Nick Routledge

Did you see yesterday's 'Science' journal?

Full alt-text available here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTjElB7N4CjztlEbTaDiUPB8HuL3oy9cQVWkbRD7f9KSstIp-7phgH3RlK7cL0hdhpClphwYvr3Z5f-/pub

A World War, centered on consciousness itself. "The fusion of agentic AI and LLMs marks a new frontier in information warfare ... reach[ing] unprecedented scale and precision, manipulating beliefs and behaviors on a population-wide level." - AAAS 'Science' journal, 01/22/26 x.com/nick_routled...

"In The Prophetic Imagination (1978), he frames the work of the prophet as that of imaginative disruption."

Image of Rebbe Abraham Joshua Heschel and Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., taken from tweet here: https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1548743408524480512 Tweet thread: https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1674052414641524738?s=20 @BerniceKing Jun 28, 2023 CHALLENGE: Before sharing another quote from my father or asserting what he would stand for or against today, read #LetterFromBirminghamJail and comment on this tweet with something you learned. Letter: https://africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html @nick_routledge "If today's church does not recapture the sacrificial spirit of the early church, it will lose its authenticity, forfeit the loyalty of millions, and be dismissed as an irrelevant social club with no meaning for the twentieth century." He was right. A fresh 21stC. start, then? Image: "Jesus was calling for a radical disruption of his religion, a great spiritual migration. A similar disruption and migration are needed no less today in the religion that names itself after Him. - McLaren [From tweet here, responding to the Letter from Birmingham Jail, color inverted for graphic fit: https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1821066495583252668?s=20 Of edited tweet originally here: https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1297338768244932610] Tweet: @nick_routledge April 1, 2023 @MattThiessenNT Same on the streets, never mind in the Academy. Let's be honest. It's time for a fresh start. "From time to time, the image of God has to die so not to become an idol. It has to become transparent to transcendence to be renewed." ~ Joseph Campbell Image: Richard Rohr @RichardRohrOFM May 22, 2022 Let’s be honest: religion has probably never had such a bad name. Christianity is now seen as “irrelevant” by some, “toxic” by many, and often as a large part of the problem rather than any kind of solution. It’s time to rebuild from the bottom up.

MLK’s letter reads less like warning than autopsy. Let's be honest: precisely as the world polycrisis demands love, truth and solidarity, Abrahamic religion, by and large, reads captured and spent—credible only to its own tribes and even there, imploding. A migration is due.
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1/5 Coming from a view where history includes mutations in meaning-making—changes in the OS of how humans perceive and value—Mitchell's right on. Also, as mediation itself collapses (institutional, platform, epistemic) and trust with it, place and immediacy become the only reliable unit of reality.

end\ I’ve mapped this elsewhere in a metaphysical vernacular. I’m aware that can irritate. What matters is the convergent point: religious and secular imaginaries have both failed us, and both can be superseded by the same turn toward a common quest for the Real. threadreaderapp.com/thread/19687...

4\ When the public condition of reality is re-encountered locally—where claims meet consequence—agency rebinds to what is embodied, habitable, and coherent. The defective isn’t so much torn down as outgrown: superseded by the unveiling of reality’s truer structure.

3/ The transition defines a Shift superseding the epistemological blunder enculturated as modernity's substrative structures of legitimacy and power, precisely where its claim upon reality (cloaking itself in metaphysical authority: “this is just how things are”) is unsealed. The Apparatus fails.

2/ Bioregional reinhabitation becomes political transition, not as retreat, but as a return to the structuring principle of life where personal agency and the larger processes of life converge—accessible not through ideological superstructures, but by direct, immediate participation in what's Real.

1/5 Coming from a view where history includes mutations in meaning-making—changes in the OS of how humans perceive and value—Mitchell's right on. Also, as mediation itself collapses (institutional, platform, epistemic) and trust with it, place and immediacy become the only reliable unit of reality.

@nilsgilman.bsky.social @atomicanalyst.bsky.social @brianzahnd.bsky.social
Gents, a flurry of intel relating to mimetic escalation in the nuclear weaponization of AI has surfaced in recent weeks. I haven't encountered an overarching synthesis. Above, an effort through a Girardian lens. Best wishes.

The terror and the good news. A hangover from my days co-chairing the National Computer Ethics and Responsibilities Campaign, and ongoing citizen-led peace-work, but I've spent months wading through a raft of reports on the nuclear weaponization of AI.
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Thank you so very much, Steven. Always value your presence online, even if checking in does require coming over from the other place! All the very best for the new year.

@nick_routledge Nov 19 1/2 Decades of peripatetic, mendicant life—the persistent disloyalty of the bridge-builder—have led me through a vast field of cultural oppositions. Enemies are typically allies in captivity, not essence. The real enemy is the logic of scapegoating, which the Messiah came to end. @nick_routledge Feb 19, 2021 Indeed. As in cyberspace, so below. As in meatspace, so above. On all sides, the murderous dismissal of the Other, experienced and promoted as coherent and socially beneficial, powerfully defines the anthropology of modernity. A hall of mirrors. The war of all against all. 1/ Quote tweet: @CarolSansour Feb 19, 2021 "I would like us to do something unprecedented, to create ourselves without finding it necessary to create an enemy." James Baldwin 1967 @nick_routledge Oct 8 Replying to @americamag Girard went further. Scapegoating isn't just a social reflex; it is the blind consecration of violence through collective (often religious) denial—the counterfeit holiness hiding evil: the false sacred. That's the fundamental lie the Gospels unmask: evil wears a halo. 1 John 3:8 @nick_routledge Nov 19 end/ What we call 'populist escalation' is captivity accelerating: a crisis of desire. A polity habituated to scapegoating cannot self-redeem by technique. The Paraclete universalizes that unveiling in history. A reconciliatory mimesis interrupts, rather than “wins,” escalation.

Yup. And, typically, they all march with menace; and absolutist secularism is no cure—it’s but another strain. Ultimately, our root challenge isn't wayward cosmovisions, it's the consensus violence of exceptionalism. In effect, eschatonic physics is where creeds learn humility. x.com/nick_routled...

Stephen, I've been ploughing through the flurry of recent research relating to the nuclear weaponization of AI. Do you have any particular go-to voices or resources you regard as particularly insightful on the matter?

You are a veritable long player, ol' chap.

Monotheism? What of, say, materialist fundamentalism? Or, more fully, what Thomas Berry identifies as the "downward reductionism of the mechanists and the upward reductionism of the spiritualists"? Paraphrasing Durkheim, we're never more religious than when we think we've overcome religion.

The Economist on X: "Steve Bannon says the MAGA movement has to “seize the institutions, seize them and then purge them”. He spoke to @zannymb, our editor-in-chief, and Ed Carr, our deputy editor, in Washington, DC earlier this week. Watch the full interview: https://t.co/QGGBNLAhNY https://t.co/xoKcPjn2bs" / X Steve Bannon says the MAGA movement has to “seize the institutions, seize them and then purge them”. He spoke to @zannymb, our editor-in-chief, and Ed Carr, our deputy editor, in Washington, DC earlier this week. Watch the full interview: https://t.co/QGGBNLAhNY https://t.co/xoKcPjn2bs

2:53 mins. of Bannon telling it like it is. "All we care about is victory after victory after victory and we know we're in the ascendant and they're in decline."
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Full interview: econ.st/48G0xRM

Pete Hegseth Orders Top Military Leaders to Attend Mystery Meeting “To say the military leadership is anxious would be an understatement,” one defense official told The Intercept.

@nilsgilman.bsky.social Pete Hegseth Orders Top Military Leaders to Attend Mystery Meeting
theintercept.com/2025/09/25/h...

The most recent data from the 2022 Census of Agriculture shows the average age of a U.S. farmer is 58.1 years, and rising.

Copy of tweet and quote tweet here: https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1707162423252439348 |end/ The psych's archetypal, and its direction harrowingly predictable. And half-assed, any effort to address this escalating mimetic, global pattern of self-justifying violence amped up to the nation-state level, without factoring in conclusive intervention at a planetary scale. @nick_routledge Apr 10, 2023 Replying to @MassimoFaggioli Cultures differ, but the bastard appeal of a Political Savior remains strikingly universal. The Con? Gone global. Modi, but the South Asian face of a spell of False Deliverers offering up gathering points for national anguish. What nature, then, an effective, planetary response? Image of tweet: Nils Gilman @nils_gilman “A grim warning that the spell cast by the demagogues of our times is profound: It is based on fear and loathing of internal and external enemies, and secured by close personal identification with and deep psychological dependence on charismatic figures.” https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-20/narendra-modi-owns-india-s-covid-19-disaster…

Whatever lens we use, the Parousia/radical philosophical event/Shift/Great Reset/etc. signals the breaking of a spell vastly more determinative than the epistemic frameworks maintaining the momentum of contingent social and political association: the cult of modernity itself. x.com/nick_routled...

Copy of tweet and quote tweet here: https://x.com/nick_routledge/status/1707162423252439348 |end/ The psych's archetypal, and its direction harrowingly predictable. And half-assed, any effort to address this escalating mimetic, global pattern of self-justifying violence amped up to the nation-state level, without factoring in conclusive intervention at a planetary scale. @nick_routledge Apr 10, 2023 Replying to @MassimoFaggioli Cultures differ, but the bastard appeal of a Political Savior remains strikingly universal. The Con? Gone global. Modi, but the South Asian face of a spell of False Deliverers offering up gathering points for national anguish. What nature, then, an effective, planetary response? Image of tweet: Nils Gilman @nils_gilman “A grim warning that the spell cast by the demagogues of our times is profound: It is based on fear and loathing of internal and external enemies, and secured by close personal identification with and deep psychological dependence on charismatic figures.” https://bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-04-20/narendra-modi-owns-india-s-covid-19-disaster…

Whatever lens we use, the Parousia/radical philosophical event/Shift/Great Reset/etc. signals the breaking of a spell vastly more determinative than the epistemic frameworks maintaining the momentum of contingent social and political association: the cult of modernity itself. x.com/nick_routled...

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@nilsgilman.bsky.social

Producer Price Index News Release summary - 2025 M07 Results

Trends? According to the July 2025 Producer Price Index (PPI) data released by the Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) the price of vegetables rose by 38.9% in July. www.bls.gov/news.release...

A catalog of democratic collapse, climate abandonment and "things getting much, much worse" certainly has its place. That said, any peeps or voices you're pointing to specifically focused on tangible, manifest, functional alternatives to said shitshow? Ah, while I'm here... bsky.app/profile/nick...

Nick Routledge on X: "@RobertEllsberg That strikes me as a dangerously partial reading—underestimating just how intricately fragile the current nuclear landscape has become, shaped by converging forces far beyond—and far more perilous than—anything traditional deterrence logic can account for. And yet—there is God. https://t.co/l8iPk1jsBX" / X @RobertEllsberg That strikes me as a dangerously partial reading—underestimating just how intricately fragile the current nuclear landscape has become, shaped by converging forces far beyond—and far more perilous than—anything traditional deterrence logic can account for. And yet—there is God. https://t.co/l8iPk1jsBX

The nuclear weaponization of AI marks a new phase of existential risk—technical, political, and ontological. Inscrutable, hallucinating and unbound, AI now informs nuclear command systems without any felt sense of what Armageddon entails—amid a mimetic swarm unfit to intervene. x.com/nick_routled...

Copy of tweet here: https://x.com/jamespoulos/status/1882561713607975144 @jamespoulos Jan 23 Nobody tell him Quote tweet: @jimcramer Jan 23 Nothing can stop Palantir, nothing

Then again, it isn't over until the fat lady sings.
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It's my cursory understanding that the One Big Beautiful Bill (passed by 215 to 214) makes ICE the highest-funded federal law enforcement component in the history of the United States; bigger than the FBI and with a larger budget for detention than the entire Federal Bureau of Prisons. There ya go.

Hans, never mistaken for a gardener. #TheTotalChrist exists only as a wholeness perfecting itself in the Paradisal unicity of human AND earthly #Resurrection. Only the Kingdom gives access to the New Earth but only the #NewWorldCreation renders the Kingdom fully incarnate. x.com/nick_routled...