I am not excited.

Let me be clear about what I am not saying. Anthropic builds remarkable technology - Claude, its AI assistant, is genuinely impressive, and I use it myself. The researchers behind it are serious people working on hard problems. What is in dispute is whether the global expansion of a company like Anthropic - without accountability, without redistribution, without any serious answer to the questions its technology raises - deserves the celebration it is receiving.

Anthropic’s arrival will create some jobs - a few hundred, perhaps, in sales and operations - and I do not dismiss that. But while Milan celebrates a few hundred arrivals, Anthropic’s models are quietly accelerating the displacement of millions of jobs across Europe and beyond: in legal services, financial administration, content production, customer support, every sector where cognitive work can now be automated at a fraction of its previous cost. The accountant in Turin, the paralegal in Rome, the journalist in Naples - none of them will be at the press launch tomorrow, and none of them will appear in the congratulatory statements.

The asymmetry is not accidental. It is the operating model.

Anthropic, like every major AI company, contributes nothing structured toward the workers its technology displaces. No levy on its API calls funds retraining programmes. No portion of its $61 billion valuation flows toward communities bearing the costs of automation. When a chemical plant opens in a city, it must account for the environmental costs of its operations - meeting standards, paying levies, accepting liability for its externalities. When an AI company deploys models eliminating tens of thousands of jobs in the regional economy, it faces no equivalent obligation. It collects the productivity gains, books the revenue, and leaves the social costs to public budgets and the individuals who bear them.

There is a second problem, deeper than the fiscal one.

Anthropic has been more honest than most AI companies about the risks of what it is building - publishing safety research, engaging with regulators, acknowledging publicly that it may be developing one of the most dangerous technologies in human history. But honesty about a risk is not the same as having it under control. Anthropic’s own researchers acknowledge genuine uncertainty about whether their models will remain aligned with human values as they grow more capable. The company is racing to deploy technology whose long-term behaviour it cannot fully predict - because, it argues, a safety-focused company at the frontier is preferable to ceding ground to less scrupulous competitors.

Perhaps. But that argument - we must build the potentially dangerous thing because someone worse might build it otherwise - does not constitute a guarantee of safety. Milan is not a testing ground. Its workers are not variables in a deployment model.

Banning Anthropic or prohibiting its technology is not what I am asking. What I am saying is that the terms on which companies like Anthropic expand into European cities (or elsewhere) should be negotiated rather than assumed. A social licence to operate in Milan should carry concrete obligations: a levy on local AI deployment directed toward a transition fund, binding commitments on skills development, transparency on which sectors the company’s models are displacing. These are not radical demands - they are the minimum that any industry causing significant structural disruption should meet.

The political class in Milan is so dazzled by the prestige of attracting a Silicon Valley name that it has forgotten to ask what the city is actually getting in return. A few hundred jobs and a logo on a coworking space, in exchange for normalising the presence of an industry restructuring the city’s economic foundations with no obligation to account for the consequences.

Anthropic, you are not unwelcome as a company. You are unwelcome on these terms. Come back when you are ready to have a real conversation about what you owe the city, the country, and the continent you are moving into - and the workers whose livelihoods your technology is reshaping.

That conversation is overdue. And someone needs to start demanding it.

The document - 245 paragraphs, published on the 135th anniversary of Rerum Novarum, the encyclical that first engaged the Church with the social consequences of industrial capitalism - makes arguments that will be familiar to readers of this series. AI carries moral weight not only in how it is used but in how it is designed. Technological progress will inevitably produce structural inequalities if left ungoverned. A more ethical AI means nothing if the ethics are determined by a handful of people in a handful of boardrooms. The encyclical warns of a “culture of power” fuelled by the digital revolution, calls for AI to be removed from military and economic interests, subjected to stricter state and international regulations, and shaped by the broad participation of individuals and communities rather than left to those who profit most from its development.

The timing is deliberate. Leo XIII’s Rerum Novarum in 1891 was a response to industrial capitalism - the last time a technological transformation of this magnitude reshaped the terms of human existence. Leo XIV is making the same move, and the parallel is not subtle: what is happening now demands a civilisational response, not a technical adjustment at the margins.

What strikes me most is the framing of the core problem: “We are truly experiencing an eclipse of the sense of what it means to be human,” driven by the unbridled promotion of technology at the expense of human dignity. That phrase - an eclipse of the human - captures something that most political documents on AI have been unable or unwilling to say: that the stakes here are not primarily economic but existential, and that a society which allows the terms of its own transformation to be written exclusively by those profiting from it has already conceded something it will struggle to recover.

The concentration of AI power in a handful of companies, the extraction of data without consent or compensation, the displacement of workers without protection, the risk of systems designed to serve oligarchic interests rather than common ones - these are political problems with political solutions, and a document from the Vatican has articulated them more clearly and more forcefully than most elected governments have managed. The encyclical charts a direction that the European Union, national governments, and international bodies have the legal and institutional tools to pursue, if the political will existed to do so.

That political will does not currently exist at the scale required. The existing parties are too embedded in the donor relationships and ideological frameworks of the pre-AI world to take these questions seriously as a matter of electoral priority. What the moment demands - urgently, not eventually - is a political movement organised specifically around human agency over artificial intelligence: one capable of contesting elections, shaping regulation, and making the defence of the human against the machine a live political question rather than an academic one.

The Pope’s document will not by itself change the trajectory of AI development. But it does something important: it establishes, with the moral authority of an institution that speaks to more than a billion people, that defending the human in the age of AI is not a reactionary or marginal position. It is, to use the language of this publication, the avant-garde.

The argument for organising has never been stronger. That work is beginning.

The question of which future AI produces is not a technical one. It is a political one. And at the moment, the political answer is being written almost entirely by people who were not elected to write it.

The imperialist case is not difficult to make, because the infrastructure of AI imperialism is already being built.

Consider what the current trajectory actually looks like from the perspective of a country in the Global South - or frankly, for most countries in the world. The most powerful AI systems in the world are owned by a handful of American companies - OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Anthropic, Meta - and a smaller number of Chinese ones. These systems are trained on data extracted from users across the globe, the overwhelming majority of whom received no compensation and gave no meaningful consent to the use of their intellectual and cultural production as training material. The value generated from that data flows back, almost entirely, to shareholders and employees in San Francisco and Seattle, with token amounts directed toward the infrastructure of dependency - free or cheap access to tools that entrench reliance on foreign systems rather than building local capability.

This is a pattern with deep historical roots. Colonial economies were structured precisely to extract raw materials from the periphery, process them into valuable goods at the centre, and sell the finished products back to the countries that had provided the inputs. The AI economy replicates this logic with data as the raw material, and does so at a scale and speed that the colonial administrators of the nineteenth century could only have dreamed of. A Nigerian novelist, a Brazilian journalist, a Pakistani software developer: their words, their ideas, their cultural production fed the models that are now being sold back to them as productivity tools, with the profits flowing to people they will never meet and institutions they have no influence over.

Beyond the extraction dynamic, there is the question of dependency and control. A country whose critical infrastructure - healthcare systems, financial services, public administration, military logistics - runs on AI systems built and controlled by foreign powers is not a sovereign country in any meaningful sense. It is a client state with a more sophisticated interface. The geopolitical implications of this dependency are already visible in the way the United States and China are competing for AI influence across Africa, Southeast Asia, and Latin America, and also Europe - not out of philanthropic interest in development or to cooperate as peers, but because whoever controls the AI infrastructure controls the terms on which those economies operate and the data flows that feed the next generation of models.

And then there is the most dystopian scenario, which is not science fiction but a logical extension of dynamics already present: a world in which AI-driven productivity eliminates the need for most human labour, and the response of the owning class is not to share the gains but to provide a minimal universal basic income just sufficient to prevent uprising - a digital bread and circuses, keeping billions of people in a condition of managed dependency, their basic needs met just enough to forestall revolt while the decisions that shape their lives are made entirely by systems and the people who own them. This is not inevitable. But it is a future that the current distribution of power and the current absence of political response makes more rather than less likely.

The liberation case is equally real, and intellectual honesty requires taking it seriously rather than dismissing it as tech industry marketing.

The burden of physical and cognitive labour that has defined human existence for most of history is genuinely, not rhetorically, a form of suffering. The farmer working sixteen-hour days in a climate that is becoming hostile, the factory worker whose body is broken by repetitive strain at fifty, the clerical worker grinding through tasks that offer no meaning and no development: the liberation of human beings from the most grinding and degrading forms of work is not a trivial achievement, and AI has the genuine potential to deliver it at a scale and speed that no previous technology has managed. If the gains from that liberation are distributed equitably - a very large if, but not an impossible one - the reduction in human suffering could be extraordinary.

Access to knowledge and opportunity is another truly compelling argument. The child in a rural corner of the world, who currently has access to mediocre schooling, no specialist medical care, and no professional networks that might connect her to opportunity in the global economy is not in that position because of any failing of her own intelligence or ambition - she is in that position because of where she was born, a condition she had no role in choosing. AI, properly deployed and properly governed, has the potential to give that child access to the best educational content in the world, to diagnostic tools that can identify and address health conditions that currently go untreated, and to platforms that allow her talent to connect with global markets regardless of her geography. This is not guaranteed. But it is genuinely possible, and it would represent one of the most significant expansions of human opportunity in history.

The potential for AI to accelerate scientific progress - in medicine, in materials science, in climate solutions, in our understanding of biology - is real and already beginning to materialise. Diseases that have killed millions for generations are being approached with tools that would not have existed five years ago. The gap between what is scientifically possible and what is deployed in the lives of ordinary people remains enormous, but AI shrinks the time and cost required to cross it in ways that could save hundreds of millions of lives over the coming decades.

The future will not be either of these things in its pure form - it will be somewhere in between, as all technological futures have been. But “somewhere in between” is not a single point: it is a vast range of possible outcomes, and where on that range the world actually lands will be determined by political choices made in the next decade, many of them in the next few years.

The direction of the current trajectory is clear: toward concentration, dependency, and the extraction of value from the many by the few, with the compensation of just enough material comfort to prevent organised resistance. This is not because AI is inherently imperialist - the liberation scenarios are genuinely achievable - but because the interests currently driving AI development are the interests of the companies and individuals who stand to benefit most from the imperialist outcome, and those interests are, at the moment, almost entirely uncontested in the political arena.

This is why a political movement for human sovereignty over AI is not a luxury or an intellectual exercise. It is the mechanism by which the direction of this technology gets pushed toward the liberation end of the spectrum rather than the subjugation end - through governance frameworks that break up the concentration of AI capability, through international agreements that ensure the benefits of AI development flow to the countries and people whose data and labour made it possible, through fiscal policies that redistribute the gains of automation rather than allowing them to accumulate in a handful of balance sheets, and through democratic accountability for the systems that are increasingly making the decisions that shape our lives.

The choice between AI as an instrument of imperial domination and AI as a tool of human liberation is real. It will not be made by the technology itself, which has no preferences. It will not be made by the market, which will default to the outcome that benefits those with the most power to shape it. It will be made by politics - which means it will be made by whoever shows up to fight for it.

That is the argument for building something. Not eventually. Now.

At the same time, across Europe and North America, hundreds of thousands of workers in sectors from legal services to financial administration to content production are losing jobs, seeing their hours cut, or watching their wages driven down by the same technology generating those quarterly numbers - and they are not being compensated for this, nor retrained at any meaningful scale. They are, in the language of economics, bearing the negative externalities of a transformation whose positive returns are flowing almost entirely to a small number of companies and the people who own them. This is not a market failure in the technical sense but a policy choice - specifically, the choice not to tax the winners of this transformation and use the proceeds to protect those bearing its costs, a choice that is becoming harder to justify with every quarterly earnings report.

The intellectual case for an AI levy is not complicated, and it does not require any particularly radical assumptions about the role of the state in the economy. It rests on a principle that is already embedded in the legal frameworks of most democratic societies: when an economic activity generates significant costs that are borne by parties other than those profiting from it, the state is entitled to intervene to ensure those costs are fairly distributed.

We apply this logic to carbon emissions, to financial transactions, to alcohol and tobacco whose social costs in healthcare and law enforcement are partially recovered through taxation. The principle is not controversial - what is controversial, and what the technology industry has spent enormous resources lobbying against, is applying it to AI.

The case for doing so is straightforward. When Microsoft deploys Copilot across its enterprise software and a law firm subsequently lays off twelve paralegals, those twelve people do not simply disappear into a statistical abstraction: they lose income, draw on unemployment insurance funded by taxpayers, may need retraining funded by public budgets, and leave their communities with less spending power. The costs are real, they are measurable, and they are being borne by people and institutions that had nothing to do with the decision to automate those jobs, while Microsoft books the productivity gain. That is an externality - and externalities, in a functioning political economy, get taxed.

What would a serious AI tax regime actually look like? There are three distinct instruments worth combining.

1. The first is a levy on large-scale AI model usage - essentially a per-query or per-API-call tax on commercial AI deployment above a certain threshold of scale, targeting the activity most directly responsible for labour displacement: the industrial-scale use of AI to replace human cognitive work in commercial settings. It would apply to OpenAI’s API, to Google’s Gemini deployment, to Anthropic’s enterprise contracts, to every company using these tools at the scale that generates meaningful displacement, while leaving small businesses and individual users entirely exempt.

2. The second is a windfall tax on the extraordinary profits being generated by AI-driven productivity gains in the technology sector more broadly. Microsoft, Alphabet, Meta, Amazon, and Apple have collectively added trillions of dollars in market capitalisation over the past two years, driven substantially by AI-related earnings growth and investor expectations, and a portion of those profits - not all of them, not even most of them, but a meaningful fraction - should be redirected toward the workers and communities whose displacement is generating them. This is not redistribution as ideology but redistribution as basic accounting: the people creating the value being captured by these companies are entitled to a share of it.

3. The third instrument is a wealth tax on the individuals who have benefited most dramatically from this concentration. Elon Musk’s net worth stands at over $700 billion, making him the first person in history to cross that threshold - a fortune driven substantially by AI and automation plays across Tesla, xAI, and his other ventures. Jensen Huang of Nvidia - whose chips power virtually every significant AI system in the world - has seen his personal wealth grow from $4.7 billion in 2020 to over $160 billion today, a thirtyfold increase built almost entirely on the AI boom. Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Satya Nadella: the list of individuals whose personal fortunes have been transformed by this technological moment is short, their gains are extraordinary, and the social contribution they are currently making through taxation is, relative to those gains, embarrassingly small.

The objections to these proposals are predictable, and worth addressing directly.

The first is competitiveness: tax AI too heavily in Europe (or in any other major economy) and the companies will simply move their operations elsewhere. This argument has been made against every attempt to regulate or tax the technology sector for the past thirty years, and it has consistently proven more useful as lobbying rhetoric than as economic analysis - the companies generating these profits need access to European markets, European talent, and European data, and they are not going to abandon a market of 450 million relatively wealthy consumers because they have to pay a levy on their API calls. The appropriate response to the risk of regulatory arbitrage is international coordination, not unilateral surrender, which is precisely the kind of policy agenda that requires political organisation to pursue.

The second objection is innovation: tax the technology and you slow the development of AI, depriving society of its benefits. This conflates the taxation of extraordinary profits with the suppression of innovation, which are not the same thing - Google is not going to stop developing AI because its quarterly profit is $32 billion instead of $34 billion, and the margin available for taxation without any meaningful impact on investment decisions is vast. Anyone arguing otherwise is either innumerate or arguing in bad faith.

The third objection is the most honest one: it is politically difficult. The technology industry is among the most powerful lobbying forces in both Washington and Brussels, and the individuals whose wealth would be affected by a serious wealth tax have the resources to fund political campaigns, think tanks, and media operations that will push back against any such agenda with considerable force. This is true - and it is also precisely why the political response to AI cannot be left to the existing parties, which are too embedded in existing donor relationships to take these proposals seriously.

The money exists, and the legal and intellectual frameworks for taxing it exist too. What is missing is the political will to do it - and the political organisation to create that will where it does not currently exist. An AI levy, a windfall tax on technology profits, and a serious wealth tax on the individuals most enriched by this transformation would generate hundreds of billions of euros annually at the European level alone - enough to fund a meaningful AI Transition Fund, serious retraining programmes, and the beginnings of the income support infrastructure that a just response to this disruption requires.

The question, as always, is not whether this is possible. It is whether anyone is willing to fight for it.

La domanda non è ipotetica. Il pezzo precedente di questa serie ha argomentato che la dislocazione guidata dall’IA è già in corso, che accelererà, e che l’assunzione ottimistica - nuovi lavori emergeranno per sostituire quelli perduti - potrebbe non reggere in un’era in cui l’intelligenza artificiale avanza simultaneamente in ogni dominio cognitivo. Se questo è anche solo parzialmente vero, allora il contratto implicito al cuore dell’istruzione moderna - studia sodo, ottieni una qualifica, trova un impiego, costruisci una vita - viene silenziosamente annullato, e le istituzioni responsabili di preparare la prossima generazione non hanno ancora cominciato a fare i conti con questa realtà.

La maggior parte dei sistemi educativi nel mondo è stata progettata, nella sua forma attuale, durante l’era industriale e perfezionata durante il boom economico del dopoguerra. La loro architettura riflette le esigenze di quel momento: curricula standardizzati, coorti per fasce d’età, esami che misurano la ritenzione e l’applicazione di conoscenze consolidate, credenziali che segnalano l’”occupabilità” ai potenziali datori di lavoro. L’intero sistema è orientato, al suo livello più profondo, verso la produzione di lavoratori - lavoratori affidabili, certificati, intercambiabili per un’economia che ne aveva bisogno in grandissime quantità.

Quell’economia sta cambiando più velocemente delle istituzioni costruite per servirla.

La prima e più immediata preoccupazione è quella che tende a perdersi nei dibattiti sull’IA e l’istruzione, i quali si concentrano quasi esclusivamente su come l’IA possa essere utilizzata come strumento didattico: il rischio che crescere con l’assistenza dell’IA degradi attivamente le capacità cognitive che ci rendono umani.

Questo non è luddismo. È un’osservazione diretta su come si sviluppano le competenze. La capacità di concentrazione prolungata, di affrontare un problema difficile senza ricorrere immediatamente a un aiuto esterno, di tenere un argomento in testa abbastanza a lungo da metterlo alla prova con le controargomentazioni - queste non sono doti innate ma capacità allenate, sviluppate attraverso la pratica e atrofizzate attraverso il disuso. Una generazione che cresce delegando il proprio pensiero a sistemi di IA fin dalla tenera età si svilupperà diversamente da una che è stata costretta ad affrontare la complessità da sola - e non, oserei dire, in modi che siano senza riserve positivi.

L’analogia con la capacità fisica è imperfetta ma istruttiva. Non smettiamo di insegnare ai bambini a camminare perché esistono le automobili, né di incoraggiare l’esercizio fisico perché il lavoro manuale è stato in gran parte automatizzato. Riconosciamo che la capacità ha un valore che va oltre il suo uso strumentale immediato - che un corpo in movimento è più sano, più resiliente, più pienamente vivo di uno che non si muove. La stessa logica si applica alle menti. Il fatto che l’IA possa scrivere il tuo saggio, risolvere la tua equazione o costruire il tuo argomento non significa che imparare a fare queste cose da soli sia diventato inutile. Può significare, semmai, che sia diventato più importante - perché la capacità di pensiero indipendente è precisamente ciò che distinguerà gli esseri umani dai sistemi che abbiamo costruito, e ciò che ci permetterà di governare quei sistemi piuttosto che semplicemente deferire a loro.

Questo è un motivo per fare ancora di più sulle dimensioni fondamentalmente umane dell’istruzione - leggere testi difficili, scrivere con precisione e cura, imparare a ragionare attraverso i problemi piuttosto che aggirarli, sviluppare il tipo di alfabetizzazione culturale e storica ampia che permette di collocare i nuovi sviluppi in una cornice più lunga. Non nonostante l’IA, ma proprio a causa di essa.

La seconda sfida è più profonda e più strutturale: a cosa serve realmente l’istruzione, se non principalmente per l’occupazione?

Questa è, in un certo senso, una domanda antichissima - i filosofi discutono dello scopo dell’istruzione fin da Platone - ma acquista nuova urgenza in un contesto in cui la giustificazione occupazionale, che ha dominato il pensiero educativo per almeno un secolo, non può più essere data per scontata. Se non possiamo promettere ai bambini che le loro qualifiche si tradurranno in modo affidabile in mezzi di sostentamento, allora la risposta onesta alla domanda “perché dovrei studiare?” richiede una base diversa.

La risposta, penso, è che l’istruzione dovrebbe essere ripensata come il progetto di diventare un essere umano più pienamente sviluppato - non nel senso vago da poster motivazionale, ma in uno specifico e serio. Significa sviluppare la capacità di pensare in modo chiaro e indipendente. Significa coltivare una genuina curiosità per il mondo e gli strumenti intellettuali per perseguirla. Significa imparare a vivere con gli altri, a navigare il disaccordo, a contribuire alla vita collettiva in modi che vadano oltre la produttività economica. E significa scoprire di cosa ti importa davvero - non ciò che il mercato del lavoro valorizza, ma ciò che dà alla tua particolare esistenza senso e direzione.

In un mondo in cui l’IA gestisce una quota crescente di compiti strumentali, le cose che rimangono distintamente e irriducibilmente umane - la capacità di relazione autentica, di giudizio etico, di espressione creativa radicata nell’esperienza vissuta, di agire politicamente - diventano più importanti, non meno. Un sistema educativo orientato verso queste cose avrebbe un aspetto molto diverso da uno orientato all’occupabilità, e la transizione non sarà semplice né indolore. Ma è la direzione verso cui l’onestà intellettuale su dove siamo diretti dovrebbe spingerci.

La terza sfida è la più politicamente sensibile: come prepariamo concretamente i bambini alla possibilità di un mondo in cui un’occupazione stabile e duratura non sia disponibile per loro - senza né mentire loro sulle prospettive né abbandonarli alla disperazione?

Parte della risposta sta negli argomenti politici del pezzo precedente: un Fondo di Transizione per l’IA, sostegno al reddito, in ultima analisi forse un reddito di base universale, affinché una vita senza occupazione convenzionale non significhi una vita di povertà e insicurezza. Ma parte di essa risiede anche nell’istruzione stessa - nell’insegnare ai giovani a pensare al lavoro in modo diverso, a comprendere la differenza tra occupazione e attività significativa, a sviluppare le capacità pratiche e creative che permettono a una persona di costruire qualcosa di valido anche al di fuori delle strutture formali del mercato del lavoro.

Questo non è un argomento per abbassare le ambizioni. È un argomento per reindirizzarle. I bambini seduti nelle aule oggi vivranno la transizione tecnologica più consequenziale della storia umana, e meritano un’istruzione abbastanza onesta da riconoscerlo, e abbastanza ambiziosa da prepararli - non solo come lavoratori, ma come persone.

Come si traduce tutto questo in pratica? Il riorientamento filosofico è necessario, ma deve essere tradotto in scelte politiche concrete - e alcune di esse non sono così lontane o radicali come potrebbero sembrare.

1. La più immediata è una limitazione dell’uso degli strumenti di IA nell’istruzione di base. Proprio come le calcolatrici sono state a lungo escluse dall’educazione matematica primaria con il motivo che i bambini devono sviluppare l’intuizione numerica prima di poter usare strumenti per estenderla, gli assistenti IA dovrebbero essere tenuti fuori dalle fasi dell’apprendimento in cui si formano le capacità cognitive fondamentali - scrittura, comprensione della lettura, ragionamento di base, risoluzione dei problemi. Non si tratta di essere anti-tecnologia; si tratta di sequenza. Prima si costruisce la capacità, poi la si amplifica. Fare il contrario non produce né buoni pensatori né buoni utenti dell’IA.

2. Oltre a ciò, i curricula devono essere sostanzialmente ridisegnati attorno a quelle che si potrebbero chiamare competenze umane durature: pensiero critico e capacità di valutare fonti e argomenti; ragionamento etico e capacità di navigare compromessi complessi; competenze creative e collaborative genuinamente difficili da automatizzare; intelligenza emotiva e capacità interpersonali che sostengono sia le relazioni che la vita politica. Queste non sono competenze trasversali da aggiungere ai margini di un sistema altrimenti invariato - devono diventare il nucleo attorno a cui tutto il resto è organizzato.

3. L’istruzione professionale e superiore ha bisogno di un confronto onesto con le traiettorie del mercato del lavoro. Le università e i college che continuano a vendere credenziali come biglietti affidabili per carriere specifiche senza riconoscere il grado di incertezza che ora circonda quelle proiezioni non stanno servendo i propri studenti - stanno vendendo loro una storia che potrebbe non reggere. Le istituzioni che prendono questo sul serio ridisegneranno la loro offerta attorno all’adattabilità e all’ampiezza piuttosto che alla specializzazione stretta, e saranno trasparenti con gli studenti sul panorama che stanno per affrontare.

4. Infine, e forse più importante, le scuole devono iniziare a insegnare ai giovani le dimensioni politiche ed economiche dell’IA stessa - non come materia tecnica, ma come questione di alfabetizzazione democratica. Una generazione che cresce capendo come funzionano questi sistemi, chi li possiede, come vengono regolamentati e cosa è in gioco nelle scelte che le società fanno su di loro sarà molto meglio attrezzata per partecipare a quelle scelte rispetto a una che tratta l’IA come un dato di fatto, come il meteo.

La cosa più importante che possiamo dare alla prossima generazione non è un insieme di competenze che l’IA renderà obsolete entro un decennio. È la capacità di pensare, di adattarsi, di trovare significato e di partecipare alle decisioni politiche e sociali che determineranno che tipo di mondo l’IA produrrà effettivamente.

È un progetto educativo diverso da quello che la maggior parte dei sistemi sta attualmente perseguendo. È anche, oserei dire, un progetto più degno.

The question is not hypothetical. The previous piece in this series made the case that AI-driven displacement is already underway, that it will accelerate, and that the optimistic assumption - new jobs will emerge to replace the old ones - may not hold in an era where artificial intelligence is advancing across every cognitive domain simultaneously. If that is even partially right, then the implicit contract at the heart of modern education - study hard, get qualified, find employment, build a life - is being quietly voided, and the institutions responsible for preparing the next generation have not begun to reckon with it.

Most education systems around the world were designed, in their current form, during the industrial era and refined during the postwar economic boom. Their architecture reflects the needs of that moment: standardised curricula, age-grouped cohorts, examinations that measure the retention and application of established knowledge, credentials that signal employability to prospective employers. The entire system is oriented, at its deepest level, toward producing workers - reliable, credentialed, interchangeable workers for an economy that needed them in vast numbers.

That economy is changing faster than the institutions built to serve it.

The first and most immediate concern is one that tends to get lost in debates about AI and education, which focus almost entirely on how AI can be used as a teaching tool: the risk that growing up with AI assistance actively degrades the cognitive capabilities that make us human.

This is not technophobia. It is a straightforward observation about how skills develop. The capacity for sustained concentration, for working through a difficult problem without reaching immediately for external assistance, for holding an argument in one’s head long enough to test it against counterarguments - these are not innate gifts but trained capacities, developed through practice and atrophied through disuse. A generation that grows up outsourcing its thinking to AI systems from an early age will develop differently than one that was required to struggle with complexity unaided - and not, I would argue, in ways that are straightforwardly positive.

The analogy with physical capability is imperfect but instructive. We do not stop teaching children to walk because cars exist, or stop encouraging exercise because physical labour has been largely automated. We recognise that the capability has value beyond its immediate instrumental use - that a body which moves is healthier, more resilient, more fully alive than one that does not. The same logic applies to minds. The fact that AI can write your essay, solve your equation, or construct your argument does not mean that learning to do these things yourself has become pointless. It may mean, if anything, that it has become more important - because the capacity for independent thought is precisely what will distinguish humans from the systems we have built, and what will allow us to govern those systems rather than simply deferring to them.

This is an argument for doubling down on the fundamentally human dimensions of education - reading difficult texts, writing with precision and care, learning to reason through problems rather than around them, developing the kind of broad cultural and historical literacy that allows you to situate new developments in a longer frame. Not despite AI, but because of it.

The second challenge is deeper and more structural: what is education actually for, if not primarily for employment?

This is, in one sense, a very old question - philosophers have been arguing about the purpose of education since Plato - but it acquires new urgency in a context where the employment rationale, which has dominated educational thinking for at least a century, can no longer be taken for granted. If we cannot promise children that their qualifications will translate reliably into livelihoods, then the honest answer to “why should I study?” requires a different foundation.

The answer, I think, is that education should be reconceived as the project of becoming a more fully developed human being - not in the vague, motivational-poster sense, but in a specific and serious one. It means developing the capacity to think clearly and independently. It means cultivating genuine curiosity about the world and the intellectual tools to pursue it. It means learning to live with others, to navigate disagreement, to contribute to collective life in ways that go beyond economic productivity. And it means discovering what you actually care about - not what the labour market values, but what gives your particular existence meaning and direction.

In a world where AI handles an increasing share of instrumental tasks, the things that remain distinctly and irreducibly human - the capacity for genuine relationship, for ethical judgment, for creative expression that is rooted in lived experience, for political agency - become more rather than less important. An education system oriented toward these things would look quite different from one oriented toward employability, and the transition will not be simple or painless. But it is the direction that intellectual honesty about where we are headed should push us.

The third challenge is the most politically sensitive: how do we prepare children concretely for the possibility of a world in which stable, lifelong employment is not available to them - without either lying to them about the prospects or abandoning them to despair?

Part of the answer lies in the policy arguments made in the previous piece: an AI Transition Fund, income support, ultimately perhaps universal basic income, so that a life without conventional employment does not mean a life of poverty and insecurity. But part of it also lies in education itself - in teaching young people to think about work differently, to understand the difference between employment and meaningful activity, to develop the practical and creative capacities that allow a person to build something worthwhile even outside the formal structures of the job market.

This is not an argument for lowering ambition. It is an argument for redirecting it. The children sitting in classrooms today will live through the most consequential technological transition in human history, and they deserve an education honest enough to acknowledge that, and ambitious enough to prepare them for it - not just as workers, but as people.

What would this actually look like in practice? The philosophical reorientation is necessary, but it needs to be translated into concrete policy choices - and some of them are not as distant or radical as they might seem.

1. The most immediate is a restriction on AI tool usage in foundational education. Just as calculators were long excluded from early mathematics education on the grounds that children need to develop numerical intuition before they can use tools to extend it, AI assistants should be kept out of the stages of learning where core cognitive capacities are being formed - writing, reading comprehension, basic reasoning, problem-solving. This is not about being anti-technology; it is about sequencing. You build the capability first, then you augment it. Doing it the other way around produces neither good thinkers nor good AI users.

2. Beyond that, curricula need to be substantially redesigned around what might be called durable human competencies: critical thinking and the ability to evaluate sources and arguments; ethical reasoning and the capacity to navigate complex trade-offs; creative and collaborative skills that are genuinely difficult to automate; emotional intelligence and the interpersonal capabilities that underpin both relationships and political life. These are not soft skills to be added at the margins of an otherwise unchanged system - they need to become the core, around which everything else is organised.

3. Vocational and higher education need an honest reckoning with labour market trajectories. Universities and colleges that continue to sell credentials as reliable tickets to specific careers without acknowledging the degree of uncertainty that now surrounds those projections are not serving their students - they are selling them a story that may not hold. Institutions that take this seriously will redesign their offerings around adaptability and breadth rather than narrow specialisation, and will be transparent with students about the landscape they are entering.

4. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, schools need to begin teaching young people about the political and economic dimensions of AI itself - not as a technical subject, but as a matter of democratic literacy. A generation that grows up understanding how these systems work, who owns them, how they are regulated, and what is at stake in the choices societies make about them will be far better equipped to participate in those choices than one that treats AI as a given, like weather.

The most important thing we can give the next generation is not a set of skills that AI will render obsolete within a decade. It is the capacity to think, to adapt, to find meaning, and to participate in the political and social decisions that will determine what kind of world AI actually produces.

That is a different educational project from the one most systems are currently pursuing. It is also, I would argue, a more worthy one.

What happens to her?

In the traditional political narrative, the answer is roughly: she retrains, finds something new, adapts. The economy has always created new jobs to replace the old ones. The industrial worker became the service worker. The typist became the data entry clerk. Change is disruptive but the system self-corrects.

Today, I find this argument increasingly difficult to believe - and I suspect that in a few years, almost no one will be making it with a straight face.

The standard reassurance rests on a historical pattern that may simply not apply this time. Previous waves of automation replaced human muscle or narrow, repetitive cognitive tasks, and the jobs that emerged in their place were typically ones requiring broader human judgment, creativity, or social intelligence. The implicit assumption was that there would always be a residual domain of human capability that machines could not reach.

That assumption is being dismantled, systematically and rapidly. The frontier of what AI and robotics can do is no longer advancing along one narrow track - it is advancing across virtually every domain simultaneously, from legal reasoning to medical diagnosis, from creative work to complex logistics. The question of whether new jobs will emerge to replace those lost is no longer a question about historical patterns; it is a question about whether human cognitive labour will retain any comparative advantage at all in an economy where the cost of artificial intelligence continues to fall at the pace it has fallen over the past decade.

I do not think anyone can answer that question with certainty. But I am personally sceptical that the answer will be reassuring - and I think the consequences of being wrong, if we assume optimism and it turns out to be unjustified, are catastrophic in a way that justifies treating the risk seriously now rather than waiting for the evidence to accumulate.

Because here is what is already clear, even before we reach the more speculative territory: the transition, whatever its ultimate endpoint, is going to be enormously painful for a very large number of people.

The fifty-two year old accountant is not going to retrain as a prompt engineer. The fifty-eight year old paralegal, the forty-five year old journalist, the sixty year old logistics coordinator - these are not people for whom “learn new skills and adapt” is a realistic or dignified response to the elimination of the work they have built their lives around. And they are not a marginal group. They are tens of millions of people across Europe and North America alone, with hundreds of millions more across the Global South who will face the same disruption without even the threadbare safety nets that exist in wealthier countries. And this without considering the robotics wave, coming right behind the AI one.

The social and political consequences of mass displacement without adequate support are not difficult to predict, because we have seen them before. The deindustrialisation of the 1980s, which was far slower and more geographically contained than what is coming, produced decades of political instability, the hollowing out of communities, and ultimately the populist backlash that is still reshaping Western democracies today. What is coming is faster, broader, and hits a wider range of workers across the income distribution.

We are, in other words, building toward a social crisis of considerable magnitude - and doing almost nothing to prepare for it.

What is needed is straightforward in principle, even if politically difficult in practice: an AI Transition Fund, designed to provide meaningful support to workers displaced by automation, funded by those who are capturing the gains from that automation.

The immediate priority is unemployment support - not the thin, time-limited benefits that exist in most countries, but serious income replacement for workers whose professions are being structurally eliminated, on a timescale that reflects the reality of mid-career displacement rather than the assumption of a quick return to employment. Alongside that, hoping for the best, real investment in retraining - not the perfunctory courses that pass for workforce development in most countries today, but substantive programmes built around what the labour market of the next decade will actually require.

And beyond that, as a longer-term horizon that policy needs to begin preparing for now rather than later: if the optimists are wrong about job creation, if the displacement turns out to be structural rather than transitional, then the conversation about universal basic income can no longer be treated as a utopian distraction. It becomes the only serious response to an economy in which human labour has been priced out of large parts of the market by technology. UBI is not the first step here - the immediate crisis demands immediate, easier-to-deploy tools. But any honest account of where this trajectory leads has to acknowledge that it sits at the end of the road if the jobs do not come back.

How do you fund such as Fund? The answer should follow the logic of who benefits.

The companies deploying large language models and AI systems at scale are capturing productivity gains of extraordinary magnitude while externalising the social costs of displacement onto workers, communities, and public budgets. A levy on corporate AI usage - structured around the scale of deployment and the labour displacement it generates - is not a punitive measure but a straightforward application of the polluter-pays principle to a different kind of externality. Those who profit from the disruption should contribute to managing its consequences.

Beyond that, the extraordinary concentration of wealth that AI is accelerating - in the hands of the owners of the most powerful models and the infrastructure on which they run - makes the case for higher taxes on both income and wealth at the very top more urgent, not less. The billionaires being minted by this transformation are not a natural phenomenon; they are the product of specific technological and regulatory choices, and the proceeds of that wealth can and should be partially redirected toward those bearing the costs.

This is not a radical argument. It is the same logic that built the welfare state in the wake of industrial capitalism - the recognition that transformative economic change generates winners and losers, and that a functioning society requires mechanisms to distribute the gains more broadly than the market, left to itself, will do.

The technology is not waiting for politics to catch up. The displacement is happening now, at a pace that will only accelerate, and the window for building the institutional response before the social costs become unmanageable is not infinite.

The question is not whether an AI Transition Fund is necessary. It is whether the political will to build one can be assembled before the crisis makes the absence of it impossible to ignore.

Artificial intelligence is already here, and it has been for a while. It is not science fiction, and it is not a problem for the future. It is the system that already wrote your insurance contract, assessed your credit application, screened your CV, and decided what news you see - and yet it barely appears in electoral platforms, almost never surfaces in televised debates, and when it does enter public discourse at all, it is treated as a technological curiosity rather than a central political question.

Why?

History suggests an answer, and it is not a flattering one for the political class.

Every major technological transformation has eventually generated a political response. The Industrial Revolution moved millions of people from countryside to factory, created working conditions of extraordinary brutality, and concentrated wealth in a small number of hands - and the response, when it came, took the form of labour movements, trade unions, socialist parties, and workplace legislation that reshaped the political landscape of the twentieth century. The environmental crisis, decades later, produced something similar: Green parties, international conventions, and climate policy frameworks that, however imperfect and inadequate, exist because someone decided the problem was large enough to deserve an institutional response.

Where is the equivalent response to artificial intelligence? It does not exist - or rather, there is some technical regulation at the margins, some parliamentary committee, some statement of principle, but nothing resembling a movement, a political force, or a credible programme that puts the fundamental questions this transformation raises at the centre of democratic debate.

My hypothesis is an uncomfortable one: politicians are either too unprepared or too self-interested to act.

Unprepared, because technology is genuinely complex and the political class is largely composed of (old) lawyers, economists, and communications professionals who have little understanding of how a language model works or what it means to train a system on billions of data points - and it is, of course, always easier to talk about what you already know. But beyond mere ignorance, there is something more structural at work. Artificial intelligence is not just a technology that politicians fail to understand; it is a direct threat to many of the entrenched interests on which traditional politics has always depended.

Consider what AI in government actually promises at its best: the eradication of administrative corruption, the automation of bureaucracy, the radical transparency of public processes. Less discretion in how public resources are allocated means less power for those who live off favours, contracts, and opaque intermediation - and for a significant portion of the political class, genuinely embracing AI governance would mean dismantling the very structures through which they exercise influence. So better, from their perspective, not to talk about it at all, and to let the transformation proceed in the shadows, managed by private companies without democratic mandate, while politics occupies itself with more comfortable terrain.

Meanwhile, the transformation accelerates with or without political engagement.

The displacement of workers has already begun, though not primarily in the dramatic form of robots replacing factory operatives that has dominated the public imagination. It is happening in call centres and law firms, in newsrooms and accounting offices - cognitive work, not just manual labour, and middle-class jobs, not only those of the most economically vulnerable. Conservative estimates suggest that tens of millions of positions across Europe and North America will undergo radical change within the next decade, with some professions disappearing entirely and others requiring such complete retraining as to amount to the same thing.

Who is building the safety nets for those who will lose their livelihoods through this transition? Who is designing the fiscal frameworks to tax the extraordinary gains that will accrue to those who own the machines - and to redistribute that wealth toward those who bear the costs? At the same time, the companies controlling the most powerful models are accumulating computing capacity, proprietary data, and market power at a speed without historical precedent, forming technological monopolies that within a few years may be more powerful than many nation states. This is not speculation; it is the straightforward application of industrial economics to a technology characterised by increasing returns and near-insurmountable barriers to entry.

There is, though, another side to this story, and intellectual honesty requires telling it.

Artificial intelligence does not only bring risks - it brings extraordinary opportunities that a serious politics could embrace. Better diagnostics in public healthcare, more personalised and effective education, accelerated scientific research, far more efficient management of public services: these are not marketing claims but genuine possibilities that are already beginning to materialise in places that have chosen to govern AI rather than ignore it. And yes, as noted above: the same technology that threatens entrenched political interests also offers the possibility of a more transparent, less corrupt, more responsive state - faster, fairer, and more accountable to the people it is supposed to serve.

But none of these opportunities realise themselves without deliberate political choices about who controls the systems, how they are deployed, and in whose interest they are designed to operate. They require, in other words, exactly the kind of politics that is currently absent.

The world is changing faster than at any previous point in human history, and the transformations ahead in the next ten years will exceed in their cumulative impact those of the last fifty. In every previous era of comparable disruption, the political response - however late, imperfect, and hard-won - eventually arrived. This time, we are still waiting for someone to build it.

We need a political movement that genuinely represents human interests in the age of artificial intelligence: not a movement against technology, but one organised to govern it; not one that seeks to stop change, but one with the ambition to determine collectively where that change should lead. That movement does not yet exist. But it can be built - and the time to build it is now.

There is a belief that is imposing itself, silent and fast, before anyone has time to object. The future - they say - belongs to the most efficient systems. To the most precise algorithms. To the most powerful oligarchs. To the most ruthless investors. And anyone who wants to slow this process down, anyone who dares ask who controls these machines and in whose interest, gets dismissed as a reactionary, a nostalgic, an obstacle to progress.

I am here to flip that narrative.

Whoever defends human sovereignty over artificial intelligence is not a conservative, not a luddite. They are the avantgarde.

My name is Andrea Venzon. I founded Volt Europa, the first transnational party in European history, today represented in several national parliaments and the European Parliament. I built the Atlas Movement, a global progressive network active in 130 countries with 25,000 members. I have worked on political and institutional strategy for more than a decade, from Brussels to Nairobi, from London to New York.

I have seen up close how the big decisions that reshape the world get made: far from public debate, in rooms where few people sit, without democratic mandate, often without even an awareness of the consequences. With artificial intelligence, this process has accelerated at an unprecedented pace.

Let’s be clear. Over the past few years, one of the greatest transfers of power in modern history has taken place. Not through elections, not through treaties, not through revolutions. Through server farms, language models, and commercial agreements signed in silence.

A handful of companies - almost all American, some Chinese - is building the systems that will soon decide who gets a mortgage, who passes a job interview, who ends up under surveillance, how information spreads, how wars are fought. These systems are not neutral. They embed values, priorities, interests. But no one voted for them.

Meanwhile, governments are struggling to keep up. Europe produced the AI Act - a serious but imperfect effort, already under pressure. The United States dismantled the modest regulatory attempts of the previous administration. The Global South, which will bear the heaviest consequences of this transition, has almost no say.

The window is closing. And most people don’t even know it was open. This publication exists to do one simple thing: keep that window open for as long as possible.

This is not a technical outlet. You will not find code analysis or model benchmarks here. What you will find is a political argument: that human sovereignty over artificial intelligence is worth the cost of defending it. That the trade-off between efficiency and democratic control is real, and that choosing democratic control is not a mistake - it is the only rational choice for anyone who wants to live in a free society.

You will also find a broader ambition: these ideas are not meant to stay on paper. The goal is for them to translate, over time, into a concrete political offer. How and when, we will figure out together.

Why now?

Because in a year’s time, the most important choices will already have been made.

The implementation of the European AI Act - the most ambitious regulation on AI governance in the world - is already being overtaken by events. The collapse of regulatory oversight in the United States is creating a vacuum that someone will fill. Elections across Europe are reshaping who sits at the tables where these decisions get made.

Whoever is not at that table does not decide. They are on the menu.

I expect some people to bristle at this publication. Those convinced that technological efficiency is a value in itself. Those who think politics cannot - and should not - engage with complex systems. Those comfortable with the idea that the future should be designed by engineers, not citizens. And those who think there are more urgent problems - when this is the single factor that will determine the concentration of power and wealth more than any other in the years ahead.

I respect these positions. I will fight them.

Because if there is one lesson I have learned building transnational political infrastructure, it is this: the rules of the game do not change on their own. They change when someone decides to change them - with organisation, with arguments, and with the patience of someone who knows that important battles are not won in a news cycle.

Over the coming months I will write about AI governance, economic power and technological concentration, how to build a transnational political movement in 2026, and what defending democracy means today. Each article will be one piece of a larger argument.

If this vision interests you, subscribe. If you know someone who should read it, share it.

And if you have objections - if you think I am wrong, that the problem is framed badly, that there are angles I am not seeing - write it in the comments. This space is built for that too.

The future is not written. Let’s write it now.

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Versione in Italiano

First Venezuela. In January, the United States military captured Nicolás Maduro in a direct military operation, Washington then recognised the transitional government and took control of Venezuelan oil. Then Iran: joint military operations with Israel that led to the death of Ayatollah Khamenei. Now Cuba.

Cuba has received no oil shipments since the beginning of January, following United States pressure. Trump signed an executive order imposing tariffs on any country that supplies oil to the island, producing in effect a total energy blockade. The result is that Cuba’s national electricity grid has collapsed completely, leaving an island of ten million people in the dark. It is not the first time: this is the third major blackout in four months.

And while Cuba was plunging into darkness, Trump was telling journalists at the White House: “Whether I liberate it or take it - I think I can do whatever I want with Cuba. They are a very weakened nation right now.”

Take it. As though it were a territory, a piece of property, a deal to be closed.

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The regime pretext

I already know what many will say: but Cuba is a dictatorship, Iran was a theocracy, Maduro was an autocrat - is it not right to liberate those peoples?

It is an argument that deserves a direct answer, because it is the one being used to justify the silence of the so-called democratic world.

I want to be clear about one thing, first of all: I have condemned these regimes, and not only in words. I have demonstrated in person against the Cuban regime, against the Iranian one, against Maduro - in the streets, alongside others, putting myself out there. I am convinced that supporting peoples in their struggle for freedom is not only right but necessary.

But there is a fundamental difference that those who use the liberation pretext refuse to see: replacing a head of state with one subservient to Washington, without changing anything else, is not liberating a people - it is changing their master.

Washington has not liberated anyone, at least not so far. What Trump is doing is using force to subjugate governments he dislikes - not to bring democracy, but to install compliant governments, open markets and take resources. In the case of Venezuela, Trump recognised the transitional government and announced a deal over Venezuelan oil. Where is the democracy in any of this?

The method, furthermore, is that of striking the civilian population until it surrenders. Just as in Iran where civilians are paying the price of this aggression, Cuban hospitals have had to postpone procedures, fuel shortages have left rubbish piling up in the streets, and schools have cut their hours. The civilians who are suffering are not the regime’s officials - they are the very Cubans Trump claims to want to liberate.

And then there is a third point, the one that should make us tremble: imperial logic does not distinguish between regimes and democracies. It distinguishes between strong nations and weak ones, between those who can resist and those who cannot.

What happens when it is a free country’s turn?

This is the question nobody wants to ask out loud.

Trump has already set his sights on Greenland - an autonomous territory of Denmark, a NATO member, a European democracy. He has threatened Canada with punitive tariffs and hints at annexation. He has treated European leaders like vassals to be kept in line. Venezuela was a regime, Iran was a regime, Cuba is a regime - but Greenland is not, Denmark is not, and if the logic now being established is that of the strongest, if the international community learns to accept that borders shift by force and that sovereignty is negotiable, then nobody is safe.

The precedent being built today is not about Cuba. It is about all of us.

Silence as complicity

And Europe? Democratic governments? International institutions? Silence. Or worse: pre-emptive alignment.

This is not about sympathy for the Castro regime - it is about something more fundamental. Either international law applies to everyone, or it applies to no one. Either the sovereignty of a nation, even one that is badly governed, is inviolable - with exceptions only for interventions decided upon to protect that very law, which would place Ukraine and Palestine far higher on the list - or it becomes an optional extra that great powers reserve the right to ignore whenever convenient. European governments that stay silent in the face of Cuba being starved out, Maduro being captured, and Iran being bombed, are building the world in which one day it could be their turn - they are teaching Trump, and whoever comes after him, that the method works, that you just need to wait for the right moment, weaken the target enough, and then you can take what you want.

It is not naive to resist. It is naive not to.

I know that saying this comes at a cost. Opposing the United States has economic, diplomatic and political consequences, and it is not a comfortable position. But the alternative - standing by, hoping not to be next, buying security through silence - has already been proven to fail, because the countries that have genuflected before Trump have not obtained protection: they have obtained contempt and ever-growing demands.

A country already in difficulty like Cuba, left in the dark, is a mirror. It shows us what a world becomes when the only rule is force, and it shows us, with brutal clarity, which side those governments we call democratic are on when someone else’s rights are trampled.

The question is not whether Cuba deserves its regime. The question is what world we are building with our silence. And the answer, right now, is: a world far more dangerous than the one we inherited.

My name is Andrea Venzon. I am a political activist, and I write to help build an independent political space - free from the blackmail of great powers and from resignation. If you like what you read, subscribe. And if you can, become a paid subscriber: it is what allows me to keep writing, analysing and taking a stand without masters.

What makes it worse is how early it still is. We are barely twenty days into 2026, and yet the year already feels saturated. In just a few weeks we have witnessed the kidnapping of Nicolás Maduro, new waves of protests shaking Iran, and renewed threats over Greenland coming from Donald Trump among many other significant pieces of news. Any one of these events, taken alone, would normally dominate the political conversation for months. Together, they collapse into a constant state of emergency. Feeling lost in this context is normal.

Authoritarian leaders understand this very well. Chaos is not a by-product of their politics; it is a tool. When figures like Trump sense that their grip on power is weakening - when the economy underperforms, when discontent grows among their own supporters, when elections loom - they escalate. They flood the public sphere with extreme statements, sudden threats, and deliberately divisive positions. The aim is not coherence. It is saturation.

This strategy serves two purposes at once. On the one hand, it forces their base to close ranks. Even their voters who are unhappy with concrete outcomes are pulled back in by a sense of siege, loyalty, or cultural war. On the other hand, it traps the opposition in a permanent reactive mode, chasing the latest outrage, dissecting the newest provocation, and arguing endlessly about yesterday’s absurdity instead of tomorrow’s alternatives.

In this environment, confusion becomes contagious. People disengage not because they don’t care, but because caring feels exhausting. Reality itself starts to feel unstable, and when everything appears chaotic, strongmen present themselves as the only source of “order.” This is how disorientation turns into political power.

That is why recognizing the pattern matters. Once we understand that overwhelm is intentional, it becomes easier to resist its effects. Confusion stops being proof that “nothing makes sense anymore” and starts being evidence that someone benefits from it not making sense.

And here is the crucial point: leaders like Trump do not have unlimited power. They cannot destroy our future by force of personality or volume alone. Their strength depends on fragmentation - on people feeling isolated, tired, and resigned. It depends on the belief that resistance is futile and that democracy is too weak to respond. History tells a different story.

If we stay close to one another, if we refuse to let confusion turn into apathy, if we keep our focus on what actually shifts power - elections, institutions, accountability- then the noise loses its grip. Authoritarians fear not outrage, but persistence. Not panic, but organization. Not chaos, but clarity. Confusion is part of the game.

So take a big breath, follow the news with a critical eye, get out and protest, vote, and do not get discouraged, ever. Focus is how we win it.

My name is Andrea Venzon. I am a political activist, and I write to help build an independent political space - free from the blackmail of great powers and from resignation. If you like what you read, subscribe. And if you can, become a paid subscriber: it’s what allows me to keep writing, analyzing, and taking positions without masters.

Versione in italiano

Europe’s Unfinished Miracle

After World War II, Europe embarked on one of the bravest political experiments in human history - rivalled only by the creation of the United Nations. The European Union brought together peoples who had slaughtered one another for centuries under a shared framework of law, markets, and institutions.

Crucially, it did so by inventing something radically new: supranational governance - the voluntary subtraction of powers from nation-states in exchange for peace, scale, and collective strength. From the Coal and Steel Community to the single market, the euro, and the Court of Justice, the EU demonstrated that sovereignty could be pooled without being erased. It showed that borders need not be battle lines, and that cooperation could replace domination.

Power Without Power

And yet, the project was never completed.

As it stands, the EU is unable to deliver on its own promises of prosperity, cohesion, and strategic autonomy. It has the economic and demographic weight of a superpower - around 450 million people, a combined GDP of roughly €16 - 17 trillion (second only to the U.S. worldwide), and close to 15% of global trade - but not the instruments, nor the political will, to act like one.

Among all its shortcomings, it is of course easy to point out the lack of a truly representative democracy: the heads of state and government of the various member states call the shots, even selecting the executive body, the Commission, while the Parliament does not even have the power to initiate legislative processes — as well as the absence of a genuine foreign policy, including, regrettably, a common defence policy.

The results are visible everywhere: from Washington pushing Europe around on security and trade, to a botched and hesitant collective response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine; from chronic commercial dependence on China to energy vulnerabilities exposed at the worst possible moments. Europe had every condition to become a decisive global actor. It simply never chose to finish the job.

A Now-or-Never Moment

We are now approaching a point of no return. Losing a European territory to U.S. pressure - by far the most likely scenario if current dynamics continue - would either hammer the final nail into the coffin of the European project or force a historic leap forward.

One path leads to slow disintegration, not unlike what the United Nations itself increasingly seems to be experiencing: a fragmentation into competing national interests, each weaker and more exposed than before to the whims of superpower politics. The other leads to the creation - by those willing, if not all member states - of a European federal state. There is no stable middle ground left.

A New Pole of Hope

A federal Europe would finally provide the scale and strength needed not only to fend off attempts by superpowers to dominate the continent, but also - if done right - to expand the European model itself: an ever larger social safety net, high quality of life, and strong environmental protection, all of which remain at the level experienced by the continent a largely unique experience in the Western world, if not worldwide.

The ability to compound policies and instruments such as sovereign debt would likely accelerate the uplifting of European regions that are still lagging behind and, by investing in local technology and strategic industries that are currently outsourced (A.I. anyone?), could revitalise areas that have long stagnated. It goes without saying that the creation of a European army could finally create the much-needed security infrastructure the content is lacking, at a fraction of the cost of what is currently spent by member states.

Beyond Europe, the implications could be global. In a world squeezed between superpowers that increasingly embody authoritarian and dictatorial tendencies, many small and mid-sized countries are forced to accept the “lesser evil” simply to survive. For example (and without discounting the remanence of imperialists flare Europe wish to have and its own disregard for international law, typical of the global north) European states have, for decades, hypocritically tolerated the bending of international law to appease U.S. interests and preserve American protection - from the genocide in Gaza to war crimes committed in other parts of the Middle East.

A united Europe could repeat the same mistakes. But my hope is that a democratic European federation could instead become a new pole of hope: a power that supports dignity, rights, and self-determination without demanding submission. Over time - or, ideally, as soon as possible - such a federation could open its membership beyond the European continent to societies that share these values and seek protection and prosperity through law rather than force.

The Real Obstacle

The main blockage to this project is internal: nationalist forces sustained and amplified by external powers. Taking my country as an example, Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni appears unable to resist kowtowing to Trump, while Matteo Salvini, current interior minister, is openly enamoured with the Kremlin. Both cling to fantasies of national rebirth in a continent that has long left such realities behind.

No small European nation - France and Germany included - has the scale to be more than marginal on its own. Sovereignty without power is not sovereignty at all. It is dependency dressed up as pride.

Europe already proved it can do the impossible. It turned enemies into partners and war into law. What it has not yet proven is the courage to complete its own creation.

This is the moment to move forward: toward a democratic, accountable, federal state of Europe - capable of defending itself, supporting people at home and abroad, and finally standing upright in the world.

There is no safer option left.

This is not a new experience. When I support Ukraine, I’m attacked by pro-Putin voices and anti-American ideologues; when I support Palestine, I suddenly become anti-Western, an extremist, a deranged communist. Today, in supporting the Iranian people, the pattern repeats almost identically. The contexts and words change, but the mechanism is always the same: instead of looking at oppressed people, one picks a geopolitical “team” and defends it - even at the cost of denying reality.

We live in an era in which imperialism and authoritarianism have violently returned to fashion, yet there is always a ready-made excuse not to stand with those on the front lines. Supporting Ukrainians fighting for their freedom is seen - by those who, sometimes rightly, distrust NATO and the United States - as a betrayal; supporting Palestine is perceived - by those who cannot tolerate anti-democratic armed movements like Hamas or theocratic regimes like Iran that back them - as a rejection of democracy; supporting those who rebel in Iran automatically becomes “playing the West’s game.” The result is that, in the name of ideological consistency, no one is supported anymore.

Meanwhile, reality keeps moving. People die, international law is trampled every day, and paralyzed by our “ifs” and “buts,” we leave millions at the mercy of local dictators and imperial powers. Today, more than 70% of the world’s population lives under authoritarian regimes; fewer than one in five people lives in a fully free country; more than 110 million human beings are displaced or refugees because of wars, repression, and persecution. This is the scale of the problem. Everything else is abstract debate.

There is also an uncomfortable truth many pretend not to understand. If those reading this article lived in Iran today, they would likely be very glad to receive external support - even from the United States - if it meant liberating their country. If they lived in Gaza, they would probably seriously consider joining an armed group rather than spending their entire lives under Israeli control. Not because it is abstractly right, but because oppression changes how people reason and drastically narrows the range of choices available.

The only way to truly understand whom to support - and why sometimes you have to hold your nose - is to stop observing the world from above and try to put yourself in the shoes of the oppressed. And this is precisely what is missing today: a transnational movement against imperialism and dictatorships that supports the liberation of peoples without asking them to pass an ideological purity test; that stands with people, not with power blocs.

Such a movement would not be abstract or symbolic. It would be concrete, visible, uncomfortable. It would organize synchronized protests in cities around the world every time a people is crushed in silence; permanent vigils in front of embassies and international institutions; targeted pressure campaigns against individuals and regimes responsible for repression; transparent fundraising to support activists, families of detainees, independent media, and tools of civil self-defense. It would be able to hold together the streets, legal advocacy, and communication - without delegating everything to governments that always arrive too late or not at all.

This is not a utopia. In embryonic form, we have already done it. In 2020 and 2021, together with Colombe Cahen-Salvador, we organized 50 consecutive weeks of protests called Fridays for Freedom, bringing thousands of people into the streets in cities around the world to support Hong Kong - breaking the silence and forcing media and institutions to look where they would have preferred to look away. Over time, those protests also drew in activists from other causes, from Belarus to Tibet, forming a true international front. Not only did we help many people in Hong Kong feel less abandoned; we can now also say that we have been investigated for terrorism by the Chinese dictatorship and are no longer able to enter the country. Obviously, these efforts did not stop the repression - but they demonstrated something essential: when solidarity becomes organized and transnational, it stops being a hashtag and becomes a political factor.

This is the level we need to return to - and surpass. Not choosing who is “pure enough” to deserve support, but who is oppressed enough to need it. Not waiting for the ideal victim, but acting in the real world, with all its contradictions.

Our duty is not to moralize about those who suffer, nor to judge their choices from a position of privilege. Our duty is to help them free themselves.

My name is Andrea Venzon. I am a political activist, and I write to help build an independent political space - free from the blackmail of great powers and from resignation. If you like what you read, subscribe. And if you can, become a paid subscriber: it’s what allows me to keep writing, analyzing, and taking positions without masters.

Versione in italiano

Some did so out of desperation. Others out of hatred for a regime that had crushed dissent, impoverished millions, and hollowed out a country with extraordinary human and natural wealth. That anger was legitimate. Maduro’s Venezuela was not free, not democratic, not just. Even I - who strongly condemned the horrible imperialistic attitude of Trump and the blatant disrespect for international law - could understand the happiness of Venezuelans at being freed from a dictator.

But many others applauded for a different reason: because the operation was carried out by Trump’s United States. And in today’s broken political debate, that alone was enough to suspend all critical thinking. We were told - loudly, confidently, repeatedly - that this was the moment Venezuela would finally become democratic. That an illegal kidnapping of a sitting head of state was not imperialism, but liberation. That sovereignty no longer mattered, because the end goal was “freedom”.

So let’s ask the only question that matters.

Where is that freedom?

Maduro is gone. But power has not changed hands. The same political class that ruled Venezuela for decades is still there. The same networks, the same elites, the same structures of control. Only now, instead of being hostile to Washington, they are dependent on it.

And that dependency is not abstract. Oil - Venezuela’s lifeline, its curse, its historical battlefield - is already being reassigned to American companies. Decisions about extraction, commercialization, and profits are no longer primarily Venezuelan decisions. They are being shaped elsewhere, according to interests that are very familiar to anyone who knows Latin American history.

Local communities? Absent.
Democratic deliberation? Non-existent.
Popular sovereignty? A slogan, not a reality.

So again: is this freedom? Or is it simply another colonial project with better branding?

We have seen this movie before. A dictator falls. The flags change. The rhetoric improves. And yet, real power moves even further away from the people it claims to liberate. Yesterday’s authoritarianism is replaced by today’s tutelage. Yesterday’s repression by today’s dependency. Yesterday’s “anti-American strongman” by tomorrow’s “responsible, pro-market leadership” that answers not to voters, but to foreign capitals and corporations.

And then comes the most cynical part: the cheering. Anyone who raises doubts is accused of “defending Maduro”. Anyone who asks about international law is told to shut up because “the regime was bad anyway”. Anyone who dares to ask whether kidnapping a head of state sets a dangerous precedent is dismissed as naïve.

This is not politics. This is cheerleading.

I want Venezuela to be free. Truly free.
Free from dictators.
Free from corruption.
Free from repression.

But also free from imperial guardianship.
Free from having its future negotiated elsewhere.
Free from being treated as a resource depot rather than a society of citizens.

Freedom is not when one strongman replaces another with foreign backing. Freedom is not when oil contracts are signed before elections are held. Freedom is not when sovereignty is suspended “just this once” for a supposedly good cause. Freedom is messy. It is slow. It is built by people, not delivered by drones.

Until Venezuelans themselves can decide who governs them, how their resources are used, and what kind of country they want to be - without coercion, without tutelage, without external puppeteers - then no amount of pro-democracy rhetoric will change the truth.

What we are witnessing is not liberation. It is a rebranding of domination. And if we truly care about Venezuela - not about geopolitical wins, not about oil, not about scoring points in an ideological war - then we must be honest enough to say it.

Not everything that removes a dictator creates freedom.
Not everything done in the name of democracy is democratic.
And not every enemy of our enemy is a friend of the people.

Let’s wait and see, but the script is already too familiar.

My name is Andrea Venzon. I am a political activist, and I write to build an independent political space, free from the blackmail of great powers and from resignation. If you like what you read, subscribe. And if you can, take out a paid subscription: it is what allows me to keep writing, analyzing, and taking positions without masters.

Versione in italiano

This is nothing new.

It had already happened to me when I supported Ukraine (“Zelensky is CIA,” “Putin is a liberator”) and the Hong Kong protests (“China is liberating Hong Kong!”). And I imagine it has also happened to people on the right who supported Palestine, accused of “hating the West.” The pattern is always the same.

On both sides, too many people stop looking at oppressed peoples and start rooting for a political color, an empire, or an ideology. We lose sight of who is actually suffering, here and now. When this happens, reality gets crushed into a binary narrative: us versus them. And the ones who always pay the price are civilians, protesters, those asking for basic rights.

What Is Really Happening in Iran

Starting on December 28, 2025, Iran was hit by a massive wave of protests, initially sparked by a deep economic deterioration, including soaring inflation and currency devaluation, which have severely impacted people’s daily lives. The demonstrations quickly spread to hundreds of cities and provinces and became not only protests against the economic crisis, but also against the regime’s authoritarianism and the lack of fundamental rights.

According to various NGOs and human rights activists, the repression has been extremely violent, involving the use of firearms, metal pellets, tear gas, and mass arrests.

The most recent available data - despite enormous difficulties in verification due to the internet blackout imposed by the government - indicate that hundreds of people have been killed and over 10,000 arrested during this wave of protests. Some alternative sources speak of significantly higher numbers, but all agree that this repression is among the harshest of recent years. In fact, and this is important to stress, this is not the first protest against the Iranian regime: at regular intervals, the Iranian people - especially the youth - rise up and are brutally repressed, as happened during the protests two years ago centered on demands for greater rights for women, under the slogan “Woman, Life, Freedom.”

Why the Left (and Not Only the Left) Should Always Stand With Peoples

In an ideal world, a “left-wing” person believes in social progress, human rights, and the freedom of individuals and oppressed peoples, regardless of who the oppressor is. This means looking at struggles for freedom and self-determination beyond geopolitical blocs - beyond U.S. imperialism, the repression of the Chinese or Russian dictatorships, or any other form of domination and occupation. And yes, sometimes this is not easy, because it can mean finding ourselves aligned with governments we oppose in 99% of cases, as with the Israeli government in the case of Iran.

But whatever our political color, one thing should unite us: standing with populations fighting for freedom. From Ukraine to Palestine, from Iran to Hong Kong. This does not mean supporting governments, military alliances, or geopolitical strategies. It means something much simpler - and much harder: putting people before flags. When we stop doing that, we are not doing political analysis. We are just choosing a team to cheer for.

And oppressed peoples have no use for cheerleaders.

PS – A Note on Venezuela

One example that often sparks debate is Venezuela and the illegal operation carried out by Trump to arbitrarily remove the dictator Maduro. I am absolutely happy if the Venezuelan people gain freedom and dignity, and I understand why many people there might celebrate. But the difference with what is happening in Iran is that a people’s freedom should not be achieved at the expense of international law or by legitimizing the law of the strongest. It is a bit like cheering if the state were to eliminate a mafia boss through an extrajudicial killing: if you live in an oppressed community you will naturally feel relief, but the precedent remains extremely serious and unacceptable. Normalizing illegality today means opening the door to new abuses tomorrow.

My name is Andrea Venzon. I am a political activist, and I write to build an independent political space, free from the blackmail of great powers and from resignation. If you like what you read, subscribe. And if you can, take out a paid subscription: it is what allows me to keep writing, analyzing, and taking positions without masters.

Versione in italiano

For decades, it has systematically oppressed half of its population - women - while imprisoning, torturing, and killing political opponents. Iranian women are legally second-class citizens: compulsory hijab laws are enforced by a “morality police,” testimony by women counts less than men’s in court, and family law heavily favors male guardianship. According to human rights organizations, hundreds of protesters have been killed and tens of thousands arrested during major protest waves, while Iran consistently ranks among the world’s top executioners, including executions following grossly unfair trials. Peaceful protests have repeatedly been met with live ammunition, mass arrests, torture, and death sentences designed to terrorize society into submission.

A couple of years back, the “Women, Life, Freedom” uprising shook the country to its core, mobilizing millions across cities, classes, and generations. It came closer than anything in decades to breaking the regime’s aura of inevitability - but not enough to tilt the balance of power. In that context, last year’s Israel’s indiscriminate bombing and regional escalation played directly into the hands of Tehran’s hardliners, allowing the regime to shift the narrative from internal legitimacy to external threat, repress dissent under the banner of “national security,” and rally nationalist sentiment around the flag.

Yet today, despite relentless repression, people are rising again. Courage is spreading faster than fear.

This moment matters. Not because outside powers should “intervene” with bombs or coups - those paths are illegal, immoral, and usually catastrophic unless done to prevent massacres, with the West is usually very good at ignoring - but because the democratic world can tip the balance legitimately.

If leaders like Trump and his allies claim to love democracy so much that they justify illegal interventions elsewhere, a simple question follows: why the silence now?
Why no concerted effort to back Iranian protesters with tools that actually align with international law - targeted sanctions on regime elites, travel bans, asset freezes, diplomatic isolation, and sustained political pressure? Why not rally allies to raise the cost of repression until it becomes unbearable?

The uncomfortable answer is that supporting Iranian civil society doesn’t come with easy resource extraction, pliable client regimes, or quick geopolitical wins. Genuine solidarity is harder than regime-change theatrics.

Standing with Iran’s protesters does not mean choosing chaos or war. It means:

• targeting those who order and profit from repression, not civilians;

• protecting activists, journalists, and dissidents;

• amplifying Iranian voices rather than speaking over them;

• refusing normalization with a regime that governs through fear.

The people of Iran are not asking for saviors. They are asking for space, pressure, and principle - so their struggle can succeed on its own terms.

Let’s stand with the brave people of Iran and help free the country from a brutal, extremist dictatorship, the right way.

My name is Andrea Venzon. I am a political activist, and I write to help build an independent political space - free from the blackmail of great powers and from resignation. If you like what you read, subscribe. And if you can, become a paid subscriber: it’s what allows me to keep writing, analyzing, and taking positions without masters.

Italian version here

We live in a world marked by brutality and injustice that recall a past any reasonable person would like to bury under a kilometer of dirt: genocides, wars of conquest, the explicit return of dictatorships.
But reading between the lines, three converging dynamics clearly emerge - dynamics that together are eroding what remains of our freedom, our democracy, and our humanity.

1. The return of imperialism (without restraints)

International rules are systematically trampled by those powerful enough to ignore them.

Russia invades Ukraine and remains unpunished - indeed, with the increasingly concrete possibility of being rewarded with territory.
The United States kidnaps heads of state, bombs sovereign countries, and openly threatens its allies, without facing any real consequences.
China effectively annexes Hong Kong in violation of the 1997 agreements and annually threatens 23 million Taiwanese with military force, while the rest of the world looks away in embarrassment.

Imperial powers impose their will through economic, military, and technological force.
Meanwhile, as spoiled heirs of these empires - particularly the American one - a handful of billionaires gamble with our future, unleashing immensely powerful technologies without democratic control, without accountability, without any mandate.

The very engineers behind the most widespread artificial intelligence models have admitted that they no longer fully understand how their algorithms make certain decisions. This is not a technical detail: it is a warning siren for our future.

This is not progress. It is domination.
And those who do not comply are crushed, marginalized, or made irrelevant: the students of Hong Kong, the hundreds of thousands of Ukrainians killed (perhaps in vain, if Moscow gets what it wants), or the dozens of Venezuelan civilians killed by U.S. bombings that no one talks about anymore.

2. Abuse of power becomes normal

Those in power increasingly abuse their positions at the expense of ordinary citizens.
This has always happened, of course. But today, in the age of digital transparency, it feels even more outrageous - almost a deliberate insult to our intelligence.

Just today, news emerged of a new raid by ICE, the U.S. federal immigration agency, in Minneapolis, ending with the killing of a woman. In the video, an agent is clearly seen shooting her point-blank in the head as she sat in the driver’s seat of a jeep - guilty of not immediately exiting the vehicle and of attempting to move it.

To the MAGA right, she was a dangerous extremist. To anyone watching that video without prejudice, she was a panicked person who posed no real threat. The woman was also American - a detail that matters for only one reason: it shows that no one is safe when the state acts outside the law.

And there is no need to look only at the United States.

During my electoral campaign in the Veneto region of Italy, I personally experienced abuses of power that should alarm anyone: illegal phone calls from the police to me and my wife aimed at intimidating me and preventing me from going into public squares to speak with citizens (which I did anyway), and systematic obstacles to the right to protest - such as when I tried to demonstrate alone in front of a right-wing convention.

“Small things,” some might say.
That’s how it always begins.

3. Extreme concentration of wealth

Wealth is concentrating in fewer and fewer hands. And this is not an abstract or moral issue - it is visible, daily, concrete.

Cities like Milan have become playgrounds for finance bros, investment funds, and real-estate speculation, rather than livable places for those born there or who work there. Only the blind can fail to see the change, deliberately encouraged by tax policies that would allow a billionaire like Jeff Bezos to pay roughly €200,000 a year in taxes by transferring his tax residence to Italy.

At the same time - taking Italy as an example - official statistics show that:

• over 5.7 million out of 60 million people live in absolute poverty;

• more than 96,000 people are homeless, a sharp increase compared to the previous decade;

• in major cities, the number of people sleeping on the streets has grown by over 30% since 2019.

Meanwhile, stock markets continue to rise cheerfully, generating wealth almost exclusively for those who already have it.
How can all of this be considered “normal”? Where has our humanity gone?

Why is all this happening?

The billion-dollar question.

Because wealth and power have globalized, while democracy and the ability to regulate them have remained local, fragmented, and increasingly fragile.
Because technology - social media and artificial intelligence - makes it harder and harder for the average citizen to understand what is happening, let alone oppose it. Scandals last six hours before being buried by new ones. Those with money and staff control the narrative. The media, too often, act as megaphones or useful idiots.

Finally, because an increasingly individualistic culture has convinced us that “it’s none of our business.” Few would give up a vacation to vote. Even fewer would lose a day of work to protest. Almost no one would give up comfort or technology to boycott a power responsible for war crimes or genocide.

And no: changing course will not be easy or immediate. Historically, it has often taken major tragedies - wars, collapses, catastrophes - to reverse these dynamics. But waiting for them is not a strategy. It is surrender.

So what can we do?

Resist. Resist. Resist.

Abuses of power and wealth are the cancer of freedom: they erode democracy from within, destroy social trust, and block cultural and human development.

But concretely, what does resisting mean for an ordinary person?

1. Resisting imperialism

Inform yourself. Prepare. Understand why we live in a world dominated by brutes.
Knowledge remains the most powerful weapon we have. Perhaps this is why - again using Italy as an illustrative example - the latest national budget includes a €620 million cut to education spending.

From knowledge, from critical thinking, from knowing your rights and not being intimidated by institutions and the powerful, come boycotts, protests, conscious political choices, and informed voting.
This is exactly what, over three or four generations, eradicated institutional racism, legal sexism, and chemical weapons, for example—things that were still considered acceptable when our grandparents were alive.

2. Resisting impunity

Do not look the other way.

From the employer who bullies a colleague, to the police who do not respect the law (or do not know it), to politicians who monetize conflicts of interest - such as Giorgia Meloni’s book promoted by Donald Trump.

Talk about it. Speak up at dinner tables and on social media. File complaints. Report abuses. Will it cost you friendships? Yes. Probably friendships better lost than kept.

But when your children ask what you did in the face of injustice, you will be able to answer without lowering your gaze.

3. Resisting inequality

What we need are redistributive policies, nationally and globally.

A hundred years ago, many would have been scandalized by the idea of being taxed “a bit more” to guarantee, say, access to dental care for those who couldn’t afford it. Today, many would still be outraged at the idea of being taxed slightly more (less say 1%) to eradicate extreme poverty. For me, that would be the only ethical choice.

The same logic applies internationally: global taxes on multinationals and financial transactions could eliminate poverty worldwide without any real sacrifice for the vast majority of people. Unfortunately, society will still need years to move closer to these solutions.

In the meantime, start with something simple: do not get used to horror.
Be outraged when you see someone sleeping on the street. Always.

In 2026, in any society that calls itself “developed,” extreme poverty is a political crime. Countries like Italy could eliminate it with a minimal fraction of public spending. They choose not to. It is not normal for charity and NGOs to replace the state. It is not normal that people without food or housing are ignored because they are not an electorally interesting group.

It is absurd.
And it is inhumane.

Sorry for the long article, but my real hope for this year is that more and more people choose to resist - quietly or on the front lines. Every act matters.

Remember this: resisting is the one thing they cannot take away from you.
Full speed ahead.

My name is Andrea Venzon. I am a political activist, and I write to help build an independent political space - free from the blackmail of great powers and from resignation. If you like what you read, subscribe. And if you can, become a paid subscriber: it’s what allows me to keep writing, analyzing, and taking positions without masters.

Italian version here

There is no need to be a fortune teller. We live in an era in which outcomes that align with the interests of power, when they appear likely, tend to happen.
Israel has sought to empty Gaza of Palestinians for decades and, when a political and military pretext presents itself, it carries out genocide.

Russia has claimed an imperial role since the fall of the USSR and, when it saw Ukraine moving closer to the West, it invaded.
The United States seeks control, resources, and global deterrence and, when necessary, overthrows governments or redraws borders.

This is not chaos.
It is logic.

Within this logic, Greenland is a perfect target: militarily strategic, central to the Arctic, and crucial in the confrontation with Russia and China. And this must be stated clearly: the United States is already there.
At Pituffik (formerly Thule), in the north of the island, Washington maintains a permanent military base hosting missile early-warning systems, space surveillance, and key infrastructure for North American defense. This is not a symbolic presence of a few soldiers - it is a fully integrated asset at the core of U.S. strategic architecture.

Talking about “annexation” does not mean imagining a landing tomorrow morning, but rather a gradual process of hollowing out sovereignty until it becomes a mere legal formality.

Trump could pursue this through an apparently consensual arrangement - an economic offer, a special status, “enhanced protection.” Or he could do it the way power politics often works: through a fait accompli, expanding military and political presence until any opposition becomes impractical. In either case, the substance would be the same.

And this is where the real European problem emerges.

No country on the Old Continent appears willing to seriously oppose such a move -not for lack of arguments, but out of fear of the consequences: a NATO crisis, political retaliation, strategic isolation. The most likely outcome is one we have already seen too many times: statements of principle, some diplomatic protests, and then silence. Everything swallowed in order “not to make things worse,” just as happened when Washington suddenly imposed 15% tariffs without facing any retaliation.

If this were to happen, the implications would be enormous. For the first time, Europeans - the last U.S. allies still willing to defend Western double standards within the international order - would be forced to confront reality: a world in which rules apply only when they align with the interests of the strongest.
Europe accepted this madness in Gaza, just as it did during the U.S. invasions of the Middle East in the early 2000s. The kidnapping of Maduro is only the latest blatant example. We do not live in a rules-based order. We live under the law of force, disguised as legality. Historically, this behavior serves the powerful until they cease to be so - exactly what is happening to Europeans today.

And yet, this very scenario opens up a new political space.

Europe has a rare opportunity: to become the backbone of a global anti-imperialist network, capable of uniting countries that do not want to remain at the mercy of superpowers. And when I say Europe, I do not mean only the European Union - still slow and paralyzed by vetoes - but also individual European states or, for what matters, states from any other continent..

Take my birth country, Italy, as an example - but it could just as well be Brazil or South Africa, or any other medium-sized power. Italy is not marginal. On its own, it has a GDP larger than Russia’s (a striking reminder of how the entire European continent allows itself to be bullied by a country way poorer than the Union as a whole). It has longstanding relationships in Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. A country like this could begin to weave alliances, build bridges, and propose an alternative - not to confront anyone head-on, but to reduce structural dependence on those who currently decide everything.

In practical terms, this would mean:

• creating reciprocal economic and trade benefits for countries that join this network;

• offering greater mobility to people, students, and workers from the Global South, finally abandoning the idiotic and suicidal anti-migration narrative - working with young, emerging societies is the only future for an aging continent;

• building new military and security cooperation networks not subordinated to a single center of power, i.e. outside NATO control;

• developing autonomous technological infrastructure, free from superpower monopolies.

This last point is not secondary. Today, much of the internet, cloud infrastructure, and essential digital services used in Europe (and beyond) depend on U.S. infrastructure, software, and companies: undersea cables, hyperscalers, operating systems, platforms. In a scenario of political coercion, Washington could quite literally “turn off the internet.” It would not even need to go that far - simply restricting access to critical services would be enough to paralyze entire European economic and administrative sectors.

Would there be sanctions, pressure, retaliation? Of course. But that is inevitable anyway. The choice is not between risk and safety; it is between paying a price now to build autonomy or paying a higher price later, under worse conditions, when alternatives will be even fewer.

Trying this path means working to prevent future conflicts - or, if they become inevitable, preparing the world that comes after.
Continuing to pretend that what benefits the powerful “won’t happen because it’s never been done before” is the true political irresponsibility of our time - especially on the part of those who govern us.

We must change course, before it is too late.

My name is Andrea Venzon. I am a political activist, and I write to help build an independent political space - free from the blackmail of great powers and from resignation. If you like what you read, subscribe. And if you can, become a paid subscriber: it is what allows me to keep writing, analyzing, and taking a stand without masters.

Italian version here

In just over a year in office, Trump has accumulated a sequence of decisions that, taken individually, would already be extremely serious. Taken together, they tell us something more: an erratic, vindictive, narcissistic exercise of power - and above all, a dangerous one. A few examples follow.

He has cut off vital humanitarian aid without any remorse, affecting millions of people. One concrete example: global HIV/AIDS programs historically supported by the United States, worth tens of billions of dollars over multiple years. Even “partial” cuts or freezes translate into interruptions of life-saving therapies. Global health literature is clear: suspensions on this scale lead to hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths within a few years, due to viral rebound and new infections. And we are talking about sums that are negligible within the U.S. federal budget: a few billion dollars - the equivalent of a handful of days of domestic military spending (the U.S. defense budget exceeds $900 billion per year), or of a single major weapons program. In other words: human lives sacrificed to save pocket change in a defense budget that surpasses a trillion dollars annually. This is not austerity. It is cynicism.

He has then publicly humiliated foreign leaders - such as Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelensky and South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa - live on television, only to reverse himself and flip diplomatic positions within hours or days. Threats, sudden praise, new threats. A foreign policy reduced to impulses, whims, and personal resentments.

But the real point of no return was the frontal attack on the international system. Trump decided to sanction judges of the International Criminal Court for doing their job: investigating international crimes - an unprecedented act among liberal democracies. Among those recently targeted are Georgian judge Gocha Lordkipanidze and Mongolia’s Erdenebalsuren Damdin. Asset freezes, restrictions such as the inability to open bank accounts across much of the world, personal intimidation. The message could not be clearer: anyone who applies the law against American interests will be punished. It is the same logic used against Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur, who has been politically attacked for documenting and denouncing crimes committed in Gaza by Israel and supported by the United States. Same pattern, same punishment: telling the truth becomes a hostile act. The paradox is almost grotesque. That multilateral system - courts (even if the United States never joined the ICC in particular), conventions, rules - was built by the United States itself after 1945 to prevent the return of the law of the strongest. Today it is being dismantled by those who once created it.

Then there is the most revealing aspect, often dismissed as folklore but in fact politically central: the cult of gifts and compliments. Trump demands personal praise, public deference, theatrical recognition. The symbolic case is the luxury jet received from Qatar - a Boeing 747 worth hundreds of millions of dollars - accepted as if it were normal for a head of state to receive such “gifts.”

The dynamic is always the same: those who flatter him are rewarded, those who do not are punished. A craving for attention and validation that resembles that of a pre-adolescent more than the sobriety required of someone leading a nuclear superpower.

At this point alone, speaking of eccentric behavior - if not bordering on insanity - was already legitimate.

Venezuela and the claim of global jurisdiction

With the military operation in Venezuela, the question became urgent. On Saturday, U.S. forces conducted raids on Venezuelan territory, kidnapping Nicolás Maduro without any UN authorization and without approval from the U.S. Congress. The operation caused the deaths of dozens of Venezuelan civilians and soldiers during the raids.

The administration then had the audacity to deny that this was an invasion, describing it instead as a mere law-enforcement operation - as if Washington were a planetary police force, entitled to enter any country armed, kill, capture, and then even claim moral superiority.

This logic is not new. It disturbingly resembles Hong Kong’s National Security Law, imposed by Communist China in 2020 to crush the last wave of pro-democracy protests. A vague, repressive, extraterritorial law designed to criminalize dissent wherever it appears. I myself was investigated under that framework for organizing peaceful protests for 52 consecutive weeks, in dozens of cities, under the banner “Fridays for Freedom.” The principle is identical: power decides, law adapts.

Immense military power in the wrong hands

I am not a psychologist, and I do not make diagnoses. But the facts are these: Trump controls the most powerful military apparatus in human history. The United States possesses around 5,000 nuclear warheads out of roughly 12,000 worldwide. It maintains more than 800 overseas military installations or bases (depending on official definitions) and tens of thousands of troops permanently deployed outside its borders.

And this person, within the span of 48 hours, threatens Cuba, Iran, democracies like Colombia, and even allies such as Denmark, speaking openly about occupations, interventions, and “necessary actions.” Phrases like “we’ll take it, one way or another” or “we’ll hit them hard” are not jokes: they signal a conception of power detached from any restraint.

History is full of precedents of unstable leaders - paranoid, megalomaniacal, isolated within sycophantic inner circles - who dragged entire peoples into disaster: Hitler in the final years of the Reich, Stalin during the great purges, or African dictators like Idi Amin and Bokassa. Each time, the price was paid by millions of innocents. The point is not armchair psychiatry. It is understanding that personal instability, when combined with unlimited power, becomes a global threat.

What to do now

In the United States, all that remains is to hope that the opposition wakes up from its torpor, returns to filling the streets as it did during mobilizations like the “No Kings Day,” and that Congress remembers it exists, initiating impeachment proceedings against someone who has just brought the country to the brink of open war in Latin America and close to the dissolution of NATO.

As citizens from around the world, our task is different but no less important: to oppose - in the streets and within institutions - any attempt by our governments to blindly follow an unstable leadership. As an Italian, I want to share a historical precedent that we should remember more often: the crisis of Sigonella. In 1985, the Italian government ordered its military forces to surround U.S. special forces to prevent the forced transfer of a prisoner from an Italian airstrip, affirming in practice that on Italian soil it is national sovereignty and international law that apply - not the law of the strongest. I’m sure plenty of more examples of such behaviour exists worldwide.

But this is not enough. Faced with Trump’s manias and the broader imperialist drift — American, Russian, Chinese — the need for a global anti-imperialist movement becomes increasingly evident: one capable of defending the dignity of all peoples and stopping a slide that is pushing us, step by step, toward a third world war. I’m in. Are you?

My name is Andrea Venzon. I am a political activist, and I write to help build an independent political space, free from the blackmail of great powers and from resignation. If you like what you read, subscribe. And if you can, become a paying supporter: it’s what allows me to keep writing, analyzing, and taking positions without masters.

Versione in Italiano qui

Not the ones from history textbooks, but contemporary powers - technological, militarized, and convinced that force matters more than any rule. We live in a world where international law ceases to exist the moment it becomes inconvenient for those who dominate, as happened during the genocide in Gaza or with the invasion of Ukraine.

This is not a failure of the system: it is how the system actually works. A logic embedded in the very organization that, more than any other, should protect international law - the United Nations - where five countries, past and present superpowers (France, the United Kingdom, the United States, Russia, and China), hold veto power in the Security Council. In the past, these states at least pretended to uphold a functioning international order. Today, even that pretense is gone.

Just look around. The United States invades Venezuela, threatens Greenland, topples unfriendly governments, and demands obedience from its allies. China treats Taiwan as a province to be annexed, deliberately ignoring the will of millions of people. Russia, a declining empire but still armed to the teeth, has invaded Ukraine to reassert a sphere of dominance it wants to make permanent. In this scenario, superpowers behave like global warlords, and rules apply only to those who lack the strength to break them.

Several democratic nations, in all of this, are not neutral spectators. They are vassals.

Let’s take Europe as an example. For decades, many European societies have lived under the umbrella - and control - of the United States. In the aftermath of the Second World War, this dependence may have had a rationale: liberation from Nazi-fascism and massive reconstruction efforts such as the Marshall Plan. Today, generations later, it has turned into a chronic condition of political subordination.

Across Europe, the United States alone operates around 40 military bases, hosting approximately 80,000–100,000 U.S. military personnel. In addition, Europe hosts an estimated ~100 U.S. B61 tactical nuclear bombs, deployed under NATO’s so-called “nuclear sharing” arrangements at six air bases in five countries: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. These weapons remain under exclusive U.S. control, are not subject to national democratic oversight, and in many cases are not even fully accountable within NATO, where host countries supposedly have a voice. Foreign forces and arsenals that have likely played direct or indirect roles in wars and massacres supported by dominant powers, including the ongoing one in Gaza.

Many European governments not only lack the courage to condemn these abuses, but preemptively align themselves. Their leaders compete to display loyalty to powerful figures, kowtowing at every possible occasion. A particularly striking example is Italy’s prime minister, Giorgia Meloni, who broke long-standing diplomatic convention to attend Donald Trump’s inauguration - only to receive no political favors or strategic benefits in return. And despite these politically humiliating gestures, European nations continue to be treated with contempt by Trump and similar figures, gaining no real leverage or protection.

Let us be clear: many democratic nations no longer have an independent foreign policy. And this is not the result of hard-nosed realism, but of pure servility.

Few would disagree with this diagnosis. The real question is: what can be done?

Continue along the path of vassalage, hoping that the Third World War will not be fought on our soil? A rather naïve hope, given the geopolitical positions many democratic countries occupy - caught between rival spheres of influence and only hours away from some of the world’s most unstable regions.

Or behave like the other empires, trying to build new ones - continuing the European example, perhaps through a fully integrated and militarized European Union? The temptation is understandable. Yes, Europe must develop autonomous technological infrastructure, real defensive capacity, and genuine economic sovereignty. It must integrate more deeply to withstand the turbulence ahead. But not in order to repeat the same mistakes that are devastating the world.

Europe - and any other emerging power - should become a pole of hope, not a new empire. A reference point for all nations that refuse to be subjugated by superpowers. Strong not to conquer, but to protect and to open itself - especially toward younger, more dynamic, and more alive societies than its aging ones. This, in my view, is the only foreign-policy direction that can lead us out of this impasse.

And this direction has a clear name: anti-imperialism.

Europe, democratic nations, and any country that hopes for a prosperous and peaceful future must adopt an anti-imperialist foreign policy.

To be anti-imperialist means:

• rejecting all forms of political, military, and economic domination by superpowers;

• diplomatically, economically, and militarily boycotting contemporary empires;

• disentangling our economies, technologies, and infrastructures from their leverage and blackmail by building alternative networks;

• resisting pressure, even when it comes at a cost;

• actively supporting peoples and countries that are threatened or attacked.

Yes, such a policy will cost us prosperity. It will take time before opposing a power like the United States no longer affects, for example, our financial sectors. Limiting or sanctioning China will mean higher prices, consuming less, producing differently, and changing our economic model. Yes, it will not be easy.

But in the inevitable chaos that this new age of empires will produce, only those who have defended their own dignity - and that of other peoples - will emerge on the other side as true winners.

Anti-imperialism is not an ideological pose. It is a duty.

It was a duty for the peoples who freed themselves from colonial domination in the twentieth century. It is a duty today for Ukrainians defending their freedom; for Palestinians who continue to resist even when hope seems extinguished; for the students of Hong Kong who sacrificed youth and liberty for the dream of a democratic city. Today, that responsibility falls on us.

I want democratic nations to be anti-imperialist.

And if governments continue to behave like lackeys of dominant powers, it will be essential to fight every day - and at the ballot box - so that those who come after choose the right side of history. Anti-imperialism today is the only coherent position for anyone who wants to defend the dignity of every person, everywhere. It is not nostalgia, not extremism, not utopia. It is the only rational stance in a world that is rapidly returning to the law of the strongest.

If this vision resonates with you, tell me what you think in the comments.

And if you can, subscribe: building an independent political space today is already, in itself, an act of resistance.

My name is Andrea Venzon. I am a political activist, and I write to help build an independent political space - free from the blackmail of great powers and from resignation. If you like what you read, subscribe. And if you can, become a paid subscriber: it is what allows me to keep writing, analyzing, and taking a stand without masters.