After the Global Minotaur

Long essay on the changing face of 21st century geopolitics is up here. Short version: (1) neoliberalism is a fancy word for transnational capitalism, (2) no single country will ever be able to dominate the transnational world-system the way Britain ran the 19th century and the US ran the 20th century, and (3) all class struggle has become transnational class struggle. Comments/critique welcome!

Russo-imperialism Just Lost Kazakhstan

History keeps accelerating. Nazarbayev, one of the savviest politicians on the planet, scraps the Eurasian energy-rent model of accumulation and tells the Putinists to step off, all at once:

Address of the head of state to the people of Kazakhstan, November 11, 2014

Translation: "Don't even think about pulling a Crimea on our northern territories, Putin. Remember how us Kazakh soldiers ripped apart the Wehrmacht in WW II with our bare hands? Well guess what -- your nice, polite gentlemen would be facing 5 million of us... on our home turf. Now if you'll excuse us, we're going to get ridiculously rich by investing our oil wealth in infrastructure and trade with China and India."

In short, Kazakhstan just bailed from Putinism's phantom empire.

Which leads to an obvious question. Lukaschenko is backing Ukraine's sovereignty and cozying up with the EU, Tajikistan is getting $6 billion from China's Silk Road project to co-develop Central Asia, Mongolia is a stable democracy, and Georgia is gone from the imperial fold. So who exactly was supposed to join Putinism's mighty empire?

Neoliberalism's Wild Hunt

Call of Occupy

My mind. Officially. Blown.

For years, the Call of Duty franchise was stagnating in a horrible, endless loop of ludicrous neo-national villains, Terror War boosterism, and US neo-imperialism. So when I took a peek at the latest CoD, my expectations were zero.

But they finally got it right.

Just three short years after Occupy tore a continent-sized hole in the heart of neoliberalism's matrix, the single most neoconservative franchise of our time has joined the anti-neoliberal barricades.

I kid you not.

The short version: Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare is the CoD remix of Metal Gear Solid 4, only without Ocelot. Rogue PMC plutocrat bent on world domination: check. Underlying theme of biowarfare: check. Feisty female soldiers: check. New game mechanics: check (no spoilers, but be prepared to think and move... in three dimensions.) Yeah, they could've done a little more with the stealth elements, but the core pleasure of CoD has always been about delivering paintball at lightspeed, so no worries there. And I won't spoil the ending, but the denunciation of the Terror War comes through loud and clear.

Kudos to Sledgehammer, the Activision studio, for finally getting rid of the last rusty scrap metal of neocon revanchism, and letting us players run amok with the sleek exoskeleton of a true 21st century shooter. (Also, I suspect the game benefited enormously from its 3-year development cycle, rather than the 2-year cycle typical of past titles).

The only piece of the puzzle still missing is lead character diversity. The incidental characters and the environments are finally as transnational as they need to be (the kickass Nigerian level was an especial high point), but the main characters still need more postcolonial pizzazz. The folks at Ubisoft Montreal seem to have gotten this memo, and are finally introducing a postcolonial lead character in Far Cry 4. While many franchises have the problem that they're restricted to some level of historical veracity, CoD has basically been a science fiction franchise for some time, so there's really no barrier to creating stories featuring, say, some badass commando from Quang Tre or Lviv in 2060.

First They Came for the Monuments...

...because nobody stood up for the monuments. Russo-imperialism just took down a monument to that dangerous, fire-breathing radical... Steve Jobs. Can't. Make. This. War-mongering. Insanity. Up.

Round 2 of Putinism's monstrous, evil colonial war is about to begin. About 10,000 Russian army soldiers have gathered during the ceasefire in a tiny sliver of Donbass, with hundreds of tanks and artillery pieces and heavy anti-air missile systems. They will be launching an offensive very, very soon against what the Russo-imperialists, completely drunk on their own imperial dementia, deride as a bunch of drum-beating African tribes -- the subhuman Ukro-menschen who must be exterminated for glorious rule of Oil Czar, Greatest of All Czars, Master of Pipelines Which Enrich Czar's Plutocrats.

43 million Ukrainians will resist tooth and nail, and when the shock troops are driven back, a full-scale Russian invasion will begin.

War is coming. It will be terrible and bloody.

It will end with the abysmal failure and fall of Eurasia's Bonaparte, just like France's far savvier and more cosmopolitan historical original. But I shudder to think of the price tag.

All I can say to ordinary Ukrainians is that we citizens of the democracies of the world (two-thirds of the world's population) as well as almost all the remaining citizens who live in transitional governments (because most have bitter memories of colonial invasions, and know exactly what you are fighting for) -- will support you. We will lobby our governments to provide you with the weapons and ammunition you need to defend yourselves, as well as the expertise and advice you need to help improve your democracy.

All I can say to ordinary Russian citizens is that there is no crime in refusing to carry out the orders of a criminal. The Ukrainians are your Slavic brothers and sisters, and killing them for the sake of an aging gangster's bruised ego is the most terrible sin.

There was a brief shining moment, during the annexation of Crimea, where things could have gone differently. The Ukrainians did not use force to stop the Russian invaders, but chose civil disobedience, the rule of law, and free and fair national elections. As is typical with autocratic regimes, Putinism learned the wrong lesson from its quick triumph, and assumed that the Ukrainians would never fight for their autonomy. The Russo-imperialists mistook $110 per barrel for an economic policy, and the imperial past for the postcolonial present.

Ironically, Putinism is now in a desperate race with time. In the short term, the Russian economy is going to melt, along with those formerly sky-high oil prices, which will stumble along at $70-$80 for the next few years. But in just three short years, solar grid parity will be here for 80% of the planet, and whatever else happens, the hydrocarbon age will come to an end.

Bye-bye, Eurasian petro-colonialisms. You will not be missed.

Neoliberalism's Other, Asiazilla-sized Shoe Finally Drops

[Insert extended geopolitical cackle.]

I've said it before: Tahrir-Zucotti wasn't even the beginning, it was just the overture to the beginning. The overture continued in the form of Gezi, Rio de Janeiro, the Euromaidan, and Jokowi. Nobody could know when, where or how the last act of the overture would transpire But it has come at last, in Hong Kong.

Be afraid, plutocrats. Be very, very afraid. The 7 billion of us who have to work for a living on this planet are using digital tools to unmask you: Wall Street greedocrats, EU bankstercrats, Russian petrocrats, Chinese prince-o-crats, Indian industrocrats. We don't care what national flags you wave at us, we're tired of working harder and harder to make you richer and richer, while we get poorer and poorer.

%!#$ your prisons, pay us.

@$^% your flags, pay us.

 %$#* your excuses, pay us.

Pay us.

Or pay.

Game Shows We'd Like To See

The world needs a game show. Not just any game show, but a game show which properly expresses the admixture of toxic greed, lunatic power-mongering, and generalized fear and loathing typical of dying 21st century empires.

We can call this new game show "Culling The Herd". Its host will be a made-for-video star called MC Overstretch. Its tagline: "Watch dying empires do increasingly stupid things leading to their self-destruction... all in 1080P!"

The outline for Season 1: 

Episode 1. US tries to swallow Iraq. Watch $3 trillion and thousands of lives go up in smoke, generating nothing but civil war and Daesh serial killer scum. Co-hosted by a spokesperson from the YPG and a representative of the Kurdistan Regional Government.

Episode 2. Wall Street tries to swallow the global banking system. Bankstering: the only crime business where failure is punished with lucrative Federal bailouts. Co-hosted by Joseph Stiglitz and William K. Black.

Episode 3. Euroliberalism tries to swallow Greece, Italy, Spain and Portugal. Every failed liberal-era financial idea ever invented... reinvented by neoliberals. Co-hosted by Yanis Varoufakis and James Galbraith.

Episode 4. Russia tries to swallow Ukraine. Watch for the entertaining interviews with Russo-imperialists, proving that all empires in human history have been equally bad: "Uh, NATO CIA same-sex Ukro-fascist purple dragons from Arcturus shot down MH-17, yeah, that's it! What, those 5,000 Russian troops occupying Donbass? That's an elvish lie spread by filthy hobbitses! Gollum... gollum... Er... is this microphone on? ...Bueller...?" Co-hosted by Mustafa Nayem and Myroslava Petsa.

And now, latest of all:

Episode 5. Microsoft tries to swallow Minecraft. Co-hosted by the Minecraft community. Watch everyone's least-favorite fading desktop monopolist find yet another billion-sized money pit to stumble into! Boo and hiss when legions of corporate lawyers start suing 10-year-old modmakers! Cheer wildly when the digital commons transforms Minecraft into a free-to-play codebase!

We've got our popcorn ready. Let the games begin!