Not making a reel, I am writing. Writing- an old-school method of communication. If you need a TL;DR, I can give you one: 'The world is complicated, and here's my take.' But the value is in the details. These are just my two cents on the current geopolitical state of the world.
I. Winning and Losing Wars
America usually states these goals for committing aggression:
Pretexts including but not limited to spreading democracy, eliminating weapons of mass destruction, neutralising terrorist networks, countering communism, and, recently and very blatantly in the case of Venezuela, Oil.
Post-war, we would judge if they win or lose by seeing if these goals, all or some of them, were achieved. Let us look at how America performed in some of the recent wars.
Vietnam – When North Vietnam defeated South Vietnam in 1975, the country was reunified in 1976 as the Socialist Republic of Vietnam, under the Communist Party of Vietnam, which remains the sole ruling party to this day. So, the US lost?
Afghanistan – Al-Qaeda was dismantled, and Osama bin Laden killed, even though the Taliban, Islamist Jihadists returned to power the moment American troops departed. Let’s call this a tie.
Iraq – Did America win this one? Because Saddam Hussein was removed. But what about the oil? The major oil contracts did not go to American companies. Chinese and Russian firms secured many of the most significant deals. And today, Iraq sits firmly within Iran's sphere of geopolitical influence — Iran being America's principal regional adversary. By the logic of resource extraction, the United States removed a government, spent trillions, sacrificed thousands of soldiers, and handed its greatest rival the keys to the neighbourhood. That is a peculiar kind of victory.
II. What Winning Actually Means: The Military-Industrial Logic
The error in evaluating these wars lies in accepting the stated goals as the real goals. Justifications and pretexts are never the real objectives — they are narrative infrastructure, constructed to make invasion legible to the public. The weapons of mass destruction in Iraq did not exist. However, these were not intelligence failures. They were stories.
The actual measure of success in modern warfare is simpler and more brutal: who profited? It's the military-industrial complex — the interlocking relationship between defence contractors, the Pentagon, and political power. Lockheed Martin, Raytheon, Boeing, and their peers profit regardless of battlefield outcomes. Wars create contracts. Contracts create revenue. Revenue creates lobbying power. Lobbying power creates the next war.
Understood this way, the United States has not lost a war since 1945. It has consistently generated enormous returns for the capital class that owns and operates the war machine.
The soldiers who die, the taxpayers who fund it, the veterans who return broken — these are the costs of doing business, not the intended beneficiaries of the war. Profits for the capital class is the measure of success. It’s a pretty dark but coherent worldview. Hard to fully dismiss.
III. The Consumerworker and the Machinery of Capital
The term consumerworker — popularised in the animated series South Park — captures something that conventional economic language obscures. The majority of people in capitalist societies occupy a dual role: they sell their labour to earn wages, and they spend those wages on goods and services that generate profit for capital.
They are simultaneously the engine and the fuel. Their interests, their welfare, their flourishing — these are not what drives the system. Profit for the capital class does.
The most common counterargument at this point would be that Capitalism has raised living standards.
Yes. Henry Ford famously doubled his workers' wages, and said so explicitly — he wanted them to be able to afford the cars they were building. This was not generosity. It was a maintenance cost on human capital. Rising living standards, then, are not a byproduct of capitalism, nor a concession extracted from it. They are a designed feature — a lubricant for the machinery. You give the consumerworker just enough bread and just enough dream to keep them productive and compliant. What are peanuts to the capital class is a life's aspiration to the worker.
Why do big tech companies of Silicon Valley have ping pong tables and free food? To keep workers comfortable, loyal, and dreaming of stock options. Dreams are cheap to sell and expensive to abandon.
So, what am I saying? My argument isn't that capitalists are evil — it's that the system has its own logic that even capitalists are trapped in.
IV. Beyond Money: The Ultra-Oligarchs their Game and AI
What about automation? It reduces the need for human workers. Workers may become obsolete. And Bezos, he would still need you to afford his products, right? What happens to consumerworkers when capital no longer needs them as consumers or workers?
Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg — these figures possess more wealth than they could spend across ten lifetimes. The idea that they are motivated by financial gain is technically true but psychologically naive. What motivates them is something closer to historical significance — the desire to be written into the next five hundred years of human civilization. Money, at their scale, is no longer currency. It is a score. Think of a role-playing game — with empire-building as the objective, legacy as the victory condition, and the rest of humanity as non-player characters (NPCs) in their narrative.
This is not villainy in the conventional sense. It is what happens to the human brain when it has been exceptional, insulated, and surrounded by deference for decades. You cannot sustain that level of ambition, risk tolerance, and indifference to others' opinions without clinical levels of self-regard. The trait that builds the empire is the same trait that makes them dangerous at scale.
Musk thinks he's saving humanity by going to Mars. A biologist would tell him Earth's ecosystems deserve that energy first. He does not sell cars. He is positioning to own communication infrastructure, energy systems, transportation networks, and artificial intelligence simultaneously. It's childish to think that Bezos wouldn't need humans to buy his stuff etc. Bezos isn't thinking about whether humans can afford products. That's not the game. He's thinking about whether Amazon can own entire layers of civilization's infrastructure — logistics, cloud, AI, space. These are not businessmen; they're creating an epic — we just happen to live in it.
They are using AI the same way everyone else is using it - to optimise. AI isn't replacing the machine — it's turbocharging it. More efficiency, more scale, more empire. AI in this context is not a product. It's a leverage multiplier on already incomprehensible leverage. One good AI system can do what thousands of engineers did. That's not cost-cutting — that's compressing the distance between vision and execution for people who already have unlimited capital.
The best that can be said of them — and it is not much — is that they may believe, in their engineer's way, that a well-oiled capitalist machine eventually raises standards of living for all. It is also the belief of people who are not scientists but builders.
V. Envisioning the Moneyless World
The assumption that money is an essential motivator for human behaviour is as unfounded as the claim that without religion, people would abandon morality. Both arguments assert that humans require an external control mechanism because they cannot be intrinsically driven. Both are, not coincidentally, arguments made by those who benefit from the control mechanism existing.
How can we envision a moneyless world when we can’t even imagine how it would work? That’s true.
The science fiction franchises that have thought most seriously about this — Star Trek and The Orville. Their moneyless worlds are without money, yes, but not without competition or ambition. Men will still compete. Competition doesn't disappear without money. It redirects. They will compete to be the best doctor, the finest engineer, the most accomplished artist, the most respected scientist. Sexual selection will persist. Status hierarchies will persist. What will not persist is the mediation of all human value through a single abstraction called money. These words are not utopias; they are not perfect. There can never be a perfect society. There can be progressive/advanced or regressive/primitive societies.
Seth MacFarlane devoted an entire season finale of The Orville to a direct argument: that a society organised around monetary exchange is a primitive one, not an inevitable one. Instead of money, your social standing reflects what you've contributed. Open-source communities already do this informally. Your "score" on GitHub is your peer recognition.
In Star Trek, replicators eliminated scarcity. Once scarcity is eliminated, money loses its function. Interestingly — AI and automation might actually get us there.
The organisational question — how do you allocate resources without price signals? — is genuinely hard. Soviet central planning failed because human administrators could not process information at the required scale. But a sufficiently advanced artificial intelligence theoretically could. The deepest problem is not algorithmic, however. It is political: whoever controls the AI that performs allocation becomes the new capital class.
Even without money, power concentrates. How do we solve this?
Decentralization of power. That's the hope. But decentralization is incredibly hard to maintain. Here's why: Every organization, no matter how democratic it starts, eventually gets captured by a small elite. Even communist revolutions meant to destroy hierarchy produced Stalin and Mao. The structure mutates back toward concentration.
With AI specifically, the problem is acute. Where decentralization has genuinely worked:
Internet protocols — nobody owns TCP/IP
Linux — decentralized development, nobody controls it
Language itself — most powerful coordination tool humans have, completely decentralized
So, it's not impossible. It's happened. But notice — all successful decentralization happened at the protocol/infrastructure level, not the organizational level.
The pattern seems to be:
Decentralize the rules and infrastructure, not the people. Because people always consolidate.
Which suggests that the moneyless world needs:
An ungameable, ownerless, transparent system at the base layer. Like a constitution, nobody can amend for personal benefit.
But then the question becomes — who writes that constitution?
The answer, perhaps, is that no single authority writes the rules. Society continuously writes them. The constitution of the post-money world is not a founding document — it is a living system, accumulating wisdom and revising itself through shared trauma and collective experience, the way common law evolves case by case, the way science self-corrects across generations, the way language changes without anyone deciding it changes.
VII. The Condition of Evolution
An uncomfortable question:
If society continuously writes the rules — you need a society that is collectively wise enough to write good rules. Star Trek's premise isn't really the moneyless economy. That's the outcome. The actual premise is human maturation as a species.
Which brings you to the hardest question of all — not organizational but psychological. Can humans actually mature at a collective level? Or does each generation just repeat the same patterns with better technology?
The path to a post-money, post-scarcity society — if it exists — runs through the dismantling of the ideological tools that make inequality feel inevitable. Religion, caste, racism, and money are not separate phenomena. They are different languages for the same sentence: the current distribution of power is natural, divinely ordained, cosmically justified.
VI. Progress Is Not a Ratchet
The trajectory of human moral progress is real. Slavery was once universal and unquestioned. Women used as property and second class citizens. The progress we made against racism, casteism. Or, vast amount of scientific knowledge that we use in our life so casually.
But progress is not a ratchet. Just because something happened is not a guarantee of its permanence.
The mechanism of reversal is consistent: economic anxiety, cultural displacement, a compelling villain narrative, and a strongman promising restoration.
The language coming out of the current US administration about Greenland, Panama Canal, and Canada — these aren't jokes or negotiating tactics anymore. They're territorial ambition dressed in economic language. That's colonialism's grammar.
"We need it for national security," and "we need it for economic reasons" are the exact justifications every colonial power used. Britain, France, Belgium — same sentences, different accents.
What the best science fiction imagines — and what the most coherent political philosophy points toward — is not a designed utopia but an evolved one. Not a constitution written by a founding genuises, but a civilisation that continuously authors itself, integrating wisdom across generations, correcting errors, refining logic, and expanding moral horizons.
