'World War Four': the Global Involution of Global Involution, 2025

– You say you want an involution? Well, you know…

This has been a ghastly year.

Or no: 2025 has been a great year – for ghouls, grifters, chancers, chasers, and for bullies, above all.

But for those who don’t have a boner for that circus, how can we think a way through this carnival of morass: the spectacle of binfires pulled into the yawning galactic anus of an AI sloppy sarlacc?

In attempting this, a few things I’ve been exploring in 2025 have proven true enough to be worth returning to, as approach November.

Firstly, it seems clear enough to me that involution is a global master process. Involution is what is happening in 2025. And right now, it is owning us. Globalisation – and most of society – has lost control of itself, and it is unwinding, curling into itself, entropically unspooling.

In 2025, the fascists are involuted. Their erection of violence lacks the tumescence, chest and jawline of their twentieth century hatefathers. Bolsonaro couldn’t do push-ups; ICE chooses to use Pokemon and Halo to advertise their bullying domination to ‘jobseeker’ manbabies; they use the Ghibli filter to make one of the darkest works of art imaginable about American culture. The whole thing is so grotesque, so infantile, so worthy of contempt – and yet, on it goes, getting worse and worse but never ending, even in the absence of a firm chest and strong jaw.

In 2025, even genocide is involuted. In 2004, nine years after Yigal Amir popped Yitzak Rabin, an interesting long read asked: Will the settlers destroy Israel? Twenty-one years on, we can answer. Yes, they 90% did: for themselves, for nearly all Jewish Israelis and, needless to say, for all Arab Israelis and Palestinians… but, thanks to involution, Israel-Palestine will hover around 90% wrecked, and not be definitively done enough for anything to ever be over. There won’t even be any Evil Paradise of Neoliberalism; no Grifter Ghouls Riviera on the Mediterranean. Instead, there will be Tony Blair.

Israel is now so involuted it can’t even control its own genocide. Having armed them and patted them on the back, it was the US told Bibi to put the IDF’s donated death toys away – for now. Yet in line with the ‘90% fucked’ rule of involution I’m sketching in here, more than 90% of buildings in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed; and Hamas lives, clawing their way out of the rubble in keffiyahs and balaclavas, 90% killed, but still 10% scraping on. This photo of Yahya Sinwar says it all.

And having 90% wrecked Gaza and cruelled the lives of its two million people, the Knesset votes 71–13 (84% in favour) for the total annexation of the West Bank, which even Vance and Rubio think is worth opposing. Then, once it happens, once it’s 90% ruined – for the settlers – three million Palestinians will still have to live there somehow, just under involuted terror from ghoulish bullies, without peace, prosperity, happiness, or anywhere else to go. But don’t worry: involuted fascism and genocide ‘will take care of everything’. And there will be Tony Blair. This is the only gambit of the remaining parts of politics that are fully pumped for what’s happening.

In 2025, we can even see involution transpiring through the enshittification of Amazon and Google. We can also see an involution stand-off between Xina and MAmeriGA, a strange death match in which, the moment either side wins, everyone loses. Then we see the Own Goal Involution of everything EUropean, which is pretty much no one’s fault but Europe’s, as well as a forseeable outcome of three decades of geopolitically incoherent decisionmaking, inertia, and momentum (alongside a strangely self satisfied evaluation from the elite that got ‘em there that these are our norms and values and we’ll stick with them). In 2025, it seems that, no matter what happens, no matter where it happens, it is subject to involution, and this means, necessarily, it will be a bad sequel, it will have destructive slop and click bait flashing in the margins, it will involve pitfalls that turn out to be a pixelated sarlacc you can still really fall into, and die a low res death in, slowly finding “new definition of pain and suffering, as you are slowly digested over a thousand years.”

In fact, what’s most fascinating, if one takes an involuting Amazon, Google and the EU as trillion+ dollar examples, is to notice that involution is such a powerful dynamic now, that it seems to be owning things even in the absence of a complicated substantive wrong (like military occupations and atrocities), a massive extrinsic shock (like covid), or eco-geopolitical disadvantage (like being under aerial bombardment or underwater, like Gaza, Ukraine, or Pakistan). 2025 has taken us into a place where, no matter what happens, there will be involuted thinking, involuted processes, and involuted outcomes. Quite often it’s bamboozling: how could it all be this bad? If we had all sat down and worked out a fiendish plan to attack ourselves and everything, it would uncannily look just like ‘how shit rolls’, just because everyone can’t shoot straight, is asleep at the wheel, jacking off to GPT’s new AI porn offerings while they should be paying attention, or distracted by a trying to buy their loved one a *genuine* Labubu.

But beyond a certain point, involution isn’t ‘destructive like a war’: it is war. I don’t think we clocked this. Or like: involution is happening and we know it is very destructive, but because we still don’t think it is possible that the system could take itself down, could be its own destructor, we don’t acknowledge it to be true. And it could actually-also turn into hot war: armed conflict between major power is still, sadly, a crapshoot chance. But at the same time, the biggest source of conflict and destruction in the mid 2020s is ‘just what shittily happens’ as the whole shebang, this globally involuting pseudoreality, prevails. Baudrillard, as often, glimpsed this back in 2008:

“The first two (wars) put an end to colonialist Europe and to Nazism. The Third, which we euphemistically call the Cold War, though it was a very real one, sealed the fate of Communism. Note that on each occasion we’ve moved towards a more all-encompassing world order, more towards one world. And this process has now virtually reached its end. Hence the widespread sense that we’re dealing with an enormous unified system today, an integral reality, in which the enemy is everywhere and nowhere. This is what I have in mind when I speak of a Fourth World War: the war globalization wages on itself. In a globalized system, face-to-face conflict is no longer possible; there’s no declared enemy any more, no territory to conquer. The system’s gone too far. To the point where it eventually breaks down and begins to consume itself by secreting a form of inner corruption. Not corruption in the moral sense, but something like a dismantling of the whole, terrorism being the violent metaphor for this tension that is irreducible to the system. As though it played the role of a virus which, in the end, might be said to affect everyone’s imagination, adding a supplementary element of tension to the system, though this time a symbolic and virtual one” (link).

Reading this resonated deeply with what I was describing, earlier this year, as 3SD, the moment where the 3S of ‘surreal, stubborn and stupid’ of 2022-4 compounded with the 2025 added 3D of ‘dangerous, dumb, and destructive’. 3S, 3D, and 3SD were ways for me to try to give some metaphorical designation to what seems to be happening, while saying: ‘this is a bad trip, look forward to a very bad comedown indeed’. We can see the world tripping balls on 3SD in the crazy levels of slop (see the background pics); we can see it with the polybubble of gold, silver, crypto, and stock prices; we can see it in the choice to grant weapons-grade plutonium to Sam Altman.

But in going ‘full Baudrillard’ and naming this as World War Four, and in designating involution as its putative cause, I feel like theory helps again. This is because, by seeing involution this way, I can get my head around something else that’s really been troubling me – and this will be the focus of the next post – the fact that ‘all of this’ feels beyond human agency. For me, this is stronger than ‘Things are in the saddle, and ride mankind’; it’s differently shaped to some rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem to be born; and it’s different again to the pathogen-induced shock of covid. I think of Mr Stay Pufft in Ghostbusters, but at least there, the Marshmallow Man took shape as some remnant memory from childhood: there had to be something imaginable and imagined about Mr Stay Pufft. There is nothing in human history or experience – as far as we know – that could have prepared us for the fact that *this* would be our undoing.

If World War Four is caused and proceeds by way of involution, that means our undoing will be our undoing, that our unravelling will be its own causal-effective snowball. Ai ai ai.

This means we can say now, with full clarity and perplexity, that we are the cause and the problem, and that we are its only solution – which might mean there is none.

I don’t have much hope. In fact, I’m with Mike Davis here, in this interview shortly before his death:

“To put it bluntly, I don’t think hope is a scientific category. And I don’t think that people fight or stay the course because of hope, I think people do it out of love and anger. Everybody always wants to know: Aren’t you hopeful? Don’t you believe in hope? To me, this is not a rational conversation. I try and write as honestly and realistically as I can. And you know, I see bad stuff. I see a city decaying from the bottom up. I see the landscapes that are so important to me as a Californian dying, irrevocably changed. I see fascism. I’m writing because I’m hoping the people who read it don’t need dollops of hope or good endings but are reading so that they’ll know what to fight, and fight even when the fight seems hopeless” (link).

I agree with Davis, and ‘hope’ you might be more animated by love wallop than a hope dollop. At the same time, how does one fight a revolution against involution, when it is us, in our systems, shredding ourselves, with our systems – we who cannot live now without our systems? For this, I have no easy or simple answer.