Is this the Broligarchy's first world war?

AI-guided weapons, two out-of-control authoritarians, no legal authority and a toxic mess of masculinity: welcome to the manosphere's first major conflict

A note on who I am: I’m an investigative journalist who’s spent a decade reporting on the collision of technology and democracy including exposing the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica scandal for the Guardian and the New York Times. Two years ago, I called the alliance of Trump, Silicon Valley and a global axis of autocracy: a tech bro oligarchy, aka the Broligarchy. Please help me continue to expose it.

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Welcome to the manosphere: Larry Ellison, Donald Trump, Benjamin Netanyahu, Tony Blair

The brand is chaos. That’s the defining quality of everything that Donald Trump is doing. It’s also the state of our information system. They’re both marked by the same absence of rationality, order, logic, rules and signposts to the future. We are living in an eternal present, an unending scroll of news, videos, cats falling off logs, bombs blowing up apartment blocks and perfectly smooth foreheads speaking at the camera as they narrate the narrowest of world views.

There is no sense to be had in a media landscape that both mirrors and enables the political turbulence we’re living through. We’re trapped inside this never-ending algorithmic scroll where our dopamine-fuelled lust for the endless new is Trump’s literal foreign policy. In three months, we’ve careered around the world in his wake from Venezuela to Greenland to Iran. Next stop Cuba.

I’m writing these words, after a gap of silence, because the last thing I wanted to do is to add to the noise. And I can’t presume to try and help make sense of what’s happening in the world for anyone else when I can’t understand it myself. And I don’t see how anybody can. The chaos we are living through is the equivalent of cognitive assault. Our extra-sensory information landscape engages our frontal lobes in the busyness of mental processing from which no meaning comes.

Three weeks ago, the news cycle stopped briefly on a subject that for a brief moment was shocking even in spite of this algorithmic numbing. The dazzling glare of public exposure shone a light on a global network of rich and powerful men, many of them household names, who had participated in, or turned a blind eye to, an international trafficking operation involving hundreds of women and girls. For the briefest of moments, it felt like a sharp blast of daylight had been shone on one of the darkest corners of our world. There was no path to justice or accountability for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein, but there was some small comfort in that at least, finally, it couldn’t be ignored.

How wrong can you be? Of course, it could be. The news cycle hasn’t just moved on, we are now deep into the testosterone zone, the fizzing, almost sexual excitement of war. This is what the early stages of all wars look like. Pumped up officials walking stiff-legged to podiums to tell the waiting press about the incredible potency of their firepower. Videos of fighter jets commanding the skies. Mesmerising footage of high-tech “intercepts” across the night sky. Spectacular explosions among dense tower blocks, all of it so familiar from any video game while a constant parade of interchangeable military men, analysts, commentators pontificate across our screens.

This was what was on the White House’s social media accounts three days ago. A hyper-masculine meme-ified fantasy of war.

But there’s another even more dangerous fantasy at play because this is a war that is being waged with a new generation of AI-guided missiles. What’s happening in Iran is a step-change. Gaza was the laboratory, this is the next stage. Reporting from 972 magazine in 2024 revealed the Israeli military were using an AI programme, Lavender, to find and profile targets. And last week, the WSJ and Washington Post revealed that the US deployed AI at scale. It reports the US military is using the “Maven Smart System” built by Peter Thiel’s Palantir and powered by Anthropic’s Claude to profile and select kill targets. Or as this excellent piece by the Citizens sums it up:

“The same logic that built recommendation engines and social media algorithms is now being applied to the industrial generation of kill lists. Chatbot systems that entered public life writing emails, summarising documents and telling you what to have for dinner now help determine who lives and who dies.”

Three weeks ago, details of Peter Thiel’s relationship with Epstein came tumbling out. A social, intelIigence and business relationship that saw Epstein invest $40m in Thiel’s Valar Ventures and, with the former Israeli PM, Ehud Barak, co-invest in an Israeli surveillance firm, Carbyne. This week, news of Palantir’s involvement in the US’s and Israel’s war of choice saw its stock price rise 15%.

Was it AI that selected the Iranian school where at least 168 people were killed, mostly children? Investigations by three major US news organisations - the New York Times, CNN and Reuters - have now concluded the school was hit by US bombs. Reuters identified a “double tap”, two strikes, 40 minutes apart. The open-source investigative site Bellingcat yesterday published a report that reviewed verified footage and identified the missile which hit the school to be a US Tomahawk. That report has now been independently replicated by the New York Times.

I grew up in Wales and felt the chill every time we passed a road sign to “Aberfan”. My dad would recount the story of the day a coal tip fell on the town’s school killing 144 children. The name of Aberfan is still burned into the nation’s collective memory more than half a century on. But the slaughter of an entire community’s children in the town of Minab in a single day? It’s an obscenity that’s caused barely a ripple of anguished outrage.

We now need to know: was AI involved in targeting this school? This is a crucial question. Were those children the collateral damage of an AI hallucination? We all know how unreliable these large language models are. We’ve all been served a bullshit answer based on a fabricated link. Now apply this to war. We can’t let this moment pass. Minab, like Aberfan, is a place that should be burned onto our brains.

AI, like war, is another hyper-masculine fantasy of God-like power. It’s nothing of the sort, it’s just a story, a myth, that’s being imposed on us by a self-interested cohort of unaccountable men succoured by a pliant and incurious press.

But not here. Not in this newsletter, not on the day after International Women’s Day, not in the midst of a new illegal war that the US and Israel have started and that Britain is being press ganged into joining by a right-wing media that’s using Trump’s words as if they were evidence of anything other than an out-of-control megalomaniac.

Forget Andrew Tate, this is the real manosphere. One whose edges we can’t even see because we’re living inside it. Our world is controlled by these men, their platforms, their alliances with nation states, technology-fuelled political power which is only accelerating and gathering strength. When I coined the word “broligarchy” it wasn’t as a cutesy pun: I used it to describe the confluence of Silicon Valley technologies and US state authoritarianism, and a warped toxic pseudo-masculinity that’s at its heart.

Andrew Tate is simply a phenomenon that is downstream of this. He’s a visible excrescence that’s a byproduct of this phenomenon, nothing more than a boil on the backside of the broligarchs. Two weeks ago, in the midst of the Epstein revelations, I read Gisèle Pelicot’s autobiography ahead of what was going to be a last-minute interview with her. It’s an astonishing story of almost superhuman resilience but it also forced me to confront yet another bleak dystopian consequence of our brave new digital world. The multiple rapes Gisèle Pelicot survived were only possible because a technology platform enabled her husband to connect with other rapists - at least 72 of them - in a 50km radius of their small French provincial town.

What do you do with that information? In the pre-internet age, would all those men be rapists? I don’t believe so. Their desires were normalised by algorithmic forces beyond their control and an opportunity was presented by a platform that offered anonymity and impunity. It fed them a fantasy of God-like power and control: possession of a woman who literally couldn’t fight back.

You don’t want to face this. None of us do. It’s too dark, too bleak. But to understand what is happening now, in Iran and Lebanon, and the forces behind it, we need to see that this is a continuum. Dominique Pelicot and Andrew Tate and Jeffrey Epstein are only symptoms. They are the doorway through which we can understand the forces behind not just another catastrophic Gulf War but a global power structure in which state violence, commercial profit and the control, domination and violation of women are inextricably entwined.

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The Blair Factor

For those of us old enough to remember the despair and helplessness we felt at the outbreak of the last Gulf War, it’s impossible to avoid vivid flashbacks from that era and one figure in particular: Tony Blair.

On Friday night, a story dropped in the Daily Mail that claimed Tony Blair had “rebuked” Keir Starmer for not backing Trump.

The comments, it was said, were made at a private event where Blair was quoted as saying.

“The American relationship matters. It matters particularly today. It's not a question of whether it's this president or that president. If they are your ally and they are an indispensable cornerstone for your security... you had better show up.”

If the British people had a vote on who would be the very last person they’d like to hear from now, I suspect that there would be a landslide for Tony Blair. He led us into the disastrous war on Iraq and he’s never expressed guilt, contrition or doubt.

But his rhetoric is exactly what the united ranks of the right-wing press have been saying since Trump and Netanyahu began this war. They’ve been making cheap political capital about the UK government’s reluctance to facilitate an illegal war they weren’t even warned about. (Bookmark this paragraph for when the war reaches Britain’s shores and Keir Starmer is also to blame.)

This tweet by a political commentator and member of the House of Lords sums up the hyperbole and jingoism that’s characterised the last week.

But Blair also throws a helpful light on what else is at stake here and who else is involved. Because Tony Blair is not a free agent or simply a mouthpiece for the opinions of Tony Blair. Tony Blair’s entire project - the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change - is bankrolled by Larry Ellison, the billionaire founder of Oracle, the technology company that’s front and centre, alongside OpenAI, in the great AI bubble boom. In Britain, Blair has to be considered an unregistered lobbyist for Larry Ellison. He’s received in the order of half a billion dollars from him. Blair may very well believe everything he says with every fibre of his being - it’s likely part of the reason Ellison hired him - but Tony Blair’s financial interests are also squarely Larry Ellison’s financial interests.

And Larry Ellison’s financial, commercial and now ideological interests are not Britain’s or even America’s. Larry Ellison mostly acts in the interests of Larry Ellison. But as I laid out in this investigation for the Nerve - Ellison, a Trump donor and ally, is also tightly bound up with Netanyahu - his good friend and sometime holiday companion. And both Blair and Ellison are front and centre of the plans for Gaza, Blair as a member of the absurdly named “Board of Peace” and Ellison as one of the technology companies that stand to control and profit from the grotesque plans for redevelopment.

Tony Blair is a way to understand the forces at work in this latest war. A confluence of US and Israeli state, technological and commercial interests that all stand to gain. That Blair’s views are being channelled into the UK press as it cheerleads for Britain to join this war without this disclaimer is yet another point of failure.

Though that’s as nothing compared to the power over the US press and media which Larry Ellison now wields - through his son, David Ellison, a nepo baby in the mould of Succession’s Roman Roy. Ellison’s purchase of CBS has turned it into a state propaganda outlet and with the proposed buyout of Warner Brothers, CNN and HBO Max are next in line. He’s also acquired a majority stake in the US company that now controls TikTok.

This consolidation is being reported in the US as a business monopoly story. Hollywood Reporter and Deadline have carried quotes from Hollywood types saying they think it’ll be fine because David Ellison likes movies. But this isn’t about who controls the Harry Potter franchise or even the CBS newsroom. It goes beyond even the creation of a state-aligned propaganda machine with one central point of coordination across multiple news and media brands. There’s a far bigger strategic power play at work here, the Trump-Netanyahu alliance that’s behind this latest war.

And Blair is the key that helps unlocks this. The takeover of the US media is part of the same power players behind the “Board of Peace”, an organisation owned and run in perpetuity by Donald Trump, that’s been set up not just to rape Gaza but to replace the United Nations with a wholly illegitimate pseudo authority.

Whatever else we do in this moment, it cannot include listening to Tony Blair.

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Blowback

Gaza is the blueprint for everything we are seeing right now. There are no words to describe what happened there. And yet, it’s happening all over again. Last week, Israel’s far-right finance minister, Bezalel Smotrich, told reporters that Beirut would be Gaza-ified. “The southern suburbs will become Khan Yunis,” he said referring to one of many Gaza communities destroyed in the Israeli assault.

Israel has ordered half a million people - a tenth of Lebanon’s tiny population - to leave their homes, in the middle of Ramadan with nowhere to go.

Forced displacement of a civilian population is a war crime. But then it’s all war crimes. On Sunday, it was reported Israeli commandos disguised as Lebanese soldiers - a war crime - killed 41 civilians - a war crime - because they went looking for the body of an Israeli airman shot down 40 years ago. What? Even his wife called out the IDF for the madness of this operation.

The failure to focus on the victims, to treat them as humans, amid the complacency of the western media, the vested interests of political class and the chaos of our information landscape is a refrain we’ve heard before but Iran firing back has changed the equation. Today the price of oil is shooting up, the world’s supply of sulphur is literally going up in smoke over Tehran and a JP Morgan analyst in the Wall Street Journal called the closure of the Strait of Hormuz, “not just the worst-case scenario…an unthinkable scenario.”

Jeffrey Epstein never got to pay for his crimes. Netanyahu and Trump have so far gotten away with theirs. But the rest of us may not. Actions have consequences. And we may be living with what the US and Israel started last week for many years to come. There’s no roadmap to “victory” or even how this ends. Over the weekend, it was reported that the US had deployed its nuclear command or “doomsday” plane to the Middle East.

When I googled the village in Lebanon, the Israeli commandos shot up, I realised I knew it, or at least I’d been there many years ago, tracking down a vast stone monolith from when I lived in the country back in the 90s researching the first post-war guidebook.

I loved Lebanon, a beautiful, tragic, fascinating, corrupt, clannish, sophisticated, endlessly charming country that’s been blown up by armies and marched over by militias time and time again. On Thursday night as the bombs on Beirut started to fall, I saw a post on Twitter from the Royal Albert Hall of someone singing Fairuz’s hauntingly beautiful lovesong to Beirut. It’s a song that I endlessly heard in taxis and cafes and I’m leaving you with a cover version of it from a young Lebanese singer from 2019 when Lebanon was going through one of its periodic tumults because Lebanon’s resilience is like Gisèle Pelicot’s, super human, inspiring, against all odds.

Shame has to change sides, Pelicot says. And maybe that should apply not just to rape and sexual assault but to war crimes too. Shame on the men - the broligarchs and their accomplices - who’ve brought this war to pass and to every technology company, politician and media outlet that is dancing to their tune. We can’t stop them but we can expose them. We can name them. We can at least try and make shame change sides.