Crisis as Opportunity

I enjoyed this conversation! I hope you will too.

I have been in intermittent contact with Nafeez Ahmed over the years. We are both systems theorists with many areas of overlap. What became clear during our dialogue is that we share a very similar — almost identical — analysis of the current geopolitical crisis. We also share a number of ideas about how to address it.

BIO

Dr Nafeez Ahmed is the founder of the Age of Transformation, a newsletter exploring what he calls ‘the planetary phase shift’ and Director of the System Shift Lab, a systems transformation consultancy based in London. A systems change expert, Ahmed has worked with some of the biggest organisations in the world, including United Nations agencies, national governments, Fortune 500 companies, and the world’s largest philanthropic foundations - helping to build and deliver high-impact change strategies. The Evening Standard has twice named Nafeez in its Power 1,000 list of the top most influential Londoners. His award-winning journalism, praised by the Sunday Times, The Guardian, The Independent and many others, has been read and watched by millions. His new book is Alt Reich: The Network War to Destroy the West from Within (2024): an investigative history of how the Nazi-aligned Pioneer Fund has given birth to a global far-right network on the cusp of subverting Western democracies.

As we discuss in what follows: The U.S. has always been an oligarchy disguised as a democracy, but now the pretense is getting stripped away. In essence, we are experiencing a second “American Revolution” which intends to force corporate technocracy on the world, just as the U.S. once exported the liberal nation-state model across Europe and its colonialist Empire. What we’re witnessing is an attempt to create a new world order—just as the American Revolution set the model for nation-states in the 18th century, these tech elites are trying to impose the next iteration: a centralized corporate-government AI-controlled system.

The integration of technology and government points toward a new model. The goal is an inhumane technocratic system where AI and blockchain replace public services, reducing government to an automated, algorithmic apparatus. This will be atrocious for most of humanity.

Neither of us think the U.S. will ever return to its old constitutional system. That era is over. We’re in a revolutionary moment — a free fall from the rule of law. One challenge is that outright resistance and old forms of protest probably won’t work. Project 2025 anticipates how to handle these. The power of our authoritarian overlords is too entrenched. Instead, we need to define a new symbiotic strategy—building parallel systems beneath the existing infrastructure.

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Protecting Our Rights and Future

AI leaders like Sam Altman and Dario Amodei openly talk about artificial general intelligence (AGI) arriving in three to five years, at which point most cognitive labor or knowledge work will disappear. AI will start building AI-enhanced robots, accelerating the process until human labor is nearly obsolete. What happens when billions of people no longer have a role in the system?