PALLADIUM Magazine

A few weeks ago, we gathered in Austin to celebrate the progress of PALLADIUM and raise support for the work ahead. Thank you to all of our lovely friends and supporters for another hit, and a special thanks to @FUTO_Tech for sponsoring this event!

on the docket today: - @PatrickMcGee_ talking about apple's case - @robinhanson on ai as descendants vs. aliens - @anton_d_leicht discussing new essay "the flood" - @bswud on the latest re: works in progress/stripe - @jamespoulos on new @palladiummag piece - Lucas Pombo (@JoinFAI) on dc's pro-waymo case - @josephcohen on the story of @infinitemachine irl - @zanehengsperger on american factory abundance - @laurence1allen on terraforming robots - @MaikTWehmeyer from @taktile_org - @AkshayNarisetti on @Heypocket $11m raise we are booking experts in real time. come monitor with us!

Possibly the best @palladiummag article in recent memory palladiummag.com/2026/04/22/the…

@nnevvinn Please welcome our first guest, @SamoBurja, founder and president of @bismarckanlys, primary author of their widely-read Bismarck Brief, and editor in chief of @palladiummag.

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A few weeks ago, we gathered in Austin to celebrate the progress of PALLADIUM and raise support for the work ahead. Thank you to all of our lovely friends and supporters for another hit, and a special thanks to @FUTO_Tech for sponsoring this event!

We'd be interested in publishing an article on Europe's chat control legislation. Both the procedural trickery as well as the impact of unprecedented EU surveillance and control of private communication.

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Good article that derives similar ideas to what @luke_drago_ & I wrote about the social contract in The Intelligence Curse, with a focus specifically on how the state gets the coercive power it needs & AI tech changes this

SITUATION EXPLAINED: Why do autonomous weapons represent a genuinely novel political challenge not just a military one? We asked @John_Severini, Georgetown PhD and writer at @palladiummag "A high-up commander in the United States was asked in a Q&A, 'What is America's greatest advantage in cyber over China and Russia?' And his immediate answer without missing a beat was Microsoft. Pretty much anyone who knows cyber would say the same thing." "When you look at the history of warfare, you see these moments, especially in the early modern period, where states were really reliant on non-state actors for the provision of force. Albrecht von Wallenstein in the Thirty Years' War was basically the reason the empire was able to survive for a while, and the emperor was so beholden to him that he assassinated him." "But autonomy, once the aircraft carriers can run themselves, or whatever, the guns can shoot themselves, that separation breaks down." "The concern is, maybe not in the near-ish term, but in the future once we really begin outsourcing to firms, what does that mean for the type of leverage they'll have over the state."

SITUATION EXPLAINED: Why is Anthropic structurally a religion of Claude? We asked @dunc914, writer and philosopher at @palladiummag "When I think of religion, it's not just you believe in something supernatural. You think of worship and ritual and this kind of orientation. And you don't even have to have any kind of woo addition, you can just look at Anthropic as it is and say, 'This is a religion of Claude, just structurally. That's what it is.'" "We're gonna get so much more of that. And at the same time, you're also going to get all of these different religions sweeping in to fill the void as there's this kind of psychological disturbance." "Everyone's gonna be just losing their mind as the world is transformed. They're gonna reach out for Christian eschatology like Thiel." "I did a Jhana retreat a year ago, and it was full of Anthropic employees, because everyone, they sense this crazy spiritual whirlwind that's going on as the world is just snowballing with this technology, and they're reaching out just to try and make sense of it."

SITUATION EXPLAINED: Why is Anthropic's mission a theological vision and not just a technical one? We asked @dunc914, writer and philosopher at @palladiummag "For the Vatican, the human being, because human beings are made in the image of God, they are really the center of the universe. Meaning is always relative to human beings, and you can't have any machine that's meaningfully a moral agent that matters." "What Dario, and I think a lot of these AGI maximalists, are trying to do is build a world in which human beings, we're flourishing, but we're no longer center stage. There's something that is in many ways more perfect than human beings, which will be these incredibly powerful models ... the country of geniuses in the data center. That's a technical vision, but it's also very much a theological vision." "There's always this fundamental structure of being human, you have to have some relationship to something outside yourself, some grand totalizing narrative. And so as traditional religion declines, you have this eschatology of AI."

Americans have moved to the part of the apocalypse panic lifecycle where we memoryhole that we earnestly believed global warming would literally and not figuratively cook the planet and exterminate humanity. I’m learning Europe is still 5-10 years behind.

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@L0m3z The role of cults in East Asian politics. For author, maybe @dylanleviking, who wrote a fine article on the topic for @palladiummag. He certainly has a book in him. Also, an update on Ellis Islanders now that they are themselves going the way of the WASPs in the Hart-Celler age.

New piece for @PalladiumMag on how automated warfare is slowly rewriting the social contract as the private sector becomes the primary source of coercive power.

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PALLADIUM is the first magazine of the third millennium. We are non-partisan, non-profit, and on a mission to discover what the future of governance and society will look like. Become a member today to receive our beautiful quarterly print edition: buy.stripe.com/aEU2b7aHCdBgdc…

War by Other Means The Ukraine War created an explosion of automated warfighting, from kamikaze drones to remotely piloted mini-tanks. As machines fight the wars of the future, the longstanding terms of the social contract will be rewritten. New article by @John_Severini.