The Great Narrative War

Inside the second front of the capitalist civil war — the war for common sense.

Curtis Yarvin, the Dark Enlightenment philosopher of Silicon Valley, developed the concept of the Cathedral, to explain why Western institutions, despite having no single central command, behave as a unified system. He asserts that these institutions operate as a secular theocracy — instead of an organized religion, society is guided by a “market of ideas” where progressive values, egalitarianism, and secularism are constantly reproduced, mutated, and selected.

Yarvin ponders that the Cathedral appears to act as a unified agent: “The mystery of the cathedral is that all the modern world’s legitimate and prestigious intellectual institutions, even though they have no central organizational connection, behave in many ways as if they were a single organizational structure.”

However, our factional model refutes the idea of centralized command. Each faction reproduces its own narrative, its own Cathedral and its own common sense — the factional war within the transnational elite isn’t just being fought over financial infrastructure — it’s simultaneously being fought over narrative infrastructure: Who creates the stories people tell about the world is inseparable from who controls the pipes money flows through. In fact, narrative infrastructure and financial infrastructure reinforce each other — you need the stories to legitimize the pipes, and you need the pipes to fund the stories.

Yet, there is no single narrative, and no faction has control of the totality of narratives. Populations are affected by the narrative dissonance, greatly amplified on news, film and social media — a surging cacophony of voices.

AP and Reuters — The Neutral Pipe Illusion

The wire services occupy a structurally similar position to the BIS in the global financial infrastructure model. They present themselves as neutral infrastructure — objective conveyors of information rather than partisan actors — while actually encoding very specific assumptions about what counts as news, what counts as a credible source, and what counts as a legitimate political actor.

Financial systems move money.

Narrative systems move legitimacy.

AP and Reuters are both Western institutions with deep structural ties to the Davos globalist faction. Former Thomson Reuters CEO James C. Smith has historically served on WEF boards and the Atlantic Council. AP accepts philanthropic grants from organizations like the Rockefeller Foundation, which share overlapping development goals with the WEF. Both networks run fact-checking units that frequently debunk alternative theories regarding WEF agendas.

Their ownership, their editorial frameworks, their sourcing hierarchies — establishment governments, major financial institutions, credentialed experts — all reproduce Davos assumptions about legitimate order. They’re not propagandists in the crude sense of agents in cubicles crafting Ministry of Truth newsreels. They’re something less overt — they provide elite access bias by defining the frame within which events are interpreted, which is more powerful than outright propaganda because it’s invisible as ideology.

They craft the overall narrative, and the stories write themselves. Whoever controls the dominant narrative infrastructure establishes which actors are regarded as credible, which crises are seen as urgent, which experts are authoritative, and which policy responses appear reasonable.

The Reuters Trust Principles declare that Reuters shall at no time pass into the hands of any one interest, group or faction. Yet Reuters itself emerged from — and grew alongside — the commercial and imperial communications infrastructure of nineteenth-century Britain. Its rise was inseparable from London's position as the world's financial centre and Britain's control of the global submarine telegraph network. The Trust Principles, adopted in 1941, can themselves be read as an institutional response to the perennial problem of maintaining editorial independence while operating inside powerful political and commercial networks.

Today, Reuters functions as a key information infrastructure within the liberal international institutional order. Its reporting frequently privileges the perspectives and assumptions of governments, central banks, multinational corporations, and international organizations that constitute that order.

Davos influences the legacy narrative infrastructure — AP, Reuters, BBC, CNN, the major Hollywood studios, the prestige press. Their weapon is credentialing — deciding who counts as a legitimate source, what counts as misinformation, who gets platformed. The fact-checking or censorship industrial complex is the Basel/BIS framework equivalent — a technocratic regulatory overlay presented as neutral while encoding specific power relationships. Critics cite studies and specific examples, such as the differential treatment of claims by Donald Trump versus Kamala Harris, to argue that fact-checkers systematically favor progressive narratives and protect establishment institutions like the FDA and CDC.

The New York Times

Noam Chomsky made a remarkable statement about the New York Times in an interview regarding his seminal book, Manufacturing Consent:

“The New York Times is certainly the most important newspaper in the United States, and one could argue the most important newspaper in the world. The New York Times plays an enormous role in shaping the perception of the current world on the part of the politically active, educated classes. Also The New York Times has a special role, and I believe its editors probably feel that they bear a heavy burden, in the sense that The New York Times creates history.”

The New York Times has historically functioned as a high-capacity narrative valve. It does not need to convince every citizen directly. Instead, it influences the institutions that shape public knowledge: government, universities, journalists, think tanks, courts and publishers. Chomsky emphasizes ideological filtering in service of elite interests, whereas the rheopolitical model emphasizes control over narrative flows regardless of ideology.

Journalism studies have repeatedly shown that major television networks and other newspapers often follow the agenda established earlier in the day by the New York Times. One 2006 study comparing the morning New York Times with ABC, CBS, and NBC evening broadcasts found significant correlations suggesting that the newspaper influenced which international stories television covered later that day.

The New York Times’ role as archivist of history has uniquely positioned it as institutional terrain — one of the principal institutional forums through which the Transnational Capitalist Class articulates and normalizes its preferred policy agenda. The New York Times occupies a strategic valve within the global information infrastructure. Its power does not consist primarily in manufacturing belief, but in regulating elite legitimacy. By choosing which voices are amplified, marginalized, or ignored, it exercises denial authority: the ability to impede the flow of narratives into the institutional mainstream.

Hollywood Territorial Dispute

Hollywood is contested terrain that three of our four factions are fighting over. Its relationship to American hegemony has been extensively documented — Joseph Nye’s concept of soft power was essentially built around Hollywood as its primary illustration. American cultural exports don’t just entertain — they export a specific vision of individualism, consumption, liberal democratic values, and American-led world order as the natural common sense horizon of human aspiration. Nye explained, that, "the best propaganda is not propaganda", further asserting that during the Information Age, "credibility is the scarcest resource."

However, Hollywood’s major studios are owned by or deeply integrated with the same financial networks — BlackRock and Vanguard are major institutional shareholders across virtually all major media conglomerates. They are the top shareholders in companies like WarnerMedia, Comcast, Disney, and News Corp, which control more than 90 percent of the U.S. media landscape. For instance, they hold approximately 18% of Fox, 16% of CBS, 13% of Comcast, 12% of Warner Bros/Discovery, and 12% of Disney.

The content they produce consistently reflects Davos-compatible values — liberal multiculturalism, technocratic problem-solving, institutional legitimacy, the idea that the system works if you work within it.

Critics and scholars argue that the dominance of passive institutional investors creates a structural bias toward risk-averse, status-quo content. Because firms like BlackRock and Vanguard hold diversified portfolios across the entire economy, their primary interest is in systemic stability and global market growth rather than the success of any single film.

This financial imperative favors content that avoids radical critique of capitalism or global financial institutions (which would undermine the investors’ own legitimacy); promotes “safe” liberal values (multiculturalism, diversity) that align with global marketing strategies and the demographics of international box offices, particularly in emerging markets; and reinforces institutional legitimacy, portraying existing power structures (government, corporations, science) as ultimately functional or redeemable, consistent with the “technocratic problem-solving” ethos often associated with the World Economic Forum.

The Streaming Disruption

Hollywood is currently experiencing its own version of the factional war. Several tensions are pulling it apart:

Silicon Valley is disrupting the narrative infrastructure. Netflix, Amazon Prime, and Apple TV are Silicon Valley incursions into Davos’ narrative infrastructure. These platforms have different ownership structures, different content logics, and different relationships to the state. They’re less susceptible to the kind of Pentagon and CIA cooperation that shaped classical Hollywood — The Department of Defense's Entertainment Liaison Office has far less leverage over Netflix's recommendation algorithms than it once had over studio executives dependent on military cooperation. In the streaming era, the strategic bottleneck has migrated from production to distribution: whoever controls the algorithm increasingly determines what audiences actually see, regardless of who financed or produced it.

The algorithm is a valve, not because it creates content, but because it regulates flow. Content is the water, the internet is the pipes, the recommendation algorithm is the valve controlling how much water reaches each destination, and the viewer is the endpoint receiving the flow.

The key shift is that Hollywood’s power used to lie primarily in production — deciding what films got made. Netflix, YouTube, TikTok, X, and Meta increasingly exercise power through distribution — deciding what gets surfaced, recommended, or buried. That fits perfectly with the broader definition of rheopolitics: Power is increasingly exercised not by owning content, but by governing its flow.

This also suggests the distinction between two different kinds of valves: hard valves and soft valves. Hard valves stop the flow completely: SWIFT removing a bank; export controls on AI chips; undersea cable shutdowns; and cloud providers terminating an account.

Soft valves throttle, prioritize, or reroute the flow via Netflix recommendations; YouTube’s recommendation engine, X’s ranking algorithm, Google’s search rankings and Facebook’s News Feed.

Soft valves don’t deny flow entirely. They throttle access to the audience, a more subtle and effective form of control. In the rheopolitical model, the algorithm isn’t merely another technology; it’s an application-layer valve. The physical internet may be open, but algorithms determine which streams become torrents and which become trickles. In that sense, recommendation systems are to the attention economy what locks and sluice gates are to a river: they don’t own the water, but they determine where it flows, how fast, and to whom.

Culture War Fracture

The culture war fracture within Hollywood reflects the Davos versus Imperial Nationalists/Silicon Valley conflict directly. The DEI content push, the ESG-influenced programming decisions, the explicit progressive messaging — these are Davos using narrative infrastructure to advance its governance vision. Conservative political economist Samuel Gregg contends that these initiatives represent a form of “political capture” where businesses drift toward causes unrelated to dynamic markets. He argues that progressive activists, having failed to achieve all their goals through legislation or elections, shifted tactics to take over institutions from within. However, ESG and DEI initiatives are narrative capture, not political capture.

Gregg notes that many CEOs, such as Larry Fink of BlackRock, have aggressively pushed these programs, often using “apocalyptic language” regarding climate change and social justice to bludgeon others into compliance. He suggests some leaders use ESG/DEI to excuse poor financial performance or to curry favor with political leaders.

The U.S. Department of Defense and Central Intelligence Agency have historically influenced Hollywood and streaming platforms primarily through script vetting and resource exchange, where filmmakers trade creative control for access to military equipment, personnel, and technical expertise. This system, often termed the military-entertainment complex, relies on Entertainment Liaison Offices that review scripts for compliance with national security narratives, effectively censoring content that portrays war crimes, corruption, or controversial military actions.

In a revealing book written in 2020, The National Security Cinema, by Matthew Alford and Tom Secker, it is shown that the CIA/Pentagon national security state has worked on hundreds of Hollywood films and over a thousand network television shows. Productions requesting military support must submit scripts to the DoD’s Entertainment Liaison Office. If a script is deemed incompatible with military interests, access is denied, forcing a rewrite or cancellation.

In exchange for assets like F-22 fighters, Marines, or aircraft carriers, the DoD mandates specific changes, such as scrubbing scenes of misconduct or inserting lines that portray the military as heroic and paternalistic. Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) documents revealed the DoD has influenced over 1,900 film and television titles, including blockbusters like Transformers and Top Gun, as well as series like NCIS.

The Imperial Nationalists weaponize narrative infrastructure — the embedding of journalists within military units, the Pentagon’s entertainment liaison relationships, the selective release of intelligence to friendly media outlets and the active information warfare operations that the Iran war has demonstrated on all sides — all of the above have demonstrated that their relationship to media utilizes narrative as a weapon of war rather than a governance tool.

Elon Musk’s acquisition of Twitter/X

Perhaps the clearest single act of narrative infrastructure war that was explicitly framed as breaking the globalists’ control of a key narrative chokepoint — Musk frequently characterized the pre-acquisition Twitter administration as infected by the "woke mind virus," a term he uses to describe progressive globalist ideology. While Musk rarely uses the specific word "globalist" in formal SEC filings, his allies and the broader right-wing ecosystem explicitly framed the purchase as “de-globalizing" the town square.

Musk is seen on X, stating: "I'm against globalist power. The UN should not have a lot of power. Who voted for them? I didn't vote for them. We want power to the people! Maximum power to the individual."

X has functionally operated that way, platforming Imperial Nationalist and Silicon Valley voices while systematically reducing the reach of Davos media institutions. A recent 2026 study published in Nature, The Political Effects of X’s Feed Algorithm, revealed that conservative content on X was boosted by the algorithm, significantly altering political viewpoints. The platform's ecosystem has actively courted Silicon Valley tech voices and populist, Imperial Nationalist geopolitical narratives. This shift reflects what some scholars term "platform illiberalism,” where internal algorithms and moderation are repurposed to enforce a specific ideological worldview:

“…we demonstrate that Musk has acted as a globally influential, politically ambitious, and business-oriented type of “sysop,” [systems operator] the individual system operators who, as Schneider (2024) reminds us, despotically governed early online spaces. Unlike those digital rulers, however, X’s “Great Sysop” framed his despotism as rooted in the very free speech principle his actions subverted, with consequences that extend well beyond the platform.”

China’s Media Model

China’s media model is the most sophisticated narrative infrastructure operation in the world — and it operates on two completely distinct logics simultaneously.

Domestically — the Chinese model is explicit narrative sovereignty. The Great Firewall, the party’s control of all major media, the social credit system as behavioral infrastructure, the censorship of any narrative that threatens CCP legitimacy — this isn’t primarily propaganda in the crude Soviet sense — it is a narrative enclosure, the construction of a bounded information environment within which only State Capitalist-compatible stories circulate. WeChat, Weibo, Baidu — all Chinese social and information infrastructure operates within this enclosure. The domestic model is about preventing narrative infiltration from Davos, Silicon Valley, or The Imperial Nationalists — exercising denial authority and maintaining information sovereignty as a dimension of the broader sovereignty doctrine that defines the State Capitalists.

The theoretical point here is that China recognized earlier than anyone that information infrastructure is inseparable from financial and political infrastructure. The Great Firewall isn’t just censorship — it is the construction of a parallel narrative pipe system, decades before the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank built parallel financial pipes. In this sense China’s domestic media model is the template for its infrastructure duplication strategy — prove the concept domestically, then export it.

Internationally — the Chinese model is much more subtle and operates on multiple levels: CGTN and Xinhua function as the narrative equivalent of the AIIB — explicitly positioned as alternatives to the AP/Reuters/CNN Western narrative infrastructure, targeted primarily at Global South audiences who have legitimate grievances about how Western media represents their countries and experiences. The pitch isn’t “believe Chinese propaganda” — it’s “here is a non-Western perspective on world events.” That’s a genuinely compelling offer to audiences in Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America who have spent decades seeing their countries represented solely through a Western lens.

TikTok is the most strategically significant Chinese narrative infrastructure operation globally — and the most contested because it’s the most effective. It’s not producing Chinese state propaganda directly. It’s something more subtle — a Chinese-owned algorithm controlling what the next generation of Western youth pays attention to, what emotional registers they inhabit, what cultural references they share. The algorithm is the narrative infrastructure. You don’t need to produce the content if you control what content gets amplified.

The Distraction Strategy: Independent reports, such as studies by the Network Contagion Research Institute (NCRI), show that searching for sensitive terms like “Uyghur,” “Xinjiang,” “Tibet,” or “Tiananmen” on TikTok yields a disproportionate amount of irrelevant lifestyle, clickbait, or travel content. This effectively buries human rights criticisms under a flood of noise.

The US attempts to ban TikTok are explicitly a narrative infrastructure war maneuver — Davos and the Imperial Nationalists recognizing that a Chinese-controlled attention architecture represents a deeper threat than any conventional media operation. Silicon Valley’s ambivalence about the TikTok ban is revealing — they oppose Chinese narrative infrastructure control but also oppose government regulation of platforms, putting their two core commitments in direct tension.

The Belt and Road Initiative’s narrative dimension is often overlooked but theoretically important. Chinese infrastructure investment in the Global South comes with its own narrative infrastructure. The China Story uses Confucius Institutes, Chinese-language media partnerships, state visit coverage through Xinhua — the systematic construction of a story in which China is a developmental partner rather than an imperial power. This is soft power in Nye’s sense but deployed through State Capitalist rather than Hollywood mechanisms — state-directed rather than market-driven, long-horizon rather than quarterly, sovereignty-respecting rather than values-imposing.

The State Capitalists are duplicating narrative infrastructure — CGTN, RT, Al Jazeera funded by Qatar sovereign wealth, the whole ecosystem of Global South media alternatives to the AP/Reuters duopoly, with the caveat that Al Jazeera is the outlier here: Qatar is swing capital, not a State Capitalist, so its narrative arm rides the same anti-duopoly current without belonging to the faction building the parallel pipes. This is the narrative equivalent of the AIIB — building parallel pipes that bypass Western narrative chokepoints. TikTok is perhaps the most significant example — a Chinese-owned algorithm that has achieved deeper penetration of Western youth attention than any previous non-Western media platform in history.

Russia’s Media Model

Russia’s model is theoretically distinct from China’s and maps onto its position as the militarized disrupter, adjacent to the State Capitalists rather than the patient developmental core.

Where China plays a long game — building parallel infrastructure, patient capital, sovereignty doctrine — Russia’s narrative infrastructure model is essentially tactical disruption. RT, Sputnik, the Internet Research Agency troll farms — these aren’t primarily building an alternative narrative infrastructure in the way CGTN is. They’re attacking the coherence of Western narrative infrastructure by amplifying contradictions, accelerating polarization, and weaponizing the divisions within Western societies.

This maps onto Russia’s broader strategic position. Russia cannot match China’s developmental legitimacy or long-term strategic capital. It cannot match Western financial infrastructure. Its hard power is real but limited in scope. What it can do — and has done with considerable effectiveness — is exploit the organic crisis of the Capitalist Civil War. A fractured Western TCC, a demoted precariat available for populist mobilization, a Silicon Valley disrupting narrative chokepoints — these create openings for Russian tactical narrative operations that wouldn’t exist in a stable hegemonic order.

According to a 2021 report by the Crime and Security Research Institute at Cardiff University, researchers uncovered evidence that “provocative pro-Russian or anti-Western statements were systematically posted in reader comments sections in articles relating to Russia in 32 prominent media outlets across 16 countries,” that Russian-language media outlets subsequently used as the basis of stories about politically controversial events.

Another extensive Russian disinformation campaign was dubbed Doppelganger by researchers, who profiled Russian use of multiple “clone” websites impersonating at least 17 outlets — Bild, 20 Minutes, Ansa, The Guardian, RBC Ukraine — and seeded them with fabricated articles, videos, and polls.

The theoretical point is that Russia’s media model is parasitic on the organic crisis rather than constructive of an alternative. RT didn’t create the contradictions, it amplified them — the Iraq War, the 2008 financial crisis, immigration pressures, deindustrialization, the opioid epidemic — these were real. RT found the wounds and poured salt on them.

The U.S. State Department and intelligence agencies officially designated RT as a fully-fledged participant in Russian covert global intelligence operations. Investigators revealed that RT does not merely broadcast state perspectives; its infrastructure is directly used to run cyber operations, manage proxy media organizations, and obscure the funding of secret influence campaigns abroad.

Banning RT, while understandable as a defensive move, doesn’t address the underlying problem within the wounded and fractured US hegemon.

Russia’s narrative model is ultimately more aligned with Silicon Valley’s disruptive logic than with China’s constructive parallel infrastructure logic — both are attacking narrative hegemony rather than building alternatives to it. The tactical alliance between Russian information operations and Silicon Valley disruption politics — visible in the 2016 election interference, in the amplification of anti-establishment narratives on Musk’s Twitter/X — is not coincidental. It reflects a structural convergence of interest between a militarized adjacent State Capitalist and a Silicon Valley faction both primarily motivated by destroying the existing order — case in point: Elon Musk obliterating USAID in 2025.

Davos’ Gramscian Problem

Former head of the WEF, Klaus Schwab released his own narrative theory, The Great Narrative, in 2022, a compilation of conversations held at a conference of the same name in Dubai, the previous year. Co-authored by Thierry Malleret, it bills itself as “an optimistic book that categorically rejects the negativity that permeates too many doomsday narratives ready to consign us to a future of oblivion. It asserts that human creativity, ingenuity and innate sociality will prevail, and it offers a comprehensive framework to explain why.”

From a Gramscian perspective, the initiative is an attempt to construct a new hegemonic “common sense” — a shared set of assumptions and values that legitimizes a specific global order — in this case, the World Economic Forum‘s vision of a “resilient, inclusive, and sustainable” future. Critics argue the Great Narrative seeks to make the Davos worldview appear natural and universal by consolidating a unified global story that marginalizes other alternatives.

The Dubai meeting brought together a select group of “global thought leaders” (futurists, scientists, economists) to co-create this narrative. In Gramscian terms, this resembles the formation of a historical bloc — an alliance of organic intellectuals and political elites working to establish ideological dominance.

Davos institutions behave as if financial infrastructure control requires narrative infrastructure control. Neither Klaus Schwab nor the crowd who meet at Davos every year are naive enough to think you can restructure global governance through institutions alone. You need the story first. Schwab’s story is technology as salvation, global citizenship and stakeholder capitalism that rebrands corporations as responsible social actors balancing profit with purpose.

The Great Narrative reveals Schwab’s awareness of the WEF’s own Gramscian problem of a failing narrative giving way to Silicon Valley’s disruption, to the Imperial Nationalists’ culture war, to the State Capitalists’ alternative media ecosystem. The Great Narrative project is a deliberate attempt to reconstruct hegemony at the cultural level because the Davos elite share a decentralized and unconscious gut-level sense of the narrative slipping.

There is profound irony in a book called The Great Narrative, written by the architect of the Great Reset, explicitly attempting to construct a legitimizing story for a governance project — perhaps the most transparent act of ideological manufacturing by a ruling class faction in recent history. Gramsci would have found it fascinating. The organic intellectuals aren’t even pretending anymore.

The Deeper Point

The narrative infrastructure war and the financial infrastructure war are not separate conflicts — they are the same conflict fought on two terrains simultaneously. You cannot maintain dollar hegemony without the narrative infrastructure that makes dollar hegemony seem natural and inevitable. You cannot challenge dollar hegemony without first building the narrative infrastructure that makes alternatives seem legitimate and possible.

This is why Davos’s response to losing narrative chokepoints has been so panicked — the labeling of RT as propaganda, the banning of TikTok debates, the fact-checking apparatus, the EU’s Digital Services Act as a regulatory attempt to reassert narrative infrastructure control. They understand intuitively — lose the narrative pipes and the financial pipes follow.

The hegemony is always dual — economic and cultural, financial infrastructure and narrative infrastructure, simultaneously. The organic crisis is always a crisis of both at once. Davos can deny legitimacy to a story Silicon Valley shares on your news feed; Silicon Valley can throttle a story Davos credentials; the Imperial Nationalists can ban the platform the State Capitalists own; the State Capitalists can deny the West access to their billion-member social media market. No faction can produce legitimacy at scale — the final good — using only its own layer. That’s the same shape as “no one makes the Blackwell B200 chip alone.”

The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

This is a soft-valve denial regime, not a hard-valve one — Chip and financial denial is physical cutoff (ASML stops shipping, SWIFT removes a bank). Narrative denial mostly throttles rather than completely severs — China has routed around it, built its own fact-checkers, and its own audience. That’s why the narrative war produces dissonance and stalemate rather than clean shutdown. The mutual asymmetric denial is real but administered through soft valves.

It is three-locked-plus-one-exiting, not a symmetric quad. Davos, Silicon Valley, and the Imperial Nationalists are genuinely locked into the integrated Western stack — none can exit the others. The State Capitalists are the faction that built the parallel pipes and can operate outside it. That is the identical asymmetry as the financial map (three inside SWIFT/dollar, China building CIPS/mBridge). The narrative map doesn’t just resemble the financial map — it is asymmetric in the same place, which is strong corroboration that we are describing one structure on two terrains, not forcing an analogy.

The Capitalist Civil War is being fought on both terrains. The faction that wins the narrative infrastructure war will find the financial infrastructure war considerably easier to win. And right now — with Hollywood fracturing, the wire service duopoly breaking down, and social media under factional assault — nobody is winning the narrative war either.

The Deepest Point

Schwab’s Great Narrative book inadvertently reveals the central problem of Davos hegemony in the current moment — you cannot construct a Great Narrative by committee in Dubai. Genuine cultural hegemony isn’t produced by a room full of intellectuals convened by the World Economic Forum. It emerges organically from lived experience, from art and storytelling that resonates because it captures something true about how people actually live.

Hollywood worked as soft power not because the Pentagon told it to but because American consumer capitalism genuinely delivered rising living standards for a generation and the stories reflected that material reality. When the material reality changed — when the promises of liberalism stopped being delivered to the working class and precariat — the narrative infrastructure lost its grounding in lived experience and began to feel like what it increasingly is: the ideological production of the Transnational Capitalist Class whose interests have diverged from the populations they once successfully represented.

Other alternative narratives have emerged: some are doomsday/oblivion focused, others are anticipating a great elevation in human consciousness. The Silicon Valley techno-optimism is radically positioned against the Abrahamic religions’ prophecies of an epic battle for good and evil in the end times. And still darker, the conspiratorial commentariat promote a narrative of despair and helplessness. This does nothing to soothe the bleak youth horizon.

The disconnected, extracted and mortgaged are caught in this narrative vortex of conflicting realities and ambivalent futures. The Great Narrative War is not just about capitalist factions feuding over control of the media, but it is a broader struggle over the universal human story: who are we? where are we going?

A fractured hegemon cannot consolidate legitimacy or promote global prosperity because there is no great narrative, no shared story, no shared experience, and no shared common sense.

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About this series: Building on the fracture of the Transnational Capitalist Class outlined in Chapter 1 and Chapter 2, this article forms part of a book-in-progress, The Capitalist Civil War. It is an ongoing investigation, into the emerging conflict between four factions of the global elite: Davos Globalists, Imperial Nationalists, Silicon Valley techno-sovereigns, and State Capitalists. Each chapter explores a different aspect of that struggle. If you want more of this kind of elite-power analysis, paid subscribers make this work possible.

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Here is the project so far. Some of the articles are commentary on current developments to test the thesis in real time.

INTRODUCTION: The Great Divide: Why We’re Fighting the Wrong War

CHAPTER 1: Morbid Symptoms: The Origins of the Capitalist Civil War

CHAPTER 2: The Four Factions of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Davos Faction Floats the United States of Europe

CHAPTER 3: Modus Operandi: Who are the Transnational Capitalist Class?

CHAPTER 4: Globespeak: The Four Dialects of the Transnational Capitalist Class

(COMMENTARY) Carney Does Europe: A Marriage Made in Heaven

CHAPTER 5: The Chinese Capitalist Party

(COMMENTARY) Trump Hurries to Beijing for Emergency De-Risking

CHAPTER 6: Silicon Valley: Cult, Club, Cabal, or Class?

(COMMENTARY) The Quadripolar World Order at the Beijing Summit

CHAPTER 7: How Mark Carney Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Variable Geometry

(COMMENTARY) BRICS is Dead.

(COMMENTARY) Danielle Smith’s Referendum is Aimed at Carney, Not Alberta

CHAPTER 8: Awareness Creep: How the Four Factions Woke Up to the War

CHAPTER 9: The Four-Clocks Problem

CHAPTER 10: The New Grand Chessboard

CHAPTER 11: The War Inside the Panopticon

(COMMENTARY) Hats Off to the Conspiratorial Commentariat

(COMMENTARY) Musk’s Trillion Dollar Coronation Inside the Cathedral

CHAPTER 12: The Blackwell B200 Kill Switch

CHAPTER 13: The Layered Global Map

CHAPTER 14: The Transnational Broker Class

CHAPTER 15: How to Rule the World and Why Nobody Can

(COMMENTARY) Conspiratorial Answers to Evil

CHAPTER 16: Rheopolitics: The Power to Deny

CHAPTER 17: Mortgaged, Extracted, Disconnected

CHAPTER 18: Permanent Planetary Turbulence

CHAPTER 19: Two Wings of the Same Imperial Nationalist Bird

CHAPTER 20: A Herd of Goats