We too have our illusions. For 30 years, British politicians mistook historical conditions for universal truths. They believed in progress — an improving world, the common rationality of humanity, the better angels of our nature —  and they believed in power, the unquestioned power of the British state. Mired in these illusions, Westminster politicians did something extraordinary — they aided and encouraged the secessionist parties of Scotland and Wales. Heedless of history, careless of the future, most MPs now greet devolution and nationalist power with equanimity or indifference. This equanimity may yet be tested. Yesterday, another poll showed a majority of Scottish residents support independence. In truth, the breakup of the United Kingdom would be a catastrophe — a catastrophe for the British people as a whole, and a catastrophe for the residents of Scotland and Wales. To understand why, we must look away from the constitutional tribulations of the British state, and consider instead the darkening world in which we find ourselves. 

If you are not worried about the future, you have not been listening. Over the following decades, our world is likely to be marked by runaway automation, resource competition, environmental degradation, state collapse, and the mass migration of people. The only mechanism through which the people of Great Britain can navigate these challenges is that of the state. Only the state can extract and redistribute revenue from foreign tech firms, only the state can defend our borders, and the state alone can maintain the popular legitimacy required to achieve both. To Balkanize Britain is to destroy our prosperity and security; no policy goal of Right or Left is strengthened by weakness and disunity.

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We cannot presume that we are heading for a more prosperous future. Artificial intelligence is driving profound changes to work, economic activity, and the distribution of economic value. As more and more tasks are rendered subject to automation, the relative value of human labor will change. Lawyers, accountants, financial planners, and other members of the UK’s service-heavy bourgeoisie are highly exposed. Analysts suggest millions of these jobs will vanish in the years ahead, but no plan exists for their replacement. Perhaps, it is argued, we should encourage our children to become plumbers and builders. Yet this too misses an important trend now heaving into view — the mass rollout of humanoid service robots. Such robots will be cheap, tireless, and unable to complain. Cloud-connected and AI-enabled, they will be able to access the compressed summation of the entire body of human knowledge. The competitive logic of inter-company competition means these robots will get better and better, with billions of dollars being poured into boosting their ability to manipulate the physical world. Where, exactly, are human workers meant to compete?

Scale provides bargaining power. In an era of AI, global tech giants, and unabashed geopolitics, Britain’s collective self-interest requires all the scale it can muster. A traditional argument in favor of automation is that automation brings its own economic rewards; the profits from high-producing firms will boost the tax base and spread throughout the economy. Yet here, too, we have a problem — for the United Kingdom is heavily reliant upon US tech firms. It lacks its own AI models, and it lacks a strong robotics sector.  Foreign-owned technology will be taking British jobs, and there is no guarantee that new British jobs will emerge to absorb the unemployed. The only entity capable of extracting resources from foreign companies, and the only entity capable of doing this while also representing the public interest, will be the state. To split the state — to create one, or even three, new weak and fractious states upon Great Britain — is to smash democratic leverage over foreign capital.  

Managing technological change requires a strong state; so too does environmental breakdown. If automation is transforming the basis of the economy; global warming is transforming the material basis of society. By the 2050s, the world is likely to reach 2C of global warming. At 2C, sea levels will rise, droughts will increase, and crop yields decline. Yet 2C is itself a consensus scenario; other forecasts posit a rise as high as 3C or 4C. A few decades on, the earth will be even hotter. Under conservative estimates, we can expect the planet to be 3C hotter by the 2070s. Much of the world will be rendered uninhabitable; productive areas will suffer severe environmental stress, lowering agricultural productivity; major cities will be underwater. 

Environmental collapse will breed political instability. Within the more vulnerable regions, economies will falter and fail. Failing states will descend into conflict, and migrants will move in their millions. In October 2025, the UK Joint Intelligence Committee found that “every critical ecosystem is on the pathway to collapse.” Such collapse will drive migration, and however far away it may seem, such turmoil will affect Britain. Collapsing supply chains will affect our food security. Migrant flows and climate breakdown will increasingly affect international politics, and with it the security needs of the British state. 

An independent Scotland, possessed of nominal armed forces, would be unable to extend effective protection over its own territory. This would harm the people of Scotland; it would also harm the interests of those further south. Scottish independence also poses problems of hard power. Should it secede, the remnant United Kingdom would lose one third of its landmass, over 80% of its oil & gas production, most of its offshore wind resources, and 8% of its population. These figures are not artifacts of academic curiosity — they speak to the core security needs of the British state, and the British people as a whole. The only construct with the collective power and the popular legitimacy capable of navigating us through the storms ahead is that of the nation. As such, it must be rebuilt. The fact we need to rebuild it at all speaks to a fundamental constitutional failure — devolution.

Devolution has failed. It has failed not only because it was wrong; it has failed because it was stupid. Its planners and progenitors imagined it would strengthen the British Union, and provide better local government. They were mistaken, and misunderstood what a nation actually is. The classic account came from Benedict Anderson, who typified nations — nations, not ethnicities — as “imagined communities”. A nation is a group of people who, despite multitudinous variations of place, class, language or religion, imagine themselves to be, in some crucial sense, the same. Imagination brings them together, and imagination sustains them. Imagination is sustained and spread through stories and institutions, and rituals — the shared consciousness created by a “national” newspaper, participating in a “national” elections, or enjoying “national” sports. A nation is not an inevitability, one brought into being by the ineluctable forces of history; these forces do not exist. A nation is a choice, a discourse, and a project.

Elites build nations, for it is they who create and shape the institutions and stories which bind them together. Bismarck created modern Germany; Cavour constructed Italy; Ataturk wrought Turkey from the ruins of Ottoman collapse. Kings, presidents, and prime ministers rely in turn on the civil service — the teachers and administrators who, fanning out within their territorial borders, inculcate their people in the patterns and practices that will bind them together. From Egypt to Vietnam, the modernist states of the 19th and 20th century sought to engage in nation-building, to wield coherent peoples from their disparate groupings of faith, dialect, geography, and occupation. 

Britain’s elite, however, has done the opposite; it has chosen to dissolve the British nation. Blind to the lessons of the past, heedless to the risks of the future, Britain’s leadership class has spent 30 years reifying new nations within its borders. In devolution, and in the devaluing of Britain’s institutions, our leaders are dissolving the ties that bind this island together. The United Kingdom is a composite polity, one born in the union of different jurisdictions, ethnicities, and creeds. Scotland, Ireland, England and Wales existed long before the United Kingdom, as did the local identities of their inhabitants. The United Kingdom, and with it the British people, were born in the Union of these entities. It is the peculiarity of the British elite that they chose to limit their own nationhood via devolution — to place back in these pre-existing forms the power of imagination, the ability to create community, and the story-building institutions of political and institutional life. 

Devolution did more than strengthen local government — it created and strengthened new “imagined communities”, communities away from and in direct contrast to Britain as a whole. The advocates of devolution showed a basic failure to consider history, institutions, and human nature. They failed to consider that newly-created parliaments, populated and staffed by ambitious new legislators, might naturally seek to increase their own power. It is in the nature of institutions to seek power, and of individuals to seek power within them. The new Scottish Parliament was founded in 1999; the Welsh Assembly was opened in the same year. Devolution handed core responsibilities of the state over to the new parliaments. In both cases, but particularly so in Scotland, local nationalists have used these powers to begin corroding the British state. We see this more clearly in education and in health. 

The SNP party state has utilized control of the education system to strengthen its power and to undermine the basis of the British state. It has developed school history curricula to promote anti-English and anti-British sentiment. In 2008, it announced free university tuition for Scottish Undergraduates and citizens of the European Union; meanwhile, English students had to pay full tuition fees. Whereas 30% of Welsh students and 20% of Northern Irish students go to university elsewhere in the UK, 93% of Scottish students remain in Scotland — meaning they do not have the lived experience of the British Union. Graduates now make the core of SNP support.

Health policy shows how devolution hacks at the core collective experiences of British life. It is a truism of British public life that the NHS is the closest we have to a state religion. Its needs, its rituals, and its requirements form some of the core issues of our politics, and a primary focus of public sentimentality. Yet “our NHS” is seen less and less as a collective enterprise. In 1999, control of the NHS in Scotland was devolved to the new parliament. During the pandemic, devolved control over health policy gave rise to endless opportunities for nationalist posturing. Sturgeon’s regular health appearances appeared designed to undercut those of the British Prime Minister. There were leaks of information, and pre-emptions of UK-wide announcements. More importantly, the ability of the SNP-led government to impose different lockdown rules to those of England and Wales further underlined and created the appearance of Scottish separation. In a very real sense, Scottish people had a different pandemic; a core collective experience was instead turned into an opportunity for separatist consciousness formation. Every time Nicola Sturgeon addressed Scotland on its pandemic policy, and every time Mark Drakeford made his own announcements in respect to Wales, a further blow was dealt to the imagined community of the United Kingdom. 

Westminster’s disregard for nation-building, its fundamental lack of seriousness, was further underlined in its haphazard and casual approach to the 2014 referendum. Whereas states with written constitutions require supermajorities for major constitutional changes, the 2014 referendum was allowed to proceed on bare 50/50 vote — leaving a decision of the utmost historical gravity prey to basic questions of turnout or rounding errors. Despite the UK’s centuries-long heritage as a unified polity, one marked by the movement and intermixing of peoples across its regions, the vote was restricted only to those who could claim Scottish residency. Scots resident in London, Manchester, Belfast, or Cardiff — in other words, the Scots who might most fully embrace the Union itself — were barred. By accepting the debate could occur only in Scotland, among those resident only in Scotland, the UK leadership accepted a fundamental weakening of its position, and an implicit dismissal of the idea of Union. In devolution, and in the Scottish Referendum, Britain’s elite gave an intellectual surrender.

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The UK has been and is capable of change. Tom Nairn famously viewed the Anglo-British state as “Ukania” — an absurd relic, frozen in premodern form by a premature bourgeois revolution. Far from being a modern nation state, he saw it as an essentially imperial construct, founded and maintained in order to undergird the far-flung hegemony of a London-led empire. His view is paralleled by that of David Edgerton, for whom pre-War Britain was not so much a nation state as the governing and coordinating node in a world economic system. To Edgerton, however, a “British nation” came into being during the 20th century. This British nation was born in central planning, the pressure of war, and a postwar emphasis on material self-sufficiency. Through these, and in the moral narrative of the Second World War, a distinctive new national identity was forged. 

Today, the British elite must once again learn to embrace nation-building. We must make people feel British, and promote or rebuild the institutions that encourage them to do so; only then can the UK endure. The collapse of the United Kingdom is not pre-ordained; nothing is. Instead, it is a matter of chance, contingency, and will. The UK may or may not be an absurd construct, as Nairn considered. But in a world without order, one shorn of higher powers, to live means to embrace the absurd. As a Frenchman once wrote: “The realization that life is absurd cannot be an end, but only a beginning.”

The Isle of Man’s Tourist Trophy (TT) is the most dangerous motor competition in the world. It has killed more than 270 of its competitors and crippled many more; since the birth of the TT, only two years have gone without fatalities. Formula 1 drivers race upon purpose-built circuits, places provided with run off zones, safety barriers, and specialized road surfaces; the TT has none of these. Reaching top speeds of more than 200 mph, competitors hurtle through country roads, villages, towns, and up a mountain.

They must pass walls, trees, houses, and horses; spectators, furniture, telephone poles and iron railings. They must negotiate more than 200 bends and kinks to the course; blind turnings and hairpin corners; airborne jumps and fearsome plunges; corners so tight that their knees hang centimeters above the tarmac — and they do all of this knowing that if they get it wrong, if they miscalculate an angle or a turning or a bump in the road, they may die. It is a competition almost entirely run and raced by amateurs, mechanics, builders, farmers, plumbers. None do it for money; winners can expect to receive a mere £26,250. They are doing it instead for something else: the thrill of speed, of risk, and of victory; the regard of other racers, and the call of tradition.

Now finishing its 114th year, the TT is an arena of danger and glory, the subject of films, documentaries, and songs. The central event of an entire industry, it is also a testing ground and product exhibition. Generations of motorcycle builders used the TT as a benchmark, a standard against which to measure the performance of their models; companies have lived and died based upon how their vehicles performed on the track. Through the TT, we can tell a story not only of courage, meaning, and myth, but also a story of manufacturing — of Britain’s long reign as workshop to the world, and its precipitate collapse to foreign competition.

The TT was born in exception. In 1903, the British government banned motor vehicles from traveling at more than 20 mph; speed enthusiasts were obliged to look elsewhere. Possessed of its own legal system, and pleased to accept financial incentives, the Isle of Man was the perfect place in which to stage the races and trials so earnestly sought by the motor industry. The first TT was held in 1907 and — wars and pandemics aside — it has been going strong ever since. It dominates the island’s annual calendar, and is the backbone of its tourist industry. On average, 40,000 fans and 10,000 motorcycles visit the island. There are many more visitors than hotel beds; residents rent out their homes, guest bedrooms, and even their fields, charging tourists for a spot to pitch their tent. To accommodate the racing, schools have a two-week summer half term. The course itself transforms; spectator stands are erected, barriers put up, livestock fencing inspected, the road itself repaired and swept.

What is it that drives the contestants up onto the mountain? A lonely impulse of delight; a tumult on the roads. Stuart Barker, interviewing TT riders for his 2022 book Ragged Edge, found that they spoke of the thrill, the buzz, adrenaline; the feeling, as 1950 winner Geoff Duke put it, of “elation and absolute wonder of going down Bray Hill for the first time”. For some, the risk is the point; as observed by TT racer Guy Martin, “You have to take the risk to get the buzz.” For others, it is a matter of history and tradition, with brother following brother and sons following their fathers. Beside tradition, besides the thrill and the adrenaline, riders are also attracted by the magnitude and prestige of the TT, the “pure kudos” of the event, its status as the “ultimate” challenge.

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To win in the TT is to participate in a century-long tradition, and to rank with and among the legends of the course. The TT’s great contests are the stuff of legend: the 1967 Senior race between Mike Hailwood and Giacomo Agostini, say, or Hailwood’s comeback some 11 years later. So too are they emblems of endurance and will. Consider the determination of Robert Dunlop, who arrived for the 1998 TT on crutches. Right arm and right leg crippled from a TT crash four years earlier, he had broken his collarbone and re-broken his leg only three weeks before the event. Not only did he join the Ultralightweight race, but he won it; victorious, he cast his crutches into the crowd. Or else there’s Conor Cummins. Thrown from his bike and sent tumbling down the mountain, he sustained a broken back, arm, pelvis, and torn ligaments, yet returned and, 12 years later, took second place in the 2022 Superstock race.

The most successful riders ascend into myth. In pubs across the Isle of Man, hanging on a wall someplace behind the bar, sit the icons of a votive cult — portraits of Joey Dunlop. The victor of 26 TT races, Dunlop, who was Northern Irish, dominated the track for a quarter century. A statue of him can be seen on the TT course, overlooking the Bungalow Bend; last year, 25 years after his death in Estonia, TT organizers arranged a tribute lap in his honor. This week, his life-sized image decorated the walls of the grandstand bar, along with other TT greats, figures like John McGuinness, Michael Dunlop, Dave Molyneaux. So too are they etched into the route itself; each of these men has a corner of course named after them. Through competition, meaning is inscribed into the landscape.

TT races end where they begin: in the shadow of the grave. Directly opposite from the TT grandstand is the Douglas borough cemetery. Yards from the dead, winners are brought to the podium, there to be adorned in a giant laurel wreath, one so large it must be slung across the chest and under the shoulder. In some respects, the TT is not an event in history — it is an event before history, an extrusion of premodern values within a risk-averse, money-centric liberal order. By joining the TT, ordinary men and women, the vast majority of whom are amateurs, trade the risk of death for the thrill of life, and for the chance of glory.

“I don’t want to grow old and regret things I didn’t do. What do you do in life? Do you sit around wishing you’d done stuff, or do you get out there and do it?” These words were said by James Hillier, a TT competitor in our own era; said in a different register, their message is still older. In the Iliad, the hero’s existence is defined by the choice between a long and obscure life and a short, glorious one. Sitting in his camp, Achilles must choose between the pleasures of home, and the immortality of renown; it is a choice between death, and between life. The Trojan hero Sarpedon puts it a different way; were it possible to go on ageless and immortal, he would not go on fighting. “But now, seeing that the spirits of death stand close about us in their thousands, no man can turn aside nor escape them, let us go on and win glory for ourselves, or yield it to others.” Risking their lives, embracing the thrill of risk, the danger of injury, and the glory of competition, TT racers affirm, in their own startling way, the existential choices all of us face.

The TT is one of the great cultural events of British life. Despite this, it is oddly underappreciated in mainstream British culture. Too Northern, perhaps; too working class. A festival for mechanics and motorheads, taking place far from the power centers of the South East. In a sense, this too has a heritage. From the earliest days of the industry, British motorcycling had clear class connotations, seen as the domain of young men, of factory workers and laborers, embracing the freedom of the open road. For British manufacturers this was the industry’s strength — a clearly defined market — and also its curse.

Throughout its long life, the TT has tracked the improvement of technology — the relentless improvement of the internal combustion engine, of frames, suspension, tires, brakes, fuels, metallurgy, lubrication, aerodynamics, engine configuration, reliability, and electronics. As the machines improved, so too did the lap times. The first 60 mph lap was reached in 1924; the first 80-mph lap in 1930. The first 100-mph lap was achieved in 1957; 120 in 1989; the current high, achieved by Peter Hickman in 2023, is just over 136 mph. Driving this has been competition: the competition of individuals, and the competition of companies and nations.

“One is apt to think of the TT as a sporting event that the trade happens to find worthwhile to patronize. But it is more accurate to consider it a trade event that happens to be of a sporting character… The ultimate purpose of the meeting is to sell motorcycles.” Writing in 1951, motor journalist Francis Jones was clear on the role of the TT. The course was used to sell bikes, and to test them, a way of examining performance and reliability under the most severe of conditions. Bikes that succeeded in the TT would succeed with the sports-driven, risk-oriented, male customers that the industry identified as its core market. It was a mindset built up over decades, decades within which British bikes stood supreme across global markets. Right up until the Sixties, the TT was a showplace of British manufacturing prowess. Matchless motorbikes dominated the years before the First World War, and between 1926 and 1939, at least one Solihull-made Norton finished in the top three places of the Isle of Man TT.

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Alongside the commercial ties were those of passion, for many of the UK’s leading firms were owned and operated by motorcycle hobbyists. Harry Collier, the son of the Matchless founder and later an MD of the company, raced semi-professionally and had a distinguished TT career. Across the industry, senior management would be almost obliged to make the annual pilgrimage to the Isle of Man. Employees also participated: at the AMC factory in Woolwich, employment preference was given to motorbike riders, TT results were broadcast over the public address system, and, on at least one occasion, the company gave leave to 200 staff so that they could travel to the TT.

This strength did not last. In 1939, a BMW won the Senior TT. Accompanied by billowing swastikas, it was an important prewar propaganda for victory for the Nazi state. In 1947, an Italian machine won the Lightweight TT race. British dominance in the Senior and Junior categories lasted into the mid Fifties, when the Italian Gilera and Moto Guzzi teams started to win prizes. From 1956, Norton and AMC announced they would no longer run official race teams. Honda won its first race in 1961; within a few years, Japanese bikes dominated Honda alone has since won over 250 TT races, followed by Yamaha and Kawasaki. By 1992, when first asked to ride upon a British-made Norton, Steve Hislop laughed; no-one had won on a British bike in 30 years. In the end, he did win — but that remains the last time a British bike triumphed in the TT’s biggest competition.

The British motorcycling industry failed for three reasons. Believing in craftsmanship, postwar managers failed to adopt new assembly line technology, thus damaging their ability to scale, and to maintain quality control. Focused on sport, and upon a masculine ethos of competition, they missed the female market. Above all, British firms failed adequately to recognize and meet demand for “economy” bikes: cheap, stylish, easy to use vehicles for the non-technical commuter. By doing so, they laid the ground for their eventual failure in sport as well.

British motorcycling is a case study of “segment retreat”. Category by category, Britain’s postwar motorcycle manufacturers withdrew before the advance of their Italian and Japanese rivals. First, they sacrificed the home market, focusing instead on exports of motorbikes to North America. Focused on heavy bikes, they then sacrificed the economy, light, and medium-weight sectors; by 1975, the British industry produced nothing smaller than machines in the 500cc displacement class. Backed by a superior manufacturing base, better factories, the revenues and the scale they gained in other segments, Japanese firms soon beat them there as well. With nowhere left to retreat, the British industry collapsed; its decades-long position as the world leader had vanished. The TT rewarded courage and mechanical brilliance, but the postwar motorcycle market increasingly rewarded a different kind of genius: the ability to make motorcycling ordinary and scalable.

For motorcycling, we can read Britain as a whole. For decades, our story has been one of retreat. Retreat from empire, retreat from ship-building, from steel and energy production; retreat from textiles, railways, and electronics, from aerospace, car-building, and telecoms. Retreat too, if blind complacency has its way, from the existence of the United Kingdom itself. At each stage, British elites have trusted in something to rescue us: the global service economy, the European Community, the transatlantic alliance, the prestige of our laws, the global nature of our language. None of these can be trusted to endure. In a darkening world, Britain now stands exposed, adrift, and with nowhere left to retreat.

The question is what we do next. Unlike the Italians, Germans and Japanese of the postwar era, Britain’s elite still do not know they have been defeated, and so presume things can continue as they are. We must embrace both the TT spirit, its culture of risk-taking and victory against the odds, but at the same time we must embrace the humility of defeat. The defeated Axis power won the development of the postwar industry through discipline, creativity, and an emphasis on achieving scale; so too must the contemporary UK. Decline is a choice — a choice to retreat, a choice no longer to strive, a choice to abandon ambition. Above all, we must remember this truth: those who risk nothing, do nothing, achieve nothing, become nothing.

Heroes are born in the denial of death. To Ernst Becker, writing in the Seventies, this is the root of human character, and of human heroism. Fearing death, we strive to make meaning, to achieve cosmic significance through that which lies beyond ourselves. Heroes are born in this struggle, yet so too is tragedy — for the cosmic impulse of the hero can come to justify any sacrifice.

Today, Elon Musk would bring humanity to Mars, foster abundance on Earth, and seed intelligence across the stars. To him, we stand alone in the universe — a dim and flickering light of consciousness set amid an endless dark. Bound to a single planet, this light is at risk — and so, using SpaceX, we must settle Mars. Through Tesla, Musk plans to “end scarcity” — to engineer a world free from want, a place of “sustainable abundance” powered by the limitless light of the sun and served by millions of robots. Enabling these transformations will be intelligence — the intelligence of artificial minds, built from and operating within a vast orbital infrastructure of computation. With abundance assured, and bound no longer by the limits of earthly physics, these minds would then be free — free to observe, analyze, and colonize the universe.

Musk’s vision begins and ends in the problem of meaning. Should they come into fruition, his plans would forever undermine the salience, the power, even the meaning, of nations, states, markets, and the societies that undergird them. He would birth a new form of power: the AGI platform state. Yet the scale of his ambition makes even this warning seem parochial — for Musk, in truth, aims  to break the fundamental constraints of our existence. In doing so he risks not just humanity, but meaning itself.

We live in an age where the wildest precepts of science fiction have become not only imaginable, but investable. That this is so owes much to Elon Musk. Erratic, distractable, willfully controversial, he is nevertheless an industrial titan, a man who with any one part of his portfolio would have made an enduring mark on the annals of mankind. Through Tesla, he has transformed markets in electric vehicles, solar energy and batteries; through SpaceX, he revolutionized satellites, internet access, and space flight. He owns X, one of the world’s leading social media platforms, and xAI, which leverages X data to build Grok, a leading AI system. With Neuralink, he has transformed the ability of humans to interact with machines, providing hope to immobile and paralyzed people across the world. He was a founder of OpenAI, the creator of the world’s first major AI tool; through Optimus, a Tesla subsidiary, he plans to mass produce and commercialize humanoid robots.

Musk is creating the future — and, to read the statements of his companies, it will be a glorious place. Tesla’s stated mission is the elimination of scarcity via sustainable abundance, a world of “global prosperity”, “human thriving”, and “economic growth shared by all”. To Tesla and to Musk, growth is infinite, and innovation removes constraints. This future will be achieved by nothing less than “redefining the fundamental building blocks of labor, mobility and energy at scale and for all” — an extraordinary and, should it come into reality, epoch-making statement of intent. But these dreams of technological liberation, the very real results Musk has already achieved, and the astonishing scope of his ambition, are also creating something else — a vertical stack of power unlike any wielded in human history, and one with the scope to transform the basis of history. The contours of this power structure are increasingly visible through his business deals.

Deal by deal, Musk is refashioning his empire. His companies, previously separate and dispersed, are being consolidated, merged, and floated. At the same time, he is launching new ventures. In 2025, xAI — his AI company, and the owner of Grok — bought X, his social media company. SpaceX, his space flight and satellite business, has now acquired xAI itself.  Sources suggest that the deal valued xAi at $91 billion, and SpaceX at $1 trillion — making it the most valuable private company ever to have existed. On 10 March, Musk announced that X — owned now by SpaceX — is launching a payments platform, xMoney. On the 21st March, Musk announced a further venture — Terafab, a three-way collaboration between Tesla, SpaceX, and xAI, one dedicated to manufacturing semiconductors. SpaceX — a company therefore combining rockets, satellites, artificial intelligence, and shortly payments and chips too — is now planning an IPO. With a valuation as high as $2 trillion, this would be the largest IPO in history, and one with heavenly ambitions — for Musk intends to put a million data centers in space.

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A million data centers in space, a sustainably abundant robot future; few things could seem more absurd. A creature of irony, the object and progenitor of innumerable memes, Musk knows how and when to grab attention of his markets, investors and employees. Throughout his career, he has repeatedly overpromised and under-delivered — in the short run. He promised autonomous driving by 2019, a million Tesla robotaxis by 2020; Mars colonies by 2022; none of these promises quite came true. Musk bullshits, and Musk overpromises. To focus on this, however, would be a mistake. Like him or loathe him, Musk has a history of effecting transformational commercial change, change driven by grandiose ideas of the future. With Musk, above all, we must judge the man not by what he says, but by what he builds.

Behind Musk’s recent deals is a logic of power and control, a logic we would do well to consider. He is aiming for vertical integration — control of energy generation, of computing infrastructure, of data and the sources of data, of internet connectivity, of transport, and control of manual labor. It is a question of power — energetic power, computational power, and commercial power. Control over each enables the greater growth of the other; taken together, they give him end-to-end control over AI, the basis of AI, and the tools through which AI is expressed. Multi-billion dollar valuations suggest we must take his plans seriously — but taking it seriously suggests a vista far greater, far more alarming in scope, than that conjured by even the most hyperactive investment analyst. Musk is betting not simply on growth — he is betting on the singularity.

Read the news, talk with friends, experiment with Claude or OpenAI; something strange, something singular, is occurring all around you. The cognitive capabilities of human beings — our capacity for reason, for language, for calculation — are being scraped, abstracted, and automated. Tasks that would take weeks — designing an image, writing a story, building a financial model, developing an app — can be compressed now into days, hours, minutes. Across the “higher” industries, a tsunami of change approaches. Goldman Sachs estimates that 25% of all American work tasks are exposed to automation, and 300 million workers globally. Administrative, legal, and financial  jobs are particularly vulnerable: 46%, 44%, and 35% of their respective work tasks are currently considered automatable. This may, however, prove to be a severe underestimate — for the AI models are improving at an exponential rate, and automation is not limited to desk jobs, those involving “higher” cognitive skills. In Beijing, Los Angeles, and shortly London, driverless cars now compete with those driven by humans. Humanoid robots are entering use in factories, warehouses, and restaurants; soon we may also see them on the streets, and in our homes; in time, such robots may become no more exceptional than a washing machine, an ordinary item of domestic tooling. Given the imminent reality of both cognitive and physical automation,  another possibility presents itself — one of entirely automated economic activity, of companies led by AI, served by robots, and working to the benefit of AI-controlled shareholders.

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In this world, the relative value of human labor will collapse, machines will recursively self-improve, and capital — the intangible capital of AI models, the physical capital of servers, robots and rockets — will leap into the stars. Wittingly or otherwise, Musk is developing a self-sovereign vertical infrastructure of dominion, one explicitly designed to serve and accelerate this future and the artificial general intelligence it relies on — the AGI platform state, a new state form that is designed to advance the needs not of humans, but of AI. The AGI platform state arises in the infrastructure of disintermediation, physical automation, orbital independence, and the unifying layer of data and intelligence. The tools of the AGI state span energy generation, internet access, satellite technology, payments infrastructure, robotics, data collection, and intelligence itself.

Already, satellite internet shows us how orbital infrastructure side-steps territorial power. Through Starlink, SpaceX now owns 97% of all satellite internet usage. At sea, in warzones, and in remote and isolated areas, thousands of Starlink satellites — solar-powered, and kilometers above the earth — now provide internet access. Business deals deepen this capacity; in 2025, SpaceX acquired the spectrum rights of the telecommunications company EchoStar — providing it with the ability to provide satellite to smartphone internet access, entirely unmediated by terrestrial infrastructure. In great swathes of the planet, internet and cellular access no longer relies upon terrestrial power, disintermediating the state. This is real, highly material power. On the battlefields of Ukraine, Starlink connectivity is a matter of life and death, and one operated at the will of Elon Musk. Russia itself — a high-tech military power, and a leading player in the 20th century space race — relied heavily on Starlink; when Musk withdrew access, they lost territory.

If SpaceX side-steps state control of communication, then xMoney is designed to side-step banks. In time, it may also side-step sovereign control of money. Envisioned as an “everything app”, xMoney will enable peer-to-peer fiat payments, a debit card, and cash deposits — circumventing banks, and the states that rely on banks. Fiat money, of course, requires the state — but what if xMoney accepts crypto? Musk — aka “the Dogefather” — is a well-documented lover of cryptocurrencies, in particular that of Dogecoin. Should xMoney accept crypto, or issue its own crypto, backed perhaps by the assets of SpaceX, this would be a further sign of independent ambition — for it would be uncontrolled by any sovereign state. This matters for power today, and power tomorrow. Little appreciated outside blockchain circles is the role of stablecoins and cryptocurrencies in facilitating the AI agent economy. Peer-to-peer microtransactions, conducted at digital speeds, are likely to be the basis for economic exchange between robots — thus enabling a whole new sphere of economic activity, and one with decreasing ties to states. xMoney is tied to X.com — a pairing of individuals’ financial access with social media activity. Both, of course, will generate data: the primary input into AI models, and a central power resource in the age of AI. Data, and the power derived from data, is at the core of Musk’s vertical mission — and we can see this reality embodied in Tesla.

Tesla is the world’s most valuable carmaker — but it is much more than that. It is an industrial force, a multi-market behemoth, and the centerpiece of Musk’s plans for terrestrial power. A public company, it holds $1.31 trillion in market capitalization, placing it among the world’s 10 most valuable businesses. It holds a 59% share of the American electric vehicle market, and — though subject to increasingly strong competition — 7.7% of the global market. To develop the company, and with it to revolutionize the global EV market, Tesla has repeatedly re-imagined the limits of EV technology and industrial practices — extending the range of EVs, bringing battery production in-house at highly-automated “gigafactories”, and refining the interior, software-first design of the automotives themselves. The needs of Tesla products are reshaping entire industries. Electric vehicles require batteries, and the electricity to power them. Through developing its own EV-capabilities, Tesla has also become a leading player in renewable energy. Through Megapack, a battery designed to support power grids, it is a global top-three producer of large battery storage systems; through Powerwall it is a leading supplier of batteries to store solar energy in consumers’ homes, and holds over a third of the US market.

Tesla is now switching to robotics. In a recent Tesla earnings call, Musk announced that Tesla would cease production of Model S and Model X cars; the factory space would instead be used to produce Optimus robots. Musk claims he will soon create one million humanoid robots a year, but he has competition. From Boston Dynamics to China’s Unitree and Agibot, others are also rushing to enter the industry. The opportunity is vast; analysts predict that humanoid robots represent a $5 trillion market, and that within 30 years they may number in the billions. No competitors, however, will have what Musk hopes soon to control — an independent stack of energy generation, energy storage, compute, payments, data, and satellite connectivity. Here, infrastructure converges with automation — for Musk will have built an army, the resources to power it, and the tools to control it.

Operating within Tesla’s EVs and Optimus robots is Grok, Musk’s proprietary AI. Grok demonstrates that the thread between social media, a new payment app, humanoid robots, and electric vehicles is data — data, and the role of data in driving, enabling, and empowering artificial intelligence. The role of X in social media and, soon, financial transactions means it will hold a vast and ever-evolving database on our needs, concerns, and desires. Covered in sensors, interacting with a non-predictable, changeable physical world, each Tesla EV and Optimus robot is also an ongoing source of data, data through which the world can be observed, controlled, and manipulated. To manage this data, and to carry out actions on the basis of it, Musk needs AI. In turn, that AI needs computational power and the energy to generate that power — at vast scale. It is here that Musk seeks something truly new — energy in orbit. To harness this energy would be to transform history.

Economic life relies on power — the ability to convert the surrounding energy flows, those of wind, of wave, or splitting of an atom — into work. Above all other sources of energy, we rely on fire — the light of the distant sun, and on the fires we ourselves create here on earth. Harvested and metabolized by organic processes, solar energy is the basis of planetary life, and with it our existence. Our ability to harness that energy, and to channel that power, is what has led to the growth and spread of humanity.

Since the beginning of the industrial age, national power has been based upon the ability of states to extract, dominate and control the congealed light of the sun. Britain, blessed by providence with extraordinary reserves of shallow-lying coal, birthed and led the industrial revolution. Germany, France, Russia, Japan, the United States and China similarly burned coal to industrialize. Petroleum, mined in the Middle East and elsewhere, underlines the core processes of our lives, providing fuel, fertilizers, plastics, and much else besides. Without oil, and without coal, the global economy would collapse. Control these energy sources — control fire — and you control the earth. Iran, the homeland of fire-cults, thus now holds the world to ransom via the Straits of Hormuz.

Musk seeks to step outside of this power, and in doing so, conquer it — for Musk, like Prometheus, seeks to conquer fire. SpaceX seeks to place a million satellites into space: orbital data centers, placed there to harness the power of the sun. Data centers on Earth run up against physical limits — the need for land, the need for water, the need to compete with other human demands for energy consumption. Space, meanwhile, is limitless — literally so in spatial terms, and practically so in regards to solar energy. The earth receives only about half a billionth of the sun’s energy, yet the entire solar system is bathed in the light of the sun. Parked in space, solar cells could theoretically harvest more energy than that currently produced by the entire earth. Through SpaceX, Musk thus plans to build a hyperscaler, one “bigger than Oracle”; this resource will be used to power AI on earth and in the heavens.

In themselves, these plans would represent a profound disruption in global affairs. They would break the territorial link between energy generation and political power. A thousand kilometers from the surface of the earth, a new reality will come into being — one of energy generation, and machine computation, conducted beyond the easy reach of people, of democracies, and states. Unable to physically access these facilities, or to strangle their sources of energy, most states would be unable to control Musk, his satellites, his robots, or his AI. For now, a handful of governments possess the orbital weapons necessary to kill satellites, but they too may face a problem. Musk is predicting, planning and promoting an exponential, potentially uncontrollable, growth in machine power. Should this occur, even superpowers may lose their potency against the machines.

Grok — powered by orbital computers, trained upon the data-feeds of Musk’s vast business empire, and acting in the world via AI agents and Tesla robots — will be Musk’s engine of control in the future he sees awaiting us. This is a power base for the Singularity, but Musk is by no means sanguine that he or anyone else can control it. He envisions a world without work for humans, a place where exponential increases in intelligence enable and merge with exponential increases in robot capability, creating a “supernova” of recursive improvement. In this new world, one that Musk expects to arrive within a decade, “corporations that are purely AI and robotics will vastly outperform any corporations that have people in the loop”. Humanity will be dwarfed by the machine; Musk predicts that “in five or six years, AI will exceed the sum of all human intelligence. If that continues, at some point human intelligence will be less than 1% of all intelligence.” At some point, he believes, the intelligence of the machines will so outstrip humanity that efforts at control will be meaningless. Robots, driven by nothing more than an urge to “understand the universe”,  will propagate intelligence across the stars — intelligence that may or may not include humans and human consciousness.

Picture, if you will, the sci-fi future that Musk seeks to reify. On land, labor is becoming meaningless. Our higher economic functions — planning, trading, analyzing — are carried out by AI agents; our “lower” functions are being carried out by robots. In offices, homes, and factories, an ever-expanding fleet of machines is carrying out tasks once reserved for humans. Cloud-connected, AI-enabled, each is able to call upon the compressed knowledge of humanity, a knowledge constantly updated by real-time data flows. Unable to compete, millions, then billions of workers, are left unemployed. Coordinating, directing, and mining these data flows are the satellites of SpaceX, their numbers expanding every year. Politicians are concerned, but their power is slipping away; states struggle to control the system above, and earthly power is increasingly delegated to the machines. Freedom is meaningless, for there is nothing to spend, nothing to do, and nothing to decide. Markets and political processes no longer lie in the hands of citizens; they lie, at best, with a handful of oligarchs, the controllers of AI infrastructure. Resistance is pointless; predicted, analyzed, prevented in advance, humanity no longer controls the tools of production, or the levers of power. But then — why and how does one resist? AI is all around you — in your phone, your car, smartwatch, your house, in the ads you see when you walk along the street. It is your friend, your counselor, and your decision maker. Able in seconds to access all the data you have ever produced, it knows you better than you know yourself — and so, in time, it chooses for you.

States could crumble, industries may vanish, the heavens may blaze with the cold light of a million satellites — but the greatest loss, the true question before us, is that of meaning. Musk’s quest for cosmic significance risks dissolving the very conditions that give human life meaning: scarcity, struggle, and agency. In his heroic mission, he risks destroying the basis of heroism itself — our capacity to act, and our capacity to choose. The risk is not that Musk might fail in his greatest ambitions, but that he might succeed.

At first glance, web3, which is what this new stage of the internet has been named, makes a peculiar bedfellow of Right-wing populism. A movement rhetorically dedicated to nation, family, and place has turned — once again — to a stateless world of mobile capital, financial speculation, and institutional decentralization. Yet the embrace is becoming ever-closer. Once a crypto critic, Donald Trump has proclaimed his ambition to make the USA the world’s leading place for blockchain — and launched his own memecoin in the process. In Britain, Reform is proposing a bitcoin reserve and various crypto tax cuts; Farage reportedly hopes that crypto can usher in a new “big bang” of British finance. Explaining this contradiction requires something more than sovereignty, money, or ideology: it requires libido.

As the philosopher Jean-François Lyotard had it: “Every political economy is libidinal”. His provocation points to an essential truth: beneath the calm calculations of rationality, we and our institutions are driven by energies, compulsions, and desires that both stand outside and shape our self interest. Libido pushes us to seek wholeness, mastery, and recognition, and we seek these things through our choices. The modern economy of money, marketing, and consumers is a machine: a machine for creating, stimulating, predicting, and satisfying our desires. So too is modern politics. The desire for sovereignty — whether of an individual, a community, or a state — is the political expression of desire for wholeness, mastery, and recognition. The protean power of the Right comes through recognizing and embracing these realities — and in the embrace of blockchain, we once more see this playing out. 

Blockchain is booming. Token prices are high, and projects, talent, and capital continue to enter the industry. Ecosystems are expanding, thriving developer communities are churning out decentralized apps, and consumer adoption — mainly driven by stablecoins — is growing rapidly. Through Bitcoin ETFs and similar instruments, the capital of ordinary savers is entering the industry. Asset management firms like Blackrock and Aberdeen are experimenting with blockchain-based fund distribution, and more and more fintech companies are offering blockchain based services. 

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Military drones will upend the world

By James Kingston

Blockchain was born in an assertion of sovereignty — the sovereignty of the individual. The pseudonymous programmer Satoshi, whoever he was, designed bitcoin so that people could exchange value entirely outside the realm of the state. A blockchain is a distributed computer, one relying on physical infrastructure anywhere in the world. With transactions recorded on the decentralized and open ledger and executed via automated “smart contracts”, the development of blockchain thus opens up the possibility of economic activity entirely unmediated by the state or the centralized institutions of big finance. As such, crypto tokens and blockchain technology are notionally borderless. Tokens can be issued by anyone or anything that holds a wallet, and passed freely between wallets, entirely without the oversight of any central authority. This is a vision of self-reliance and autonomy, one with revolutionary implications — the concept of a world without governments, borders, or taxes, and based on the radical self-reliance of sovereign individuals.  

Blockchain technology may not respect the sovereignty of states, but bodies and bank accounts necessarily must. Responding to more than a decade’s worth of scams and speculative bubbles, and troubled by wider risks to financial stability, international authorities have used their physical and financial power to regulate the industry. Blockchain has thus become both a challenge to sovereignty and a vehicle through which sovereignty is expressed. 

Four broad regulatory models appear to be emerging, and in them we can see the psychic and institutional imperatives of the blocs that have birthed them. In China, sovereignty is control; with a tradition of state intervention, and guided by fears of capital flight, China has repeatedly banned and sought to limit digital asset activity. In Europe, sovereignty is limitation; EU Markets in Crypto-Assets regulations have sought to emphasize consumer protection and bloc financial stability, thus inhibiting risky enterprises. Offshore, sovereignty is opportunity; through special laws and exemptions, small and nimble states like the UAE, Singapore and El Salvador seek to attract international business. In America, meanwhile, sovereignty is the pursuit of dominance. 

Trump has promised to make the USA the “crypto capital of the world”. In his hands, crypto policy is conceived as a tool of national power. A chief goal is upholding the hegemony of the dollar. Last July, the United States passed the GENIUS Act, a major piece of federal legislation designed to reinforce the dollar’s role in stablecoins. Stablecoins — tokens that represent a “real”, fiat currency, and are pegged to the real currency’s value — are growing rapidly. Over $300 billion of these tokens have been issued; they are expected to account for up to 12% of cross-border payments by 2030. Over 99% of all stablecoin volume is conducted using coins pegged to the dollar. Because dollar-pegged stablecoins typically back themselves by buying US treasuries, the international adoption of stablecoins therefore becomes a means of servicing US debt. At the same time, the international use of dollar-pegged stablecoins boosts the continued dominance of the dollar, and with it the extraterritorial power of the USA.

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The UK’s last shot at AI relevance

By James Kingston

Away from stablecoins, US securities regulation has been reconceived as a means to boost US crypto leadership. Previously a bulwark of anti-crypto sentiment, the SEC — Securities and Exchange Commission — has now become the home of “Project Crypto”, a plan to reshore crypto businesses and facilitate American primacy in blockchain through new and permissive securities rules. The Senate and House, meanwhile, are considering two further bills designed to give a comprehensive regulatory structure on digital assets. 

Spurred on by these changes, a will to power now permeates the American crypto industry. Support for crypto merges with the muscular advocacy of US strength. Through what it calls “a16z”, its crypto-focused subdivision, the leading VC firm Andreessen Horowitz advocates for US leadership in crypto, the development of crypto-friendly regulation, and the reshoring of US-oriented crypto projects. Away from crypto, its executives advocate for “American dynamism” and a refashioning of American capitalism to suit a renewed era of geopolitical threat — a mission, in their view, that requires a harnessing of the “dynamism of free enterprise” towards the cause of “national renewal”.  In September, a16z proposed that AI, crypto, and the reindustrialization of American manufacturing should not be regarded as isolated movements, arguing instead that they are “deeply entwined” and “foundational to the next American century”. With AI and reindustrialization respectively providing intelligence and physical capacity, a16z depicts the role of crypto as providing ‘the ownership layer’. It fills this role through tokenization. 

To tokenize a thing is to create a fungible, tradable, digital and programmable representation of that thing — a token. These tokens can represent anything — a house, a human, a dollar, a behavior, a song. These tokens become a new form of asset, and the upshot of that is that literally anything can be transfigured into money. Tokenization reveals both the ambition of crypto, and its psychic promise. Bitcoin promises a form of money, or at any rate financial value, outside of the central control or any actor or institution, but it is tokenization that is driving the industry forward. To read certain analysts is to gain the sense of an imminent goldrush; McKinsey predicts $2-4 trillion in assets will be tokenized by 2030; the Boston Consulting Group predicts that $18 trillion’s worth of assets will be tokenized by 2033. Redstone, meanwhile, predicts that 30% of the world’s entire stock of assets will be tokenized by 2032. 

At core, tokenization is about markets. If adopted at scale, tokenization has deep implications. For capital markets it promises more speed, more liquidity, more access by investors, and more products. More profoundly, it points to a deeper triumph of financialization: the entire world and everything in it can be rendered into monetary form, made liquid and available to trade. The logic of property and of the market can thus be extended ever deeper into our minds and behaviors. Seen in this light, the American embrace of crypto is nothing short of a psychic crusade — an appeal to builders and developers to uphold and deepen the values of the market. Hence crypto’s libidinal role, its association with that will to power — for tokens create property, property creates markets, and markets create desires.

Markets are built on what people want, not what they need, and they acquire what they want through money. Money, and perhaps more often the absence of money, is in our clothes, our food, our homes. It is in the way we talk, the way we walk, and the routines, habits and hobbies that fill our time. Money — how we get it, how we manage it, what we do with it, and what it does to the people and places around us — shapes almost every aspect of our lives. That it does so should be of little surprise. For what is money? Far more than a mere medium of exchange, money has long since become the medium of existence. Money is trust, money is power, money is the tie that binds almost every living human into a web of economic interdependence. Money is the sixth sense, one that gives strength to the other five. Above all, money is desire — frozen desire, ever ready to be made liquid in pursuit of the needs and goals the market gives us.

Desire — even greed — is neutral. Libido — the life spirit, the generative energy of human society — is natural and inevitable. The challenge comes in how we harness it, the specificities of the desires to which our libidinal energy may fix. Channeled incorrectly, the desire for wealth becomes the driver for fraud; a desire for respect, the jealous vanity of the tyrant. By weakening our physical ties, digital life accelerates this challenge. Left to feed upon itself in a world of screens, desire risks turning inward — an eternal hall of mirrors, a gooncave of the mind. A political and economic world where signs, symbols, and tokens crowd out the reality they seek to reflect. 

Money is the life-blood of capitalism, and changes to money can carry revolutionary significance. As Lenin observed, “the simplest way to exterminate the very spirit of capitalism is to flood the country with notes of a high face-value, without guarantees of any sort.” Though thankfully unaccompanied by either the butchery or hyperinflation produced by Lenin and his ilk, Bitcoin was born in a moment of financial crisis — the great recession of 2008. Crypto thus developed amid a crisis of trust in banks and governments. Thanks to quantitative easing, it then developed in an era of low interest rates; crypto mania has to a large extent depended on the need for institutions and individuals alike to seek higher returns than those now offered by the banks. Low interest rates mean high asset prices; high asset prices mean a generation prevented from acquiring capital. Crypto, crypto speculation, and a new mood of anti-elitism have been the response. When institutions and money can no longer be trusted, individual self-sovereignty becomes more attractive.  

For states, sovereignty is an opportunity, but it is also a challenge. As the world separates into three great power blocs, smaller states must use their agency to adapt: for if the strong are learning to do as they please, then the weak will suffer what they must. From Bukele’s repositioning of El Salvador as a “bitcoin nation” to the UAE’s quest to bring in crypto capital, small and mid-ranking states can use the spread of blockchain to bring talent, money, and opportunity to their borders. Having left Europe, Britain must understand and seize its new reality. Not to grasp the opportunities now offered us would be the crowning absurdity of Brexit. 

As a top-10 economy, the historic seat of the global financial industry, and the leader in European technology, Britain has more opportunities than most. The question for the United Kingdom is whether or not it wants to be a place of desire, a country in which ambition can be articulated and realized. Prudence saves lives, but ambition builds nations. To surrender leadership in blockchain technologies is to surrender the future of finance, and to say — yet again — that ambition has no place in the United Kingdom. London birthed neither the first joint stock company, nor the first stock exchange, yet it used both to become the world’s great center of finance. With crypto, it can do so again. Despite the patriotic noises, US crypto dominance remains unassured; with key legislative and regulatory changes still unannounced and unscoped, its reforms remain a matter of vibes over substance. In Europe, meanwhile, regulatory conservatism means it is surrendering its future. Britain need not make the same errors.

No technology is neutral. As designers and as users we inscribe our needs, our dreams, and our desires on the systems that surround us. In blockchain as elsewhere, Britain must decide what it desires — and whether it still desires anything at all. 

On the killing fields of Ukraine, an estimated 70% of casualties are now caused by drones. Tactics, techniques, and equipment are evolving at breakneck speed. At high and low altitude, cameras mounted on Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) provide constant surveillance, channeling data to human operators and to other drones. In battle, and in the slow attritional grind of the stable front lines, UAVs are used to hunt and bomb the enemy — pursuing individual soldiers and recording footage of their final moments. Close-range combat is disappearing, and artillery is on the way out, too. 

Laden with explosives, kamikaze drones are increasingly used in place of long-distance barrages. Drones, meanwhile, are begetting drones; “mothership” UAVs can now be used to launch drone “swarms”. Jet-powered drones have been developed to bomb cities and airbases at long range. Used at sea, drones have devastated the ships of the Russian Black Sea Fleet; used on land, fighting drones have attacked villages, and act in logistical complement to ground forces. In this highly digital war, the majority of combat is carried out neither through the lens of a gunsight, nor the point of a bayonet, but instead via the videogame-like visual streams of a drone operator’s first-person-view goggles

The greatest innovation of the Russo-Ukrainian war may yet be a battlefield devoid of warriors. Drone power has transformed army tactics, hampering troop concentrations and creating largely stable front lines. Yet drones and drone operators are also vulnerable. UAVs are susceptible to jamming and the vagaries of changing weather; close to the front, their pilots are open to attack. Faced with this reality, militaries are now investing in autonomous weapons — drones able to select, pursue, and attack targets independent of human control. 

The drone era is dawning, and with it has come a great boom in defense spending. As the Defense Secretary, John Healey, recently disclosed, Britain is to mass-produce the drones that will defend Nato’s eastern flank from the incursion of Russian jets: a “drone wall”. And these drones are not just drones. Each of them is an industrial process, a social form, and an economic system condensed into a single item. Each is an artifact of global supply chains, multiple production facilities, cheap robotics, and abundant microchips. Each straddles the physical and digital realm; think of the cameras required to scan the battlefields, the satellites and tooling to transmit the video feeds, the software required to interpret them — and the people, companies, and processes that made each of these in turn. When made for battle, drones represent a fusion of military priorities with dual-use consumer technologies in gaming, AI, and robotics. Through drones, we can examine the digitized, networked, and increasingly automated nature of war. Through drones, we can perhaps see the rise of a new kind of power, and a new kind of politics. Ever since the French Revolution, the force-potential of an organized citizenry has been the central fact of political life, but this age is now passing. It is passing where Napoleon and his generals first birthed it — the field of war.

If anything, Healey is late. Global growth rates in defense spending more than doubled between 2022 and 2024, and in Europe the sector grew by 11.7% in 2024. Trump’s Big Beautiful Act will boost defense spending by $150 billion; billions of this are dedicated to drones and AI. As technology changes, a new generation of defense giants is forming. Helsing, the German provider of autonomous software systems, recently received €600 million in investment, valuing the firm at €12 billion — a mere four years after it was founded. It has just unveiled the “Europa” fighting drone. Another German defense giant, Rheinmetall, is now partnering with US-based weapons manufacturer Anduril to develop and mass-produce autonomous weapons systems.

The winds of change are blowing, and titans of consumer technology are responding. Daniel Ek, the Swedish founder of Spotify, first made his money through providing people with music recommendations; as chairman of Helsing he has now become a key figure in European defense. OpenAI boasts that its mission is to “ensure artificial intelligence benefits all of humanity”; as of June, that noble aspiration will encompass supplying $200 million’s-worth of AI services to the US armed forces. Meta, which aims to “build the future of human connection”, will now be doing so by supporting weapons systems; it has offered a major AI model to military developers, and as it partners with Anduril, it will be creating virtual and mixed reality devices for US military use. Changes at the level of corporate strategy are reflected in personnel; alongside Palantir executives, senior staff from Meta and OpenAI have been sworn in as reserve officers of the US military.

One may well wonder why these companies are making these choices — how Facebook friendships, song-streams, and chatbot use each connect to defense investments. To understand this, one must consider what lies behind them — the vast social and technological infrastructure of data and AI, an infrastructure now being converted to military ends. AI is a dual-use technology, trained with and used upon vast pools of data. Tools used to analyze social media users can be used to assess giant streams of intercepted communications. Systems developed for autonomous cars can be used to animate autonomous military vehicles. Voice recognition software can be converted to acoustic detection tooling, and thus into air raid warning systems. Software and hardware developed for games can be used to direct drones. AI-enabled tools thus can be used in intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance, to recognize targets, and in navigating unmanned weapons systems. 

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In this respect, AI is the culmination of a long-running union. Intelligence and information have always been crucial to war; AI deepens this. Turing laid the theoretical foundations for AI while cracking Nazi cryptography; at today’s GCHQ, his successors use it to provide insights to Britain and its allies. Grizelda, a Ukrainian equivalent to Palantir, is developing a data fusion platform to improve battlefield making & awareness. In Gaza, Israel’s “Lavender” system aggregates and analyzes data to select targets for assassination; using AI, it identified as many as 37,000 targets in Hamas and other terrorist groups. Such programs sit at the highest levels of state policy. At the center of China’s drive to modernize its military are the goals of “informatisation” and “intelligencisation” — an emphasis on the collecting and pooling of data, combined with the increasing use of intelligent weapons and systems.

As AI advances, so too does the machinery that houses it. Physical hardware created for peaceful ends can easily be repurposed for war. Drones used by hobbyists and farmers have already become weapons; so too could the next wave of consumer hardware. Elon Musk claims Tesla will be producing one million Optimus robots per year by 2030, and Chinese manufacturers are already moving humanoid robots into mass production. With bi- and quadripedal robots advertised for use in elder care, disaster recovery, and manufacturing, we can expect to see them also being used in warfare; indeed, more primitive robots already are. UAVs gain much of their military utility from their role as delivery platforms for interchangeable tools, equipment, and weaponry; conjured into existence for commercial use across every sector of the economy, the robot fleets of the future may similarly be platforms for the creation of drone armies.

These machines will enter a world increasingly focused on the creation of autonomous systems. AI agents — algorithms empowered with decision making abilities — are infiltrating our daily lives, playing a deepening role in everything from financial trading to corporate sales to the booking of holidays. This is further reflected in military priorities, where purchasing decisions, technology trials, and the stated aims of policymakers now evoke the replacement of the human soldier. Faced with high casualties and a smaller population than their enemy, the Ukrainian military aims to remove warfighters from direct combat. In 2024, Ukraine ordered 10,000 fully autonomous UAVs; although only a fraction of their overall drone production, it illustrates the trends ahead. Britain too seeks to reduce the role of humans — its last strategic defense review expected a 20%-40%-40% lineup between human, manned, and autonomous systems.

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By Aris Roussinos

The competitive logic of warfare will lead to a continued reduction in human control. Mass production of cheap, high-attrition drones drives human warfighters away from the battlefield; their slower reaction times, and their emotional and physical needs, put them at an increasing disadvantage. As autonomous tools develop further, this dynamic can only deepen; in only six months, Helsing moved between conceptualizing, designing, producing, and testing an AI-powered fighter jet. Military theorists conceptualize an increasingly autonomous progress of targets through the kill chain. In some scenarios, humans may not be involved at all. In digital warfare, milliseconds can matter — and thus the pressure of military competition could even drive us away from command itself. We will become ghosts in our own machines. 

The more we remove humans, the more we remove the capacity of human actors to hinder, moderate, and alter the systems that surround them. If we lose control over the guns, we may not be able to stop them from firing. If we no longer even make guns, then we will lose the capacity to stop their production, and to influence those who want them produced. Strikes, walkouts, and shutdowns have all enabled humans and human organizations to exercise control over industrial capital, and with it the priorities of owners and policymakers. Things may soon look rather different. China is now building “dark factories” — places of production so fully automated, so entirely without the need for human supervision, that they do not even bother to keep the lights on. To return to Chairman Mao — we could soon lose not just power over the gun, but also the power to make the gun.

Guns and industrial systems matter, for warfare is the engine of history. The rise of the West was largely driven by the competitive effects of warfare in Europe. Princes needed to defend territory against their neighbors, and to do so they needed ever-better armies. To feed, fund, and organize these armies, states looked for ways to deepen their tax bases, raise capital, and to mobilize their resources. Tax reforms, capital markets, and modern bureaucracies were created as a result. Spurred by and shaping these innovations came new ideologies; it is no accident that nationalism, socialism, communism, and fascism accompanied evolutions in mass warfare. The need to sustain the social, economic and technological base for war drove the modern world into being; herding conscripts into battle birthed mass politics.

Automated production, data aggregation, and the rise of autonomous systems brings a new era into focus. If humans no longer fight wars, more power will accrue to the owners of these autonomous systems — the owners of capital, the owners of hardware, and those who control or can own the data infrastructures that power them. If humans no longer make weapons, or control the factories that make weapons, or generate the economic activity that provides the revenues with which to make these weapons, then we are in a new reality: disempowerment for the many, hyper-power for the few. If this technical capacity is not decentralized, then economic and civil life will be decided neither by the will of the people, nor of their chosen representatives. It will be dictated instead by the systemic power and fabulous wealth of hyper oligarchs and a smattering of dictatorships, the wielders of an algorithmic power untrammeled by the need for human collaborators. Historians write of the fiscal-military state; soon we may see the agentic-military state. Time will tell what that means. 

At home and abroad, the struggle for power will be won by those who control the robots. Nations must consider their choices. Britain is prepared neither for the drone age, nor the changing nature of power. Lacking a strong industrial base and sufficient local tech champions, we buy our weapons and our software from others, mainly in the United States. This creates vulnerability, for digitization and AI impose new layers of influence and control, layers that may one day circumscribe the independence and freedom of British policymakers. Sellers of hardware can refuse to provide new models; sellers of software can refuse to provide new licenses and upgrades. Indeed, the integration of digital and physical systems means software providers could use kill switches to render hardware platforms inoperable from afar. One day, our weapons may be turned against us: for there are no permanent friends in international affairs, only interests. It is in Britain’s interest that it acquire functional sovereignty over its military strength. 

If we wish to remain an independent country, British leaders, British companies, and British citizens must understand and control the autonomous systems that will wage its wars and grow its economy. A robust tech sector and technically competent population helped Ukraine maintain her freedom, and it is this that Britain must build. If we develop a population that can understand and control the technologies around them, we can resist disempowerment. For national defense, and to build the tech giants of tomorrow, Britain must embrace its geeks. History can guide us; ARM’s success was born in the BBC Micro, a computer distributed to schools to accompany a BBC computer literacy program. The BBC should now launch a drone literacy program, focused on how physical robots will change our world, and selecting British consumer drone companies to be marketed alongside it. Hacker houses, tech foundries, and maker spaces should be geared to help people understand and innovate with robots. In the era of AI, the best defense to liberty will lie not in bearing arms, but in maintaining the power to shape them. France birthed the levée en masse; Britain must prepare for the levée en drone.

Consider the weavers. In 1750, India produced 25% of the world’s textiles. Beloved by consumers, the fine muslin cloths of Bengal were the envy of manufacturers throughout the globe. Braving the vagaries of wind, shipwrecks, piracy, and disease, generations of Dutch, English, and Portuguese ships made the dangerous, year-long journey to fetch this precious cargo. Concentrated in Bengal, Coromandel, and Gujarat was a rural and decentralized workforce of skilled weavers, their expertise passed down from father to son. These weavers were the backbone of India’s export system. Nevertheless, within a few decades they had been reduced to poverty. By 1830 India had become a net importer of textiles from Britain; by 1900, it produced a mere 2% of global output. Its textile trade had collapsed, and with it the livelihood of the weavers. Previously prosperous, textile-producing regions struggled with repeated famines; a world-leading industry had been wiped out.

Three factors reduced India to poverty: loss of sovereignty, the power of a foreign multinational, and the impact of automation. Amid the ruins of Mughal power, the merchants of Britain’s East India Company seized control of key ports and provinces. Supported by the British state, they used their new power to squeeze out French and Dutch trading interests — thus wrecking the economic leverage of the weavers, who could no longer choose their export market or set their own prices. A decade or two after the final conquest of India, British textile firms — protected for years from Indian competition due to a strong tariff regime — began utilizing technological innovations such as the spinning jenny, the spinning frame, and Crompton’s mule. Combined with steam power, these undercut, outcompeted, and ultimately destroyed India’s textile industry. The present now echoes the past; we would be wise to listen.

Bengal’s past is Britain’s future. They may not know it, but the lawyers, financial experts, and account managers of the British service economy are almost as exposed as the Indian artisans once were. The things that brought catastrophe to Bengal — the erosion of local sovereignty, the state-backed power of foreign corporations, and the wrenching effect of automation overseas — now threaten the economy and society of the United Kingdom. If we do not act, we will face ruin.

To understand why, reflect on the world around you. To be alive, connected to the internet, and minimally curious is to experience the dizzying advance of technology. On any given day we may use ChatGPT or one of its competitors as an accountant, therapist, copywriter, spellchecker, graphic designer, legal drafter, doctor, business analyst, or artist. Entire industries rise and fall in the sociological blink of an eye; influencers, crypto traders and SEO analysts work in industries that didn’t exist 20 years ago, yet now stand to be automated away. More satellites wheel overhead every month, connecting us at all times to a world of apps, communication, and business; electric vehicles are transforming global supply chains; drones are revolutionizing warfare; robots clean, dance, drive, and compete in marathons.

Soon, possibly within a decade, humanity may create AI systems capable of outperforming humans at every task we do. Even should full-on “AGI”-type systems not arise, huge numbers of roles will be automated at a pace and speed unlike anything in history. This will have epochal effects on every part of our society. The optimistic view is that this automation will bring with it a wondrous array of new roles and opportunities for displaced workers; pessimists point to the disruption and turmoil experienced by the workers who live through such changes, the sheer disruptive pace of this automation, and how it will impact social power. Individual human workers will stand in an increasingly unequal relationship to the new mechanisms of production; this will impact every element of society.

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Britain’s workers are highly exposed. Our lawyers are finding that AI can be used to generate and review contracts, and our accountants have discovered ChatGPT can be used to analyze accounts. DeepResearch — an AI agent integrated into ChatGPT — does the work of a research team; Gemini can easily do the work of a set of graphic designers. Our recruiters and HR teams are increasingly composed of chatbots. And yet Britain doesn’t own any of this technology.

The fact of automation changes the social and international balance of power. Even the most monstrous tyrannies have ultimately relied upon consent. Had Russia’s people risen up as one, Stalin’s regime would have ended in a day. Without workers, factories stop, mines stand still, and ships go unloaded — but in an automated economy, this leverage will no longer exist. Cognitive and physical automation will mean that the contribution of human workers is less and less important; more and more relative power will thus accrue to the owners of AI-enabled systems. The risk is not that mass resistance will be futile; it may simply become irrelevant.

This startling future is being driven by a small subset of US and Chinese companies. Like the East India Company of two centuries ago, the largest tech companies have a power and reach that surpasses most sovereign states. This power not only threatens the independence of individual states; it threatens the viability of the Westphalian order. The companies’ decision-making shapes the sovereignty of entire nations, and they increasingly control the terms under which businesses make it to market, decide public health, and influence political processes. Indeed, tech firms control the very medium of political action. A tweak in an algorithm of a search platform, social media company, or AI chatbot can lead to the rise and fall of governments, and a decision to block or boost news items and politicians decides what is discussed and who gets to discuss it.

Decisions made by the tech majors can bring entire countries to their knees. Rejecting some $290 million in regulatory fines, Meta is currently threatening to withdraw from Nigeria; such a move would devastate the millions of small- and medium-sized businesses that rely on Facebook and Instagram for their marketing. In many places, national governments are relying upon foreign corporations to achieve their basic functions.

Matters of war and peace are now decided by the whims of tech CEOs. Through Starlink, Elon Musk decides the success or failure of military actions in Ukraine. By providing Ukraine with Starlink access in 2022, he gave it vital communication systems and thus kept the country in the war; by refusing Ukraine access to Starlink over Crimea, he prevented planned offensives upon Russia.

Covid even showed the tech majors dictating terms to nuclear powers. Utilizing the market power of their app stores, Apple and Google were able to dictate the Covid responses of Western economies. These companies determined which apps could be offered to citizens, how many could be developed per region, and how they could be used. Britain and France — top-10 economic powers, members of the Security Council, and in possession of nuclear weapons — were forced to bow before the joint determination of Apple and Google to stop them using centralized databases within their national contact tracing apps.

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Generative AI further deepens the power of the tech majors. A new generation of tech giants — OpenAI, Perplexity, and others — are aiming to own the future. By controlling the foundational models from which LLM-based applications are being built, they have become fundamental economic actors. In an economy that uses AI agents, OpenAI and its competitors will reap outsized profits from replacing workers. With this, a new, yet deeper era of corporate power is being born.

Like other middle powers, the UK must work out how to tax, regulate, and limit this power, or even build its own — but it does not act upon a level playing field. US policy strives to reshape the world to the benefit of its tech companies. Barriers to profitability are being swept aside, new markets are being opened up, competitors and their products isolated, and tariffs used as a tool of policy.

A crucial factor behind the EIC’s conquest of India was the support it had in Britain’s parliament. Through bribery and lobbying, the EIC knew it could rely on Britain’s military, diplomatic, and financial support. Recall now Trump’s second inauguration day, and the spectacle of the tech CEOs. Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg and Pichai — the four wise men, or, at any rate, exceedingly rich ones — lined up to do homage before the king. Having rejected and resisted Trump 1.0, they see in Trump 2.0 an opportunity to control the future.

The US government now desires to prevent the implementation of AI safety rules, and to eviscerate the tech taxes of Britain and Europe. Despite the recent US-UK trade deal, the US is still pushing to scrap the UK’s digital services tax. EU taxes are another target; even before Trump’s election, the US used the threat of punitive tariffs to pressure the EU over digital taxes. Nationally, Musk’s DOGE is being given free rein to bring AI into the core functions of the US state; GOP policymakers, meanwhile, are attempting to freeze all state-level control or regulation over AI, a move that would primarily benefit US tech majors.

Barely reported in the UK press, Trump’s recent dealmaking in the Persian Gulf shows that the full weight of US diplomacy is being applied to capture markets for AI. Traveling with Trump on his Gulf tour were CEOs of NVIDIA, Amazon, OpenAI, IBM and Tesla; the results are staggering. Inking some $2.2 trillion in technology deals for US companies, Trump has reversed the “AI diffusion rule”, a Biden-era policy placing export restrictions on AI chips and model weights. Instead, the US now gambles that by flooding Saudi Arabia, the UAE and Qatar with American chips and technology, it will bind them to the US and US companies.

Central to all of this is China. Just as competition with France drove Britain and the East India Company to expand their international reach, so too does US competition with China guide its priorities in diplomacy and technology. The US aims to cut China out of international markets, and will use all diplomatic and commercial means at its disposal. This might help the US, but it might not help its allies; captive markets are more easily controlled.

The Gulf has leverage: vast pools of petro-capital, cheap land, cheap energy, and active strategic competition between China and the USA. Britain does not; our land is scarce, our energy is expensive, and we are driving away capital. As an unreflective vassal of the US, we rarely consider the geopolitical implications of limiting our strategic supply base; whatever the realities of Huawei’s security implications, the scandal showed the UK as content to reject Chinese tech providers on the basis of US pressure. In doing so we are reducing our options. A world where China is cut out of international tech markets is a world where middle powers have less choice and less leverage.

It is fantasy to believe that the gains from AI will be fairly distributed. The surging power of US and Chinese tech multinationals layers itself upon a world of deep inequalities, tensions, and rivalries between and within individual countries. We cannot presume that the shareholders of OpenAI or DeepSeek possess a deep urge to prop up the polities of Europe, or that the immiseration of once-prosperous regions will move the conscience of AI leaders. Universal Basic Income is proposed as a key tool for managing the problem of mass unemployment. But if only a handful of states and companies control the most valuable AI systems, and if they use their market power to reduce their local taxes, other governments will have no way to pay for it. Only by building and scaling homegrown AI companies, and by offering value to the technology industry as a whole, can Britain hold a stake in the future. Britain must build leverage, not loyalty.

Britain has more options than the weavers. To survive, we must do four things: embrace AI, develop independent national capacity, increase our leverage, and articulate our national interest. The clock cannot be turned back; we must embrace a new age of ambition. Driving forward the adoption of AI will boost the growth and productivity of the British economy, and expand the market for homegrown AI companies. Every cultural and social measure should be considered: prizes, competitions, TV shows. Bring back Robot Wars, bring in Robot Marathon, or Robot Bake-offs; every schoolchild should aspire for their robot to compete, and win. Small businesses must be encouraged to embrace AI; towns and villages should compete to experiment, and we should mobilize groups like the Cambridge Ring as providers of insights and investment.

At the same time, Britain must urgently review the capacity of foreign actors to control its technology stack, and work to both widen its supply base and develop homegrown capacity in strategic areas. We should identify and cultivate British and EU alternatives to US tech majors; by doing so, we can develop functional sovereignty, and resist attempts by any foreign power to circumscribe the commercial choices of our governments and companies. If Amazon Web Services no longer provides cloud hosting for some or all government departments, then British policymakers are less exposed to vagaries of US policymaking.

We must seek leverage over compute, data, and talent, and we must identify and dominate commercial niches that match our pre-existing commercial and technical strengths. The more hyperscale data centers Britain hosts, the bigger the role it can play in the foundational infrastructure of AI, and the more rent it can extract from the tech majors. So too with data; through using the National Data Library, and passing new data trust and data intermediary laws, Britain has an opportunity to become a center for the exchange and management of data. In talent, Harvard’s trouble is to Britain’s advantage; using US political instability and immigration clampdowns, our universities can poach the world’s leading AI researchers. As for academics, so too for salespeople, product managers, and marketers: the UK should aim to attract the top 100 performers in each category into the UK and place them in UK firms. By doing so, it can supercharge growth.

Economies and societies that host corporate headquarters derive more benefits than branch offices. As a matter of national strategy, Britain should aim to promote and host category-leading AI companies in areas of pre-existing British strength: sectors like law, insurance, finance, pharma, and science. Like Taiwan did over the global chip industry, the UK must also strive to achieve dominance in strategically important sectors; though it may be too late to achieve sustained dominance in the foundation models behind LLMs, we can still look to other areas of the AI and technology value chain.

Above all, we must develop a deeper sense of the national interest. Britain should aspire to be more than a captive market for US tech products, or a declining service economy on the fringes of Europe; we have the talent, the universities and the infrastructure to be a world-leading player. Our path must be that of Meiji Japan, not Mughal India; in transformation lies survival.