I write about AI and Geopolitics
Bill Friend A Decentralized Immune Response This series isn’t a prophecy, and it’s not a counsel of despair. It’s a diagnosis. And a diagnosis has one purpose: to make a thing treatable. What follows maps out how a specific kind of containment works. It’s about the slow, engineered transfer of human agency to automated systems owned by … Read more
We Don’t Want to Miss This I want us to slow down. Not just to avoid danger, but so we don’t accidentally build something smaller than this moment allows. Please allow me to explain. The usual case for slowing down is framed as a warning about danger. That warning is necessary — but incomplete. But … Read more
The Iron Curtain, the Digital Slave, and the Fate of Humanity I’ve been thinking a lot lately about where we are heading with artificial intelligence. It feels like we are standing at a precipice, and the ground is shifting under our feet. If the twentieth century was defined by who controlled uranium and plutonium, the … Read more
The Promise We Haven’t Kept World Refugee Day comes around every year on June 20. We treat it as a time to honor the courage and endurance of people forced from their homes by war, persecution, and collapse. But if we are honest with ourselves, it is also a day of indictment. The global theme … Read more
The U.S.-Iran MoU and the Architecture of Privatized Geopolitics The Surface On June 17–18, 2026, in Evian-les-Bains, France, U.S. President Donald Trump and representatives of Iran signed a fourteen-point Memorandum of Understanding. The headlines called it historic. The terms, at first glance, sounded like a textbook diplomatic breakthrough: Iran would forego nuclear weapons, accept unrestricted … Read more