Rewriting the Script: Rethinking the World’s Rules
A World Too Connected for Old Ideas
Once upon a time, specifically in the summer of 1989, a man
called Francis Fukuyama stood up at the University of Chicago and gave a
lecture that would, in the eyes of many, draw a neat curtain over the grand
ideological dramas of the 20th century. In The End of History?, later
expanded into his 1992 book The End of History and the Last Man, Fukuyama
argued that liberal democracy had triumphed, not merely as a political system,
but as the final destination in humanity’s ideological journey. The Cold War
was over, the Soviets were done, and for a brief moment, it looked like liberal
democracy had won the philosophical equivalent of the Eurovision Song Contest.
It was neat. Too neat.
Because as the 21st century unfolded, it became clear that
history hadn’t ended so much as taken a long drag of something strong and come
back with a vengeance.
Of course, Fukuyama wasn’t alone in trying to make sense of
the global tide. John Mearsheimer, ever the realist, saw the world as a
chessboard of power and security, great powers forever jockeying for position
like testy uncles at a wedding. His offensive realism, laid out in The
Tragedy of Great Power Politics (2001), painted a world where cooperation
is fragile, and conflict is practically baked into the system. A useful model
for the 19th and 20th centuries, perhaps. But, can it really account for a planet
where your AI or Alexa powered smart refrigerator might be hacked by a teenager
in Belarus?
Then there was Immanuel Wallerstein, who saw it all
differently. In his World-Systems Theory, Wallerstein argued that we’ve
long been locked in a global capitalist system, where core nations exploit the
periphery, and the game is rigged from the start. A powerful critique, though
one increasingly tested by a world where the periphery has started building
smartphones, launching satellites, and buying Premier League clubs.
And let’s not forget Johan Galtung, the Norwegian peace
scholar who gave us the concepts of “positive peace” and “structural violence.”
Galtung pointed out that even without war, societies can suffer from systems
that harm and exclude. He also predicted the decline of the American empire
back in the 1980s with eerie accuracy. But even Galtung’s models, rooted in
structural critique and systems theory, feel stretched thin by today’s chaotic
blend of soft power, viral influence, and algorithmic governance.
The point is not that these thinkers were wrong. On the contrary, they each offered maps of extraordinary insight. But the territory has changed. The problems we now face are not only more interconnected, they’re more entangled. Climate change, AI, data sovereignty, ideological echo chambers, meme warfare… these aren’t neatly separable issues. They're braided together in ways that make old models look rather like trying to understand quantum physics using a compass and a biscuit tin.
This article argues that the frameworks we’ve inherited;
liberalism, realism, Marxism, and their many offshoots, are no longer enough.
I’m not here to replace them with a shiny new theory of everything. But I am here
to say: the tools we’re using to understand the world are, increasingly, not up
to the job. It’s like trying to do open-heart surgery with garden shears.
So let’s re-examine these ideas. Appreciate what they
got right. Acknowledge what they’ve missed. And then, just maybe, start to
sketch the outlines of something new, not just because we’re
utopian dreamers, but because clinging to outdated theories in a world of
collapsing glaciers and viral TikToks is beginning to look a lot like denial.
Where We've Been And The Thinkers Who Brought Us Here
Before launching into a new way of thinking about world
politics, it’s only right to look back at the minds who built the frameworks
we’ve been using. These thinkers didn't just comment on the world; they
definitively shaped how we see it. Some offered grand visions of justice and
harmony, others a much colder view of power and survival. Many were right in
their time. Some still are. But in a world more interconnected than ever;
economically, technologically, existentially, the old maps might no longer chart
the terrain we're walking.
Liberalism and the Post–Cold War Order
Liberalism, that post-Enlightenment child of revolution and
reason, didn’t just offer a way to run governments, it pitched itself as a
moral compass. It told us that people had rights simply by being alive, that
rulers should answer to the ruled, and that markets, if left to do their thing
with the occasional nudge, would eventually lift everyone’s fortunes. After the
Cold War, liberalism didn’t just win the argument. It held a victory parade.
Communism crumbled under its own paperwork, fascism was long buried, and
suddenly it felt like everyone wanted elections, consumer goods, and American
sitcoms.
Francis Fukuyama captured this triumphal mood in The
End of History and the Last Man (1992), where he made a striking claim:
that humanity’s ideological evolution had reached its destination in liberal
democracy. Not because it was flawless, but because it had outlasted everything
else. All that remained, he suggested, were the bureaucratic chores of fine-tuning
democracy, sorting out policies, maybe the odd humanitarian rescue mission.
History, in the grand philosophical sense, had clocked out.
It was a bold idea; perhaps too bold, but for a time, it genuinely seemed to fit. The Soviet Union was gone. China was flirting with the free market. The EU was growing. The internet was bringing us closer, and American pop culture was practically an unofficial global export. Liberalism wasn’t just dominant; it felt like destiny.
But here’s the twist: Fukuyama was never quite the
cheerleader people made him out to be. The “last man” in his title was borrowed
from Nietzsche; a warning that a society too safe and too satisfied might lose
its sense of ambition and soul. The last man might be living peacefully in his
IKEA-furnished flat, but he might also be bored stiff, detached from any larger
purpose, and a prime target for whatever movement promised meaning and fire. As
it turned out, the end of history wasn’t an ending at all. It was a brief
intermission before the next act. Democracy began to wobble. Populism exploded.
And authoritarian regimes swaggered back onto the stage; slicker, richer, and
with high-speed internet.
While Fukuyama traced liberalism’s big-picture journey,
others got stuck into the details; particularly the moral mechanics of how a
just society ought to function.
John Rawls was the philosopher who tried to give liberalism
a soul. In A Theory of Justice (1971), he asked a simple but powerful
question: what kind of society would you build if you didn’t know whether you’d
end up rich or poor, healthy or sick, part of the majority or a marginalised
group? This thought experiment ; the now-famous "veil of ignorance" ;
forced people to imagine fairness not from their current position, but from a
position of radical uncertainty. You couldn’t game the system if you didn’t
know where you’d land in it. Rawls didn’t offer a one-size-fits-all blueprint,
but he did provide a moral yardstick ; one that asked societies to look less
like ladders and more like safety nets. If liberalism sometimes looked like the
smug cousin of capitalism, Rawls reminded it to have a conscience.
Amartya Sen, for his part, took this moral commitment and
added both urgency and perspective, especially from the Global South. In Development
as Freedom (1999), Sen flipped the traditional view of development on its
head. Instead of measuring success by GDP alone, he asked whether people
actually had the capability to lead the lives they valued. It wasn’t
enough to have the vote if you were too hungry to use it. It wasn’t much of a
win to have legal rights if you lacked the education, health, or security to
exercise them.
Sen didn’t just expand liberalism’s reach, he deepened it. He argued that true freedom was not about being left alone, but about having the real, practical means to flourish. His work placed dignity and agency at the heart of development, making a powerful case that liberal principles only mean something if they translate into lived realities. This was liberalism with its sleeves rolled up, less about grand declarations and more about asking, “What does freedom actually look like in someone’s life?”
He also challenged the lazy assumption that Western liberal
democracies were the only source of wisdom. Drawing on diverse traditions, including Indian and Islamic intellectual histories, Sen reminded us that the
desire for freedom, justice, and public reasoning was not a Western export, but
a universal human pursuit. In doing so, he invited liberalism to grow up a bit,
stop acting like it had all the answers, and learn how to listen.
Still, for all its thinkers and theories, liberalism began
to trip over its own shoelaces. The post-Cold War glow turned out to be more
smugness than consensus. Markets were freer, yes, but so were capital flight,
inequality, and the ability for the rich to vote with their money while
everyone else queued up at polling stations. The internet, once celebrated as
the great democratic equaliser, ended up breeding disinformation, surveillance,
and opinion bubbles. And when financial crises rolled in like thunderstorms,
people began to wonder if liberal democracy could offer not just ideals, but
actual outcomes.
Liberalism promised a lot and, in fairness, it delivered
plenty too. But it struggled to anticipate the cracks that would appear in
identity, inequality, and power. Even its greatest champions warned us that the
system would need looking after. We just didn’t always listen.
Realism: The Cold Shower of World Politics
If liberalism was the dream of perpetual peace and polite
institutions, realism was the grumpy uncle at the barbecue, muttering that
everyone’s going to fight over the last sausage, anyway. Where liberals saw
progress and possibility, realists saw power, survival, and an international
system that resembled a Hobbesian pub brawl more than a Geneva roundtable.
Hans Morgenthau, the founding father of modern realism, argued that politics was governed by objective laws rooted in an unchanging human nature. In Politics Among Nations (1948), he wrote like someone who had seen a few too many empires rise and fall, which he had, having first-handedly witnessed both World War One and World War Two. Power wasn’t a dirty word to him, it was the currency of survival. Morality might exist, sure, but it didn’t belong in foreign policy, unless you fancied getting annexed or conquered or dominated. Morgenthau believed that states acted primarily in their national interest, and that moralistic or idealistic foreign policies were a surefire way to end up diplomatically embarrassed or geopolitically irrelevant.
Then came Kenneth Waltz, who looked at Morgenthau’s human-nature stuff and said, “Sure, but let’s take this up a level.” In Theory of International Politics (1979), Waltz launched neorealism, which stripped the whole thing back to system mechanics. Forget psychology, forget individual leaders; Waltz focused on the structure of the international system itself. The world is anarchic, he said, not chaotic but lacking a global authority to enforce rules. And in this self-help system, all states, big or small, democratic or dictatorial, have to look after themselves. It’s like a school with no teachers; even the nice kids bring their own brass knuckles.
Waltz argued that the behaviour of states could be explained by the structure they were trapped in. You didn't need to know a state’s inner motives, ideology, or even the leader’s favourite breakfast. If the system is anarchic and survival is the goal, then security-seeking behaviour becomes rational, predictable, and the only logical imperative.
John Mearsheimer, Waltz’s intellectual heir (and frequent
sparring partner), took this a step further with offensive realism. If
Waltz said states seek security, Mearsheimer said they seek power and lots
of it. In his 2001 book The Tragedy of Great Power Politics, he argued
that great powers are never satisfied with the status quo. They’re like chess
players who can’t resist turning every game into total war. Mearsheimer’s
worldview is chillingly clear: there’s no world government, everyone’s armed,
and if you don’t want to end up vassalised or worse, you better bulk
up; militarily, economically, politically. It’s survival of the fittest and
trust is for suckers.
To Mearsheimer, liberal internationalism is not just
naïve, it’s dangerous. He’s been especially scathing about American foreign
policy since the Cold War, arguing that liberal overreach, rather than realist
restraint, led to debacles like Iraq and the worsening of US-Russia relations.
He warned, long before it was fashionable, that NATO expansion would provoke
Russia. And while he’s been both lauded and lambasted for that view, no one
could accuse him of being vague.
But not all realists are fire-breathing
pessimists. Stephen Walt and Barry Posen, for instance, have
offered more nuanced versions. Walt’s balance-of-threat theory added
a layer of subtlety: it’s not just power that worries states, but how
threatening that power feels. Canada, after all, is powerful in many ways, but
no one’s exactly quaking at the thought of a surprise invasion from Ontario.
Posen, on the other hand, has advocated for restraint in US foreign
policy, a call for fewer military adventures and more focus on genuine strategic
interests.
Realism doesn’t deny cooperation, but it reminds us that
cooperation has limits. Alliances are convenient marriages of interest, not
soulmate-level commitments. And as soon as the costs outweigh the benefits,
someone’s walking out the door.
The realist tradition is full of contradictions, caveats,
and academic knife-fights; but it’s held up a brutal mirror to international
politics. It may not be hopeful, but it has been historically accurate more
often than not. And while it often feels like the intellectual equivalent of
cold porridge, realism continues to remind us that the international system is
not designed for trust falls.
But here’s the problem: realism, too, may be struggling with
the scale and speed of 21st-century interdependence. The system it
describes is still anarchic, but it’s also digitally entangled, economically
fused, and environmentally doomed if everyone just plays to win. The chessboard
is now a web and the old moves don’t quite land the same way.
Global Systems and Inequality: Follow the Money, Mind the
Empire
While liberalism sold us the dream and realism handed us the
terms and conditions, a third group of thinkers stared at the system and asked:
who built this thing, and why is it rigged? These are the scholars who took one
look at the post-war world order and said, “Ah, so colonialism didn’t die. It
just changed clothes.”
Immanuel Wallerstein was one of the most prominent
voices in this line of thinking. His World-Systems Theory wasn’t
content with analysing states in isolation. He argued that to understand any
country’s position, you had to look at the entire global economic system and
crucially, where that country sits in it. The world, he said, is divided into
the core, the semi-periphery, and the periphery. Core countries
(think the US, parts of Europe) specialise in high-skill, capital-intensive
production, while peripheral countries provide raw materials, cheap labour, and
agricultural goods.
It’s a neat system, if you’re in the core. For everyone else,
it’s an economic treadmill: resources flow out, dependency flows in.
Development doesn’t lift all boats, Wallerstein insisted; it builds yachts for
some and leaves others dog-paddling in debt.
Wallerstein wasn’t merely criticising inequality; he was
challenging the very foundations of liberal economic ideology. For all its talk
of progress, free markets, and win-wins, the world economy had recreated
colonial patterns under a new banner. Independence brought flags and national
anthems but not necessarily autonomy or justice.
Then there’s Johan Galtung, a Norwegian sociologist who
introduced the world to a key distinction: direct
violence vs structural violence. While direct violence is the sort
you can point at; war, assault, oppression; structural violence is baked into the
system. It's the poverty that prevents a child from accessing healthcare, the
economic policies that starve entire populations while boosting shareholder
returns. Structural violence is slower, subtler, and often entirely legal.
Galtung’s work also gave us the idea of positive
peace; not just the absence of war, but the presence of justice. You can have a
country with no active conflict and still have widespread misery, exploitation,
and inequality. Peace, he argued, was more than the silence of guns; it was the
dignity of people. And by that standard, much of the post-Cold War
international order looked suspiciously peace-ish but not peaceful.
Both Galtung and Wallerstein challenge the idea that our
current frameworks are universal or inevitable. From their perspective,
liberalism often justifies inequality through “freedom,” and realism excuses it
through “necessity.” But the result is the same: vast sections of the globe
kept on the margins, their development measured not in wellbeing but in GDP
figures and foreign investment.
These thinkers also anticipated many of the critiques now
front and centre in 21st-century debates. Climate change, for instance, isn’t
just an environmental issue; it’s an inequality amplifier. Who emits the most?
The core. Who suffers the most? The periphery. Even solutions; solar panels,
green infrastructure; often require materials extracted from poorer countries at
bargain-bin prices. It’s the same story, just eco-washed.
And when pandemics hit or supply chains snap or interest
rates climb in Washington and spark debt crises in Africa, Wallerstein and
Galtung’s frameworks begin to look less like theory and more like prophecy.
What makes their work so powerful is that it doesn’t simply
call out injustice. It exposes how that injustice is sustained, systematised,
and sold as stability. In doing so, it forces us to ask not just how the
world works, but for whom.
Complexity in the Present Moment
As the world grows more complex, the traditional frameworks
of liberalism and realism, while still valuable, can sometimes feel like they’re
reading from an old script. It’s not that they’re wrong or irrelevant, but
rather that they were built for a different stage. They helped explain a world
of nation-states, ideological standoffs, and clearly drawn alliances. But
today’s challenges; climate change, surveillance capitalism, disinformation, and
posthuman politics, tend to blur categories, cross borders, and defy easy
binaries. A new crop of thinkers hasn’t come to tear down the old models, but
to offer lenses that might be more flexible, adaptive, and better suited to the
tangled, hybrid systems we now inhabit. They aren’t waving manifestos; they’re
drawing new maps.
Bruno Latour, in We Have Never Been Modern (1991),
didn’t so much write a book as drop a philosophical spanner into the gears of
Enlightenment thinking. Modernity, he claimed, was built on a fantasy; that we
could separate nature from culture, science from politics, facts from values.
In practice, we never did. We simply pretended we had. Our systems; legal,
political, scientific; were never truly modern because they never operated in
isolation. They were (and remain) intricate hybrids, full of leakages between
the supposedly distinct realms. Take climate change: it’s not a tidy scientific
issue to be ‘solved’ in a lab. It’s about carbon, yes; but also about colonial
legacies, market systems, migration, media, global inequality, and who gets to
speak on behalf of “truth.” Latour’s real insight was that we’ve never actually
outgrown pre-modern entanglement; we’ve just become more sophisticated at
denying it.
Shoshana Zuboff, meanwhile, peeled back the digital curtain
with The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2019), revealing that what
Big Tech offers isn’t just convenience; it’s behavioural extraction. In her
view, capitalism has quietly mutated. Where it once commodified labour and
land, it now mines you; your clicks, your keystrokes, your anxious late-night
Googling. This isn’t capitalism with gadgets; it’s a new logic entirely.
Autonomy, the golden calf of liberal democracies, begins to look a little
fragile when your thoughts can be anticipated, influenced, and sold before
you've had your morning coffee. Zuboff’s work isn’t just a diagnosis of a
business model; it’s a damning critique of the way we’ve let democracy and
consumerism merge into a behavioural laboratory run by a handful of unelected
coders and their shareholders.
And then there’s Yuval Noah Harari, our modern-day storyteller-in-chief. In Sapiens and Homo Deus, he argues that what truly sets humans apart isn’t opposable thumbs or tool use; it’s narrative. We build imaginary orders and then live inside them as if they were natural law. Borders, brands, marriage, money, constitutions; all fictions, just very well-marketed ones. But the twist in our current era is that these fictions are accelerating. A tweet can move markets. A YouTube rabbit hole can spawn a political movement. Algorithms have become modern-day bards, whispering new stories to us 24/7. Harari doesn’t suggest we escape these myths; he suggests we understand how fragile, powerful, and programmable they really are.
In Homo Deus, he muses on the coming age of “dataism,”
where the ultimate authority is no longer God, reason, or the people; but
algorithms. If knowledge is power, and data is the new gold, then whoever
writes the code writes reality. The issue, Harari warns, isn’t that AIs will
become sentient. It’s that we’ll stop being needed. A future where
insurance companies set premiums based on biometric trackers, where dating apps
outperform gut instinct, and where political campaigns fine-tune messages not
for demographics, but for dopamine;all of it signals a shift from humanism to
machinic pragmatism. And what happens when the myths that used to bind
us; nation, religion, equality; no longer stand up to statistical modelling?
Harari doesn’t answer. He just points to the cliff and says, “Look down.”
Enter Donna Haraway, who, decades before Silicon Valley realised tech could sell us a lifestyle, was already thinking about what it meant to be part-human, part-machine. In her seminal 1985 essay, A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century, Haraway argues that the “cyborg” is not a robot in a trench coat; it’s us. Her work forces us to ask what happens when the lines blur between nature and nurture, flesh and code, organic and synthetic. As we outsource memory to Google, attention to apps, and intimacy to screens, Haraway’s cyborg is no longer a metaphor; it’s a mirror.
David Graeber, too, shook the snow globe of capitalist logic. In Bullshit Jobs, he questioned why so many people feel useless in an economy supposedly driven by productivity. If capitalism is meant to reward value, why does it produce sprawling bureaucracies full of people who quietly admit that their work accomplishes nothing? Graeber’s point wasn’t just that the system is inefficient;it’s that it’s increasingly absurd. He pushed us to imagine economies based not on profit margins but on human flourishing, leisure, and the value of care; ideas that felt radical in a world that measures worth in quarterly reports and LinkedIn endorsements.
And while Antonio Gramsci might seem an odd bedfellow among tech theorists and futurists, his insights into cultural hegemony remain uncannily useful. Writing from a fascist prison in the 1930s, where he was confined by Mussolini’s regime, Gramsci filled his Prison Notebooks with reflections on how power works not just through force, but through consent. He warned that the most dangerous power isn’t brute force; it’s the kind that makes people believe they chose their own submission. When dominant ideologies seep into the everyday—into films, textbooks, job interviews—they begin to look natural. Gramsci didn’t live to see X (formerly Twitter), but he would have understood it immediately: a platform where power and culture mingle so intimately that it’s often hard to tell the difference between content and control.
Together, these thinkers offer no tidy ideology, no single
party line. What they offer is something arguably more useful for our current
moment: a way of thinking. A tolerance for complexity. A suspicion of binaries.
A willingness to embrace entanglement. Rather than lament the end of clear
frameworks, they invite us to become more agile thinkers; to trade blueprints
for compasses. Because the world hasn’t stopped making sense; it’s just stopped
making the kind of sense we used to expect.
These aren’t answers. They’re provocations. And maybe that’s
the point. In a time when the world seems to be moving faster than our theories
can catch up, it might be better to think like a cyborg, argue like an
anthropologist, and dream like a heretic.
When the Map Stops Matching the Terrain: Institutions in
a World They Can’t Read
If the last century was defined by grand
theories; liberalism, realism, Marxism, take your ideological pick, then this one
is increasingly defined by their exhaustion. It’s not that these frameworks
were never useful; it's that the world has shapeshifted so radically that the
tools built to understand it now feel like trying to navigate with a paper map
in a city that’s constantly rearranging itself.
Take liberalism, with its breezy faith in free markets and
free peoples. For all its Enlightenment optimism, it’s struggled to offer
anything coherent in the face of crises like climate collapse, where
“individual choice” means less than nothing when supply chains, multinationals,
and century-old carbon economies are involved. Climate change isn’t a market
failure, it’s the market working exactly as designed, just with a side of
ecological annihilation.
Realism, meanwhile, promised to deal in the cold, hard facts
of power and self-interest. But what happens when power is distributed across
server farms, corporate boards, and platforms with no flags? Realism doesn’t
quite know what to do with stateless warfare, or with a cyber-attack launched
by a teenager in Ukraine that can knock out a hospital system in Brazil. The
state-centric world it describes still exists, it just feels like it’s been
demoted to middle management.
And Marxism, for all its searing insights into class and
capital, still hasn’t quite figured out what to do with a world where people
identify more with playlists and personality types than their position in the
labour hierarchy. Try telling someone juggling three side hustles in London or
New York, drained by rent and notifications, that they’re a “revolutionary
subject.” They’re more likely to send you a meme about late-stage capitalism
than storm the barricades. The proletariat still exists, it’s just busy replying
to emails, trying to pay for groceries, and trying to afford basic health care.
But theory’s not alone in its flailing. The institutions
built to reflect and manage these frameworks aren’t faring much better. The UN,
WTO, and NATO are still speaking the language of mid-century geopolitics; state
actors, official resolutions, formal declarations; while the world they’re
trying to police has gone informal, decentralised, and extremely online.
Consider the EU’s migration policy, a bureaucratic Rubik’s
cube of quotas, border disputes, and politely worded failures. People are
fleeing war and climate collapse with nothing but the clothes on their backs
and a smartphone, while Brussels is still trying to agree on the correct shade
of blue for its official letterhead. It’s not malice, it’s mismatch. These
systems were designed for a different scale, a different speed, and a different
kind of problem.
Or look at pandemic politics, where nations bickered over
PPE shipments and vaccine patents while the virus pinged across the globe at
the speed of a group chat. The WHO, bless it, issued guidance. The real action,
though, happened on Twitter, in DMs, in ad-hoc supply chains built by logistics
nerds and burnt-out nurses. The old command-and-control systems wheezed into
motion just as the world had already moved on.
Then there’s Silicon Valley, blithely operating on the
principle of “permissionless innovation”, which is a fancy way of saying, “We
broke it, now you figure out how to regulate it.” Political systems that take
years to pass a bill are now expected to manage technologies that evolve faster
than you can say “algorithmic opacity.” The tech bros ship updates weekly; your
local MP is still stuck in a subcommittee meeting arguing about what “AI” even
means.
And here’s the kicker: people sense this disconnect. It’s
why Occupy, Extinction Rebellion, and Anonymous resonate, even when they’re
chaotic or cryptic. They feel like the only things matching the vibe of a world
that’s fuzzy, interlinked, and emotionally charged. Traditional institutions
look at these movements and see disorganisation. Many citizens look at
traditional institutions and see irrelevance.
We’re not witnessing a crisis of governance;we’re witnessing
a crisis of application. The tools we once used to read the world no longer
scan. The operating systems of politics were designed for inputs that made
sense in the Cold War era: national interest, GDP growth, diplomatic leverage.
Now the inputs look like: one billionaire’s mood swing, the virality of a
TikTok trend, the weather in the Congo, and the stock price of a semiconductor
company in Taiwan.
And just as outdated code can crash a system, outdated ideas can crash a civilisation.
Shared Planet, Shared Stakes
We need a new framework. Not just a tweak or a patch to the
old ones like it’s a Windows update, something actually new. Something
built from scratch for the messy, entangled, absurdly interconnected world we
now live in. As inevitable as a global government might be in the sci-fi long
run (and yes, I’d absolutely subscribe to that newsletter), we’re unfortunately
lightyears away from it. The political will isn’t there, the institutions
aren’t there, and let’s be honest, the species is still stuck rage-tweeting at
strangers and arguing about milk alternatives. So in the meantime, we need a
functional interim system. One that doesn’t collapse the moment things get
weird;which, let’s face it, is always.
This new framework has to start with accepting that we are,
in fact, different. And that’s fine. Cultures, languages, histories,
beliefs; we're a multicoloured, multi-spiced stir-fry of humanity, and that’s
kind of the point. But our differences shouldn’t be treated like they're
insurmountable. They’re not final bosses. They’re background context. The real
story is that this is our planet, our civilisation, and if
we don’t start acting like that means something, we’re all going to end up
equally doomed; just in slightly different aesthetics.
The old “us vs them” reflex isn’t going to vanish overnight.
It’s baked into us like bad browser extensions. But fine; if we must live with
that narrative for a while longer, let’s at least reframe it. Let
“us” mean all of us; humans, collectively muddling through this glitchy
multiplayer simulation. And let “them” be the stuff that’s actually trying to
kill us: climate collapse, predatory surveillance capitalism, rising
inequality, algorithmic nonsense in policymaking, and the general vibe of
late-stage everything.
Speaking of capitalism; it’s overdue for retirement. Not in a
storm-the-palace way, but in a “this has stopped working and is actively
setting the house on fire” kind of way. Capitalism has gone from being an
economic model to a full-blown metaphysical condition. It sees your free time,
your attention span, even your hobbies, as potential revenue streams. It’s like
that one cousin who tries to sell you crypto at family dinner. It’s time to
say: thank you for a wonderful time, but we need to see other systems.
Even The Orville, created by Seth MacFarlane gets this. In that
future, currency is obsolete thanks to the synthesiser; a kind of magical
vending machine that gives you whatever you want, no money required. The logic
is brilliantly simple: no scarcity, no capitalism. Now, we don’t have synthesisers
(unless you count 3D printers and deeply suspicious AI-generated smoothies),
but we do have the knowledge, tech, and coordination to start
embracing the philosophy behind that world. We can begin building
systems that aren’t glued together by competition, exploitation, and the
constant threat of burnout.
Imagine: economies focused on care, not just consumption. Social systems where mutual aid is the norm, not the exception. Tech driven by ethics, not just profits. Politics that understand interconnected global networks, not just borders. It's not about building a utopia overnight; it's about changing the direction we're heading. We don’t need advanced tech to realise we shouldn't organise society like a corporate pitch meeting, as if we're stuck in some never-ending Shark Tank episode.
Of course, the moment you suggest this, the powerful will
cluck their tongues and warn that without the current institutions, chaos will
reign. “But who will look after the poor if not the state?” they’ll say, as if
it wasn’t the state (and the market it dances with) keeping the poor exactly
where they are. These are the same institutions that let billionaires rocket
themselves into space while insisting there’s “just no money” for housing,
healthcare, or school lunches. The same institutions that bailed out banks but
not renters. That subsidised fossil fuel giants while youth climate strikes
were dismissed as truancy.
In reality, much of the care, the real, meaningful
support, already comes from outside those systems: from communities, mutual aid
groups, digital cooperatives, informal economies, and decentralised networks of
solidarity. Think of the COVID-19 pandemic; who showed up? It wasn’t the structural institutions like the WHO or the IMF.
It was neighbours, NGOs, healthcare workers, teachers adapting overnight, people
crowd-funding each other’s rent, through apps such as GoFundMe, Ketto and Milaap.
We don’t have to burn it all down and start from scratch.
But we do have to admit the current models are badly outdated; like
trying to run modern apps on a Windows 95 machine riddled with malware. Maybe it’s time to stop patching the code and start rewriting the system.
Slowly. Collectively. Thoughtfully. And ideally, with fewer tech bros involved.
So where do we begin? A few starting points:
- Global civic identity: No, not one-world
government (yet), but real initiatives that promote global citizenship. Think
open-source education that anyone with an internet connection can access, not
just those with legacy university logins or trust funds. Multilingual media
platforms that reflect different realities, not just repackage Anglo-American
takes in twelve languages. Imagine an international digital commons where
artists, coders, farmers, scientists, everyone; can collaborate and share tools,
not just compete for grants or patents. And let’s stop pretending climate
agreements made over croissants and vague promises are going to cut it. What we
need is practical, shared climate action;goals that are visible, trackable, and
owned by people, not just pencil-pushers in suits.
- Decentralised cooperation: We’ve got the tech.
We just keep using it like toddlers with rocket launchers. Blockchain and mesh
networks don’t have to be the Wild West of speculation and NFTs of sad monkeys.
They can enable transparent, decentralised systems that actually serve the
public. Imagine climate relief funds directly managed by the communities
they’re meant to support, not “trickled down” through opaque international
agencies. Or cross-border healthcare pools where funding isn’t tied to your
flag or passport but to your actual need. If we must worship tech, let it be
because it finally helped us cooperate across borders, not just hoard coin or
collect surveillance data like Pokémon.
- Values-based governance: This one’s overdue.
Instead of running society like a volatile stock portfolio; constantly asking
“how’s the market feeling today?”; we could centre governance around shared
human values: dignity, sustainability, reciprocity. Metrics that measure wellbeing,
environmental repair and social cohesion, not just quarterly profits. We already do
this in microcosms: some cities are measuring citizen happiness; some nations prioritise environmental stewardship over GDP. It’s not radical. It’s overdue
maintenance. We just need to scale it and trust that people can handle
complexity if you stop treating them like children.
- Post-capitalist experimentation: Look, we don’t
need a full revolution overnight. No pitchforks, no guillotines (unless they’re
metaphorical and tastefully ironic). But we can start piloting
alternatives to extractive capitalism; right now. Universal basic services, like
public transport, healthcare, or internet, that aren’t tethered to employment.
Community-run cooperatives that control their own data instead of handing it to
megacorps. Degrowth trials in towns or cities where the goal isn’t to outpace
the S&P 500 but to reduce waste, increase leisure, and nurture local
economies. It’s not utopia. It’s beta testing for a less soul-crushing future.
This isn’t naïve utopianism. It’s maintenance. It’s adaptation. The frameworks we inherited were built for a colder war, a simpler globe, and a much slower internet. What comes next won’t be perfect, but it has to be braver. It has to be built not on fear, or profit, or rivalry; but on coordination, creativity, and that quiet, irrational hope that maybe, just maybe, we could actually get this right.
Comments
Post a Comment