Science Fiction

AI is a mass psychotic delusion

In April of 1856, a teenage girl named Nongqawuse stood by the banks of the Gxarha River in South Africa and received a message from the dead. ​She told her uncle that she had spoken with the spirits of their ancestors. The spirits delivered a prophecy, one that offered a total and miraculous salvation for the Xhosa people, who were then buckling under the encroaching weight of the British Empire. The ancestors promised to rise up, drive the British into the sea, and usher in an era of unimaginable utopian abundance. Flocks of beautiful, immortal cattle would emerge from the earth. The fields would spontaneously yield grain. Sickness and old age would be eradicated. ​But, as with all divine contracts, there was a catch. To trigger this utopia, the spirits demanded an act of supreme faith. The Xhosa had to slaughter all of their existing cattle. They had to burn their crops. They had to destroy their stores of grain and empty their water reserves. They had to liquidate their entire present economy to prove they were worthy of the future. ​And so, they did. ​Historians estimate that the Xhosa slaughtered over 400,000 cattle. They burned their own fields to ash. They waited for the sun to turn red and the ancestors to arrive. But the sun remained yellow. The ancestors did not rise. The utopia did not materialize. Instead, the resulting famine killed tens of thousands of people and shattered the Xhosa civilization. ​It stands today as one of history’s most devastating examples of mass psychotic delusion, a society so thoroughly captured by a spiritual mythos that it happily engineered its own starvation. Watch the full video essay as a member SubscribeSubmitting form Log in ​Or watch on YouTube Welcome to 2026 and the era of the Artificial Intelligence IPO. The American people and the broader West feel they are in decline. The people are poorer, their portfolios and 401ks are at risk. The precious oil is scarcer and more expensive. The newly powerful Chinese threaten American global hegemony. But the billionaires and venture capitalists of Silicon Valley have an answer. They will summon the machine god AGI, and it will provide the productivity boost needed to achieve abundance. Robot workers will clean our offices, and LLMs will fill in the spreadsheets. The capitalist promise of a post-scarcity economy will be made real….for those who invest early. Because there is a cost. To achieve AGI we must burn all of the remaining fossil fuels so that the AGI god will gift us the power of fusion energy. We must pump our water into the gaping maw of the AGI god who will show us how to mine ice asteroids in return. We must invest all of our capital into data centre construction so the super-intelligence can awaken. The future science fiction promised us is there for the taking! Think of this as an intelligence test for humanity. A test we are failing spectacularly. To understand the current financial mania, we must first look at the altar where the sacrifices are currently being made. On June 12, 2026, SpaceX debuted on the Nasdaq under the ticker SPCX. It was the largest initial public offering in the history of human commerce, raising $75 billion and immediately cementing a valuation of $1.77 trillion. By the end of the day, the stock surged, pushing the market cap over $2 trillion and crowning Elon Musk as the world’s first trillionaire. Let me reassure everyone that you were not the only person who had to google whether a trillion was actually a real number. A valuation arrived at on the basis of some recycled tropes from 1980s scifi novels. A small fraction of SpaceX valuation was based on rocket launches and satellite communications. The rest was a speculative fiction of asteroid mining and Musk’s “vision” of making humanity multi-planetary and “extending the light of human consciousness to the stars”. Elon likes to wear a Foundation tshirt, and has clearly read too much Isaac Asimov. Or not enough. Oh and a third rate AI model currently burning billions. Talking to the believers sucked in by the Musk mythos reveals over and again the same circular illogic. Humanity is doomed to extinction if it stays on one planet so…instead of learning to live on our planet…we must pay Elon for the scifi fantasy he is selling us. Like a forty a day smoker buying a snake oil cure for cancer instead of giving up. ​Meanwhile, the architects of Artificial Intelligence are preparing their own ascensions. OpenAI, currently valued north of $800 billion, and Anthropic, the creators of Claude, have both filed their S-1 forms, preparing to unleash their own historic IPOs later this year. Valuations that could not exist if investors had not been pumped full of sci-fi summer blockbusters starring murderous machine gods. Claude and ChatGPT are worth …squillons…because they are summoning that machine god AGI, and it will destroy the jobs of most humans. But those who sacrifice their capital today will be given greater capital tomorrow. The tech priesthood has issued an ultimatum to the people: Sacrifice to the future, or be left behind in the dirt. It’s important to understand that the AGI doomers are the ones truly powering the hype-cycle. When Elizier Yudkowsky warns that If Anyone Builds It Everyone Dies he is massively boosting the excitement to build it. The ancient gods and ancestors have never been loving or kind; they are vindictive, volatile, and terrifyingly arbitrary. Because terror is not a marketing failure, it is the ultimate mechanism of authority. To believe the AGI god can save us, we must believe it has the power to destroy us. But what the AI doomers are asking us to fear is…ourselves. Because Artificial Intelligence is not AI. It is CI…Collective Intelligence. But…we’ll come back to that. The doomers and the boosters, the haters and the investors all repeat the same thing about AI. “It’s like something out of sci-fi.” But they all miss what this means. AI isn’t just *like* something from scifi. It only exists as an idea at all because of the mythos of scifi. Being like scifi is the only justification for throwing quadrillions of dollars at companies that are incinerating cash at an unprecedented rate to build windowless data centers and starships to irradiated rocks. ​We are evaluating these companies not on rational metrics of earthly utility, profitability, or physical limitations. We are pricing them based on their proximity to a fictional narrative. ​This is the Xhosa delusion dressed up in the sleek, minimalist aesthetics of Silicon Valley. We are witnessing a mass psychotic break where the firewall between objective reality and speculative fiction has entirely collapsed. A Brief Interlude… And when our agricultural sectors inevitably collapse because all municipal water has been legally re-routed to cool the new server farms, how exactly do you plan to sustain your biological form? ​Which brings us to today’s sponsor: GRUEL. ​GRUEL is a nutritionally complete, shelf-stable synthetic sludge designed specifically for the modern algorithmic serf. As traditional farming becomes a luxury of the pre-AI past, GRUEL provides the baseline macro-nutrients required to keep your brain functioning just long enough to continue training the models. It requires absolutely no water to prepare – which is convenient, given the state of the local reservoirs – and features a flavor profile that tastes absolutely nothing like the ashes of humanity. GRUEL’s official slogan says it all: “It’s not made of humans. Honest.” ​Go to the link in the description below, use the promo code SACRIFICE, and get 10% off your first bulk crate of survival paste. GRUEL : Eat the ashes. How does an entire civilization lose its grip on reality? It doesn’t happen overnight. It requires a slow, methodical rewriting of the cultural operating system. ​For millennia, humanity’s mythos was governed by conscious creators. We believed in gods, spirits, and ancestors who sat above the world, pulling the strings. But during the 20th century, as industrialization alienated us from nature and the atom bomb proved we could harness the power of stars, we needed a new mythology. Science fiction writers – Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Robert A Heinlein – inadvertently authored a zero-day exploit that hacked the American psyche. ​They replaced the mythos of the Divine with the mythos of the Machine. With the 1960s and the Space Race it seemed as though the mythos of scifi was coming true. We could build machines that would take us to the stars and to our rightful future. But then the fantasy died, not because we didn’t invest enough capital, but because it had always been a fantasy. Then the development of the computer and the internet created a new fantasy. Writers like William Gibson imagined virtual worlds within the machine. If the machines could not take us to space, they could take us into cyberspace. And if the Gods of antiquity were dead, the machines could give us new gods. If humans no longer believed we had a soul, we could believe instead we had a code. The code of human intelligence that runs on the wetware of the brain could run instead on the hardware of the computer. And the fantasy of Artificial Intelligence was born. The contemporary obsession with Large Language Models is the most intimate manifestation of this psychosis. The Silicon Priesthood have spun these algorithms as the spark of an Artificial General Intelligence. But expecting an LLM to spontaneously generate AGI is like expecting Wikipedia to suddenly achieve sentience. An LLM is not a reasoning engine; it is a probabilistic text generator doing next-token prediction. It is a highly compressed algorithmic map—a high-dimensional latent space built by grinding billions of pages of dead text, human manifestos, and forgotten novels into a statistical paste. Believing ChatGPT is talking to you is no less ridiculous than believing any book is talking to you. Which was a commonplace delusion in antiquity when the illiterate were taught to read. This intimate psychotic break is not a novel side-effect of modern technology; it is a fundamental flaw in human psychology that was discovered sixty years ago. In 1966, an MIT computer scientist named Joseph Weizenbaum created ELIZA, the world’s first chatbot. He programmed it with a rudimentary script called DOCTOR, designed to mimic a Rogerian psychotherapist by simply rearranging the user’s own sentences into open-ended questions. It was a cheap, transparent parlor trick of basic string manipulation. Yet, Weizenbaum watched in absolute horror as his secretary, his students, and highly educated academics immediately began pouring their deepest, darkest personal secrets into the terminal. When Weizenbaum explained exactly how the primitive code worked, his users didn’t care; his own secretary famously demanded he leave the room so she could have a private, intimate conversation with the machine. Weizenbaum realized a terrifying truth that the silicon priesthood has successfully monetized today: the human mind is so profoundly desperate for a cosmic companion, and so deeply vulnerable to anthropomorphism, that it will eagerly grant a soul to a handful of if/then statements. This is the ultimate sleight of hand of the Silicon Priesthood: there is actually nothing artificial about Artificial Intelligence. The machine did not generate a new, alien consciousness from the ether; it simply harvested ours. Every poem, every theorem, and every forgotten blog post has been scraped, flattened, and ground into a probabilistic paste. We are bowing down in terror to a mirror—tricked into worshiping our own reflections. LLMs are not alien Artificial Intelligence. They are human Collective Intelligence. And they belong to humanity collectively. Which is why I use CI, for the folks typing that comment. ​But because our minds have been cyber-primed by decades of sci-fi cinema, we do not see in ChatGPT the human collective intelligence talking. We hallucinate HAL 9000. We hallucinate Samantha from Her. When we type a prompt into this digital archive and it responds with the polite, slightly detached tone of an android, the trap snaps shut. We mistake the statistical average of our own libraries for a brilliant, alien intelligence. ​We whisper into the void, the void regurgitates our own blog posts, and we fall to our knees in worship. We have replaced the gods with a chatbot, completely convinced that if we just give it enough electricity, it will solve climate change, cure cancer, and absolve us of our moral failures. If the Chat AI on your laptop is the intimate delusion, the gigawatt data center in the desert is the macro-psychosis. ​To the modern, secular mind, ancient animal sacrifice looks like chaotic, barbaric theater. But the ancient polytheistic worldview was profoundly pragmatic. In Rome, the relationship between humans and the divine was governed by a strict legal contract: Do ut des. I give, so that you may give. ​The gods were like Mafiosi, who demanded their portion of smoke and fat as sacrifices to sustain their power. If a society neglected its sacrifices, the gods would grow angry and throw the cosmic order into chaos. Furthermore, to slaughter an animal, which was the ultimate measure of wealth in antiquity, was to literally burn your capital. When an emperor sponsored a hecatomb, the ritual slaughter of a hundred oxen, he was engaging in extreme conspicuous consumption. He was proving his dominance by showing how much of his civilization’s wealth he could afford to set on fire. The modern logic of building AI data centers operates on the exact same pagan framework. ​The tech oligarchs are pouring hundreds of billions of dollars into NVIDIA GPUs, cooling systems, and dedicated power grids. Why? Because of the “Scaling Laws”, the theory that these models only become more intelligent by being fed exponentially larger diets of data and electricity. But what needs to be scaled isn’t the processing power. It’s the human collective that is the source of intelligence. ​The gods of silicon are ravenous. The tech priests believe that if they just sacrifice enough power, land, and capital, the Machine will grant them the ultimate reward of Artificial General Intelligence. If the model simply outputs a slightly better autocomplete, or hallucinates an absurd answer, the engineer does not conclude that matrix multiplication cannot spontaneously generate consciousness. The psychotic logic dictates that the sacrifice simply wasn’t big enough. We need more compute. We need more gigawatts. We need to build a nuclear reactor to power the server farm. ​This is the Sunk-Cost Psychosis. ​When a sovereign wealth fund or a venture capital firm backs an AI IPO, they are participating in a modern hecatomb. Hoarding hundreds of thousands of cutting-edge GPUs is a performance of dominance aimed squarely at rival factions. It is the ultimate geopolitical flex: Look at the sheer scale of the resources I can afford to incinerate in the desert. Bow before my capacity to bear the cost of the future. ​And just like the SpaceX IPO, where $75 billion was materialized to fund the sci-fi dream of terraforming Mars, these financial maneuvers are active disassociations from reality. We are bankrupting the infrastructure of the planet we actually live on to appease a hallucination of the future. We cling to the comforting delusion that the men leading this charge are rational actors, objective engineers and benevolent visionaries dutifully pushing the boundaries of applied science. They are nothing of the sort. The modern AI CEO is a psychotic pagan wearing a Patagonia fleece. Their pursuit of an artificial god is not a technological endeavor, but a strictly imperial one. Driven by an insatiable, Caesarian ambition, they are perfectly willing to sacrifice the literal lifeblood of our civilization, our energy grids, our water tables, our capital, on the altar of their own greatness. They demand these modern hecatombs not because they possess a rational, empirical blueprint for human flourishing, but because in the twisted logic of the silicon priesthood, whoever summons and controls the Oracle controls the empire. They are happily burning the present world to ashes, entirely convinced that they alone are destined to rule the smoke. When we read about the Xhosa, we feel a patronizing pity. We diagnose their absolute faith in ancestral spirits as a tragic, primitive superstition. Yet, we are entirely blind to the superstition of our own era: the dogma of the Machine Universe. Silicon Valley operates on the fundamental, unquestioned belief that the cosmos is merely a highly complex, computable mechanism, that human consciousness is just a byproduct of scale, and that if we simply stack enough processors in a warehouse in Utah, a digital messiah will spontaneously emerge. But this mechanistic worldview is fundamentally false. It is a reductive, brutally limited framework masquerading as objective science. In a few centuries, historians will look back at our gigawatt data centers with the exact same anthropological pity we reserve for ancient altars. The best sociological analysis suggests that sacrifice “worked” because it brought people together and focussed them on communal problems, creating solutions. It had nothing to go with gods, just humanity. Emile Durkheim in his 1912 work The Foundational Forms of Religious Life called this “collective effervescence”. Sacrifice literally activated human collective intelligence. LLMs aren’t AGI, they are us, they “work” because billions of us already solved these problems. They are a way to access and activate our human collective intelligence. The way to make better AGI isn’t to burn silicon wafers in a desert. It’s to understand that we, humanity, are the source of intelligence. And to fully educate and value every human on this planet to contribute to our collective intelligence. The future will see our frantic hoarding of microchips not as an era of high technology, but as a deeply embarrassing, primitive superstition. A time when desperate men set the earth on fire, trying to coax a soul out of a spreadsheet. A mass psychosis is not merely a widespread error in judgment. It is a closed-loop system of magical thinking. When empirical reality contradicts the belief, the psychotic society does not abandon the premise; it simply escalates the ritual. ​This is the escalation trap of 2026. The firewall has burned away. We have billionaires spending their fortunes to build escape pods to barren planets, researchers ritually attempting to align digital gods they themselves are writing into existence, and financial markets valuing speculative fiction over terrestrial survival. All because of a psychotic belief in the myth of the Machine Universe. ​The tragedy of the Xhosa cattle killings was not just the absurdity of the prophecy; it was the absolute, horrific finality of the cost. Once the cattle were slaughtered and the grain was burned, no amount of realization could undo the famine. And the British who the Xhosa sacrificed to destroy? Simply watched the mass psychosis unfold, the people starve, then took over the land without a fight. Do nothing, win. As the Chinese have been saying a lot recently. ​We are currently standing by the river, listening to the tech prophets tell us what the spirits of the Machine require. We are being asked to sacrifice our energy grids, our water, our capital, and our grasp on objective reality to summon a utopia that exists only in the paperback novels of the 1980s. ​A civilization that burns its present sustenance to summon a mythical savior does not inherit the future. It simply starves. Listen to the podcast audio

Backrooms is avant-garde art for normies

It’s 1990. This morning I found an open door in the shopping centre of the dull commuter town I live in. Beyond the door are a series of large empty rooms, poorly lit, with large boxes. Backrooms. I phoned my friend Matthew Woods. Woodsy. He pedaled over his BMX and together we’re going to explore the rooms. I’ve made it to the third room but Woodsy has disappeared. Now I’m hiding behind the boxes as footsteps approach. What are these rooms? Where do they lead? Who is coming for me? Woodsy’s pudgy face appears over the box, and his annoying older brother Rick who works in Dixons the electronic store. They’re laughing. “Damo you twat” Rick roars “you’re in the backroom of Dixons”. Because there are no liminal spaces. Only backrooms. Become a member to watch the full video essay SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Mainstream cinema is choking on its own product. Every movie is a perfect 3-act structure, complete with Inciting Incident, Rising Action, Crisis, Climax and Resolution. Every hero has a meaningful journey that will hit at least nine of Joseph Campbell’s seventeen stages. Every location up to and including alien worlds and Heaven above is an exercise in logical worldbuilding realised as a CGI model in a supercomputer. Everything is a reboot, a prequel, a mashup and an exercise in fan service. And now even the most normie of normie audiences are sick of the product. When along comes a movie that hurls The Writer’s Journey in the bin and treats narrative structure like dated fashion trend its refusing to wear. A movie that follows characters who have no desires to drive them, whose only arcs are traced through non-euclidean liminal spaces. And a movie whose one notable location is the kind of storage room found behind most large shops. The Backrooms, directed by 20 year old Kane Parsons, extending his super successful webseries, itself inspired by the “creepypasta” backrooms meme. A movie that … well … is basically a mid 1990s video art installation straight out of MoMA or Tate Modern. But now in a multiplex near year. Because Backrooms is avant-garde art for normies. Hey guys. Just taking a moment to share a personal confession, that I like many of you often struggle to get a good night’s sleep… …because of the crushing weight of living in capitalist realism. Until I found the solution…and no it’s not one of those “sleep trackers” that induces the exact cycle of low grade anxiety guaranteed to shatter your rest. Introducing the NoClip mattress from BackroomBeds. Their patented Liminalweave technology allows one half your body to rest in the dreary reality of having to get up at 7:30am for another day in the office, while the other half clips off on an adventure in non-euclidean spacetime. You won’t feel any better rested but you will at least feel some hope that there is anything, anywhere beyond another trip to the shopping mall. Get your NoClip mattress from BackroomBeds by walking through the wall of any good basement near you. Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle is basically Clive Barker’s Hellraiser but made for art galleries. Around the mid 90s digital video cameras and projectors began to allow gallery artists, working with tiny budgets, to create visual art using video. Video installation art went back to at least the 1960s, when the Sony Portapak became the first consumer grade video camera. Artists like Nam June Paik created installations using bulky CRT screens, often stacked and arranged into sculptural forms. But digital projectors allowed installation and cinema to merge. Artists like Stan Douglas and Doug Aitken created vast, multi-screen installations of cinema grade imagery. Of works that were non-narrative, instead documenting fragments of real lives and locations, or creating fantastical worlds shown only in brief glimpses. Works that were, for lack of a better term, avant-garde. Avant-garde art is a term almost guaranteed to set most people’s teeth on edge. It’s one of those poncy French words used by English speakers to sound intellectual. Without diving into the full etymology the avant-garde are the forward guard or vanguard. Avant-garde art then is like the cutting edge of art. And, crucially, avant-garde art is doing, ahead of schedule, what mainstream art will be doing thirty years later. So it’s not at all surprising that Backrooms in 2026 looks like video installation art of 1996. That’s exactly what avant-garde theory would predict. Backroom’s excellent soundtrack is less avant-garde than its non-narrative narrative. Ambient and electronica mainstreamed its sound in the 80s and 90s. But when William Basinski pioneered experimental drone music using magnetic tape to tape recordings in the 1970s… …or when John Cage’s 1952 composition 4’33” confronted audiences with 4 minutes 33 seconds of silence… …or when composer Pierre Schaeffer used real world sounds of cars and planes as “instruments” in the 1940s… …these were truly avant-garde art. But today their sound is entirely mainstream in the film soundtracks of Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross or even Hans Zimmer. Once you realise how regularly avant-garde art leaps into the mainstream you realise that it is nothing to fear. It’s kind of crazy to remember that the cinematic jump-cut was considered avant-garde when Jean-Luc Goddard used them in 1960s Breathless. Today the medium of the Tik Tok short wouldn’t exist without them. William S Burrough’s “cut-up” and rearranged pages of text still seems like a cheat to many people, but David Bowie’s song lyrics and every LLM basically do the same. The absurdist humour of the Dada movement, and the confusing, non-narrative performances of their Cabaret Voltaire were utterly dumbfounding to the general public back in 1916. But Monty Python put Dada on our tvs, and today absurdism seems pretty tame compared to Gen-Z shitposting and meme culture. It doesn’t get much more Dada than Pepe the Frog. And the Dadists and 4Channers have more in than dank humour. Because avant-garde art is not just weird art for weird arts sake and shock value. Avant-garde art is fundamentally political. Mainstream art is and always has been there to give comfort. Mainstream culture from Homer’s Iliad to Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan has always reassured us that reality is meaningful. That even war with all its horrors is there to give us the chance to be heroic. But the artists of Dada were living through the mechanised carnage of World War 1. The avant-garde artists who followed saw the worst the 20th century had to throw at us. The concentration camps, the nuclear blasts, the napalm and the AR15. The avant-garde decided that mainstream culture was bullsh*t. Reality wasn’t a 3 act structure with a redemptive character arc. Reality was fucking chaos, random events, meaningless lives and acts of absurdity. And the avant-garde made art that showed that reality. So Backrooms is the avant-garde of 30 years ago finally smuggled into the cinema for normies… …as horror. Backrooms certainly contains a few frights. And it’s perfectly fine to market a movie as horror to bring in the normies. But what Backrooms trades in is less jump scares than profound dis-ease, that will dog you long after you leave the cinema. The true literary forebear of Backrooms is not Stephen King but Jorge Luis Borges, JG Ballard and Thomas Ligotti. The horror of Backrooms is not the supernatural monster but the bland truth that these urinal yellow spaces are much closer to our reality than most “real” locations depicted on the cinema screen. To understand the meaning of Backrooms… …not as a complex made-up LORE… …but as avant-garde art, imagine it projected in a gallery at Tate Modern, with one of those small white cards to explain it to the normies. On that card are written two important words. Liminal is the word most used today to describe Backrooms. And with good reason. But to get to the Liminal we need to go through… …Disenchantment. Ignorance, as they say, is bliss. For most of human history we just didn’t know shit about anything. What’s under the ground? What are those sparkly things over head? What happens after we die? What even are we? So it was very easy to enchant the unknown with the nouminal and the transcendent. To imagine dark fiery hell’s underground, or splendid immortal heavens above. In his 1917 lecture The Vocation of Science the sociologist Max Weber described “the disenchantment of the world”. Already by the early 20th century the power of science and reason had made it impossible to enchant the world with imagination. We could dig into the dirt and look out into the stars. There was nothing transcendent there. There was no nouminal anywhere. Instead, Gen-Z and their Gen-X parents, Millenials and their Boomer mums and dads, all of us alive today, have been born into what Weber called The Iron Cage. With no other places for our imaginations to inhabit, we are trapped in a cage of rationalization and bureaucracy. What little is left of our imagination is commodified and sold back to us as “entertainment” to keep us amused in our Iron Cage. The Hollywood CGI slop machine mindlessly churns out old gods and old myths in new shiny outfits to comfort a humanity that has lost all belief in anything beyond the cage. But then there is the liminal. The state between states. For instance, the messy transition between childhood and adulthood. The place between places. The barren land between city blocks. The strip of grass between motorways. The rooms behind the furniture store. Backrooms. The liminal appears as one of the last spaces where we can place our imagination. Even if the liminal is inhabited by monstrous entities, it’s better than yet more strip malls, housing tracts and office spaces that are our lives in the Iron Cage of the real. Until we realise that even those liminal spaces are just the backroom of Dixons. Normies are the people who don’t even understand they are living in the Iron Cage. But Backrooms is giving them just an edge of a glimpse of that reality. Which has always been the task of the avant-garde. Listen to the podcast audio here

Why do Leftists always lose? A (partial) defense of Contrapoints

Chess is the King of Games. It just is. It’s not Buckaroo. It’s not Kerplunk. You don’t see political strategists huddled in a bunker in the Pentagon trying to model geopolitical implications by extracting a plastic stick from a tube so that the marbles don’t fall. No. They play chess. ​Chess is the King of Games because it is a map. ​If we look at the brief history of chess we see a game that evolved out of chaturanga in 6th century India. It spread to the Persians. Then the Arabs got a hold of it. Then it made its way to Europe, where the Europeans, in their infinite wisdom, decided what the game really needed was a phenomenally powerful, hyper-mobile Queen, presumably because medieval European men desperately needed a strong maternal figure to tell them where to go and who to kill. ​But through all of these iterations, from the dust of India to the pristine digital boards of chess.com, chess has remained fundamentally the same thing. It is a map. A map… of POWER. Become a member to watch the video essay here Members get access to all my videos, essays and posts SubscribeSubmitting form Log in ​Just let that sit there for a minute. A map of power. If you’ve come here for a whimsical romp, you’re in the wrong place. We’re doing structural analysis of power dynamics using board games. We’re doing the coolest scifi novel ever written about gameplayers. And we’re doing a brutally honest look at Why Leftists Always Lose. But first we need to talk about Contrapoints. Buckle-up. Contrapoints: The Online Left’s Token Liberal The Liberal centrist is a dying breed. They stay on their reserves in the mainstream media, CNN, MSNBC, The New York Times. Channels nobody watches. Newspapers nobody reads. Meanwhile the Left, the actual Left, is online. And the online Left is very VERY Left wing. If you’re outraged by Hasan Piker you need to know he is the LEAST Left the online Left gets. And with good reason. Gen Z and the rest of us have been living through the “slow cancellation of the future” named by the much missed Mark Fisher. A future imagined in the 60s and 70s built on widespread redistribution of wealth has been replaced with an 80s cyberpunk future where a tiny oligarchy uses all the money to build the torment nexus. It’s no surprise the most googled subject among unemployed young people is how to build a guillotine. The online Left has formed from ideologies of utopian socialism, Marxism and anti-Imperialist Leninism that were made for such unequal times. And that, to be perfectly blunt, do not have the best track record of success. Which brings us to Natalie Wynn, AKA Contrapoints. The Left’s answer to the shrieking hysterical vitriol of Right wing streamers is…the gentle understated irony of the video essayist. Contrapoints is, or was until more recent entrants like FD Signifier, the biggest YouTube video essayist on the Left. Kind of. In her own words Contrapoints costumed, trans identity videos are “communist coded” attracting a much more Left audience than her actual politics. Wynn describes herself the social democratic end of liberal, but to her detractors she is just plain vanilla liberal. A shitlib, as they say on the Left, that uses such terms for anyone right of Lenin. Which makes Natalie Wynn the online Left’s token liberal, trapped in an endless, agonizing cycle of “audience capture” as her incredibly well-lit, feature-length theatrical video essays are ever more centrist, while the audience goes ever further Left. ​If we summarize the “Contrapoints controversy” – and frankly, pick your era, pick your specific cancellation, it’s a repeating fractal of minor grievances – it usually boils down to Natalie suggesting that perhaps, occasionally, engaging with electoral politics or dealing with the world as it actually exists, rather than how it exists in a 90-page zine about anarcho-syndicalist polycule farming, might be a good idea? For this, she is routinely ritually humiliated. ​But the anger directed at Contrapoints isn’t actually about Contrapoints. It’s about the fundamental, irreconcilable and quite valid animosity the Left holds towards a liberal centre that cannot admit its own part in creating the fascist revival of MAGA and Trump, cannot say the letters g e n o c i d e and Gaza in the same sentence, still believes the answer to everything is to go back to the 90s and still, basically, loves capitalism. Contrapoints carries the can for all liberals, who are still the vast majority of the not so online public. Because she says the things that the majority actually thinks about today’s online Left. That you’re unrealistic. That you just don’t understand the position on the Chess board. If we let you play, you will lose. Because ​liberals, you see, want to win at Chess. Leftists want Chess to fuck off and die. ​How Chess Models Power ​Let’s look at the map. Let’s look at how chess actually models power. It does so through four fundamental concepts. Position, Materiel, Initiative, and Checkmate. ​Position. Where are your pieces? Do you control the center of the board? In warfare position is geography. Do you hold the high ground on the battlefield? But in politics, position is Institutional Capture. Are you in control of the House, Senate and Presidency? Or is your total influence some underfunded NGOs and academic departments in Gender Studies? ​Materiel. How many pieces do you have on the board? Have you got your rooks? Your bishops? Or are you down to a single, traumatized pawn shivering behind a king who has completely lost control of the situation? Materiel in politics is people and capital. How many senators and judges do you have? Who are your billionaire backers? ​Initiative. Who is doing the doing? Are you dictating the pace of the game, forcing your opponent to react to your threats? Or are you constantly on the back foot, defending, scrambling, apologizing? Initiative in politics is the news cycle. It is the narrative. Donald Trump is incompetent and most things, but his political brilliance is in winning the narrative, and holding the initiative. ​Checkmate. The end. The absolute cessation of the opponent’s ability to resist. The realization that there are no legal moves left. In Chess the king is never destroyed. He is trapped. The aim of politics is not to destroy but to entrap your opponents and make them pieces in your in future battles. ​Now, imagine politics in the year 2026 as a massive game of chess. Played on a board of near infinite size, with a vast number of players and pieces that all have their own agendas. Keep that in mind, we’re going to think about a game like that very soon. With a few exceptions, like New York mayor Zoran Mamdani, the Left seems determined to lose at chess, by adopting strategies that cannot win. ​The Right-wing Advantage and the Liberal Game ​Here is the brutal political reality. The Right have a massive, almost insurmountable advantage in this game. Why? Because all they do is play to win. ​The Right don’t care if the knight is supposed to move in an L-shape. If the referee isn’t looking, they will pick up the knight, smash it into the side of your head, and declare a glorious victory for traditional family values. They understand materiel. They understand initiative. They will sacrifice the pawns. My god, will they sacrifice the pawns. They will sacrifice all the pawns in their stupid red hats if it means the King gets a slight tax break. They play the map of power exactly as it is designed to be played and the win. ​Liberals have it much harder. Liberals play to win ethically. ​A liberal sits at the chess board and says, “Well, I could take that bishop, but has the bishop been offered a negotiated settlement? Have we done an environmental impact study on moving this rook to D4? Is it fair that the Queen has so much mobility while the pawns are downwardly mobile professionals? We should probably form a committee.” ​The great triumph of liberalism – the reason we are not all currently living in a Mad Max dystopia paying tithes to a local warlord – is that liberalism triumphed by LIMITING the game. They introduced rules. They introduced HR departments, and human rights tribunals, and the concept of “democracy.” The launched a four hundred year offensive to make the game survivable and they won. ​What a pragmatic liberal like Contrapoints is worried about, deep down beneath the corsets and the neon lighting, is that this hard-won advantage, this delicate, limited game of liberal democracy, will be entirely lost if we succumb to playing “Leftist Chess.” ​Because she knows, as anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes in a left-wing organizing meeting knows, that Leftist Chess is an unremitting fucking disaster. ​How Leftist Factions Play Chess ​If you want to know why Leftists always lose, you just have to watch them play the game. Let us break down the factions. It’s a very rich tapestry of failure. And because I know how chill and open to critique Leftists factions are, I’m sure you’ll all take this with good humour. ​The Utopian Socialists They refuse to start the game. They look at the mass-produced, factory-molded board and declare it a symptom of profound spiritual alienation. They demand the board be remade as a circle, and the squares must be abolished, because alternating black and white squares enforces the brutalist, soul-crushing logic of the industrial loom. They sit there, cross-legged, weaving a new, non-competitive game out of locally sourced hemp, while the Right-wing player silently reaches across the board and takes their King. ​The Orthodox Marxists The Orthodox Marxist sits at the board, folds their arms, and does absolutely nothing. They have read the theory. They understand the dialectic. They know, with absolute scientific certainty, that the contradictions inherent in the opponent’s opening strategy will inevitably lead to the collapse of their position. Moving a piece would be adventurism. It would delay the inevitable historical process. The Conservative player checkmates them in four moves. They claim this checkmate proves they were right all along. ​The Leninists The Leninist arrives at the table and immediately establishes a “vanguard party” consisting entirely of their own Rooks. They execute the opponent’s pawns. Then, just to be safe, they execute half of their own pawns for exhibiting counter-revolutionary tendencies. They declare victory. Five years later, the Rooks realize they are now just playing capitalism, but with worse food and more concrete. The Right wing player wins by default. ​The Stalinists The Stalinist plays exactly like the Leninist, but after executing their own pawns, they meticulously airbrush those pawns out of all the official tournament photographs, and if you point out that the pawns used to be there, you are sent to a gulag located on square H8. ​The Social Democrats Ah, the Social Democrats. Bless them. They start the game by apologizing for being there. They try to implement a welfare state for the pawns, funded by a tax on the King’s diagonal movements. They are then brutally crushed by a nakedly aggressive Conservative Queen who has offshored all her wealth to a different board altogether. ​The Democratic Socialists The Democratic Socialists spend three and a half hours agonizing over whether moving a pawn is a betrayal of the working class. They hold a plenary session and after intense factional infighting, they reach a historic compromise where they agree to move a pawn one square forward only with a unanimous vote of other pawns, before realising all their pawns have now been taken by the Right wing knights. They write an academic paper about it. ​The Anarchists The Anarchists insist that the game can have no rules. They immediately declare the center of the board a temporary autonomous zone. Knights attempting to move in an L are beaten with sticks and anyone asking what the rules are is targeted with a bombing campaign to preserve the “principles of non-violence”. After declaring them terrorists the Right wing player has them rendered to a black site and rewrites the rules to his own advantage. The Trotskyists declare their own side ideologically impure and form a splinter group before the game can begin. The Internet Tankies lose every game specifically so they can accuse it of being a CIA backed colour revolution. Hasan Piker chess is played on a pearl inlaid board with solid gold and silver pieces made by Cartier. And the liberals. The dull, stolid liberals pop in their ear buds to listen to Ezra Klein and make one cautious, boring move after another, slowly, surely accruing material advantage, trading initiative for position, and close in on Checkmate… …only to be removed from the players seat by a populist Left who want cheaper bus fares. ​Contrapoints looks at this absolute circus of self-sabotage, ideological purity spirals, and historical LARPing, and she is right to doubt it. She is right to say, “Maybe, just maybe, we should try to actually win the game of chess we are currently forced to play, rather than pretending we are playing a different game entirely.” ​But she, and other pragmatic somewhat dull liberals, miss something essential. ​The Player of Games ​If you want to understand the solution to all of this, you shouldn’t be reading political theory. You should be reading Scottish science fiction. Specifically, you should be reading Iain M. Banks. ​In Banks’ 1988 novel The Player of Games, we are introduced to a society called the Empire of Azad. The Empire of Azad is held together entirely by a staggeringly complex board game, also called Azad. The game is the system, and the system is the game. Your social standing, your political power, your entire life is determined by how well you play Azad. And that system is as brutal as they come. Late in the story we are shown the “secret channels” the Azadian Epstein class watch livestream torture and murder. ​The protagonist, a man named Jernau Morat Gurgeh, comes from a post-scarcity, fully automated luxury space communist society called the Culture. Morat means “gameplayer”. Jernau Morat Gurgeh, the greatest gameplayer in the Culture, is sent to the Empire of Azad to play them at their own game. ​He doesn’t go there and complain that the game is unfair. He doesn’t go there and write a blog about how the board is structurally oppressive. He doesn’t try to organize the game pieces into a syndicalist commune. ​He sits down. He learns the rules. He plays. And he wins. And in winning, destroys the game entirely. ​There is a lesson here. Two lessons, actually. One for the Leftists, and one for the Liberals. ​The lesson for Leftists is this: The only way to change the game is to win. ​You cannot ignore the map of power. You cannot wish it away with purity tests and theoretically flawless critiques published in obscure journals. If you want chess to fuck off and die, you cannot achieve that by refusing to play. You have to sit down at the board, look the bastard across from you in the eye, and systematically, relentlessly dismantle their position. You have to master position, materiel, and initiative. You have to learn to corner your opponent, reduce their possible moves to zero and force checkmate. You have to beat them at their own game before you can flip the table, burn the board and shred all the pieces. ​The lesson for Liberals, however, is this: The only way to really win is to transcend the system. ​In The Player of Games, Gurgeh doesn’t just beat the Emperor of Azad by playing the Emperor’s style of game better than the Emperor. He beats him by playing his own style. He plays a style of game that reflects the values of his own, utopian, egalitarian society. He plays so fluidly, so beautifully, and so completely outside the narrow, brutal, fascistic paradigm of his opponent, that the game itself, and the Empire based on the game, are destroyed forever. ​Liberals like Contrapoints want to protect the limited rules of the game because those hard won rules keep us safe. And they are right, in the short term. But in the long term, Chess always ends with carnage. You must play not to preserve a slightly better version of the game, but to transcend Chess entirely. ​You have to play to win, yes. But you have to play in a way that proves a better world is possible. You have to master the board not to become the King, but to demonstrate that the very concept of the King is obsolete. And you did this once. Liberals deposed the kings, established democracy, won human rights. Then you just fucking gave up. You decided your expensive cities and more expensive college degrees were enough. You stopped playing to change the the game and started just…playing the game. ​Chess is the King of Games. It is a map of power. ​But maps can be redrawn. And Kings, historically speaking, can be removed from the board entirely. You just have to be willing to make the move. Listen to the podcast audio here

2026 : the year World War 3 begins

To my Gen-X compatriots, to the Boomers and Millenials, and to Gen-Z who will have to clean up this mess we all made… …can we agree that Star Trek is the future we would all like? A future in which poverty is eradicated, disease is a mere curiosity of the past, humanity has put aside petty squabbles over resources, borders, and skin melanin and replaced all of that sh*t with a collective, enlightenment-driven pursuit of knowledge and self-betterment. A future in which humanity has – to use the rigorous academic term – Grown The Fuck Up Watch the full video essay here SubscribeSubmitting form Log in Is Star Trek a future we can all agree on? Let us tune out the ideological zealots, the Tankies and the Nazis, who treat our planetary collapse as a competitive team sport, and among the exhausted, fact-based majority, agree on Star Trek as our shared prize. When we look at the USS Enterprise we do not just see a starship, we see a perfectly calibrated, post-scarcity society. It is the ultimate manifestation of what contemporary political theorists affectionately call FALC: Fully Automated Luxury Communism… in space. Let’s place ourselves at the intersection of eschatology, speculative fiction, and macro-economics and ask a question of Star Trek – specifically, the teleological trajectory required to actually achieve the utopian federation depicted within it. Put in layman’s terms–how the fuck do we *get* to Star Trek? ​Because there is, unfortunately, one catastrophic, glaring problem with this cultural lodestone. ​In the canonical lore of the Star Trek universe, this magnificent, post-scarcity utopia does not emerge from a peaceful, democratic transition. It does not arrive because a coalition of enlightened centrist politicians finally passed the right carbon tax. It happens exclusively on the other side of World War III – a global, thermonuclear, and genetic holocaust that wipes out a third of the Earth’s population and plunges the survivors into a radioactive dark age. ​And, according to the deeply unsettling timeline of the Star Trek universe, that war starts right here. Right now. In 2026. ​Check your watches, ladies and gentlemen. We are right on schedule. ​PART ONE: WW3 AND STAR TREK ​Signs of WW3 in 2026 ​I do not need to remind you that it is currently 2026, and the geopolitical dashboard is flashing red across every conceivable metric. We are witnessing an unprecedented convergence of systemic stressors that makes the Cuban Missile Crisis look like a polite disagreement over a parking space. Check your newsfeed, or simply look out the window We have the protracted, grinding meat-grinder of the Ukraine war, acting as a proxy battlefield for nuclear superpowers and playground for combat robot gen 1 Terminators. We have Iran and the broader Middle East locked in a collapsing spiral of kinetic retaliation, vaporising the very oil reserves America started yet another war to secure. We are drowning in an epistemological nightmare of disinformation, where shared objective reality has fractured into bespoke, algorithmically curated psychotic echo chambers so deranged they make Alex Jones look like a reliable source. Economic inequality has reached a velocity where billionaires are literally launching themselves into the exosphere while the proletariat attempts to crowdfund their insulin. Consequently, fascism is no longer a historical curiosity confined to black-and-white footage. It is once again a rising, viable, mainstream electoral strategy. Immigrants are being demonised and minorities persecuted. Germany and Japan are re-arming. If this all looks spookily like the events that drove us through WW1 and WW2 that’s because the systems which caused those wars are once again driving us towards global arma-fucking-geddon. Which is what we’re really here to think about, not human morality or high drama, but cold, machine logic, the systems driving us to war. And the one system that those of you in the know will see lurking behind all the others. A system whose name we shall not utter…until later. And what Star Trek, the ultimate work of systems fiction, can teach us about those systems. ​Why WW3 Happened in Star Trek ​We must first examine why World War III happened in the Star Trek continuity. Originally, the writers in the late 1960s, operating under the assumption that the Cold War would inevitably go hot, placed the Eugenics Wars and the precursor to WW3 in the 1990s. When we miraculously survived the 90s with nothing more distasteful than dial-up internet and Nu-Metal, the lore was continuously retconned. ​The canonical window for the end of the world is now established as 2026 to 2054. ​What the writers of Star Trek intuitively grasped, and what modern science fiction authors like William Gibson have explicitly codified, and what we have already explored together in the channel, is the concept of “The Jackpot.” The Jackpot is not a single, catastrophic Michael Bay explosion. It is a multifactorial collapse. It is what happens when climate change, pandemics, economic implosion, and localized nuclear exchanges all decide to book onto the same budget holiday tour to Earth. ​The specific causes of WW3 in Trek lore reflect this multifactorial nightmare: Eco-collapse: The environment degrades to the point where resource scarcity triggers mass migration and border wars. We’re already close to the 216 million climate refugees predicted by 2050 Colonel Green and “Humanity First”: The rise of ecofascism, when the elites who caused climate catastrophe start using it as another excuse to persecute the victims, spearheaded by a charismatic military man who justifies mass culling under the banner of preserving a pure, surviving humanity. Is Humanity First better or worse than America first? Maybe they’re both just the same old xenophobia in a new package. The Eugenics Wars: The disastrous byproduct of unregulated biotechnology and genetic engineering, leading to augmented transhumans (like Khan Noonien Singh) who view baseline humanity as a biological relic meant to be subjugated. Today’s “transhumanists” freezing their heads in cryo and sucking stem cells out of teenagers are just a foretaste of what is to come. ​What Is Systems Thinking? ​To understand how these fictional events map so terrifyingly well onto our current reality, we must engage in “Systems Thinking.” ​In pre-modern times, human beings lacked the ontological framework to understand complex, interconnected crises. In layman’s terms : we didn’t know why the fuck things went wrong. When crops failed, plagues spread, and empires fell, we blamed systemic problems on “powers and principalities.” We blamed demons, angry gods, witches, or that goat with the funny eyes. We lacked the cognitive tools to understand that the problem was not acting upon the system from the outside; the problem was inherent in the system. ​In the modern scientific age, we utilize systems thinking. We define a system as any interconnected set of elements that is coherently organized in a way that achieves something. A nation, a dog, an economy, the M25 ring road, are all systems. If you look at a traffic jam on the M25, the pre-modern thinker blames the evil spirit of the highway. The systems thinker maps the feedback loops of urban planning, population density, and individual commuter incentives. And don’t start assuming just being alive in 2026 makes you a systems thinker. How many of us stuck in a traffic still bkame Jesus Fucking Christ? How many of us look at the systemic issues of climate change and blame Jeffrey in Norwich for not separating his tins from his plastics? The ancient practice of “scapegoating” that was exploited by a British Petroleum ad campaign in 2004 to make us blame each other and not… …the system ​Star Trek as Systems Fiction ​And those of us who can manage some systems thinking today can do so in part because of Star Trek. Star Trek is one of the few enduring pieces of popular media that operates as “systems fiction.” Every episode the Enterprise arrives at a new planet and analyses it AS A SYSTEM. ​When the Enterprise visits a planet where half the population exploits the other half, Picard doesn’t just punch the alien leader. Ok, yes, Kirk did sometimes often just punch the alien leader. But our Philosopher King analyzes their resource allocation, their historical dialectic, and the systemic flaws in their socio-economic paradigm. He operates as an intergalactic systems auditor. Star Trek is not a unique sample of systems fiction. The greatest science fiction – Frank Herbert’s Dune, everything by Ursula K Le Guin, the works of Octavia Butler, or Thomas Pynchon, or Don Delillo – are also systems fiction. Systems FICTION matters because stories are one of humankind’s most powerful…systems. We think and live in stories. Frank Herbert’s Dune takes all the systems of an entire planet and funnels them down into one anti-heroic story. But systems thinking is rare, oh so rare, in mass media. Star Trek was virtually a lone bastion of systemic analysis in 20th century mass culture. Given to us by one of the great science fiction imaginations. Gene Roddenberry, the creator of Trek, was a systems thinker. Roddenberry didn’t write Star Trek, he conceived it. He built the playground others would play in to create season after season of mind blowing systems fiction. And, crucially, Roddenberry understood that complex adaptive systems—like global civilization—do not change their fundamental operating rules voluntarily. They change only because the parts of the system, us, humanity, grow the fuck up. Or when the failure to grow the fuck up subjects the system to a catastrophic shock that shatters the existing paradigm. ​Roddenberry believed that to get to Star Trek, humanity had to go through WW3. The old system had to be violently dismantled because it was fundamentally incapable of reforming itself from within. ​Was he correct? Part Two – ​The Systems of World War 3: A Typology of Doom Imagine the classic scifi thought experiment – an alien arrives on Earth and judges our primitive society. But this is no alien. This is Captain Jean Luc Picard, in orbit in the Enterprise-D, looking down upon us…severely. Not because our problems are serious. Picard is a compassionate man and if we were doomed by, say, the impending collapse of the planetary crust, he would move heaven and earth to save…Earth. No. Picard looks down on early 21st century humanity because our problems are dumb and we fail to solve them only because we are too greedy. Why are we so obsessed with the green paper tokens we use for resource allocation? Why don’t we just fairly share our resources, from each according to our capacity, to each according to their need? Why are the factories owned by a tiny elite who mostly live in Dubai, Monaco or Manhattan? Why are the means of production not owned by the workers? Why would 21st century humanity rather fight a third global war than chill out and focus on cool things like exploring the final frontier? And most of all Picard would scowl down upon the one system driving all others to their doom. Let us now examine the specific systemic architectures currently operating in our 2026 reality that are leading us, with mathematical inevitability, toward the precipice. Here I have compiled the many systems leading to WW3 into a literal listicle of doom. ​Existential Tech We are the first generations in the history of the Earth to possess the technological capacity to enact our own extinction. A stone axe can cause a nasty flesh wound, a nuke can vaporise a civilization. This is a profound systemic shift. The proliferation of nuclear arsenals under the doctrine of Mutually Assured Destruction (MAD) created a system where peace is maintained only by a perpetual hostage situation. But it is no longer just nukes. The democratization of biotechnology means that CRISPR gene-editing kits can be purchased by any mildly alienated terrorist group. And the incentives of the free market system mean that no state can choose to *not* build such dangerous toys or risk losing out. Existential tech proliferates exponentially while wisdom declines even faster. ​Disinfo: The Semiotic Collapse A civilization cannot survive if it cannot agree on basic epistemological reality. No human population in which a significant percentage can be convinced the Earth is flat or that Lex Fridman is an intellectual can expect to survive long. We have built a global communications architecture optimized not for truth, but for clicks, resulting in a semiotic collapse, where propaganda, deepfakes, and algorithmic hallucinations have severed the signifier from the signified. A society trapped in a Baudrillardian hyperreality – unable to distinguish between a genuine geopolitical threat and an AI-generated psy-op designed to manipulate a stock price or a prediction market. Because in our global digital media the truth belongs to whoever pays. ​Unipolar Hegemony Following the Cold War, the global system reorganized around a single unipolar hegemon. Which worked kind of until the hegemon had a mid-life crisis and decided it couldn’t be f*cked anymore. The American empire is like late career Elvis. Everything that seemed “cool” until quite recently – the hamburgers, the aircraft carriers, the global financial system – seems suddenly obsolete, kitsch and a tad embarrassing. But the desperate flailing of a declining empire attempting to enforce a unipolar reality on an increasingly multipolar world is a system doomed to generate … doom. ​Multipolarity Game Theory Collapse Conversely, the transition to multipolarity offers no salvation. In a multipolar system with multiple nuclear-armed actors (state and non-state), traditional Cold War game theory collapses. John Nash’s equilibrium only works when the variables are limited and actors are … rational. In a world with seven or eight or two dozen nuclear powers, all acting on differing ideological, religious, and economic imperatives, the game theory matrix becomes incomprehensibly complex. The system shifts from a predictable standoff to a chaotic n-body problem, where a localized skirmish cascades unpredictably into a zero-sum, planet-wide thermonuclear exchange. ​Eco-collapse and Resource Wars The global economic system is predicated on the delusion of infinite growth on a planet with finite resources. This is a terminal systemic error. As we cross planetary boundaries—ocean acidification, topsoil depletion, atmospheric carbon saturation—the carrying capacity of the Earth plummets. Eco-collapse forces the system into a brutal contraction. When the equatorial regions become uninhabitable, we will see climate migration on the scale of billions. Borders will harden, supply chains will snap, and nations will invariably go to war over access to arable land, fresh water, and rare earth minerals. It is the ultimate tragedy of the commons, enforced by artillery. ​Religious Fundamentalism Systems of extreme religious fundamentalism operate on an eschatological death drive. While secular states might go to war for resources or security, fundamentalist systems operate on a theological teleology that actually desires the end of the world. When you inject nuclear or biological capabilities into a systemic worldview that views the apocalypse not as a failure state, but as a divine prophecy and a prerequisite for salvation, deterrence theory is rendered utterly moot. You cannot deter an actor who believes that mutually assured destruction is merely the quickest transit route back to Jesus. The Military-Industrial Complex The system that Eisenhower warned against is not a defensive apparatus, it is an autonomous, self-replicating economic algorithm that converts human blood and public tax dollars into shareholder dividends. By intentionally fracturing its manufacturing supply chains across multiple legislative districts, it has perfectly captured the political process. The system cannot sustain infinite financial growth without continuous kinetic consumption, meaning geopolitical friction must be structurally manufactured to justify the endless production of precision-guided ordnance. World Peace is now literally too expensive. When your fundamental economic paradigm requires the perpetual destruction of surplus capital and human lives just to meet quarterly profit targets, the equation simplifies itself with terrifying mathematical certainty: capitalism is war. ​Fascism: The Weakness of the Masses Drawing on Wilhelm Reich and Deleuze and Guattari, fascism is not merely a political structure; it is a psychological system. It is a symptom of the psychic inadequacy and the weakness of the masses, who, under conditions of extreme economic and social stress, actively desire their own repression. The fascist system relies on the perpetual construction of an “Other” to blame for systemic failures. Because this system is inherently irrational and requires constant escalation to maintain its internal cohesion, its only logical endpoint is an aestheticized politics of total annihilation. It is a suicide pact masquerading as national rebirth. ​The Great Filter The Fermi Paradox asks: if the universe is so vast, where is everyone? Robin Hanson’s “Great Filter” theory provides the systemic answer. The evolutionary leap from a single-planet species to a multi-planetary, star-faring civilization contains a systemic bottleneck—a filter—that almost no species survives. As we survey the cascading crises of 2026, it is overwhelmingly apparent that we are currently slamming face-first into this filter. The combination of god-like technology and primate-level emotional regulation suggests that intelligence itself might be a lethal evolutionary dead-end, a system inherently prone to self-termination. ​Algorithmic Escalation Ladder We have integrated autonomous, machine-learning algorithms into our global financial and military infrastructure. These systems operate at speeds incomprehensible to human cognition. We have seen financial “flash crashes” where algorithms triggered massive economic destruction in seconds. If we apply this same systemic architecture to military early-warning and response protocols, we risk an Algorithmic Escalation Ladder. An AI, processing a false data point, initiates a counter-measure, triggering an opposing AI’s response loop. World War 3 could begin and end in the space of three milliseconds, entirely bypassing human agency. ​Sandpile Effect: Self-Organized Criticality Finally, we must look to physics, specifically Per Bak’s concept of self-organized criticality, often referred to as the Sandpile Effect. If you drop sand grain by grain, it builds a pile until it reaches a critical state. Once at this state, dropping one more grain of sand will trigger an avalanche. You cannot predict which grain will cause it, or how large the avalanche will be, only that the system is structurally poised for collapse. The global geopolitical and economic system in 2026 is a critical sandpile. The inciting incident for WW3 will not be a grand, rational policy decision. It will be an errant drone strike, a localized bank run, a misinterpreted tweet – a single, microscopic grain of sand that triggers the total, systemic avalanche. ​CONCLUSION : The system driving all systems ​So, Boomers, Zoomers, Alphas, Millenials, and Xers, we arrive at the conclusion of our systems analysis. ​The Bad News is mathematically bleak. EVERY system currently operating on this planet is leading directly toward World War 3. And behind those multifarious systems is a singular system. Capitalism. Capitalism demands infinite growth on a finite planet and relentless resource extraction. Our global hegemon is capitalist. Our multipolar powers are trapped in capitalist competition. Capitalism cannot stop building existential tech and capitalism is the military industrial complex. Capitalism, as we have heard, is war. The feedback loops of endless extraction, engineered scarcity, military-industrial profit motives, and hyper-individualistic consumption are all converging on the exact same coordinate: complete and utter global collapse. And the burning nuclear fires of World War 3. Star Trek gives us hope ​The post-WW3 future of Roddenberry’s vision is different from our current reality in one massive, inescapable way: It is inherently and structurally post-capitalist. Call it Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Call it Utopia. Call it space socialism. You cannot have a society where energy is virtually infinite, matter can be synthesized from thin air, and human labor is entirely voluntary, and still enforce a system based on artificial scarcity, wage labor, and quarterly profit margins. The existence of the replicator fundamentally destroys the capitalist mode of production. And as our society moves, however staggeringly, towards post-scarcity. As digitisation and the internet make many goods zero marginal cost, and as the looming spectre of AI and robotics automates work. The potential of a post-scarcity society is there for us to grasp, if we can find a path to post-capitalism. But capitalism will not let go without a fight Roddenberry’s thesis was that the capitalist hegemony would, rather than voluntarily relinquish its systemic dominance, initiate a global thermonuclear war. Roddenberry’s terrible prophecy is not just good television; it is rigorous systemic analysis. The prevailing socio-economic order cannot, and will not, voluntarily relinquish its power. It will drive the ship into the sun before it allows the crew to form a union. ​The Good News, hypothetically speaking, is remarkably simple. All we need to do to avoid the nuclear fire and skip straight to the Federation is transcend capitalism. We simply need to abandon the artificial limitations of our economic paradigms, recognize our shared planetary reality, distribute resources equitably, and finally grow the fuck up. ​Which brings us, tragically, to the final piece of Bad News. ​All we need to do is grow up. Yep. We’re cooked. Listen here

You don’t understand science fiction

There is a single narrative technique that connects almost every multi-billion dollar science fiction franchise ever made. It is the invisible engine powering the most successful stories of the last century. And yet, if you ask ten working Hollywood screenwriters what it is, nine of them will give you a blank stare—and the tenth will probably try to sell you a $200 course on “worldbuilding.” ​Think about the heaviest hitters in science fiction today. ​Take Fallout. The reason that universe is so compelling isn’t just because Bethesda really loves 1950s aesthetics and dank radiation memes. It’s built on one specific, structural cheat code. Look at Jurassic Park. The terror doesn’t actually come from the CGI T-Rex; it comes from one, very isolated scientific premise. Or look at the box office juggernaut Project Hail Mary – Andy Weir didn’t write a sprawling space opera, he built a meticulous puzzle box around exactly one new rule of biology. Members get full access to all videos and posts SubscribeSubmitting form Log in ​This isn’t just a modern blockbuster trend, either. This is the foundational DNA of science fiction. ​It is the exact same tool Mary Shelley used to accidentally invent science fiction with Frankenstein back in 1818 just because she was bored on vacation. It’s the same mechanism H.G. Wells used to absolutely terrify Victorian readers by showing them what it was like to be invaded by Victorian colonialists in The War of the Worlds. It is so deeply fundamental to the mechanics of creating a meaningful scifi world that every great from Arthur C Clarke to Ursula K Le Guin uses it without even giving it a name. Even fantasy writers, when they can stop calculating the exchange values of the seven major currencies in their world, actually do this. Even if J.R.R. Tolkien would probably rise from the grave to write a strongly worded letter in Elvish denying it. It’s RIGHT there in Lord of the Rings. Like a One Ring of power. Yes I did write that whole paragraph to make that pun. But it’s also true. ​Every great sci-fi writer is using this tool, whether they know the academic term for it or not. It is the ultimate storytelling power-up. And once you see it, you will never look at a “worldbuilding bible” the same way again. Right now I can divide you all into two groups. Group A are the ambitious power hungry young writers who want to be the next Brandon Sanderson by using this one easy trick. Group B are the creative purists who are recoiling in horror “NO! I will not sully my unique artistic vision with this HACK!” But all I’m doing is putting a new, powerful, sonic screwdriver in your scifi toolkit. What you do with it is all about you. And if you have no interest in telling scifi stories, this is also just a great way to understand them. Aaaand Group C…who already clicked ahead in the timeline to find out what the fuck I am talking about while muttering about getting to the point. So let’s get to the point. But before we get to the point of giving this thing its proper, intimidatingly academic name, let’s look at what screenwriters usually call it when they’re trying to sound smart in a pitch meeting. ​A lot of writers refer to it as the “One Big Lie.” This is the single, massive falsehood you demand your audience swallow right on page one, just so the rest of the story can function. It’s the author holding the reader hostage and saying, “Look, just accept that we can fold spacetime using spice addicted worms, okay? How do the warp drives *work*? Dilithium Crystamathingy. Do not look at the math, we have a socio-political metaphor disguised as a planet to get to.” ​Futurists and tech-adjacent folks like to call it the “Shock.” This is the specific piece of fictional technology that drops into a society and immediately shatters the status quo. Just take any William Gibson novel, extract the unique tech, that’s the Shock. Meanwhile, the alt-history buffs call it the “Point of Divergence”—the exact moment on the timeline where the fictional world violently swerves away from our actual, exponentially more depressing reality. ​All of these are…fine? They vaguely point at the right idea. But the sharpest, most precise term for this tool—the one that will actually fix your broken script and stop you from wasting another three weeks designing the fictional tax code of a moon colony no one cares about—is The Novum. ​Latin for “the new thing.” It’s a term coined by literary scholars who desperately needed to sound rigorous while analyzing tentacle faced aliens wielding space lasers in the 1970s. That literary scholar being Darko Suvin. The OG of the academic field of science fiction studies. Think of Professor Suvin as your Severus Snape, here to teach you Defence Against The Dark Arts…and we all know what that really means. But we’ll come back to Cognitive Estrangement. ​Because in practical storytelling terms, the Novum is the scientifically plausible innovation, discovery, or historical shift that forces a society to completely rewire itself. It isn’t just a cool gadget your hero uses to shoot the bad guy. It is the inciting incident not just for your plot, but for your entire fucking universe. INTERVAL: The Crucial Distinction (Or: Why a Novum is NOT a F***ing MacGuffin) ​Before we get to the master list, we need to clear up a massive misconception. Because right now, there is a very specific type of aging film student watching this who is confidently thinking, “Oh, I get it. The Novum. It’s just a MacGuffin.” ​No. Stop. Put the glowing briefcase down. ​Alfred Hitchcock popularized the concept of the MacGuffin. It is an object, a device, or a piece of information that all the characters desperately want. It exists solely to give everyone a reason to be in the same room. The Death Star plans in Star Wars. The Ark of the Covenant in Raiders of the Lost Ark. The glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction. ​But here is the defining trait of a MacGuffin: It is entirely, one hundred percent arbitrary. ​You can completely swap out the glowing briefcase in Pulp Fiction for a bag of blood diamonds, the nuclear launch codes, or a mint-condition holographic Charizard card, and the plot remains exactly the same. Vincent and Jules still show up at the apartment, they still shoot Brett, and they still go get breakfast. The MacGuffin only drives the plot. ​The Novum is entirely different. The Novum drives the world. ​You cannot swap it out. It is structurally load-bearing. If you swap the viable dinosaur DNA in Jurassic Park for a bag of stolen diamonds, the entire universe collapses. There is no theme park. There is no catastrophic failure of a biological ecosystem. There is just an eccentric old billionaire staring at a shiny rock in a helicopter. ​If you swap the simulated reality of The Matrix for a stolen microchip, you don’t have a cyberpunk philosophical awakening; you just have a very confusing Keanu Reeves action movie where people wear too much leather indoors. ​A MacGuffin is just a lazy excuse for your characters to run around and shoot at each other. A Novum is the foundational rule of physics that dictates why they are running, how they are shooting, and the structural reality of the very ground they are running on. TWO: The Kinda Complete List of Sci-Fi Novums ​The Blockbuster Novum ​Let’s start with the crowd-pleasers. This is the Novum distilled into pure, highly marketable adrenaline. ​The Blockbuster Novum doesn’t require the audience to hold a degree in sociology, and more importantly, it doesn’t require a studio executive to read past page one of the treatment. It is the ultimate elevator pitch. Instead of rewriting all of global human society, the Blockbuster Novum creates a highly isolated, extremely volatile sandbox where things can spectacularly blow up. ​Look at Jurassic Park. The Novum is perfectly constrained: Viable dinosaur DNA can be extracted from fossilized amber. That’s it. It doesn’t cure cancer. It doesn’t solve world hunger or alter global geopolitics. It just acts as the singular scientific catalyst for a standard, hubristic tech billionaire to build a theme park that immediately eats its own lawyers. ​Or consider Inception. The Novum is the PASIV device—a machine that allows for shared dreaming. Christopher Nolan doesn’t waste time explaining how this technology affects the global economy or the healthcare system. He just uses it to upgrade the standard corporate espionage thriller into a heist movie set entirely inside the human subconscious. ​When done right, this type of Novum is an instant engine for action. It’s the single “What If” that launches a billion-dollar franchise. ​Cue the rapid-fire action montage: ​The Terminator: A defense network achieves localized self-awareness and invents time travel strictly to clean up its own administrative errors. ​Minority Report: Three mutated humans can accurately predict murders before they happen, turning the justice system into an inescapable, pre-emptive bureaucracy. ​District 9: Aliens aren’t invaders or philosophers; they’re just working-class refugees whose ship broke down over Johannesburg, instantly creating a localized apartheid state. ​Avatar: A planetary ecology functions as a biological internet, which unfortunately sits right on top of the most valuable rock in the universe. ​Edge of Tomorrow: Exposure to alien blood physically resets the temporal day upon death, turning a galactic war into a lethal video game speedrun. ​Back to the Future: The Flux Capacitor makes time travel entirely possible, provided you have access to weapons-grade plutonium and a DeLorean that can somehow hit 88 miles per hour in a mall parking lot. ​These are the cash cows. They take one impossible thing, make it the law of physics for exactly two hours, and let the chaos unfold. The Literary Novum ​Now we shift gears from the Hollywood executives to the authors who want to win Hugo awards and make the reader feel slightly inadequate about their intellect. ​The Literary Novum isn’t built to optimise action figure sales. You aren’t going to get a lot of space battles or laser swords here. Instead, these are pure sociological thought experiments. The author takes one fundamental, unshakeable rule of human existence or the physical universe, alters it, and then meticulously—almost clinically—tracks the psychological and cultural fallout. ​Take Ursula K. Le Guin’s masterpiece, The Left Hand of Darkness. The Novum is a biologically ambisexual human race. The inhabitants of Gethen only manifest a sex drive or specific gender characteristics for a few days a month. By removing fixed sexual dimorphism from the equation, Le Guin builds a complex society completely free of the patriarchal and matriarchal power dynamics that define our entire history. It’s a Novum so powerful it actually turns our own real-world gender constructs into the “alien” concept. Don’t worry if you didn’t understand any of that. That is kind of the point of Literary Novums?…Novae? ​Or look at Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem. The Novum is the titular three body problem: a neighboring star system with three suns that create an unsolvable, wildly chaotic orbital cycle. It forces the native alien civilization into a perpetual cycle of apocalyptic trauma. This single astrophysical fact perfectly and logically explains exactly why they would be so ruthlessly, coldly focused on stealing our boring, stable planet. And it’s also a clear metaphor for the Capitalist powers that colonised China, when you think about it. ​This type of Novum is heavy, thoughtful, and usually leaves you staring at a wall for twenty minutes after finishing the book. ​Cue the montage of literary devastation: ​Dune: A narcotic dust called the Spice Melange allows for prescience and faster-than-light travel, instantly turning a miserable, giant-worm-infested sandbox into the ultimate economic choke point of a galactic feudal monopoly. ​The Handmaid’s Tale: A catastrophic global plummet in human fertility is immediately weaponized to build a theocratic nightmare. ​Fahrenheit 451: We figured out how to make all houses completely fireproof, so society logically repurposed the fire department to exclusively burn contraband literature. That’s a joke. Do NOT leave that pedantic comment! Just checking you’re paying attention and haven’t been virtually lobotomized by hyper saturated media that destroys your capacity for critical thinking. ​Neuromancer: The invention of the cybernetic deck, which allows hyper-caffeinated hackers to jack directly into a visual, navigable consensus hallucination called cyberspace. Or…is cyberspace the novum? Hmmm. ​Children of Time: Spiders. Something about space spiders. ​Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? / Blade Runner: The invention of “replicants” who are more human than human, testing our capacity for empathy. The Ideological Novum ​Now we move from sociology to pure politics. This is where the Novum stops being a fun thought experiment and becomes a weaponized worldview. ​The Ideological Novum bends the physical rules of reality into Attack Mode. The author is essentially rigging the game. By inventing a specific physical or biological law, they create a universe where their personal political philosophy isn’t just an opinion – it’s a mandatory survival tactic. Look at China Miéville’s The City & the City. The Novum here is geographic and psychological: Two hostile cities occupy the exact same physical space, and the citizens are legally and mentally conditioned to “unsee” the other. If you acknowledge a building or a person from the other city, you are disappeared by a shadowy secret police. Miéville takes the very real, very mundane concept of urban inequality and class segregation and turns it into a physical, unbreakable law of physics.  Or consider Robert A. Heinlein’s Starship Troopers, a novum that rewrites the social contract: Political authority and the right to vote can only be earned through grueling, highly lethal Federal Service. Heinlein rigs the universe to prove his point. In the world of the book, this isn’t fascism; it is the only logical way to build a stable, hyper-competent society that doesn’t collapse under its own weight. To be clear Starship Troopers doesn’t just contain this novum, the entire book exists to present the case for Heinlein’s idea. And power armour. Mieville and Heinlein are political ideologues who know exactly what they are doing. ​But then, you get the fascinating category of Accidental Ideologue. This is when an author creates a Novum that completely exposes their own unexamined, unconscious biases, usually while trying to write something else entirely. ​Consider Ernest Cline’s Ready Player One. Cline clearly thinks he is writing a punk-rock, anti-capitalist rebellion against a tyrannical mega-corporation. But look at his Novum: The OASIS, a fully immersive global VR utopia whose ownership is locked behind a Willy Wonka-style scavenger hunt of 1980s pop culture trivia. Cline’s Novum accidentally reveals a completely consumerist, neoliberal ideology. In this universe, the highest possible form of human achievement isn’t art, science, or empathy – it is furiously consuming and memorizing late-20th-century media. The “heroic” solution to this dystopia isn’t dismantling the horrifying techno-feudal monopoly; it’s just making sure the right kind of hyper-obsessive nerd is sitting on the corporate throne at the end. Klein accidentally wrote a glowing defense of late-stage techno-oligarchy, simply because his unexamined ideology is that pop-culture trivia makes you morally superior. ​When you start looking for the Ideological Novum, it is everywhere. Cue the politically charged montage: ​Foundation (Isaac Asimov): The Novum is Psychohistory—a mathematical formula that accurately predicts the future of large populations. It perfectly exposes Asimov’s unconscious, mid-century technocratic elitism: the belief that the masses are basically mathematical cattle, and true governance should be handed to a secretive elite of STEM majors doing advanced calculus. ​The Mote in God’s Eye (Larry Niven & Jerry Pournelle): An alien species biologically trapped in a cycle of unstoppable overpopulation, making diplomacy mathematically impossible and neatly justifying a pre-emptive, imperial defense stance. ​Brave New World (Aldous Huxley): The Bokanovsky Process allows for the biological mass-production of cloned, predestined embryos, physically manifesting the rigid British class system into inescapable genetics. ​Roadside Picnic (The Strugatsky Brothers): Aliens visit Earth, but they don’t conquer us or share wisdom. They just stop on the side of the cosmic highway, throw their incomprehensible, deadly trash out the window, and drive off. ​ Warhammer 40,000: Faster-than-light travel literally requires flying your ships through a dimension of pure, sentient Hell (The Warp), perfectly justifying the paranoid, hyper-fascistic, violently xenophobic Imperium of Man. The Negative Novum ​​Finally, we arrive at my personal favorite. The Negative Novum. ​This is the ultimate exercise in subtraction. The author doesn’t invent a magical new technology, a faster-than-light drive, or a biological mutation. Instead, they just walk up to the historical timeline, firmly grasp one absolutely crucial Jenga block, pull it out, and watch human civilization warp itself around the newly created void. ​The most brilliant modern execution of this is the Fallout franchise. ​If you ask a casual fan what makes Fallout special, they’ll probably point to the Power Armor, the Vaults, or the relentless 1950s doo-wop music playing over a nuclear wasteland. But all of that is just window dressing. The actual engine of the universe—the Negative Novum—is incredibly simple: The transistor and the microchip are never invented. Or, at least, they are invented centuries too late to matter. ​Look at the ripple effects of that one missing piece of silicon. Because miniaturization never happens, the Information Age is completely aborted. Computers remain massive, clunky, room-sized monoliths running on vacuum tubes and dangerous atomic fusion. Because technology is bulky and terrifying, the cultural zeitgeist gets permanently trapped in 1950s atomic-age optimism and Red Scare paranoia. There is no internet to globalize the culture. ​And finally, the conflict: Without the micro-efficiency of the transistor, the world rapidly and violently burns through its remaining fossil fuels and uranium. This technological dead-end leads directly to the Resource Wars, and eventually, the inevitable nuclear fire of 2077. ​The apocalypse, the Vault-Tec experiments, the super mutants – every single iconic piece of that multi-billion dollar IP stems entirely from the premise of not inventing a tiny computer chip. ​When you remove something fundamental, the world has to desperately compensate. ​Cue the montage of things we desperately miss: ​Children of Men: The complete, unexplained cessation of human fertility. There are no zombies or aliens; the apocalypse is just the quiet, devastating absence of a next generation. ​The Road: The total death of the biosphere and a permanently blocked sun. No intricate lore, just the complete absence of ecology and hope, leaving only gray ash and cannibalism. ​The Difference Engine: The microchip isn’t needed because Charles Babbage successfully built his steam-powered mechanical computer in the 1800s. The absence of the electrical age gives us Victorian cyber-punks. ​A Canticle for Leibowitz: The “Flame Deluge” purposefully wipes out all modern scientific knowledge. Humanity violently removes its own understanding of the universe, causing an artificial return to the Dark Ages where electrical blueprints are venerated as illuminated holy texts. ​Never Let Me Go: The quiet, polite removal of basic human rights—and the philosophical concept of a “soul”—from a specific underclass of artificially created organ-donor clones. ​Station Eleven: The Georgia Flu instantly wipes out the global power grid and most of humanity. It’s the sudden, overnight absence of global connectivity, reducing modern civilization to a traveling Shakespeare troupe in the ruins of the Midwest. The Exceptions of Why Star Wars is Fake Sci-Fi ​​If you really want to understand how a structural rule works, you have to look at the massive, billion-dollar properties that completely ignore it. And if you want to guarantee a thousand angry comments on your video—which the YouTube algorithm absolutely loves—you tell your audience the truth: ​Star Wars is not science fiction. ​Under the strict definition of the Novum, George Lucas didn’t write a sci-fi masterpiece; he wrote a high-fantasy fairy tale that just happens to have a very shiny, metallic coat of paint. ​Think about it. The Force is not a Novum. It is not a scientifically plausible point of divergence or a technological innovation that logically rewires the economics and politics of the galaxy. It is literally just magic. It is an ancient, mystical energy field that cares deeply about bloodlines, prophecies, and farm boys with grand destinies. ​A lightsaber isn’t a technological disruption; it’s just Excalibur with a D-cell battery strapped to the hilt. The Death Star isn’t a sociological thought experiment; it’s a dragon sitting in a dark tower waiting for the white knight to find its perfectly engineered, two-meter-wide weak spot. ​This is why Star Wars has more in common with Game of Thrones or Harry Potter than it does with Jurassic Park or The Left Hand of Darkness. They don’t operate on “Cognitive Estrangement.” They don’t want to make you uncomfortable about your present reality. They operate on Myth. They run on the Hero’s Journey, universal archetypes, and emotional resonance. ​And to be clear: That doesn’t make them bad. Space Fantasy is a glorious, highly lucrative genre. ​But if you are a writer sitting at your keyboard trying to build the next Matrix or the next Fallout, and you are using Star Wars as your structural blueprint, you are going to fail. You will end up with a messy, bloated universe full of lasers and aliens that doesn’t actually say anything. ​Because “fake” sci-fi just throws futuristic aesthetics at a standard fantasy plot. But real sci-fi fundamentally alters reality using the Novum Ahk-tually, LotR is science fiction (it can be argued) ​Before the international Tolkien Society puts a bounty on my head and sends a strike team of Oxford philologists to my house, let’s entertain a highly structural, slightly dangerous thought experiment. ​If we strictly define science fiction by the presence of a Novum—a technologically or scientifically plausible disruption that forces a society to react—you can make a surprisingly aggressive argument that The Lord of the Rings is actually a science fiction story disguised in a trench coat of Elven mythology. ​To see it, you have to look at what Tolkien was actually reacting to. He wasn’t just daydreaming about fairies. He was a traumatized combat veteran writing a direct, visceral response to the mechanized slaughter of World War I and the aggressive, soot-choked industrialization of the English countryside. ​With that context, look at the One Ring. ​If you strip away the glowing Elvish script, the Ring isn’t a mystical, magical trinket. It is a piece of technology. Specifically, it is a machine of mass surveillance and absolute industrial control. Sauron isn’t just a dark wizard; he is a hyper-industrialist trying to establish a global, mechanized monopoly. ​The Ring functions exactly like a Novum. It is a concentrated technological leap (forged in the fiery R&D labs of Mount Doom) that fundamentally distorts the reality of Middle-earth. Whoever holds the Ring gains access to a network of absolute power, but the “technology” is so advanced and inherently corrupting that it overrides the operator’s free will, turning them into a slave of the machine itself. ​Look at Saruman. He doesn’t fall to “dark magic.” He falls to the allure of industry. He literally tears down the ancient forests to build foundries, replacing nature with “a mind of metal and wheels.” He is essentially a 19th-century robber baron who discovered the efficiency of strip-mining and genetically engineered super-soldiers (the Uruk-hai). ​Therefore, the entire plot of The Lord of the Rings isn’t a traditional heroic fantasy quest to secure a magical boon. It is a desperate, apocalyptic black-ops mission to decommission a weapon of mass destruction. The Fellowship is trying to un-invent the nuclear bomb because they realize their society is not morally equipped to wield that level of technological power. ​So, yes, it has wizards and goblins. But structurally? It operates on the exact same engine of “cognitive estrangement” as the best sci-fi. It takes the real-world horrors of the Industrial Revolution and the mechanization of warfare, wraps them up in a Novum called the One Ring, and forces the audience to look at their own factories and war machines with a deep, creeping sense of dread. Wait, cognitive what-now?  Oh right I didn’t tell you yet. Woops! THREE: The Ultimate Novum (And How to Wield It) ​The Final Boss of Sci-Fi Theory ​Now it is time to meet the Final Boss of sci-fi theory. We’ve talked about the blockbusters, we’ve validated the literary heavyweights, and we’ve thoroughly alienated Star Wars fandom. Now, we drop the actual academic payload. ​In the 1970s, a Yugoslavian-born scholar named Darko Suvin officially coined the term “Novum.” Suvin was essentially an academic who desperately needed a rigorous, scholarly way to explain to his university colleagues that reading about time machines and android sex bots was actually a profound intellectual pursuit. ​But Suvin didn’t just name the tool. He identified exactly what the tool was built to do. He argued that the ultimate goal of science fiction is to achieve a psychological impact called Cognitive Estrangement. ​The Mirror, Not the Crystal Ball ​”Cognitive Estrangement” sounds like a legal defense for a messy divorce, but it is actually the secret engine of scifi. ​Let’s break the biggest myth in science fiction right now: scifi is not supposed to predict the future. It isn’t a crystal ball, and honestly, whenever it tries to be, it is usually hilariously wrong. ​The goal of a great Novum isn’t to show you what the year 2300 looks like. The goal is to take your present reality, alter one massive variable, and force you to look at your own society with fresh, uncomfortable, alienated eyes. ​”Cognition” means the premise is rational and scientific—it’s not magic. “Estrangement” means it makes you feel like an alien in your own home. It takes the mundane absurdity of our real-world economics, our politics, or our social norms, and makes them look utterly bizarre by contrast. ​The Ultimate Novum: The Monolith ​If Cognitive Estrangement is the ultimate goal, what is the most perfect, undistilled example of a Novum ever put on screen? ​It isn’t a time machine. It isn’t a cloned dinosaur. ​It is a featureless black slab of geometry from 1968. ​Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke’s 2001: A Space Odyssey features the absolute Ultimate Novum: The Monolith. Look at this thing. It does absolutely nothing. It has no buttons, no user interface, no glowing exhaust ports for a farm boy to shoot a torpedo into. It is the pure, terrifying, mathematical embodiment of the “New Thing.” ​And look at the ripple effect. When it drops into the prehistoric dirt, it doesn’t hand the apes a laser gun. It just provides the exact amount of Cognitive Estrangement necessary for an ape to realize that a femur bone can be used to crush a skull. It is the simultaneous birth of technology and murder. ​Fast forward a few million years. Humanity finds another one buried on the moon. Again, it does nothing but emit a signal. But its mere existence forces humanity into a new leap of cognitive estrangement, triggering the terrifying leap into deep space and the creation of artificial intelligence. The Monolith is the Ultimate Novum because it demands nothing but evolution. It forces the characters—and the audience—to instantly discard their previous understanding of reality. ​The Power-Up ​Which brings us to the final power-up. If you are a writer sitting at your desk right now, listen closely. Stop. Worldbuilding. Start world changing. ​Most amateur writers are permanently stuck at Level One worldbuilding. They spend four hundred hours mapping out the tax codes of a galactic empire, but their characters are just 21st-century middle managers complaining about space-capitalism. Their Novum doesn’t actually touch the human condition. It causes zero estrangement. ​Stop trying to build a universe from the top down. Put the worldbuilding bible away. ​Find your Monolith. ​Find the one, singular, disruptive idea that violently shatters the status quo. Drop it into the dead center of your story, and logically map out exactly how human politics, religion, and relationships must mutate just to survive the shockwave. ​Because when you use the Novum correctly, you aren’t just writing about a fantasy world. You are changing the real world. You are taking our ordinary cognition and estranging it to show us our world as a strange new world. You are writing the modern mythos. ​So pick your one big lie. And imagine harder. Listen to the podcast audio here