The brand is chaos. That’s the defining quality of everything that Donald Trump is doing. It’s also the state of our information system. They’re both marked by the same absence of rationality, order, logic, rules and signposts to the future. We are living in an eternal present, an unending scroll of news, videos, cats falling off logs, bombs blowing up apartment blocks and perfectly smooth foreheads speaking at the camera as they narrate the narrowest of worldviews.
There is no sense to be had in a media landscape that both mirrors and enables the political turbulence we’re living through. We’re trapped inside this neverending algorithmic scroll where our dopamine-fuelled lust for the endless new is Trump’s literal foreign policy. In three months, we’ve careered around the world in his wake from Venezuela to Greenland to Iran. Next stop, apparently, Cuba.
The chaos we are living through is the equivalent of cognitive assault. Our extra-sensory information landscape engages our frontal lobes in the busyness of mental processing from which no meaning comes.
Three weeks ago, the news cycle stopped briefly on a subject that for a moment was shocking even in spite of this algorithmic numbing. The dazzling glare of public exposure shone a light on a global network of rich and powerful men, many of them household names, who had participated in, or turned a blind eye to, an international trafficking operation involving hundreds of women and girls. It felt like a sharp blast of daylight had been shone on one of the darkest corners of our world. There was no path to justice for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, but there was some small comfort in that at least, finally, it couldn’t be ignored.
How wrong can you be? Of course, it could be. The news cycle hasn’t just moved on: we are now deep into the testosterone zone, the fizzing, almost sexual excitement of war. This is what the early stages of all wars look like. Pumped-up officials walking stiff-legged to podiums to tell the waiting press about the incredible potency of their firepower. Videos of fighter jets commanding the skies. Mesmerising footage of hi-tech “intercepts” across the night sky. Spectacular explosions among dense tower blocks, all of it so familiar from any video game, while a constant parade of interchangeable military men, analysts, commentators pontificate across our screens.
This was what was on the White House’s social media accounts three days ago. A hyper-masculine meme-ified fantasy of war. But there’s another even more dangerous fantasy at play, because this is a war being waged with a new generation of AI-guided missiles. What’s happening in Iran is a step change. Gaza was the laboratory, this is the next stage. Reporting from +972 magazine in 2024 revealed the Israeli military were using an AI programme, Lavender, to find and profile targets. And last week, the Wall Street Journal and Washington Post revealed that the US had deployed AI at scale. The Post reported that the US military is using the “Maven Smart System” built by Peter Thiel’s Palantir and powered by Anthropic’s Claude to profile and select kill targets. Or, as this piece by campaign group the Citizens sums it up: “The same logic that built recommendation engines and social media algorithms is now being applied to the industrial generation of kill lists. Chatbot systems that entered public life writing emails, summarising documents and telling you what to have for dinner now help determine who lives and who dies.”
Was AI involved in targeting the school in Iran? This is a crucial question. Were those children the collateral damage of an AI hallucination?
Three weeks ago, details of Thiel’s relationship with Epstein came tumbling out. A social, intelligence and business relationship that saw Epstein invest $40m in Thiel’s Valar Ventures and, with the former Israeli PM, Ehud Barak, co-invest in an Israeli surveillance firm, Carbyne. This week, news of Palantir’s involvement in the US’s and Israel’s war of choice saw its stock price rise 15%.
Was it AI that caused the Iranian school to be hit where at least 168 people were killed, mostly children? Investigations by three major US news organisations – the New York Times, CNN and Reuters – have now concluded the school was hit by US bombs. Reuters identified a “double tap” – two strikes, 40 minutes apart. The open-source investigative site Bellingcat yesterday published a report that reviewed verified footage and identified the missile which hit the school to be a US Tomahawk. That report has now been independently replicated by the New York Times.
I grew up in Wales and felt the chill every time we passed a road sign to “Aberfan”. My dad would recount the story of the day a coal tip fell on the town’s school, killing 144 children. The name of Aberfan is still burned into the nation’s collective memory more than half a century on. But the slaughter of an entire community’s children in the town of Minab in a single day? It’s an obscenity that’s caused barely a ripple of anguished outrage.
We now need to know: was AI involved in targeting this school? This is a crucial question. Were those children the collateral damage of an AI hallucination? We all know how unreliable these large language models are. We’ve all been served a bullshit answer based on a fabricated link. Now apply this to war. We can’t let this moment pass. Minab, like Aberfan, is a place that should be burned on to our brains.
AI, like war, is a hyper-masculine fantasy of God-like power. But it’s nothing of the sort: it’s just a story, a myth, that’s being imposed on us by a self-interested cohort of unaccountable men succoured by a pliant and incurious press.
Forget Andrew Tate, this is the real manosphere. One whose edges we can’t even see because we’re living inside it. Our world is controlled by these men, their platforms, their alliances with nation states – technology-fuelled political power which is only accelerating and gathering strength. When I coined the word “broligarchy”, it wasn’t as a cutesy pun: I used it to describe the confluence of Silicon Valley technologies and US state authoritarianism, and a warped toxic pseudo-masculinity that’s at its heart.
Andrew Tate is simply a phenomenon that is downstream of this. He’s a visible excrescence that’s a byproduct, nothing more than a boil on the backside of the broligarchs. Two weeks ago, in the midst of the Epstein revelations, I read Gisèle Pelicot’s autobiography. It’s an astonishing story of almost superhuman resilience, but it also forced me to confront yet another bleak dystopian consequence of our brave new digital world.
The multiple rapes Gisèle Pelicot survived were only possible because a technology platform enabled her husband to connect with other rapists – at least 72 of them – in a 50km radius of their small French provincial town.
What do you do with that information? In the pre-internet age, would all those men be rapists? I don’t believe so. Their desires were normalised by algorithmic forces beyond their control and an opportunity was presented by a platform that offered anonymity and impunity. It fed them a fantasy of God-like power and control: possession of a woman who literally couldn’t fight back.
You don’t want to face this. None of us do. It’s too dark, too bleak. But to understand what is happening now, in Iran and Lebanon, and the forces behind it, we need to see that this is a continuum. Dominique Pelicot and Andrew Tate and Jeffrey Epstein are only symptoms. They are the doorway through which we can understand the forces behind not just another catastrophic Gulf war but a global power structure in which state violence, commercial profit and the control, domination and violation of women are inextricably entwined.
Forget Andrew Tate, this is the real manosphere. One whose edges we can’t even see because we’re living inside it
The blueprint for everything we are seeing right now is Gaza. There are no words to describe what happened there. And yet, it’s happening all over again. Last week, Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, told reporters that Beirut would be Gaza-ified. “The southern suburbs will become Khan Younis,” he said, referring to one of many Gaza communities destroyed in the Israeli assault. Israel ordered half a million people – a tenth of Lebanon’s tiny population – to leave their homes, in the middle of Ramadan with nowhere to go.
Forced displacement of a civilian population is a war crime. But then it’s all war crimes. On Sunday, it was reported Israeli commandos disguised as Lebanese soldiers – a war crime – had killed 41 civilians – a war crime – because they went looking for the body of an Israeli airman shot down 40 years ago. What? Even his wife called out the IDF for the madness of this operation.
The failure to focus on the victims, to treat them as humans, amid the complacency of the western media, the vested interests of the political class and the chaos of our information landscape is a refrain we’ve heard before, but Iran firing back has changed the equation. Today the oil price is in turmoil, the world’s supply of sulphur is literally going up in smoke over Tehran and a JP Morgan analyst in the Wall Street Journal called the closure of the Strait of Hormuz “not just the worst-case scenario … an unthinkable scenario”.
Jeffrey Epstein never got to pay for his crimes. Netanyahu and Trump have so far got away with theirs. But the rest of us may not. Actions have consequences. And we may be living with what the US and Israel started last week for many years to come. There’s no roadmap to “victory” or even how this ends.
This is an edited version of a recent post on Nerve co-founder Carole Cadwalladr’s How to Survive the Broligarchy