools of oppression.

Warrior as Weapon

Authoritarian leaders understand the emotional pull of archetypes. The warrior appeals not just to nostalgia for simpler or greater times, but to something visceral- the desire for protection, order, and identity. By placing the warrior at the centre of a political identity, regimes re-cast violence not as brutality, but as duty.

Nazi Germany wrapped its ideology around the image of the Aryan soldier and Teutonic knights, disciplined, pure, and destined to fight “degeneracy.”

Fascist Italy looked back to Roman legions, using the warrior to mythologize conquest and silence dissent.

Militarist Japan exalted the samurai code, channeling it into fanatic obedience and imperial expansion. Compelling citizens to become kamikazes.

Francoist Spain’s propaganda leaned heavily into the Reconquistas and crusader knights.

The Great Generation of WW2, used as a recruitment tool convinceing young Americans to go to war in Vietnam. And of course the KKK recruitnment film Birth of a Nation had “Noble” knights on horseback lynching black people.

The Viking Rus and WW2 Soviet hero myths are being used in Ukraine now.

The pattern is clear, the warrior archetype, once symbolic of defense and sacrifice, becomes re-scripted as a justification for conquest, exclusion, and authoritarian control.

Today’s Warriors in the West

Across the Western world, far-right movements are reviving the warrior myth. They may not always use swords and uniforms, but the underlying narrative is the same:

“Strongmen” politicians brand themselves as lone warriors fighting corrupt elites, feminists, migrants, or global conspiracies.

Militant street movements in the U.S. and Europe (from Proud Boys to Identitarian groups) dress up in tactical gear, framing their aggression as defense of nation and tradition.

Online spaces drip with hypermasculine aesthetics, Viking runes, Spartan helmets, medieval crusader imagery, all casting violence as righteous, and even necessary.

This modern warrior myth appeals to men who feel dislocated by globalization, diversity, and gender equality. The promise is simple, reclaim power by embodying the warrior and striking at those deemed outsiders.

Ireland is not Immune

Here in Ireland, the same trend has begun to seep into our political culture.

Anti-immigrant demonstrations often frame themselves as “defense of the homeland.” Protesters chant about sovereignty while adopting combative language and symbols created to represent unity despite difference, now used to represent exclusion.

Online Irish far-right influencers draw on Gaelic warrior myths, Cú Chulainn, the Fianna, and revolutionary heroes from our colonial history, but they wist them into exclusionary slogans, as though Irish identity must be sharpened into a weapon against migrants, LGBTQ+ communities, and women’s rights.

This is a distortion. Historically, Irish warrior stories were bound to resistance against colonization and empire. Now they are repurposed to attack vulnerable groups who pose no imperial threat.

The irony is stark, a people once oppressed by empire risks resurrecting the same authoritarian archetypes that justified their oppression.

The Danger of Archetypal Politics

The warrior archetype is powerful because it bypasses rational debate and plugs straight into the emotions of fear, anger, and pride. When activated by authoritarian movements, it normalizes violence, strips compassion, and paints fellow human beings as enemies to be destroyed.

But there is nothing inevitable about this. Archetypes can be reshaped. Ireland has its warrior myths, yes, but it also has traditions of hospitality, rebellion against tyranny, and solidarity with the oppressed. These too can be resurrected.

Final Thought

The return of the warrior in today’s politics is not about defence or dignity, it’s about control and exclusion. When right-wing movements across the West (and here in Ireland) drape themselves in warrior myths, they are not protecting their people, they are preparing the ground for violence against those who are different.

Recognizing this dynamic is the first step in resisting it. The second is resurrecting other archetypes, the bard, the healer, the peacemaker, the rebel who fights not to dominate but to liberate.

The battle we face is not against mythical enemies, but against the seductive lies of authoritarianism itself. Beware the doublespeak.

“Those who separate their warriors from their scholars, will have their fighting done by fools and their thinking done by coward's”

I often wonder, if we swapped out the top 1% with any other slice of society, say the 37th percentile, would things really change? Picture a Trading Places-style scenario where the super-rich are replaced overnight with a cohort of Eddie Murphys from the 1980s. Would the system suddenly become fair and virtuous? Or is our problem not a personnel issue at all? It’s worth asking the question of ourselves, What if I was one of those Eddie Murphy’s? Would I be able to resist the temptations and pressures of power? Me? Absolutely not. You?

My hunch, backed by history and social science, is that little would change. The top tends to act in similar ways but in different degrees, because the incentives and the guard-railing institutions (or lack of them) are what largely shape economic behaviour. Think of the fiduciary duty to maximize shareholder value. It seems the system itself does most of the selecting. Neoliberal Capitalism is a competitive optimization narrative, it rewards those who are most effective at maximizing profit, growth, and efficiency. While it punishes those who hesitate due to moral haste. Over time, this narrative elevates the people most willing to play by its rules, even when those rules demand ruthlessness. The individuals rise because they embody the system’s striving, not because they’re uniquely capable of virtuous leadership, but because they’re the most useful vessels for the systems logic. Trump did not chose the system, the system chose Trump to represent it’s interests.

Concentrated wealth, concentrated power

Global wealth today is mind-bogglingly concentrated. The top 10% own about 76% of all wealth worldwide, the bottom 50% hold a mere 2% of global wealth. And the top 1% alone captured nearly 40% of all wealth growth since 1995 (World Inequality Report 2022). These aren’t just numbers, they’re a structural fact about the way our economies work.

And yet, every time a government proposes taxing that concentration of wealth, there’s the same dilemma, in the age of free capital flows, the wealthy can simply move their assets, and themselves, somewhere more comfortable and fiscally hospitable. If a country raises taxes on millionaires and billionaires, they hop on a Lear jet to a friendlier regime. In the simplest terms, it’s the same survival reflex that guides a single-cell organism. The move away from harm, towards comfort. We should not expect any different from individuals who have won at capitalism. The gospel of neoliberalism, greed is good and winning proves it, almost guarantees that the “winners” will be predisposed to self-serving behaviour.

This mobility of capital makes serious redistribution incredibly difficult. Without cross-border rules or global coordination, any single country that tries to act gets punished. The wealth doesn’t disappear, it simply relocates to retain and continue its concentration.

Does wealth equal virtue?

Part of the reason inequality feels so corrosive is because we half-expect the wealthy to be morally well-compassed. We are conditioned, in a Weberian sense, to see material success as a proxy for virtue. After all, the Uber wealthy are the best educated, the most privileged, with the most time to reflect. They have the private yoga classes, therapists, nutritionists, the wellness retreats. Surely all that available mindfulness and moral philosophy should produce gentler, kinder leaders? .

Not really. Research shows wealth does not reliably increase morality or empathy. Some studies link higher class status to lower compassion and more self-focused behavior (Piff et al., 2010). Others (Van Lange et al, 2025), note that wealthier people donate more in absolute terms, often because they have more to give, but not necessarily a higher share of their resources. It does not show that the wealthy have more empathy, just more ability to act in seemingly altruistic and socially desirable ways. A recent review in The Times (2025) finds evidence that wealth equates to virtue is mixed at best. The humble brag of a philanthropist who donates millions to projects they care about, is only possible because of tax breaks on charitable contributions which basically reroute funding from projects we all deem worthy through democratic processes. So who gets to decide?

That’s another problem baked into neoliberalism itself, selection effects. Markets are competitive optimization systems. That means the players who rise to the top aren’t necessarily the most moral, but often the most ruthless, aggressive, or single-minded. Success requires squeezing margins, crushing competitors, and prioritizing profit over everything else. Over time, this dynamic selects for leaders willing to externalize costs. The system demands it. Though they may be very nice people doing it, smiling, dressed nice, very appropriate in society, even church going family people. The same dynamic explains why tech platforms optimize for engagement even when it fuels polarization or misinformation. The system rewards growth, not virtue. In other words, Neoliberalism has a bias toward elevating the people, and firms, most willing to sacrifice long-term social health for short-term wins.

Comfort may make people more agreeable, more “appropriate,” better dressed, better spoken. But that’s not the same as being just. Sometimes the kindest person is the angry one, the one willing to shout, protest, or disrupt. Appropriateness in exclusivity is passivity. One becomes merely a vessel that culture passes through, . The happy and cheerful well-groomed elite head from their nutritionist appointment to a café to debate whether kombucha aligns their chakras. Meanwhile, the binman with the bad back is still lifting trash into a roaring truck for his tenth hour on shift before he arrives home sore and grumpy. If only he had the time to protest, but then the system selects against that. Free time and resources are largely for the compliant and complicit.

Institutions

Although when weakened these too can be misused for the benefit of a few, but strong institutions are the only thing that keep wealth and power in check. They provide the guardrails that channel self-interest into something compatible with the public good. when the institutions are under attack and being wrapped in conspiracy theories so they can be bashed and broken, ask yourself who’s way were they in? Who’s power were they restraining? Because that who wins when they fall. When institutions like the free press fall, the reins are are off power.

We have plenty of evidence for this. Randomized audits in Brazil cut corruption and allowed voters to punish corrupt officials at the ballot box (Ferraz & Finan, 2008). Press freedom is consistently linked to lower corruption levels worldwide, particularly when paired with other strong institutions capable of implementing rule of law etc (Mahmood, 2025). These aren’t flukes; they’re signals that when rules and oversight are strong, behavior changes. We don’t need soldiers on streets, we need stronger institutions, and stronger rules in the halls of power, where what is criminal or legal is determined.

Political scientists have been pointing this out for a century. The Iron Law of Oligarchy would agree that simply swapping the top 1% for the 37th percentile won’t magically fix things. Unless institutions actively counter it, power naturally concentrates, and those at the top adapt to preserve their position, regardless of their background. Selectorate theory argues leaders do what keeps them in power given the rules of the system. In both cases, change the rules, change the outcomes. Swap the people without improving the structures, and the cycle repeats eventually.

Why global institutions matter

This logic applies not only within nations but across them. If capital moves globally, then only global institutions can constrain it. And yet the very institutions we need, multinational tax agreements, international regulators, cooperative governance bodies, are among the weakest, and the most under attack.

For years, these institutions have been under attack. Some of that criticism is fair, many are imperfect, bureaucratic, and slow. But much of the assault has come wrapped in conspiracy theories, amplified online, painting institutions as corrupt puppet-masters rather than underpowered referees.

Nationalist movements often claim to be defending “culture” or “sovereignty,” but functionally they weaken the very lnstitutions that have provided the political stability for sovereignty and culture to flourish. People of different cultures, languages, religions and political leanings working towards a shared future, towards a unity despite difference. Without those shared structures, democracies splinter, and their divisions become easy prey for stronger, more authoritarian regimes. Unity has historically been our strength. Without it, our vulnerabilities glow like a heat signature to circling predators.

Adam Smith may not have been wrong, but how we’ve bastardised his humanist capitalism certainly is. Smith never argued for unrestrained greed or the worship of profit and efficiency above all else. In The Wealth of Nations he wrote about markets, yes, but in The Theory of Moral Sentiments he also insisted that sympathy, fairness, and social duty were inseparable from economic life. What passes as “capitalism” today has amputated that humanist half of his philosophy, leaving only the invisible hand. Which, untethered from morality, ushers people towards a deviant individualism.

Instead of a system that balances self-interest with the common good, we’ve built one where shareholder value trumps everything else including the rest of Nature, communities, even democracy itself. Oil companies that knew about climate change in the 1970s chose profit over truth. Tobacco companies buried evidence of cancer risks for decades. Tech platforms right now optimize for engagement even when it polarizes societies, spreads disinformation and has detrimental mental health impacts on its users, particularly on young developing minds (Haidt et al). None of this would have surprised Smith, who warned that unchecked merchants and manufacturers would conspire against the public if not constrained by strong institutions.

In other words, the problem isn’t that Smith gave us bad ideas, it’s that we cherry-pick the parts convenient for capital and quietly discard the parts which demand moral responsibility.

The Real Switcheroo

So, back to our thought experiment. Would swapping the 1% for the 37th percentile fix things? Probably not. The new elite would be fallible humans too, facing the same incentives, the same temptations, the same opportunities for capture. We might even act the same way if we are honest.

The switcheroo that matters isn’t about who has power, its about how the structures are designed to restrain and direct that power towards good regardless of who is driving. It’s about how strong the rules are around them. Do institutions channel self-interest into broad benefit, or do they allow it to metastasize into corruption and capture? That’s the real lever of change, and that lever needs moving.

The hopeful side of this argument is that it doesn’t depend on having saints as leaders. Surely one thing we can all agree on is that there are no perfect people of moral purity who can resist the implicit and explicit forces our highly sophisticated system pushes on them. What we need to change is within the system, and the goals it’s optimising for.

The power to make crucial decisions about the future of humanity cannot be left in the hands of a tiny elite, in the vain hope that their wealth or entrepreneurial success somehow qualify them to make virtuous choices. Take AI, for example. Deregulating it and letting Silicon Valley “have at it” seems wildly naïve given everything we’ve discussed here. If anything, we need massive, global cooperation and oversight of AI. Keep the narrow systems fully functioning, but all research into general intelligence must be ring-fenced, monitored, and governed collectively. We are creating an entity smarter than ourselves, but without any real governance or ringfencing. At the very least regulating for Isaac Asimov’s 3(4) rules of robotics or any required foundational framework would be a good start.

In conclusion, Trading Places made it funny, but the reality is tragic. We don’t need a new messiah, or a different set of elites to worship. We need rules that snap at the face of greed, strong institutions that hold the line, and systems that refuse to let self-interest metastasize into massive concentrations of wealth. Because us fallible humans will do dumb stuff, like race to space or live on Mars while burning everything else. We’ve been doing it for a while now. The real switcheroo isn’t swapping one percentile or personality for another, it’s switching our attention from the personality contest of modern politics, to the rules and systems that most influence our every day lives. This is hard in a time of persuasive technologies that hunt our attention from all sides, but that’s for another post here.

The irony is not lost.

P.S. Note to self - I earn an average wage in the west of Ireland which puts me in the 1% Globally. I sometimes drink in a café, kombucha on occasion, and I also Yoga’d once.. the fuckin chakras, oh shit.. Hold on a minute.. I’m one of them …. delete…delete…delete…