The empire’s weapon is algorithmic; our survival depends on pluriversal solidarity

It is ironical that I have used an AI generated image to write about digital extraction and technofascism. The prompt itself would have used half a liter of water and electricity worth 5 minutes of microwave cooking. I want to bring this awareness into how the insidious spread of Artificial Intelligence and eruption of data centers pose an existential threat to a planet on the brink of climate collapse. This rather long essay delves into some of these themes. I have perforce merely touched upon each sub-topic and have provided some reference links below in case you wish to deep dive.

The lesson is clear: only when we think for ourselves and act with each other, together in deep, dynamic, and difficult solidarity, can we begin to remake the world.”
 — Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination.

I am writing again after a hiatus of almost six months. The chaos unfolding worldwide was mind-numbing and soul-deadening. I felt ashamed of my own overwhelm when toddlers and children in Gaza fought for their daily bread and breath; when their merest trespass meant a sniper’s bullet through the chest; when mothers held the torn bodies of babies who had barely lived; when children looked unimaginable horrors in the face.

Against this backdrop of a livestreamed genocide — accompanied by denials, diversions, and disinformation from USA-led Eurocentric imperialism and shamefully supported by many other countries including India — I was left bereft of words. I desperately searched for some causality and connection that would help me make even an iota of sense of what was happening. A killing machine beyond human control seemed to be operating independent of the collective wishes and desires of ordinary people across the globe. The rise of technofascism seemed inextricably linked to this killing machine.

I became deeply focused on researching the intersection of Artificial Intelligence, technofascism, and the interconnected crises reshaping our world. More than a year ago, I wrote AI, Colonialism, and Water, where I emphasized the highly extractive nature of the AI industry. In recent months, I’ve immersed myself in the growing body of work on technofascism, techno-feudalism, and surveillance capitalism — reading scholars like Shoshana Zuboff, Yanis Varoufakis, and Cédric Durand alongside decolonial theorists examining how digital systems perpetuate colonial extractive control in new forms.

This research reveals a troubling picture: the same algorithmic systems marketed as solutions are accelerating climate breakdown, democratic decay, and global inequality while concentrating unprecedented power in the hands of a few tech oligarchs. Our current hegemonic, Eurocentric civilizational model is in free fall, and the technologies we’re told will save us are designed to preserve elite power even as civilization collapses around us.

This research has convinced me that technofascism, climate breakdown, and the assault on ordinary people’s rights and freedoms aren’t separate crises — they’re interconnected dimensions of the same extractive system. This system is designed to extract maximum value while pushing all costs onto individuals, communities, and ecosystems. Over the coming month, I’ll share a series of articles exploring these connections: how algorithmic colonization operates as the latest evolution of imperial control, why climate survival depends on democratizing digital infrastructure, and how we might build what I call pluriversal futures — where technology serves human flourishing rather than corporate domination. This first piece on technofascism lays the foundation for understanding why the empire’s latest weapon may be algorithmic, but our resistance must be pluriversal.

In this essay, I briefly touch upon some of these questions at the forefront of my mind.

• How does technofascism represent the evolution of colonial control in the digital age?

This article examines how Silicon Valley billionaires have perfected the colonial playbook through algorithmic means. Where European colonizers once required armies and administrators to extract wealth and suppress resistance, today’s digital empire operates through invisible code that shapes how billions think, feel, and act — creating a more efficient and pervasive form of imperial control while exacerbating already existing biases, prejudices, and stereotypes.

• What is the connection between longtermist ideology and the abandonment of climate action?

Through analysis of the tech oligarchy’s philosophical framework, the article reveals how longtermism — funded by “uber dominantly male, white billionaires like Musk, Thiel, and Tallinn” — provides moral justification for planetary abandonment. It argues that hypothetical simulated future beings matter more than living, breathing, suffering humans of today, thus rationalizing space escape plans while Earth’s climate collapses.

• How do algorithmic systems accelerate climate breakdown while claiming to offer solutions?

I highlight the material violence of technofascism through concrete examples: AI systems consuming massive water resources during droughts, algorithms suppressing climate science while amplifying fossil fuel propaganda, and surveillance infrastructure targeting environmental defenders. These examples reveal how digital systems serve fossil fuel interests rather than planetary survival.

• Why is pluriversal resistance essential for combating technofascist control?

I argues that conventional single-issue organizing fails against technofascism because the system succeeds by fragmenting communities and isolating struggles. Pluriversal resistance builds interconnected webs of mutual support and solidarity across borders and boundaries that honor diverse cultures and strategies while creating resilient networks that can’t be defeated by targeting any single point — drawing from examples like indigenous water protectors connecting with Palestinian activists and Detroit organizers building cooperative infrastructure.

• What concrete alternatives exist to Silicon Valley’s technological domination?

Through examination of real-world examples — from Kerala’s community-owned mesh networks and Barcelona’s democratic digital platforms to Māori data sovereignty protocols and Detroit’s community broadband cooperatives — the article demonstrates that technologically sophisticated alternatives already exist that serve community resilience and ecological survival rather than corporate profit extraction.

From Digital Extraction to Human Liberation

Our current hegemonic, Eurocentric civilizational model is in a free fall. Seen from a distance, it seems to be hell-bent on going to hell in a handbasket. As our planet burns and billions face climate catastrophe, a handful of tech billionaires are not working to save the world we have — they’re building escape routes to abandon it entirely. This is the ultimate expression of technofascism: a system where algorithmic control serves not human flourishing, but the preservation of elite power even as civilization collapses.

The billionaires of this order is all out to colonize and trash space after having made every effort to decimated this planet. The billions poured into space would have been better served in providing bus services, education, healthcare, housing, elderly care. While Elon Musk launches rockets and Jeff Bezos plays astronaut, the Global South drowns in floods, burns in heat waves, and starves from climate-induced crop failures. This isn’t coincidence — it’s the logical endpoint of a colonial system that has always sacrificed the many for the comfort of the few.

What we’re witnessing is the marriage of neoliberal capitalism with algorithmic omnipresence — the perfection of colonial control. Where European empires once required armies and administrators to extract wealth and suppress resistance, today’s digital empire operates through invisible code that shapes how billions think, feel, and act. As Shoshana Zuboff meticulously documents in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, every smartphone becomes a surveillance device, every social media interaction generates profit for Silicon Valley oligarchs, and every algorithmic recommendation nudges users toward behaviors that serve corporate interests rather than human wellbeing.

This extraction operates at unprecedented scale and intimacy, penetrating the most private aspects of human experience. Consider Amazon’s Alexa: it doesn’t just respond to voice commands — it continuously monitors household conversations, cataloging family arguments, intimate moments, and private discussions to build psychological profiles for targeted advertising and behavioral manipulation. Families report that private conversations about health issues, financial struggles, or relationship problems are followed within hours by eerily specific advertisements across all their devices. What appears as convenient technology actually functions as sophisticated surveillance that transforms the home — humanity’s last refuge from market forces — into a site of continuous data extraction.

The psychological manipulation extends far beyond advertising — it shapes the fundamental architecture of social relationships and democratic participation. Meta’s internal research, revealed through the Facebook Papers, shows that the company knowingly amplifies content that generates anger, division, and engagement while suppressing posts that promote community cohesion or collective action. This isn’t an unfortunate side effect of algorithmic optimization — it’s the deliberate design of systems that profit from social fragmentation. Communities are torn apart by manufactured divisions while platforms extract maximum engagement value from human suffering, creating what researchers call “trauma capitalism“: the idea that capitalism creates and perpetuates trauma through its inherent structures, such as competition, precarity, and alienation, while also profiting from the symptoms of this trauma.

The Deadly Logic of Longtermist Delusion

Behind this technological colonialism lies a particularly insidious ideology that provides moral justification for planetary abandonment. The space race has begun in earnest, driven by longtermism and the techno-fascist utopia of colonizing space with billions of simulated people living apparently happy lives. This philosophical framework — funded by predominantly male, white billionaires like Musk, Thiel, and Tallinn — represents what critics call the ultimate expression of techno-solutionism.

Longtermism argues that hypothetical future populations vastly outnumber current humans; therefore, present suffering matters less than speculative future scenarios. Under this twisted logic, Musk’s Mars colonies justify letting Earth’s climate collapse. Gates’ digital agriculture projects matter more than supporting the small farmers who could actually feed the world sustainably. Bezos’ space manufacturing dreams take precedence over Amazon warehouse workers dying in heat waves.

A little digging also reveals the eugenicist and racist root of the movement emanating from a country founded on colonization and the genocide of indigenous population. As scholars like Ruha Benjamin demonstrate in Race After Technology, the same supremacist thinking that justified enslaving Africans and exterminating Native Americans now rationalizes sacrificing billions of climate refugees for the sake of silicon-based immortality that only the wealthy can access.

This isn’t abstract philosophy — it’s driving real policy decisions as our planet heats beyond habitability. While climate scientists warn we have less than a decade to prevent civilizational collapse, longtermists redirect resources toward preparing for their post-human future instead of preventing human extinction in our lifetime. The movement provides intellectual cover for what Anand Giridharadas exposes in Winners Take All as elite charity that perpetuates the very systems creating global crises.

Most alarmingly, longtermist ideology has infiltrated international governance structures, fundamentally corrupting multilateral institutions designed to address collective challenges. The United Nations, once humanity’s primary mechanism for coordinated global action, increasingly adopts policies aligned with longtermist frameworks that prioritize speculative future scenarios over immediate humanitarian needs. The UN’s AI Advisory Body, heavily influenced by Silicon Valley executives and effective altruist organizations, promotes “AI governance for humanity’s long-term future“ while systematically ignoring how current AI systems exacerbate inequality, environmental destruction, and democratic decay.

This represents a fundamental corruption of international law and collective decision-making. UN agencies now channel billions toward “existential risk reduction” projects — primarily benefiting Western tech companies developing space colonization and artificial general intelligence — while simultaneously slashing funding for immediate climate adaptation, refugee assistance, and pandemic preparedness in the Global South. The World Economic Forum’s partnership with longtermist organizations has produced policy recommendations that treat living populations as expendable in service of hypothetical future beings, effectively weaponizing international governance against the world’s most vulnerable communities.

The result is a grotesque inversion of global priorities — institutions claiming to serve humanity now actively accelerate the crises they claim to address. UN climate conferences increasingly focus on technological solutions that benefit Silicon Valley investors rather than supporting community-based adaptation strategies that could help billions survive planetary heating. This isn’t policy failure — it’s the deliberate capture of multilateral institutions by oligarchs whose wealth depends on maintaining the extractive systems driving civilizational collapse.

Digital Extraction as Climate Violence

The human cost of digital colonialism becomes visceral when we see how it accelerates climate breakdown while concentrating wealth in the hands of those preparing to escape. Consider Amara, a smallholder farmer in rural Senegal, who faces both algorithmic exploitation and climate catastrophe. The mobile payment app extracting fees from every transaction also generates carbon emissions through fossil fuel–powered data centers. As climate-driven drought intensifies, her traditional crops fail. Meanwhile, the app’s algorithm pushes her toward climate-vulnerable monocultures that benefit agribusiness corporations.

This digital-agricultural nexus represents what Vandana Shiva identifies as the ultimate convergence of colonial extraction — where technological and ecological domination serve the same corporate interests. As Shiva documents in Stolen Harvest: The Hijacking of the Global Food Supply, industrial agriculture has systematically destroyed the biodiversity that allows farming communities to adapt to climate variations. Traditional farming systems maintained thousands of seed varieties selected for drought resistance, flood tolerance, and climate variability — knowledge developed over millennia by women farmers who understood seeds as “the first link in the food chain.”

The algorithmic layer adds a new dimension to what Shiva calls “seed colonialism” — the systematic replacement of farmer-controlled seeds with corporate-controlled varieties. Digital agriculture platforms use machine learning to analyze soil conditions, weather patterns, and crop performance data harvested from millions of smallholder farms. This data — extracted without compensation — trains algorithms that recommend corporate seeds and chemical inputs while systematically devaluing traditional knowledge. As Shiva argues in Oneness vs. The 1%, this creates “technological apartheid,” trapping farmers in digital systems that extract both their ecological knowledge and their economic autonomy.

The result is accelerated climate vulnerability disguised as technological progress. Amara’s smartphone app doesn’t just extract transaction fees — it collects detailed data about her farming practices, soil conditions, and traditional seed varieties that agribusiness corporations use to develop patented alternatives. Meanwhile, the monoculture crops the algorithm promotes require intensive irrigation precisely when climate change makes water scarce, creating what Shiva terms “development apartheid” where communities are forced to choose between technological integration and ecological survival. The traditional drought-resistant millet varieties her grandmother saved for generations disappear as digital agriculture systems reward only crops that generate data and corporate profits, leaving communities defenseless against the climate chaos that industrial agriculture has itself created.

This pattern of double extraction — economic and ecological — repeats across the Global South with devastating speed. In eastern Congo, artisanal cobalt miners work in conditions made deadly by corporate exploitation and rising temperatures. The cobalt they extract powers the AI systems and electric car batteries that Silicon Valley markets as “climate solutions,” yet the mining destroys local water systems and generates massive carbon emissions. As Siddharth Kara reveals in Cobalt Red, these profits fund space programs for the same executives whose companies drive the climate crisis.

The water crisis reveals how technofascism directly threatens human survival in our overheating world. Training a single large language model consumes millions of gallons of water for cooling — enough to supply thousands of people during heat waves, according to University of California research. Yet tech companies build their most water-intensive data centers in regions already facing climate-induced drought. In Karnataka, India, farmers abandon ancestral lands because Google and Microsoft’s AI systems literally consume the groundwater their crops need to survive rising temperatures — not just because algorithms manipulate markets.

Algorithmic Acceleration of Climate Apartheid

The algorithmic systems reshaping global society don’t just extract wealth — they actively prevent the collective action necessary to address our climate emergency. YouTube’s recommendation algorithm systematically suppresses climate science while amplifying fossil fuel propaganda and climate denial. Indigenous communities in the Amazon and Arctic who possess crucial knowledge about living sustainably find their voices drowned out by algorithms that prioritize corporate-friendly content over traditional ecological wisdom.

This represents what we might call climate epistemicide — the systematic destruction of knowledge systems that could help humanity survive planetary heating. Elders in Guatemala who understand how Mayan agricultural practices can adapt to changing weather patterns watch helplessly as young people consume algorithmically-curated content promoting Western consumer lifestyles that are literally destroying the climate their ancestors navigated successfully for millennia.

As Safiya Umoja Noble documents in Algorithms of Oppression, these systems encode bias that extends beyond race to suppress any knowledge that threatens corporate profits. The surveillance systems deployed globally serve not just economic extraction, but climate control — suppressing the movements that could challenge fossil fuel companies and prevent civilizational collapse. In Sudan, where climate change drives conflict and famine, Meta’s algorithms amplify military propaganda while suppressing posts by climate activists and humanitarian organizations.

“Algorithms of oppression are not just about the technology. They are fundamentally about power, about who gets to be the default and who is relegated to the margins, and they are about how narrow perspectives become universalized and scaled through technology.” — Safiya Umoja Noble, Algorithms of Oppression

Platform Capitalism Meets Climate Breakdown

As our planet becomes uninhabitable for billions, the platform capitalism that Nick Srnicek analyzes in Platform Capitalism traps communities in digital dependencies that prevent them from developing climate resilience. In Bangladesh, garment workers facing intensifying cyclones and flooding depend on apps controlled by multinational corporations for employment opportunities. These platforms extract fees from workers already earning starvation wages while collecting data that helps corporations optimize supply chains for profit rather than climate adaptation.

The gig economy exemplifies how technofascism weaponizes climate vulnerability. As extreme weather makes outdoor work increasingly dangerous, delivery drivers across India, Brazil, and South Africa face a deadly choice: risk heat stroke and flooding to earn poverty wages through corporate apps, or face destitution. The platforms externalize all climate risks onto workers while algorithms optimize routes for corporate profit rather than worker safety during heat waves and storms. The surveillance mechanism extends deep into their every moment denuding them of privacy, dignity, and meaning.

Cultural Extinction in the Climate Crisis

The social atomization that Matthew Crawford explores in The World Beyond Your Head directly undermines the community solidarity essential for climate survival. Maria, an indigenous woman in rural Guatemala, watches traditional knowledge about drought-resistant crops and sustainable land management disappear as her son becomes addicted to TikTok videos promoting Western consumer lifestyles. The algorithm actively rewards content that destroys climate awareness while suppressing the indigenous wisdom that could help communities adapt to planetary heating.

The same algorithmic systems that generate engagement and advertising revenue in Silicon Valley directly undermine the social cohesion and ecological knowledge that communities need to survive climate breakdown. As traditional evening gatherings where elders shared crucial environmental knowledge give way to individual screen consumption, the collective wisdom necessary for climate adaptation dissolves into algorithmic feeds designed to maximize profit rather than community resilience.

Meanwhile, Amazon’s cloud services power the surveillance systems that monitor climate refugees and environmental defenders while extracting wealth from the regions most threatened by sea level rise and desertification. When the Kenyan government pays millions to host citizen data on AWS servers, it’s effectively funding the digital infrastructure used to criminalize climate activism while enriching the same tech oligarchs whose carbon emissions drive displacement and migration.

The Oligarchy’s Climate Escape Plan

Understanding technofascism requires recognizing how it serves the billionaire class’s plan to profit from climate catastrophe while escaping its consequences. Elon Musk’s Starlink doesn’t just create digital dependence — it’s infrastructure for monitoring climate refugees and maintaining control as nation-states collapse from ecological breakdown. Communities that invest in Starlink dishes become dependent on space-based systems controlled by the same oligarchs whose emissions are driving their displacement.

Bill Gates’ agricultural initiatives across Africa don’t just create technological dependence — they actively undermine the agricultural diversity that could help communities adapt to changing climate conditions. As Vandana Shiva documents in Philanthrocapitalism and the Erosion of Democracy, farmers trapped in Gates-promoted systems become more vulnerable to climate-induced crop failures while generating profits for the same corporations driving planetary heating through industrial agriculture.

The longtermist framework provides moral justification for this climate abandonment strategy. By focusing on hypothetical future populations that might exist in space colonies or digital simulations, tech oligarchs can rationalize letting Earth’s current population die from climate breakdown. They’re not solving climate change — they’re engineering escape routes for themselves while leaving billions to face civilizational collapse.

Pluriversal Climate Resistance

Yet even as our planet burns, communities worldwide are developing technological alternatives that serve climate survival rather than oligarch escape plans. In Kerala, India, fishing communities use community-owned mesh networks — coordinated by organizations like the APC Women’s Rights Programme — to respond to intensifying storms and sea level rise. These systems strengthen community resilience and provide early warning systems that help people survive climate emergencies.

Indigenous communities worldwide are developing digital protocols that protect traditional climate knowledge while using appropriate technologies to coordinate climate adaptation. The Māori Data Sovereignty Network (Te Mana Raraunga) uses community-controlled databases to preserve ecological knowledge about changing weather patterns while preventing commercial appropriation by corporations driving climate breakdown — work documented by researchers at Whose Knowledge?

In Barcelona, the city government develops sovereign digital infrastructure through Decidim that enables genuine community participation in climate action planning. Citizens directly shape adaptation strategies using tools designed to strengthen collective climate response — not serve corporate surveillance and profit extraction.

Pluriverse against technofascism

Why Climate Survival Demands Pluriversal Resistance

Pluriversal resistance offers the only realistic path to climate survival because it recognizes a fundamental truth: addressing planetary heating requires dismantling the same systems of domination that technofascism serves. The interconnected crises of algorithmic control and climate breakdown both stem from colonial logic that treats people, land, and atmosphere as resources for elite extraction.

As Arturo Escobar argues in Designs for the Pluriverse, genuine alternatives require “radical interdependence” rather than competitive organizing. Conventional climate activism often focuses on technical solutions or policy changes. Pluriversal climate resistance builds interconnected webs of mutual support that enable communities to develop climate resilience while challenging the oligarch systems driving planetary heating. Indigenous water protectors blocking pipelines connect with Palestinian activists facing climate apartheid. Both coordinate with urban organizers developing community-controlled renewable energy systems.

Most importantly, pluriversal resistance recognizes that climate survival requires decolonizing ourselves — unlearning the individualism and consumerism that both technofascism and fossil fuel industries depend upon. Communities developing climate resilience rediscover practices of collective care, resource sharing, and ecological relationship that existed before capitalism but remain essential for surviving our overheating world.

The pluriversal approach scales through federation rather than domination — networks of autonomous communities that support each other’s self-determination rather than imposing uniform solutions. The Zapatista movement in Chiapas demonstrates this principle through decades of resistance that has inspired movements worldwide while remaining rooted in Mayan cosmology and community practices. Their concept of “walking while questioning” offers a model for technological resistance: experiment with community-controlled technologies while continuously evaluating whether they serve life or capital, relationship or extraction.

The Climate Choice Before Us

We face an existential choice: accept technofascist climate abandonment — where billionaire oligarchs flee to space while billions die from heat, drought, and storms — or build pluriversal climate futures where communities control technologies for collective survival.

Decolonizing technology for climate survival means creating digital systems that serve ecological resilience, not oligarch escape plans. This demands international cooperation to challenge corporate power while supporting community-led solutions that address algorithmic control and climate breakdown together.

The alternatives already exist: community networks, platform cooperatives like the Platform Cooperativism Consortium, and indigenous-led movements that treat technology as relationship, not domination. Whether we can scale these before technofascism tightens its grip will determine our future.

Our ancestors survived ice ages and ecological upheavals through collective knowledge and mutual aid. Today’s climate crisis requires the same cooperation, adapted to planetary emergency. The empire’s weapon is algorithmic; our survival depends on pluriversal solidarity that honors human dignity and ecological relationship.

The choice: collective climate survival over oligarch escape, community resilience over corporate extraction, pluriversal flourishing over collapse. That organizing begins now, while we still have a habitable planet.

Essential Resources for Deeper Understanding

Surveillance Capitalism and Digital Colonialism

• Shoshana Zuboff — The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
• Nick Srnicek — Platform Capitalism
• Ruha Benjamin — Race After Technology
• Safiya Umoja Noble — Algorithms of Oppression

Extractive Industries and Global Justice

• Siddharth Kara — Cobalt Red: How the Blood of the Congo Powers Our Lives
• Vandana Shiva — Philanthrocapitalism and the Erosion of Democracy
• Anand Giridharadas — Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World

Decolonial Technology and Pluriversal Alternatives

• Arturo Escobar — Designs for the Pluriverse
• Matthew Crawford — The World Beyond Your Head

Thanks for reading Age of Emergence! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Technofascism and the Strangling of Pluriversal Futures — I was originally published in Age of Emergence on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Decolonization is a de-territorialized movement

“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.” ~Ruha Benjamin

A Collapsing Hegemony is Lethal

Marco Rubio lamented that Brazil “cut a trade deal with China. They’re going to, from now on, do trade in their own currencies, get right around the dollar. They’re creating a secondary economy in the world, totally independent of the United States. We won’t have to talk about sanctions in five years, because there will be so many countries transacting in currencies other than the dollar, that we won’t have the ability to sanction them”. Ben Norton Twitter

Rubio’s words mirror what the USA-led White Empire has always done — extract, exploit, expropriate. Today, financial colonization keeps host-economies of the Global South in a deliberate debt trap to prevent them from developing their own sovereign systems, and thus, cast off the shackles of Eurocentric neoliberal necrocapitalism.

“The euphemism “host economy” is appropriate for these countries, because the Western economic penetration of them resembles a biological parasite feeding off its host,” writes Michael Hudson in How the Global Majority can free itself from US financial colonialism

However, the world has moved on from the post-WWII USA-led world when Global South nation-states were just emerging from decades, if not centuries, of colonization. The USA and its vassal states are unable to come to terms with the changing world order. They cannot conceive of being one amongst equals; equality feels threatening after centuries of hegemonic control. Nonetheless, in spite of and despite the USA’s neocolonial interferences and impositions, mandated liberalization of markets, relentless wars, coups, and sanctions, destabilizing of governments that prioritize national interests over USA interests, enforced Structural Adjustment Programs in exchange of IMF or World Bank loans (two Bretton Woods institutions), and ongoing exploitation of Global South nations, the hegemony is imploding.

The USA’s malicious sanctions and mendacious tariffs have increased the resolve of countries beyond the Eurocentric hegemonic pale to step away and find alternatives to this extractive, exploitative, and exclusionary system that holds them hostage. The hegemony has been crumbling for a while and ended decisively with the USA and the White Empire-backed Israel’s genocide in Gaza. The livestreamed genocide, the mindless slaughter of babies, the pulverizing of a 5000-year-old country and its culture have brought the world together in an unprecedented manner. The empire stands stripped off veneers.

More than a century ago, Rabindranath Tagore, Asia’s first Poet Laureate wrote:

The political civilisation which has sprung up from the soil of Europe and is overrunning the whole world, like some prolific weed, is based on exclusiveness. It is always watchful to keep the aliens at bay or to exterminate them. It is carnivorous and cannibalistic in its tendencies, it feeds upon the resources of other peoples and tries to swallow their whole future. It is always afraid of other races achieving eminence, naming it as a peril, and tries to thwart all symptoms of greatness outside its own boundaries, forcing down races of men who are weaker, to be eternally fixed in their weakness.’ ~Nationalism by Rabindranath Tagore, 1917

European colonization has been predicated on pillaging and plundering countries, stealing their resources, and decimating the people, culture, and land. All dressed in the garb of progress, development, and civilization. Genocide, ecocide and epistemicide have been common practices. Wealth has always flown from the peripheries (the colonies) to the metropole; lust for infinite power and affluence has been the defining feature of European colonization.

Israel’s playbook is not new. It is the standard Eurocentric imperial-colonial template on steroids livestreamed into the most intimate recesses of our lives. German colonizers killed tens of thousands of Herero and Nama people in early 20th Century massacres during its colonial occupation of Namibia. Possibly 10 million or more were murdered from 1885 when The Berlin Conference formally recognized the Congo Free State (now the Democratic Republic of the Congo, formerly Zaire) to 1908 when Belgium took it over as a colony. Congo was looted and ravaged during the reign of King Leopold of Belgium. And the rapacious extraction continues today under the garb of green capitalism.

In a sane world, Patrice Lumumba would be alive. But he was assassinated, with the tacit support of the United States and the malign neglect of the United Nations, because he dreamed of a Congo for the Congolese. Today, Congo is a ‘sacrifice zone’ for neoliberal necrocapitalism, the cobalt beneath its soil ringing its death knell.

The last stage of the Empire is here as it casts of all pretenses. Its desperate propaganda sounds hysterical and delusional; its dystopian fantasy has become its own nightmare; its flagbearers are hollow, irrelevant, and obsolete old men of straw grasping at a world that no longer exists, fighting their own irrelevance, colluding to reign over the remnants of a decaying world. This is the empire imploding. The surveillance, the suppressions, the sanctions and deportations, the ICE and the incarcerations, the institutionalized torture and CECOT are all tools to deter, penalize, and terrorize the unflinching gaze of the millions who see through the fabrications and refuse the Empire’s offer of servile conformity.

The genocide in Gaza, the attacks on Iran, Trump’s Big Beautiful Bill, and the **Alligator Alcatraz** (the Guardian article describes it as a calculated celebration of the dystopian), the definition of Palestine Action as a ‘terrorist group’ by the UK government, the antisemitism smear indiscriminately thrown around to justify genocide and terrorism, the constant vilification of any nation-state, group, community, or peoples as a “threat to security” to justify bombings, coups, incarceration, assassinations, or even worse are all part of the same narrative — the lust for limitless control of the world and its resources for the benefit of a handful of oligarchs. The patterns are now well-known; the gaslighting discernible and visible; the crude propaganda are being busted daily by 18-something year old tiktokers.

What is noteworthy is the deliberate celebration of the dystopian. This is telling not only in its crudity but also as a direct warning about what the empire holds in store for those not in alignment with the its goal for limitless wealth and power. The dystopia has been in the making, hidden behind disinformation, distraction, and conspiracy theories. Now, the empire has shrugged of all pretenses; rules-based order be damned. It was always “rules for thee and none for me”. And we, of the Global South, invariably knew that.

The Empire stands naked, dripping blood and exposing its rotten remains. What history hid from view stands revealed in these apocalyptic times. In the decimation of Gaza, we can see the slaughter of the Native Americans and Africans. Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term “genocide”, considered the displacement of Native Americans by European settlers as a historical example of genocide. In the genocide and ethnocide of Gaza, we can see the building of a settler-colonial nation in Canada — the forced displacement, land dispossession, deliberate starvation policies, physical violence, and compulsory assimilation programs. In the myth of the Chosen People, we see reflections of Manifest Destiny with its self-proclaimed exceptionalism and white supremacism. Behind the claims of “making the desert bloom again” lurk the dark shadows of Terra Nullius. In the engineered starvation of Gaza, we see the deprivation and starvation policies implemented against Indians in Bengal.

The Bengal famine of 1943 killed more than three million people in eastern India. It was one of the worst losses of civilian life on the Allied side in World War Two. There is no memorial, museum, or even a plaque, anywhere in the world to the people who died. ~Hunger Stalked Us, Churchill’s policies contributed to 1943 Bengal famine — study

Today, the starvation of Gaza is the next deliberately engineered famine occurring in full view of the world in the 21st Century.

The history of Empire is ugly. It is as Marlow described in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness:

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much.

The Third Nomos is Here

The unipolar is exploding into the multipolar. The empire managers know that the hegemony is disintegrating into irrelevance. Hence, the rise in unbridled brutality against their own citizens, against every voice raised for justice, equity, and humanity. The sanction against Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur is not only reprehensible but also deeply telling. The Empire fears voices of compassion, fearlessness, and solidarity. Integrity, humanity, and a steadfast refusal to sell one’s soul threatens the hegemony. The empire dreads those who dare to reimagine and reinvent worlds and futures beyond the control of the its mandated narratives and acceptable paradigms.

Today, the Global North led by the USA is trapped in a political and narrative prison of its own making. The West’s blind spot created by its own imagined racial supremacy and a refusal to consider that the most consequential event of the “twentieth century might not be the First or the Second World War, the Shoah, the Cold War, or, for that matter, the collapse of Communism, but Decolonization.*” The West’s proclivity to see the world only through the Western lens created a massive blind spot that ignored the tectonic shifts taking place not only in the economic realms but also in the cultural and intellectual revolutions.

*The World After Gaza by Pankaj Mishra

By focusing only on the narrow matrices of quantitative analysis and growing GDPs of countries like China and India, they missed the deeper currents that were sweeping away the old touchstones and landmarks. The apparent unraveling and political chaos hid the profoundly and radically shifting political mentalities and emotional outlooks as well as economic structures from what had existed barely two decades ago. The turn of the century was also a turn towards worldbuilding along completely different paradigms and imaginaries hitherto not experienced.

The West’s willful intellectual and moral failure to understand the significance of the anti-apartheid movement or to acknowledge the liberation of the last big country from a racist Western colonialism was a defining moment in the West’s collective failure to learn from history or to sense the upheavals roiling the world. It is hardly surprising that South Africa was the resounding voice demanding justice for the Palestinians.

The USA-led white empire is losing its mind, not because of Bob Vylan’s chant, but because the carefully constructed and manufactured histories, narratives, and propaganda are now spectacularly failing in the face of tiktokers, punk artists, activists with spray paint cans, and millions of peacefully marching bodies reclaiming the streets to create collective discourses antithetical to all the dearly held hegemonic norms. Hence the unmitigated violence, brutality, manipulation, gaslighting, obfuscation and the ‘but Hamas’. ‘But Hamas’ now sounds like a desperate wail of a falling, failing, flailing empire drowning in its own contradictions and the world’s revulsion.

Governments like mine have a duty to stand up to Israel. Far too many have failed, says Gustavo Petro, the President of Colombia

Decolonization is a De-territorialized Movement

Global South is not a geographical location; it exists in the margins and the peripheries, in the hidden and unseen corners, in the sacrifice zones, in the ghettoes, in the liminal spaces of homelessness and statelessness. It is the bodies battered in the dark mines; it is the broken dreams and unending hopes. It breathes in places where death walks; it is in the whisper that rises from our deepest selves. Its the sacred walking amidst ruins.

Global South exists wherever there is inequity, injustice; wherever there is resistance, reimagination, remembrance, and resurrection; wherever there is solidarity, connection, and community. “And you remember that hope is not a guarantee for tomorrow but a detonator for action today,” said John Berger

Global South is not a geographical location but a metaphorical identity that enfolds the unseen and the unheard, the disowned and the disavowed, the delegitimized, ‘invisbilized’, and demonized billions. Global South exists wherever there are unseen, unheard, unacknowledged, and deliberately delegitimized voices and narratives. Global South exists within the metropole, within the heart of the empire itself. It is the people putting their bodies on the streets for Palestine; it is in the students’ encampments; it exists in the dock workers refusing to load ships headed towards Israel.

Global South is not a geographical location. It is a movement of movements rising organically. The genocide of Gaza broke the torpor, the collective apathy that had for long plagued modernity. Atomized, isolated, broken individuals struggling to survive, one health-crisis away from disaster, fed a steady diet of propaganda, disinformation, and distraction, and coerced into submission through various state apparatus, rarely have the energy to reflect. Gaza broke the spell; it shattered our isolated bubbles of listless cocooned comfort, and became a metaphor for everything the Eurocentric imperial-colonial-hegemony stands for.

The shorthand Global South covers up much disunity and divergence between countries. Autocrats like Erdogan and Modi embody the betrayal of the true meaning of decolonization’s promises as well as the moral and political decay of many of the post-colonial states. However, what decolonization gestures towards is a fusion of history with a promise of emergent futures where people define and design their worlds through mistakes and misadventures, where worldbuilding is not an imposition but a collective creation of interwoven dreams, desires.

Even as the old world implodes revealing the depths of its bottomless darkness, the times feel apocalyptic. It is telling that the Greek root, Apokalyptein, means revelation, uncovering, or disclosure. The word apocalypticism (1858) meant “belief in an imminent end of the present world”. The present world is ending. The old norms have fractured and fragmented, the cracks and fissures are widening. An indescribable void has opened up. This void, however, is not empty. It is an evocation of radical hope from the hitherto unheard, unseen, unacknowledged voices long suppressed, delegitimized, and silenced.

Coming together in Bogotá, Colombia for the historic Hague Group summit are 32 states including Cuba, Honduras, Malaysia, Namibia, Senegal, Algeria, Bangladesh, Botswana, Brazil, Chile, China, Djibouti, Indonesia, Iraq, Ireland, Uruguay, Venezuela and many others “seeking to halt the genocide in Gaza”. “We are seeing the rise of a new multilateralism, principled, courageous, increasingly led by the global majority.” says @FranceskAlbs

“This summit marks a turning point in the global response to the erosion and violation of international law,” South African Minister of International Relations and Cooperation Ronald Lamola said ahead of the gathering. “No country is above the law, and no crime will go unanswered.”

In a predictable and laughable response, “a US State Department spokesperson told media that the United States “strongly opposes efforts by so-called ‘multilateral blocs’ to weaponize international law as a tool to advance radical anti-Western agendas.”

In Brussels, 27 European states, the remnants of the White Empire, agreed to continue supporting the Zionist genocide in Palestine. In Bogotá, 32 nations are meeting at this very moment to deliberate concrete measures to end it. The West is indefensible and the future will be built in and by the Global South. The Phase Shift is unequivocally here. The unipolar is exploding into the multipolar.

To the Palestinians, and those standing by them, I say: Whatever happens, Palestine will have written this tumultuous chapter not as a footnote in the chronicles of would-be conquerors but as the newest verse in a centuries long saga of peoples who have risen against injustice, against colonialism and, today more than ever, against neoliberal tyranny.

~ Francesca Albanese, United Nations Special Rapporteur on the Occupied Palestinian Territories at the historic Hague Group Summit in Bogota.

What the hegemony failed to account for was the movement of Decolonization. The advent of the third nomos has never been so apparent. The sheer arithmetic of multiculturalism is what is so feared by the western white hegemony. This fear of the ‘Other’ expressed in words and metaphors like barbarians, savages, natives and projected into the creation of a mysterious, malevolent, mythical Orient in opposition to the qualities of the supposedly civilized West, blinded them to the realities of the rest of the world. They missed the significance of this transnational imagined community that defies geographies, cartography, territories, borders, cultures, and ethnicities — a community imagined by peoples of different hues, orientations, religions, and heritages. Their internal differences and disagreements superseded by the invisible thread weaving them together in an ineffable bond.

Decolonization is not an event or an action; it is an ongoing process of constant attention, vigilance, solidarity, community, reimagination, world-building, crafting of narratives, holding of paradoxes, invitation to the difficult, and upholding of hope even when it seems hopeless. Whereas the West had colonized individual countries, the decolonization movement is a de-territorialized wave sweeping across the Global South bringing together divergent, diverse, and often misaligned peoples together in a cause beyond borders and boundaries. These “imagined communities” cohere around identities that did not exist prior to Western colonial imperialism. Globalization and colonialism tie them together in an invisible bond.

Decolonization is a cartography that offered both historical agency and racial equality to the non-white peoples in the USA and Europe as well as in the remote corners of Asia and Africa uniting them in a particularly strong emotional bond across nations with conflicting political and economic interests. Decolonization’s promise was neither confined by national self-determination nor by a nation’s sponsorship. Governments, even democratic ones, often reflect the desires and aspirations of political and majoritarian elites, and rarely those of the general masses.

Decolonization, with its fluid imaginaries encompass Vietnamese resistance to the USA, the international anti-apartheid mobilization, the Black Lives Matter movement, the Palestine Will be Free activism, and many seemingly disparate but united movements. This movement of movements underscore the pluriversality of the global order rising from the apocalyptic endings of the hegemonic and Eurocentric western civilization.

The decolonization movement gain further strength and emotional appeal even as the supremacist white nationalists of the West vehemently support the Zionist project. As millions across the globe watch a genocide unfolding on their screens, the condemnation of the West rises in tandem. This linked faiths of the “wretched of the earth” become a searing awareness delinked and detached from the boundaries of nation-states and existing frameworks of sovereignty, territoriality, and national patriotism. This truly transnational political discourse holds the seeds of pluriversality.

In Conclusion

We have entered a liminal space between stories where a hegemonic monomyth is collapsing and multitudes of unseen, unheard, delegitimized voices are collectively rescripting new worlds. This liminality is vibrating with the sounds of marching feet, of millions unshackling their colonized imaginations, and the epiphany of thousands seeing through the propaganda and the horrors perpetrated by their own governments. We are at a civilizational crossroads not only between unipolarity and multipolarity but between the very premises of world-building. The world is not only moving towards power parity, indivisible security, peace, and progress but towards re-imagining the very narratives of civilization.

Decolonization is more than the process of liberation for the world’s non-white majority; it was also, crucially, a seductive and perpetually renewable promise of equality. Jacob Talmon, in his open letter to the Israeli Prime Minister, Menachem Begin in 1980, wrote:

That the most powerful force that can impel individuals, classes, and nations to act in the modern era is the determination to oppose the hereditary humiliation of an inferior position, arising from the subjection of one people by another… The combination of political subjection, national oppression, and social inferiority is a time bomb.

The emerging world is not only multipolar but pluriversal. A tectonic and volcanic reshuffling is happening even as Israel attempts to pulverize Gaza, President Trump speaks of burning Tehran, and almost the whole of Africa aligns with China. The world to come is being shaped by ideas, movements, epistemologies, and ontologies among the vast majority of the world’s population, in countries geographically remote from and historically hostile to the West. The Third World of West’s hegemonic vision no longer exists; instead, we are in the Third Nomos.

A multipolar world is slowly, steadily, and unwaveringly expanding. As the hegemonic unipolar world shrinks behind its self-erected fences and walls, borders and boundaries, isolating itself from the pulsating, throbbing, evolving worlds, it becomes ever more decadent and degenerate. The worlds unfolding beyond the high walls of unipolarity are expanding, connecting, reshaping and reforming geopolitics and civilizational cartography.

The Empire is Naked — I was originally published in Age of Emergence on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Now, compare this with the facts below.

• Worldwide, 2.2 billion people still lack access to safe drinking water.
• 4.2 billion people do not have safely managed sanitation services
• 3 billion lack basic handwashing facilities**
• By 2030, it’s expected that global freshwater demand will be 40% greater than available supply, with billions of people lacking access to safe water.

(Source: UNICEF, WHO)

Let’s look at some of the data for AI’s overall water footprints culled from different journals, articles, and research papers:

• ChatGPT consumes 500 milliliters of water for every five to 50 prompts.
• Data centers provide the physical infrastructure for training and running AI, and their energy consumption could double by 2026. Technology firms using water to run and cool these data centers potentially require water withdrawals of 4.2 to 6.6 billion cubic meters by 2027.
• Google’s data centers used over 21 billion liters of potable water in 2022, an increase of 20 per cent on its 2021 usage.
• Microsoft disclosed it alone consumed almost 1.7 billion liters of water in 2022.
• The world, analysts say, is in the process of creating “digital doppelgangers.” This means that in the cyber world that Meta and other IT firms are frenetically building, the virtual body will demand as much, or more, water daily as the physical human body.

The more virtual we become, the more water we need,” explains Pablo Gámez Cersosimo, a researcher specializing in technology and biodiversity, “It is the water that makes virtuality possible.

• Local Dutch newspaper Noordhollands Dagblad has reported that a data center in North Holland operated by US technology giant Microsoft consumed 84 million litres of drinking water during 2021.
• Training an AI at the computing level of a human brain for one year can cost 126,000 litres of water. Each year the computing power needed to train AI increases tenfold, requiring more resources.
• The Cloud as it currently exists is housed in roughly 100 million computer servers, mostly located inside vast data centers, with each a gigantic warehouse covering many acres. Most, up to now, have been sited in the developed world, but IT companies are in the process of opening new centers in the Global South.
• Already AI’s projected water usage could hit 6.6 billion m³ by 2027, signaling a need to tackle its water footprint.
• As of 2021, Indian data centers occupy over 8 million sq ft area. 60% of total data centres are in Mumbai, Chennai, Delhi and Bangalore. India’s data center capacity is expected to double to 1318 MW by 2024 and 183 data centers by 2025.
• Data centers consume 26 million liters per MW annually, resulting in a staggering 1.4 crore liters of daily water usage — equivalent to nearly 41,900 households in Bengaluru alone.
• Google has planned to set up a 8-storey 381,000 sq ft data center in Navi Mumbai by 2025 with an investment of ₹1144 crore in first 10 years. Also Microsoft has plans to build a data center in Mumbai.

Navi Mumbai is where I live. The data centers will literally be 15-minutes walk from my home. Every summer, we have faced severe water shortage for the past decade at least. On Monday (April 18), Karnataka Chief Minister Siddaramaiah said Bengaluru was facing a shortage of 500 million liters of water every day, which is about a fifth of the city’s daily total demand.

Apart from a decrease in annual rainfall (thanks to climate crisis) and depleting groundwater, what no one will talk about are the water-hogging data centers. DCs are estimated to consume nearly 3% of the water supply in Bangalore. They are supposed to spell progress, you see. They will bring jobs to the multitudes of desperate youth in a poor nation. The government will be lauded for being pro-development, never mind if there is no water to drink. Development is here.

Noncolonized fools that we are, we still don’t understand that development is Empire-speak for exploitation, and progress is a nuanced way of saying expropriation. Any protest will be featured as anti-development, being luddites, and the reason for India’s backwardness. No one will reveal the realities behind data centers, least of all the hegemonic corporations. Their survival depends on opacity, double-speak, and data suppression all in the name of Big Data. Irony is dead!

Data centers offer few jobs. A center consuming as much electricity as a small city may need just 30 employees, and not for all that long. “A data center’s life is between five and 20 years. This is not a permanent industry. It is extractive, like mines.” Data centers, say experts, are transient businesses, rapidly constructed in a Lego-like manner, using box-shaped utilitarian architecture. Like the computers and the data products the IT industry sells, planned obsolescence is built into the structures.

“Google will generate very little employment as it will just store data,” he notes. “It won’t pay tax, as it’s being built in a duty-free zone. It will give Uruguay virtually nothing and at the same time bring in its wake a set of serious ecological and social problems.”

~The Cloud vs. drought: Water hog data centers threaten Latin America, critics say

As mega-corporations and their billionaire owners engage in this mad race of heedless planetary catastrophe, there is going to be an exponential rise in data centers — the Cloud that doesn’t rain.

Corporations like Google, Microsoft, Meta, OpenAI in true colonial fashion are lookin at developing nations to locate their data centers, even in the dry sub-Saharan Africa. As always, the poorest and the most vulnerable pay the cost while endless profit accrues upwards. Data centers are being built wherever IT companies can find cheap water and electricity and lax environmental standards. Inexpensive Latin American water is being seen as an attractive alternative along with other Global South nations like Africa and India. Pliant Global South governments are being made to host data centers with promises of jobs, development, and foreign investments.

The IT industry’s tapping into public drinking water supplies directly competes with people’s basic needs for it. And that competition is going to get more intense. With the explosion of artificial intelligence, “Google’s cooling water consumption in 2022 increased by 20% compared with 2021, and Microsoft’s water consumption increased by 34% over the same period,” says Shaolei Ren, an associate professor of electrical and computer engineering at the University of California, Riverside.

The new data centers popping up in developing nations will be thirsty. That’s because, as servers store and process data, they get hot, and freshwater coming from the public supply is the cheapest way to cool them. Public services, maintained by tax payers, are being indiscriminately used to benefit a cabal of billionaires. Even as we teeter on the brink of planetary collapse having crossed at least six of the nine planetary boundaries, take a look at the data for fresh water. We are already way beyond the safe space.

With corporations appropriating potable, fresh water for data centers, and hiding behind insidious words like progress, productivity, and profit, the most vulnerable are once again sacrificed at the altar of a Molochian god. This time, it is called Dataism. This time, algorithm is god. “Dataism declares that the universe consists of data flows, and the value of any phenomenon or entity is determined by its contribution to data processing,” wrote Yuval Noah Harari in Homo Deus.

Latin American communities fear that this “data colonialism” will consume water they desperately need for drinking and agriculture, and are critical of their governments for giving priority treatment to transnational tech giants like Google and Microsoft, while putting people’s access to basic human necessity at risk.

“Colonialism” is a nation’s enforcement of politico-economic authority over a people or territory. Though often linked to the geopolitical viciousness that branded the past five centuries, a growing number of scholars is pointing to the contemporary threat of so-called “data colonialism”. ~“Data Colonialism” and the ubiquitous appropriation of human life

The term “data colonialism” was coined by Professors Nick Couldry and Ulises A. Mejias.

Couldry and Mejias have proclaimed that “traditional colonialism” is marked by four key characteristics: (I) the appropriation of resources; (II) the formation of new social orders; (III) an extreme concentration of wealth; and (IV) the creation of ideologies to justify the appropriative practices.

Against this backdrop, Couldry and Mejias have concluded that today, companies’ and authorities’ ubiquitous data extraction ticks all four boxes of what classifies a practice as “colonialism”. The emergence of a new data colonialism, based on the appropriation of human life through data, is paving the way for a new capitalism.

Noam Chomsky, a noted linguist and philosopher, said of AI:

“The human mind is not, like ChatGPT and its ilk, a lumbering statistical engine for pattern matching, gorging on hundreds of terabytes of data and extrapolating the most likely conversational response or most probable answer to a scientific question. On the contrary, the human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information; it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations. Let’s stop calling it Artificial Intelligence and call it what it is: Plagiarism Software. It doesn’t create anything, just copies existing works from artists and alters them sufficiently to escape copyright laws. It’s the largest theft of property since Native American lands by European settlers.”

We are heading for a world controlled by a handful of billionaires and trillionaires imposing their tech-fascism on the rest of the planet. This is insidious control with our direct participation using our knowledge without consent and for free. Shoshana Zuboff called this out in her brilliant work, Surveillance Capitalism. Ordinary humans are being algorithmically manipulated into becoming a part of the Internet of Bodies, for better or worse. The implications on our privacy is immense.

With ‘developing nations’ forced into Structural Adjustment Programs coupled with massive ‘debts’ from World Bank, a vicious cycle is created where environmental regulations and basic needs of their people can be overruled by mega-corporations with impunity. Companies are ‘strategically planning’ their data centers in the developing world with two-thirds of data centers not even recording their water usage.

The mega-nexus of Big Tech, Big Data, Big Money and politics is the face of the hegemony. They are more powerful than nation-states and have the capacity to overthrow, change, and enforce regulations for their benefit. Public resources are appropriated for private profit in the name of progress. Tax cuts and tax evasions ensure that nothing flows back from these monoliths into the communities they are devastating.

Instead, they engage in insidious and Machiavellian philanthropy, making massive donations to ‘various institutions’ thus ensuring their buy-in. The USA universities and the education system being a case in point. This ‘philanthrocapitalism’ is a cynical and dangerous way of buying social capital and suppressing dissent. Those beholden to these corporations for funding lose all vestiges of freedom, integrity, and sovereignty over their own actions and values.

This article is different from my usual pieces. With the pervasive rise of AI, the race to control generative A.I. by mega-corporations like Google and Microsoft, and the ubiquitous presence of surveillance tech and algorithm-driven behavior manipulation, the global civilization is collectively signed up to become experimental lab rats. None of us really know what we are signing up for. Our knowledge and data are used without consent; algorithms track our every move; and “the global Security & Surveillance market size was estimated to be worth USD 17680 million in 2022 and is forecast to a readjusted size of USD 28850 million by 2028 with a CAGR of 8.5(Percent) during the forecast period 2022–2028”. The mind boggles.

The hegemony has now become an invisible and global web of technology-enabled forces controlling everything from warfare to healthcare, from education to eating habits. Not only is it draining the planet of natural resources, it is tapping into every entity — living and non-living. This invisible web is currently life-averse and perverse.

How might we use this web of tech in life-affirming ways? Can we sense our indelible interconnectedness and entangled lives through this? How can we refuse the click baits and polarizing echo-chambers and instead find beauty in our differences, be awed by our myriad diversities? How can tech be put in the service of hearing the unheard voices, learning from hitherto unknown narratives? I think Gaza has become an example of this. No TikTok bans can erase the narratives emerging from Palestine, Congo, Sudan, and the peripheries that the hegemony desperately tries to hide. Technology is here to stay. What we need to become aware of is the ethics of its development. As well as the limits to its growth.

Currently, the underlying foundational narrative driving its growth, design, development, and dissemination is rooted in the colonial and hegemonic monomyth of power, profit, and privilege for a few. The rest of the planet is merely grist to the mill. The hegemony knows no limit. This essential denial of limits and the hubris of ultimate control is driving this menacing and Molochian race towards collapse. Perhaps those in the driver’s seat think they will escape in a space shuttle, the reality may turn out to be different.

As users, we can be subversive forces using AI in ways that benefit community, shared narrative-building, seeding solidarity and allyship across cultures, borders and boundaries. We can build infrastructures of collective envisioning and imagination; and refuse to become zombie consumers. We also need to become aware of the doublespeak underlying words like development and progress and refuse to be entrapped. Since tech is here to stay, let’s reimagine how we use it.

AI, Colonialism, and Water was originally published in Age of Emergence on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

“Remember to imagine and craft the worlds you cannot live without, just as you dismantle the ones you cannot live within.” ~Ruha Benjamin

We live in a profoundly damaged world, a wounded and bleeding planet. The ‘great acceleration’ of the Anthropocene founded on the hollow human hubris of seeking to control and subdue nature, the lust for infinite growth driven by extraction and ecocide, and a hegemony with a deeply colonial and imperial mindset has brought us to this cusp of simultaneous systems collapse — of economies, polities, societies, communities, ethics, values, and spirituality.

A polycrisis is rapidly devolving into a metacrisis. A profound sense of meaninglessness and dissonance pervades the atmosphere in spite of (also, because of) the avalanche of shiny tech apparently at our fingertips.

Polarization, fracture, and fragmentation are manifesting in all their devastating dimensions within and between nation-states. The ostensibly boundary-less, ubiquitously connected globalized world is erecting boundaries within national borders — between its own citizens, driving neighbors against neighbors, turning citizens into vigilantes, universities into police strongholds. Growing injustice and inequality coupled with social, racial, communal, and religious rifts are tearing apart the fabric of most nations. Totalitarian fascism is rearing its ugly head everywhere.

The hegemonic narrative of growth, development, and modernity imposed through the imperial project of colonization — Eurocentric and Western — has not only been running the show for centuries but has ‘invisibilized,’ delegitimized, and eradicated other epistemologies and ontologies. Donna Haraway called it ‘playing the god trick’ which the hegemony led by the USA excels at. Now this god trick has spectacularly failed as it must. The brutal ineffectuality of this totalitarian worldview is starkly visible. The hegemony is flailing and failing as millions take to the streets, students’ encampments rise in universities across the globe, and especially in the heart of the hegemony.

We have reached a point of discontinuity, irreparable ruptures are springing up in the seams and the shiny surface of the hegemonic facade. No amount of propaganda, misinformation, disinformation, distractions (like Met Gala), and diffractions are working. Ordinary people have seen through the illusions. The myths of democracy, freedom, and human rights emanating from the hegemonic metropole as righteous lectures for ‘lesser civilizations and inferior cultures’ stand exposed in all their hypocrisy. The world within the hegemonic metropole now sees what the colonized periphery always knew. In its dying throes, the hegemonster has now turned against its own people, its students and citizens. It is collapsing and resisting its demise violently and viciously.

This demise of the hegemony had been coming for a long time. Through many big and small steps within the metropole from Occupy Wall Street to Extinction Rebellion, from Black Lives Matter to small pockets of resistance. Finally culminating in the Students’ Encampments for Palestine. What many might see as disparate and discrete events actually speak of a growing fissure in the hegemony’s monomyth. The narrative has long been defunct; and now the entire premise of this imperial-colonial-supremacist hegemonic order is being challenged. Palestine has united the world in an unprecedented manner — becoming a mirror, metaphor, and manifestation of the impact of colonialism.

Once colonized nations, now suffering through decades of arm-twisting neocolonialism in the forms of Structural Adjustment Programs, IMF, World Bank, WTO, and random sanctions now clearly see the ‘rules-based order’ for what it is. As Trita Parsi notes cryptically, “When the Biden administration is talking about a ‘rules-based order’, it is talking about an order in which the US rules; not an order based on rules.”

The illusions are no longer working. As the world tilts towards multipolarity, there is another undercurrent running in tandem. One that is moving us towards pluriversality. It is this move — gradual, often invisible, but inexorable that I want to focus on here. Pluriversality will benefit from a multipolar world, but its premises and narratives are different.

Palestine has reinforced the need for a pluriversal world — a world where many worlds fit. The students’ encampments have become microcosms of such worlds — an entanglement and interweaving of many cultures, narratives, solidarity, safety, and sheer love. For strangers in faraway lands. Radical reimagining of worlds beyond hegemonic control is unfolding in real time. History is being rewritten and reshaped.

The point of discontinuity grows ever stronger as all over the world hitherto silent and invisible voices coalesce to express solidarity and allyship. They stand on behalf of Palestine and a world beyond extractive economy, expropriation, exploitation, and exclusion. Once colonized nations find allegiance in their historical experiences.

As the hegemony flounders, unable to change course, run by men who have failed upwards from the Iraq War, the Afghanistan debacle, Libya, Syria and other failed endeavors, ordinary people have had enough. The tired tropes of power means nothing to the millions of powerless citizens of the hegemony. As they see their lives unraveling, the dissonance exacerbates.

Flashback to 2020

2020 will also be remembered by many as a point of discontinuity, an anomalous data point. This was the year when a tiny, invisible virus ripped across the planet — a planet already reeling from floods, fires, and furies. The delusions of separation from other sentient beings and this planet that we humans harbored were shredded to bits, indelibly stressing our inextricable entanglements with all sentient beings.

It exposed the fault-lines across societies and countries, underlining the disparities and discriminations lurking beneath the surface of tawdry gloss and glitter. It underscored the embedded complicity of Big Tech, Big Pharma, and Big Money with the hegemonic powers, and exposed the self-serving nature of these industries. It emphasized the extractive, exploitative, and exclusionary socio-economic policies and politics at play across the globe — barring a few countries. It essentially ripped off all hypocrisy and pretenses.

But we missed the possibilities of this Great Pause when the entire world had juddered to a halt. Humans sheltered in place, roads emptied of traffic, global supply chains crashed; the sky was left to the clouds and the birds. And over the birdsongs was heard the continuous wail of sirens as ambulances hurtled through empty streets — beacons of hope as well as despair. Four years have passed since then. The hegemonic powers have doubled down since the pandemic to shore up their wealth and privileges, inflicting devastation on faraway lands from Congo to Palestine, Sudan to Syria. In a frantic bid to get back to BAU and the haunting fears of survival, we collectively became entrapped in the old narrative.

Many insightful geopolitical analysts are writing about the shift from unipolarity to multipolarity, and how the USA is losing its head and behaving like a spoilt bully because it can’t bear to not be the dominant power. I am neither a journalist nor an analyst, I am a social observer living through history-shaping times, poised on the brink of a Change of Era, and trying to bear witness and be a scribe.

We are literally seeing in real time the fragmentation and dissolution of the hegemonic Eurocentric narrative. While this narrative had ceased to make sense for a very long time, it is literally dissolving in front of our eyes — fragmenting and fracturing and drifting away.

The unipolar world is not only becoming multipolar but also definitely pluriversal. A multipolar world has many centers of power, all vying for control, ascendance, and dominance. As major nation-states rise across the globe moving the world towards multipolarity, the underlying narrative of infinite growth will not shift from within the new Axis of Power. Not as long as GDP and economic growth remain the primary measure of nation’s impact and influence in the global arena.

A pluriversal world is a decentralized world of many interweaving, entangled narratives and cultures encountering each other and coming together to share, learn, cooperate and co-create.

What I sense happening simultaneously and in parallel is a global movement towards pluriversality. This is mostly flying under the radar because this shift is led by movements and marches, by sit-ins and teach-ins of ordinary people. And this has become a global phenomenon exponentially increasing in the last decade — almost as an antidote to the rising fascism and state authoritarianism across the globe.

Whether it is the Farmers Movement or the anti-CAA sit-ins in India by more then 100,000 citizens of India led by the Shaheed Bagh dadis (grandmother) — an 82-year old Indian woman, Bilkis who was was on Time magazine’s list of 100 “Most Influential People of 2020”. From Democracy for Myanmar to girls protesting for their Right to Education in Afghanistan to many other small and big movements that have been on the rise. Some have received public attention and some have stayed hidden within local contexts.

Those with vested interests in upholding the old, extractive paradigms are becoming desperate in the face of unforeseen courage, imagination, and coherence from ordinary women, men, and children. From women in Iran to Afghanistan, from farmers in India to climate activists in the USA, from doctors to journalists taking extraordinary risks in Gaza to heal and bear witness — ordinary citizens without vested power are rising in tidal waves across the globe against the forces of brazen, entitled colonialism.

What these foretell and presage is a world reimagined and reconstituted along very different lines. The underlying narratives and metaphors are shifting from a world predicated on Hierarchy and Supremacy to one that is Relational, Dialogic, and Participatory. Increasing number of citizens are reclaiming their sovereignty and agency, making their choices known. The marches are uniting people across manmade barriers of race, culture, and nationality. Carefully erected borders and boundaries are giving way to solidarity in action. As people step out and occupy public spaces, these discrete movements are becoming nodes in a larger web that is being woven with many strands of narratives, many voices, and many songs pouring forth from the edges and margins.

We are at a distinct point of discontinuity. A portal has opened up beckoning us towards possible futures. It is a journey of transformation at many levels that we are being asked to undertake — personal, political, social, and spiritual. Now is the time to slow down and sense what is wanting to emerge. However, just coping with the turmoil and upheaval of daily life can render us incapable of sensing what wants to emerge.

The breakdown of the old order and its edifices are asking us to slow down, to connect with our inner wisdom, to lean into this liminal space of uncertainty and ambiguity, to widen our peripheral vision, and listen to Earth’s invitation to co-create a thriving, flourishing Planet — ‘a world where many worlds fit’. And maybe, just maybe — we will catch a glimpse of the shoots of the possible futures amidst the debris and decay of the dying.

• How can we become harbingers of a world that is emerging?
• What skills and capacities do we need to develop to reconstitute and rebuild pluriversal futures?
• What does a pluriversal world mean to you?

How do we inhabit this liminal space between stories and possibilities matter. We have to make a leap of faith over a crevice, an abyss that many have traversed. This stepping beyond the known, the certain requires fearlessness and compassion — for self and others. However, not stepping forth is no longer an option.

To cling to the old shores of certainty means to keep feeding a destructive, degenerative, and hegemonic system that finally owes no allegiance to anyone except its cabal of billionaires and the military-industrial-political nexus. It is up to us to reimagine and reconstitute our worlds, to interweave the many narratives rising from the edges.

An Era of Discontinuity was originally published in Age of Emergence on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The unfolding of many possible futures

The world is moving towards pluriversality, inevitably and irrevocably. It is reforming, reshaping, and rebuilding itself along very different lines, values, visions, and stories. We are in the midst of a Change of Era. Joanna Macy called this the Great Turning. The signs are all around us if we care to see. The tik-tok generation inheriting a broken world are no longer willing to live with and in brokenness. They are weaving very different narratives, fearlessly subjecting the status quo to unflinching scrutiny, repairing the fragmented and frayed fabric of societies. The violent chaos and collapse are portents of the end of an era and heralds of different futures.

The future(s) will be multi-layered, intertwined, and interrelated. Pluriversal. A pluriversal world is a gentler world, a kinder world of horizontal relationships rather than the vertical power asymmetry on offer today. This essay and the next few parts in this series will build on this theme.

“If it’s clear that maps have been central to the twin projects of colonial dispossession and capital accumulation, can they be mobilized in the other direction, not in the interest of accumulation, surveillance, and control, but collective liberation?” asks Jordan Engel, creator of the Counter-Mapping: The Decolonial Atlas Project

Nature’s borders are porous, fluid, permeable gateways of life. Exhalations and inhalations inform these borders which are imbued with the powers of resilience, restoration, and regeneration. Manmade borders, on the other hand, strive to be impenetrable barricades creating divisions, enclosing the ‘insider’, keeping out the ‘other’, locking people in fixed identities. They are most often politically designed boundaries dividing countries and nations, states and counties. They are redrawn, reframed, and reconstituted in alignment with the aspirations of the power-holders of the moment. Such manmade borders often remain contentious, violence-ridden, and vulnerable. They embody separation, otherisation, legalities of belonging and un-belonging. The term ‘citizenship’ becomes fraught with implications of who belongs and who doesn’t. Who gets to call the land within the borders ‘home’ is a poignant question blowin’ in the wind.

Although the Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaimed: ‘Everyone has the right to a nationality’, and: ‘No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality’, it also omitted to say which state had the obligation to fulfil these rights. ~We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire by Ian Sanjay Patel

As voluntary and involuntary migrations of humans peak, the impetus to keep ‘the alien out’ and secure supposedly bounded and pure homelands of homogenous identities is growing, especially in the global north striving to retain their privileges and power. This move in a uber-connected world of high tech, continent-spanning supply chains, ‘import and export of labor for capitalism’s convenience,’ and paranoic surveillance systems is not only ironical but also futile. Migrants, refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants pour across manmade borders shredding to pieces the narrative of ‘growth and development’, of nations and nationalities, illuminating hegemony’s fault lines and underscoring the senseless vacuity of the economic monomyth.

The concept of ‘nation-states’ seem sacrosanct today, but in reality, it is a fairly recent construct. The “official” creation date for what is considered the modern nation-state is often pinned at the Peace of Westphalia in 1648. However, it wasn’t until the end of WWII and the subsequent redefining of territory in Africa and the Middle East that the modern map began to appear. The fall of the USSR in 1991 redrew the map again, adding new states in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus, and Central Asia. These major shifts occurred within the lifetimes of people today, demonstrating that the current world order is anything but set in stone.”

Counter-Mapping: The Decolonial Atlas Project shows how mapmaking was an act of power and colonial prerogative. Cartography was very much a colonial project motivated by expansion, expropriation, and control.

Cartography has played a significant role in the acquisition of new territories by colonial governments — not only by putting colonial regimes of land ownership on paper, but also by providing an impetus and a cover for colonial expansion. … Cartography has been a significant tool in the expropriation of Indigenous lands at every stage of enclosure. In the US, the establishment of the Indian Reservation System required the mapping of borders between Reservations and private lands. The General Allotment Act of 1887 required the same territories to be remapped, divided up into privately-owned allotments. At every turn, colonial maps conjoin with juridical frameworks to legally enshrine the sanctity of private property — the basic unit of capitalist economic development. (highlights mine) ~Counter-Mapping: The Decolonial Atlas Project

I am trying to show two aspects here: 1) the concept and creation of nation-states are fairly recent phenomenon. 2) Mapmaking is not an unbiased, objective process of drawing lines and boundaries. Both are highly political, power-driven, and often imperial processes linked with colonial dispossession and capital accumulation.

For those wishing to deep-dive into decolonial atlases, here is a good summary by the founder of Decolonial Atlas, Jordan Engels: What Would It Look Like to Decolonize Cartography? A Volunteer Group Has Ideas. “While European settlers named states and cities after themselves, Indigenous communities often chose names with the land in mind, describing a specific feature, local species, or important cultural event,” says Engels.

With this context of borders and cartography, I invite you to stay with the images and events I have briefly described below. There are thousands of such incidents happening daily around the world. I am highlighting a couple to show the connections between colonialism, cartography, expropriation, dispossession, refugeeism, and capitalism. The orientation of a map, its projection, the presence of political borders, what features are included or excluded, and the language used to label a map are all subject to the map-maker’s agenda.

The vision and concept of pluriversality is, thus, an invitation to reimagine the fault-lines in the homogenous surface of hegemony as arcs of possibilities. Just as industrial monoculture depletes and destroys the ecosystem, so too extreme homogeneity renders societies and communities incapable of flourishing in times of intense upheaval and uncertainty. Diversity forms the bedrock of resilience and and regeneration, of sensemaking in chaotic times. The possibilities of arranging our lives are far greater than we imagine.

The borders, where the lands and waters of different countries collide, become strangely porous, permeable, and fluid zones. Manmade, politically driven, and hegemonic, they have been drawn, redrawn, and reformed for centuries by powers in control. Borders are therefore closely related to belonging and othering, to identity and recognition, to homelessness, refugeeism, and displacement. Arbitrary borders have overnight turned citizens into refugees, displaced hundreds of thousands rendering them stateless. Borders are contentious zones of violence and also of visions.

In spite of the might of the military and the powers of surveillance, borders become places of entanglement, interpenetrating and interweaving, blurring differences and desires. Borders are human endeavor to keep things neat and tidy, controllable and unambiguous, but often become liminal zones of entanglements. The first question people ask strangers is ‘where are you from?’ But when this ‘where-ness’ is dissolved through displacement, refugeeism, and homelessness, borders cease to matter. They become obstacles to life. Such was the case of the Blue Boat that sank off the coast of Greece.

“At least 78 people have died and hundreds more are feared missing in the deadliest refugee shipwreck off Greece this year.” Thu 15 Jun 2023, The Guardian The victims, nearly all of them men from Afghanistan and Pakistan, drowned when the large trawler they were travelling in capsized off the southern Peloponnese. They were trying to enter what they deemed to be a ‘safe haven’ illegally.

This tragic, completely avoidable incident reflects the deadly impact of necro-capitalism with its ensuing climate crisis and entangled polycrisis forcing the most vulnerable and the least responsible to succumb. As climate refugees and war refugees risk their lives to cross the oceans in search of a safe haven, the Western world is desperate to seal their borders. There is complete disregard of and indifference to the fact that this upheaval is an inevitable outcome of the colonial project, carried over as neoliberal capitalism and a predatory, extractive cult of growth-driven economy. The hegemony rampantly displaces people, expropriates their land, steals their resources, and expects to face no repercussions. ‘We are here because you were there’ is literally what all dispossessed can tell the Eurocentric, hegemonic powers.

These are just a couple of examples of displacement and refugeeism. If one is willing to stay with the unsettling and unrelenting questions, it is easy to see the reasons behind these convulsions in global demography. The most vulnerable are not going out invading countries or waging wars nor are they burning up fossil fuels. However, they are the refugees — the displaced, the disinherited, the dispossessed.

They didn’t ask for it. They don’t deserve it.

Borders have the power to render lives illegal conferring labels like migrants, refugees, immigrants.

No term better than ‘immigrant’ helped convert those post-war migrants into the insinuating ghosts of a colonial world supposedly separate from domestic British life. ~We’re Here Because You Were There: Immigration and the End of Empire by Ian Sanjay Patel

It is now self-evident to the most obtuse that imposing a hegemonic world order designed to benefit a handful necessitates endless violence — wars, political destabilizations and coups, ecocide, epistemicide, genocide, ethnic-cleansing, displacement and creating of refugees, and everything in between. Because no nation or people really like being advised and controlled, hegemony has to be imposed via insidious means — changing laws and regulations, investing corporations with more power than nation-states, closed door policy making by oligarchs, and many other contrivances. Basically, rather nasty, brutish measures covered up under the garbs of progress, development, growth, and similar meaningless blather.

The Eurocentric hegemony deliberately creates the following conditions:

• Constant exploitation, extraction, expropriation of the earth and all sentient beings
• Intentional socialization of costs and impact on the most vulnerable
• Deliberate destabilizing of countries and nations not willing to subjugate themselves
• Incessant warfare and aggression to capture more of earth’s ‘resources’
• Ceaseless propaganda to wrap everything in gloss and glitter
• Finally, assign to themselves the mantle of superiority and righteousness that reeks of control

These deliberately-created conditions to maintain the hegemonic order are directly linked to displacement, refugeeism, migrations, homelessness, and immigration.

To quote Warsan Shire, “No one puts their children in a boat unless the water is safer than the land.”

Today, the fabric of our civilization is unravelling as the very Earth rejects the imposition of an imperial-colonial-necrocapitalist world order. This rejection is visible in many ways — an entangled, exacerbating, and cascading interplay of causes and events called Polycrisis. Add to that a deep sense of dissonance that everyone is experiencing in their daily lives, and the polycrisis becomes metacrisis, a crisis of sensemaking and meaning making.

As the hegemonic metropole seeks to tighten its borders while still extracting and exploiting the periphery beyond its borders, this periphery now spills over into the metropole. However, this is not a recent phenomenon of globalization and neoliberal capitalism. They have always been a part of the imperial-colonial project’s fallout.

Beginning with the early days of chattel slavery, the European imperial powers had launched upon the greatest and most cruel experiment in planetary remaking that history has ever known: in the service of commerce they had transported people between continents on an almost unimaginable scale, ultimately changing the demographic profile of the entire planet. But even as they were repopulating other continents they had always tried to preserve the whiteness of their own metropolitan territories in Europe. ~Amitav Ghosh, Gun Island

This imperial project of colonization not only ravaged cultures and civilizations but also reshaped the demographic profiles of continents. As populations were shunted from continent to continent as salves in the infamous Atlantic Slave Trade to the indentured labor of Malaya’s rubber plantations and soldiers from colonized countries fighting the Empire’s wars, the demographic map of the planet convulsed, shifted, and reformed itself. Thus, people, labor, resources, and wealth flowed from the periphery to the metropole with scant regard for human dignity, freedom, and rights. It began with Europe, and then the colonial mantle shifted smoothly to the USA after the first World War. The underlying narrative remained unaltered.

This centuries old project conferred vast privileges to the Empire while decimating the rest of the planet, destroying communities, devastating families, and completely wiping out local cultures. This dynamic is still playing out in resource-rich regions of the world like Congo, Sudan, and Gaza. The deliberately instigated and ongoing turmoil in the Middle East is hegemony’s last-bid attempt to control and access the region’s rich gas and oil reserves. This knowledge necessitated the creation of many myths to justify the empire’s existence — from pretending to be harbingers of civilization to being bearers of ‘democracy’.

Quoting from a couple of research papers below:

Drain from the South is worth over $10 trillion per year, in Northern prices. The South’s losses outstrip their aid receipts by a factor of 30. Unequal exchange is a major driver of underdevelopment and global inequality. ~Imperialist appropriation in the world economy: Drain from the global South through unequal exchange, 1990–2015

An associated article: Rich countries drained $152tn from the global South since 1960

Economists Samir Amin and Arghiri Emmanuel described this as a “hidden transfer of value” from the South, which sustains high levels of income and consumption in the North. The drain takes place subtly and almost invisibly, without the overt violence of colonial occupation and therefore without provoking protest and moral outrage.

But this also had wholly unintended consequences. The pockets of diverse diasporas thus created in the midst of the ‘White Empire’ became the hidden rifts and fault lines in hegemony’s monolithic and homogenous narrative. Much as the hegemony would like to keep the metropole ‘white’, the empire would cease to exist without the diaspora.

Even as powers that be try to build barriers and erect borders, pockets of pluriversality sweep them away. Never has it been so difficult for the power centers to convince the masses of their credibility. Their collapse is imminent, ignominious, and inevitable. They know it; we know it. It is painfully visible in the ever-tightening grip of surveillance, authoritarian policies, military excesses, unfettered censoring, increasingly outlandish propaganda, and the mindless rapacious wars. Gaza is a requiem for the imperial-colonial power. Sudan, Congo, and many many other nations are proof of empire’s greed, lust, and chicanery.

As nation-states make futile attempts to seal borders and dissuade refugees, the desperate and the dispossessed seep through the cracks, unraveling the hegemony and shrinking the metropole. As the hegemony implodes from within, we can sense the ‘universe’ fracturing, its cosmology predicated on supremacy, separation, and imperialist privileges splintering into kaleidoscopic fragments. The Gen Z within the metropole are no longer willing to play the game of hegemony and are out in the streets, rising up on TikTok, and upending the rules of the game. They can see the planet they are inheriting, and they are ready to rewrite the script.

Change of Era — from hegemony to pluriversality

As global warming peaks, parts of the earth are going to become uninhabitable.

Temperature records have already been obliterated in 2023 and intensifying heatwaves, floods and droughts have taken lives and hit livelihoods across the globe, in response to a temperature rise of 1.4C to date. Scientists say far worse is to come if temperatures continue to rise. The secretary general of the UN, António Guterres, has said repeatedly the world is heading for a “hellish” future. ~World facing ‘hellish’ 3C of climate heating, UN warns before Cop28

Refugees will flood the habitable places. Many of the most vulnerable may not make it. And unless there is a shift in perception, ‘border apartheid’ will exacerbate the looming crisis. The other option is to see it as an opportunity to create a world not predicated solely on colonial cartography but also on our interconnectedness, to celebrate our differences and diversities. To build a world predicated on relationality, non-duality, and non-hierarchy.

Yes, it sounds improbable, idealistic, and maybe plain foolish to those wedded to concepts of linear progress and cultural hierarchy. Seen through the current lens of separation and supremacy, the very notion of a pluriversal world is unsettling, absurd, and unnatural. However, whether we like it or not, the exacerbating polycrisis is already making itself felt in various ways — floods, droughts, arctic temperature rise, ocean acidification, land degradation, risk of multiple breadbasket failures, and many many more interlinked events are going to create vicious resource wars. There will again be a convulsion and churn of global demography. This needs to be seen through very different worldviews than the one responsible for where we are today.

All of us born in these times are witness to a civilizational transition whether we acknowledge it or not, whether we want to be or not. We are called upon to bear witness, to be amanuenses and chroniclers, to be catalysts of emergent possible futures. This requires a profound love for our planetary existence and for all sentient beings even in the midst of the horrors, violence, devastations, and depredations. It is easy to lose faith; who doesn’t these days. But to bear witness and have faith is an act of revolution, a profound act of decolonization. It’s a belief in our own particular, unique calling.

Walking away is a failure. Of imagination, and of faith. We don’t know even know what the story we’re in is called, or the shape of it, and we certainly don’t know how it will end. So all we can do is live fully in the part of the story that we are in. … Who says, like Samuel Beckett in The Unnamable, ‘You must go on. I can’t go on. I’ll go on.’ And then who smiles. ~Sharon Blackie, On faith, and not losing it

The hegemonic power holders need our hopelessness, despair, and rage. By refusing their bait, we can continue to stay in the cracks, and keep preparing and nourishing the soil for very different futures to take root. In this vein, I invite you to see borders as fluid zones of pluriversal possibilities, zones of transgressions as well as transformations, where entangled, entwined lives and inter-permeability of narratives fracture the ironclad, unyielding surface of hegemony.

As the planetary demography heave and roil, become ineradicably entwined and entangled, the homogenous narrative of endless hegemonic growth is irreversibly cracking and ‘alien’ ideas and visions extrude into the carefully constructed homogenous center. There is no longer a recognizable and reducible single story. The fabric of hegemony is fraying, rents appear in many guises from marching bodies on the streets to activists shutting down arms factories.

As this artificially and colonially constructed world gives way with its hollow bulwarks and scaffoldings revealing their sordid secrets, the earth is rising in multitudes of ways to signal the end of this epoch.

The pluriverse is premised on the notion of our indelible interconnectedness, our entanglement, and our communities. It doesn’t deny individual sovereignty or agency, but recognizes the power of communities and citizenship. Let’s stay with this for a moment.

I believe the antidote to hegemony lies in reclaiming our agency and our communities. And they are not contradictions. We become resilient and robust communities when our agency is honored. Hegemony fears the power of committed people coming together as communities, and hence leave no stone unturned in vilifying efforts at solidarity and allyship. Hegemony is a cult of people committed to capital accumulation, power, privilege, and supremacy. Any deviation from this cult calls down retribution in various forms — from incarceration to ostracization. There is no community within the hegemonic narrative; there cannot be.

Hence, reclaiming and remembering our pluriversality is the work of community and participatory citizenship. The current pockets of resistance and movements rising across the planet are antidotes to this hegemonic behemoth. We need to see these movements not as disparate protest marches but as nodes of a large web of interconnected narratives predicated on certain common foundations — equity, justice, wellbeing, dignity, solidarity, and peace.

And as Wade Davis, the Canadian anthropologist says,

These other cultures are not failed attempts to be us; they are unique manifestations of the spirit — other options, other visions of life itself.

Of Borders, Cartography, and Pluriverse(s) — Part I was originally published in Age of Emergence on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I will soon be starting a YouTube channel where I will explore the theme of the Pluriverse, its emergence, and why it may possibly be a compass for alternative counter-hegemonic and life-affirming civilizational narratives.

In this essay, I will briefly touch upon the differences between multipolarity and pluriversality. For this, I lean into the work done by scholars like Arturo Escobar, Ashish Kothari, Walter D. Mignolo, Boaventura de Sousa Santos, Bernd Reiter and others who have been exploring the concept of the Pluriverse from various perspectives, through various lenses, and different contextualities. They have brought a richness and depth to the field that deserves attention. To this exploration, I humbly add my pieces and perspectives, my ways of seeing and sensing a world that is collapsing and emerging at the same time. The collapse of the hegemony was inevitable. The reductionist, mechanistic, and supremacist paradigm is long past its due date. And its end is predictably a bloody one.

However, in the compost of this collapse lies the fertile seeds and imaginaries of possible futures that are counter-hegemonic, beyond anthropocentric, and beyond growth. These seeds are the imaginal cells of pluriversally constituted futures, and need to be carefully nurtured, nourished, and stewarded. The world is yearning for such vision holders and wayfinders who can sense and actualize emerging futures.

“How do we move beyond the traditional paradigm of reductionism toward a new understanding of seemingly irreducibly complex systems?” asked Melanie Mitchell. Pluriversality proposes alternative visions of a world that is essentially in alignment and in harmony with life. It is the vision of a world where myriad and diverse cosmologies, epistemologies, and ontologies overlap, intersect, interweave, and entwine to form a glorious tapestry of entanglement — a reflection of our indelible interconnectedness and inter-relatedness.

The pluriverse is not an esoteric concept; it is our natural state — a diverse and entangled web of narratives and different ways of seeing, sensing, and relating that coexist, not in power differentials, but in relationships of collaboration and cooperation. It is the vision of ‘a world where many worlds fit’. The concept of ‘pluriversality’ was first introduced in the Zapatista’s own decolonial political vision of a world in which many worlds would coexist. Ref: The Darker Side of the Renaissance by Walter Mignolo

We live in a stunningly complex and diverse world. It is absolute hubris to think that one single economic monomyth can meaningfully hold our civilizational trajectory. Our current planetary crises, variously called the pluricrisis and the metacrisis, are proof of the fallacious nature of this monomyth. The Eurocentric hegemony was imposed on the rest of the world as an imperial-colonial project; pluriversality eschews this singular narrative. It calls into question the concept of universality so dear to Western cosmology with its claims of objective truths. Pluriversality embraces contextual knowledge, partial knowing, and experiential living.

As the world spirals ever deeper into disconnect, as we witness the natural world plundered and unraveling into horror, it becomes ever more difficult to reimagine and reconstruct the vision of a world that is life-affirming. In this context, the imaginaries and frameworks of pluriversality offer unflinching and compassionate guidance to swim against the currents of egoism, power, and privilege. I believe the vision of pluriversality can no longer remain confined to a few but needs to become an alternative, an antidote, and a renewal of hope against the hegemonster gone berserk. This is my attempt to clarify the concept, and offer an invitation to all to collectively reimagine and reconstruct a pluriversal planet.

I have been writing about deconstructing the hegemony for sometime now. In this part, I want to explore the idea of a post-hegemonic world, a pluriversal one. There is no one single answer; there can never be. There can never by a single story. There are only ways of seeing. I am offering my way of seeing as a part of the many narratives that are being woven across the globe even as I write.

Empire: we may not have stopped it in its track — yet — but we have stripped it down. We have made it drop its mask. We have forced it into the open. It now stands before us on the world’s stage in all its brutal, iniquitous nakedness. ~Arundhati Roy, An Ordinary Person’s Guide to Empire

The unipolar world (a more palatable name for hegemony) with the USA at its helm and the interests of the Global North taking precedence has been the norm for the past five centuries since the beginning of colonization, and was further strengthened through neoliberal capitalism and the imposition of ‘free market’ globalization. The hegemonic world order is a unipolar world order, currently led by the USA with the support of its Western allies. The unipolar world order seeks to dominate and preserve control over the way the world is governed, the global economy, and the relationship amongst nations. It is supported in these endeavors by bodies like the World Bank, IMF, WTO, NATO, and other regulations and treatise like the The Transatlantic Trade and Investment Partnership (T-TIP). It has three main goals: a) to retain dominance over global resources; b) to always ensure the benefit of the USA and its Westerns allies; c) to ensure capital flow and accumulation by a handful (this is passed of as ‘free trade’).

Rightfully, there has been an ongoing struggle by other nations to break this chokehold and establish a somewhat distributed power dynamics. The multipolar world has been opened up by the economic growth and political confidence of China’s interstate politics, together with the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa) nations, the growing economics and politics of Indonesia and Turkey, and the Latin American states in Mercosur, following the leadership of Brazil.

Wikipedia has a rather good description of Polarity: Polarity in international relations is any of the various ways in which power is distributed within the international system. It describes the nature of the international system at any given period of time. One generally distinguishes three types of systems: unipolarity, bipolarity, and multipolarity for three or more centers of power. The type of system is completely dependent on the distribution of power and influence of states in a region or globally.

Here’s another: A multipolar system doesn’t require three powers of equal size; it just requires that significant power is concentrated in more than two states. Today, the middle powers — from Japan to India — are significantly more influential than they once were. This is the textbook definition of what scholars call “unbalanced multipolarity.”

I am neither a geopolitical analyst nor a political theorist or academician, and not qualified to analyze whether the world is truly becoming multipolar or not. My intention here is to draw attention to the fact that a multipolar world order is predicated on power-differentials between nation-states vying for control of resources and influence in the global arena. The rules of the game don’t significantly change; there are only more contenders for the top positions.

Nonetheless, multipolarity definitely tries to wrest control and domination away from the USA-led Global North regime, and creates a more diverse world with power-centers in different geographies. Multipolarity is essentially state led, and therefore continues to propagate a dominant narrative as ratified by the states in question. Multipolarity doesn’t shift the underlying paradigms of neoliberal capitalism and free market premised on extraction, exploitation, expropriation, and endless capital accumulation.

Since multipolarity continues to be predicated on power negotiations, the larger powers can negotiate “mega-regional” agreements more easily than smaller ones. When there are multiple competing great powers, this can lead to the smaller states being left out of such agreements. Therefore, a multipolar world order isn’t necessarily decolonial or dialogic. It destabilizes and dislodges the claim of superiority of the unipolar USA-led hegemonic order without really upending the power constructs that lie at the root.

I am highlighting a few aspects of multipolarity to distinguish it clearly from pluriversality.

If state-led dewesternization is forcing the formation of a multipolar world order, decoloniality is about opening the horizon of a pluriversal world. ~Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge edited by Bernd Reiter

I won’t go into the details of multipolarity; there are plenty of scholarly material available on this topic. Here are a couple: The emerging multipolar world order: A preliminary analysis; The Multipolar World: Meaning, Characteristics, Historical Evolution and Key Pillars

I want to demystify and explore my way of seeing pluriversality. Will this lead to a perfect world overnight? Of course not. Maybe we will not even see the emergence of pluriversality in our lifetimes. Nonetheless, I firmly believe, that we must clear the undergrowth and lay the foundations for a pluriversal world. Holding this vision close to our heart, each one of us, in our spheres of action and influence, can do our little bit to repair our corner of the world. We don’t have to know the impact of our actions. We have to trust that our actions will have a ripple effect beyond our knowing, our understanding, and our imagination.

Pluriversality is the decolonial way of dealing with epistemology, ontology, and cosmologies that aims to change our praxis of living in the world. It eschews the power-hierarchies and polarizing ideologies of multipolarity; but recognizes multipolarity as a move towards dewesternization.

If Westernization was unipolar, dewesternization is multipolar. Unipolarity was successful in enacting the global designs associated with Westernization. Multipolarity, on the other hand, can no longer be controlled by global designs; it fractures them, by definition. Indeed, multipolar processes are processes of de-designing. Dewesternization is the de-designing of Westernization. ~Constructing the Pluriverse: The Geopolitics of Knowledge edited by Bernd Reiter

Dewesternization is a heterogeneous set of responses disputing the unipolar management of the world’s population and natural resources. Pluriversality, predicated on decoloniality, does not compete with dewesternization and re-westernization, but rather aims to delink from both — that is, to delink from state imposed forms of governance, from the extractive economic monomyth of accumulation, and from the power-hungry personalities that run the current hegemonic world order.

Decoloniality and Pluriversality is not a master plan or a global design. They are, above all, a diverse horizon of liberation constructed by the heretofore marginalized and oppressed voices. There cannot be a decolonial global design, a single narrative. Decoloniality eschews the ‘god trick’ of a homogenous narrative and opens the horizon of a pluriversal world. You may see pluriversality as an enacting of alternative futures emerging from the shadowy edges and margins, often flying under the radar, and creatively reconstructing other ways of being, seeing, learning, and relating.

Renouncing the conviction that the world must be conceived as a unified totality in order for it to make sense, and viewing the world as an interconnected diversity instead, sets us free to inhabit the pluriverse rather than the universe. Thus, pluriversality is about shifting our beliefs and understanding of the world, which would lead to changing our praxis of living in the world. Pluri- and multiverses are convivial, dialogical, or plurilogical. Pluri- and multiverses exist independently of the state and corporations.

Thus, the movements arising across the planet from #CeaseFireforGazaNow to #BlackLivesMatter, from #OccupyWallStreet to #FarmersMovementIndia, from #antiCAAProtest to #ExtinctionRebellion are all peoples’ movement spontaneously arising in response to the dominant, hegemonic powers. These are the pockets of pluriverse already existing within the hegemony, holding seeds of dialogic and participatory futures outside of state-driven controls.

Paul Hawken described this emergence most eloquently when he wrote:

I believe that we are part of a movement that is greater, and deeper, and broader than we ourselves know, or can know. It flies under the radar of the media, by and large. It is non-violent. It is grassroots. It has no cluster bars, no armies and no helicopters. It has no central ideology. A male vertebrate is not in charge.

Paul Hawken: Blessed Unrest: How the Largest Movement in the World Came into Being and Why No One Saw It Coming

Hawken elegantly described what is in effect the Pluriverse — a weaving together of diverse narratives, not tied together by ‘isms’ but by something far deeper and profounder — a life-affirming philosophy of love, dignity, abundance, and joy.

Pluriversality is not an esoteric construct. It’s our natural state of being, which was violently wrested from us through an imposition of the misguided doctrine of Separation. Separation is violence. It’s an artificial construct seeking to control, coerce, consume, and command. Separation is a worldview, a paradigm, an ideology, a way of seeing and a way of shaping the world, both in our minds and in nature and society, through violence. It molds our ideas of knowledge, of science and technology, of the economy, production and consumption, of democracy and freedom, and of who we are, our identities, our purpose, of why we are on the earth.

As Gary Nabhan has written, we can’t meaningfully proceed with healing, with restoration, without ‘re-story-ation’. Pluriversality is thus, a ‘re-story-ation’ of the world; it is an invitation to see the world as constructed through stories, where myriad narratives intersect, overlap, converge, diverge, and merge to form an intricate, resilient, and living web of life. These stories become the compass for planetary healing, planetary living and thriving.

Colonization always seeks to destroy stories — through the destruction of schools, libraries, museums, artwork, and knowledge systems. This is rightly called epistemicide. The erasure is the aim to render invisible the uncountable sediments of history, which include innumerable and dizzying variety of peoples, languages, experiences, and cultures. These are deliberately destroyed as a process of elimination of alternative narratives, and the imposition of the hegemony. Thus, all memories and histories are swept aside or ignored, relegated to the sand heap and ground into meaningless fragments.

Just as examples, an estimated 600,000 archaeological pieces were looted by groups and militias allied with the United States since 2003, according to a book published in 2009. (Rothfield, Lawrence. The Rape of Mesopotamia: Behind the Looting of the Iraq Museum); Kohinoor and the many Indian artefacts looted by the West, on display in world museums now.

These examples are meant to highlight how colonization distorts history and wrenches cultural symbolisms out of context thus turning them into mere objects or curiosities. This is how people’s histories are eradicated, rendered invisible, and relegated to forgotten fragments. Pluriversality looks at history, not with nostalgia or with a desire to go back, but with a curiosity to learn so that the emerging futures are firmly rooted in the cultures, contexts, and shared memories. For the colonizer, delinking the colonized from their roots is a way to retain control.

Between 1869 and the 1960s, hundreds of thousands of Native American children were removed from their homes and families and placed in boarding schools operated by the federal government and the churches. … The U.S. Native children that were voluntarily or forcibly removed from their homes, families, and communities during this time were taken to schools far away where they were punished for speaking their Native language, banned from acting in any way that might be seen to represent traditional or cultural practices, stripped of traditional clothing, hair and personal belongings and behaviors reflective of their native culture. ~US Indian Boarding School History

This constant coaxing and coercing towards homogenization and standardization is a violent process, euphemistically called ‘integration’, that has been a core practice of colonization. Pluriversality eschews homogenization; it is predicated on embracing the diverse, not towards a goal of uniformity, but towards co-creating a shared vision of a pulsating, wondrously diverse, and thriving world.

It also goes beyond heterogeneity and invites multiplicity. Heterogeneity is about disparate and different powers. Multiplicity is about holding the differences in a profusion of abundance that overlaps, intersects, weaves, and dances together. It is about honoring our entangled lives and miraculous abundance. The differences are not divisive but the much-desired diversity that strengthen, mutually nourish, and form the bulwark of a resilient and antifragile world.

We are all experiencing the fallout of a hegemonic world predicated on homogenization, standardization, quantification, and endless accumulation. This violently enforced homogeneity has been a roadblock in solving most of the pressing problems as we stand on the brink of metacrisis. This is not surprising given that the challenges are ‘wicked problems,’ which as any systems thinker will know, cannot be solved using reductionist and linear thinking. The hegemonic order simply ends up doing more of the same, imposing standardized ‘solutions’ across varying contexts and cultures, and enforcing a one-size-fits-all approach on distinctly different issues.

It’s hardly any wonder that doing more of the same have merely led to a world of exacerbating crises. The hegemony is unable to envision any other way of being because it has literally and metaphorically blocked all accesses to myriad other cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies. A single cosmovision imposed on a diverse and pluriversal world has brought us to this brink of disaster; it not only did not have any checks and balances in terms of other worldviews but actively sought to repress and suppress opposing perspectives that arose from vastly different cosmologies.

Here is a quote from Scott E. Page that he wrote in the context of organizations and which applies equally well to our current planetary condition:

“To rely on a single model is hubris,” writes Page. Then how is it not hubris and a fatal fundamental flaw to rely on only one cosmovision, on a single monomyth that is supposed to be able to explain this myriad and mysterious world?

What passed as diversity are token voices still arising from the same worldview, duly indoctrinated, and offering alternatives that are deemed safe by the hegemonic paradigm. The ones who actually dare to shake the foundations of the hegemony are promptly incarcerated, suppressed, and duly taken care of. Snowden and Assange are the most famous examples.

If we unpick hegemony, at the root lies a constant desire to eliminate all that is ‘different’ from the prescribed and ‘approved’ ways of doing, being, learning, and relating. The forbidden and shadowy edges are ‘the uncivilized world’ that must controlled, their resources extracted, and their unique and mysterious narratives, rituals, and beliefs eliminated. The mapmakers of the past marked these strange, unknown territories with the caution, “There be dragons there!”

While unknown patches have virtually disappeared, the fear still exists propelling the hegemonic powers to dominate, subjugate, or eliminate. The Middle East today is a case in point as the USA plans another war to eliminate what it deems as threats. In reality, it is an ongoing effort to control the oil-rich areas for USA’s and the West’s geostrategic benefits. The hegemony is built on top of extraction, exploitation, and exclusion and knows no other ways.

The hegemony is, thus, designed and structured to be in direct opposition to a pluriverse. The beliefs, principles, and values are fundamentally different. It is my attempt to reconstruct the pluriverse by deconstructing hegemony’s playbook.

The pluriversal world is one that is networked and connected via stories. The nodes are the people, communities, societies. And stories are the links. It is premised on our inherent interrelatedness, or as the Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges put it, “everything touches everything.” It is from this foundational vision that a pluriverse is constructed — story by story, vision by vision, powered by the imagination of many.

Demystifying the ‘Pluriverse’ as the Hegemony Unravels was originally published in Age of Emergence on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Stories are pathways to a pluriversal world

In dazzling proclamations and manifestos, the Zapatistas announced the rise of the fourth world and the radical rejection of neoliberalism in 1994.

“We Indian peoples have come in order to wind the clock and to thus ensure that the inclusive, tolerant, and plural tomorrow, which is incidentally the only tomorrow possible, will arrive,” Marcos said. “With our struggle, we are reading the future which has already been sown yesterday, which is being cultivated today, and which can only be reaped if one fights, if, that is, one dreams.”

“A new lie is being sold to us as history. The lie of the defeat of hope, the lie of the defeat of dignity, the lie of the defeat of humanity… In place of humanity, they offer us the stock market index. In place of dignity, they offer us the globalization of misery. In place of hope, they offer us emptiness. In place of life, they offer us an International of Terror. Against the International of Terror that neoliberalism represents, we must raise an International of Hope.” ~Quoted by Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

We are at a revolutionary moment in our civilizational trajectory. As the hegemony visibly digs its own grave exposing its Machiavellian machinations for all to see, its time to reimagine, remember and reconstruct our wondrous, beautiful, diverse, and abundant pluriversal planet. Many might say that the hegemony is still going strong — bombing to hell all that stands in its way. But that would not be true. Bombing is really all that hegemony knows; its default reaction to opposition, resistance, and voices of reason and compassion. It can only incarcerate, incinerate, and incite violence. Hegemony basically has a ‘military’ solution to everything. It is stuck in a destructive loop of its own making with visibly ageing leaders struggling to remain in power even as they are confronted by their own irrefutable obsolescence.

At this final stage of colonialist necro-capitalism the absurdities are so vast, so copious and bizarre, that not for one second there exists a reality in which the formal narrative has any credibility. Hegemony’s problem is it continues to do the same thing expecting different results, and this is insanity as Einstein (probably) has said. Listen to what Biden says: “Are the airstrikes in Yemen working? Well… when you say ‘working’, are they stopping the Houthis [Ansar Allah]? No. Are they going to continue? Yes.” This is a textbook case of insanity.

This utter absurdity and insanity is predicated on the belief that trade and commerce should be permitted to continue as usual with zero economic repercussions of any kind. That the horrors being unleashed in Gaza should have no material impact on the rest of the world whatsoever is profoundly disorienting and problematic. This is the kind of blindness that obeisance to a single story and one worldview perpetuates — horror beyond belief. The issue is that hegemony can’t see, sense, think, or stop its own juggernaut. It is on autopilot heading off a cliff, and taking the perpetrators as well as whole chunks of other life forms with it.

Digital colonization is further enforcing hegemony where technology is more than a tool now.

It is an instrument of power and control, the means to construct a false narrative of our relationship with the natural world and society, eclipsing nature’s creativity and productivity, and the contribution of those who are colonised — women, slaves, workers, and farmers.

The reductionism associated with technology is also reflected in the reductions in society — the 99% lose their economic security; their diverse skills, ways of thinking, potentials, and intelligences are reduced to the management of digital data; and people end up as appendages to machines and technologies. Instead of being a means to reaching higher ecological, ethical, social and human ends, the deployment and use of industrial technologies become an end in themselves, a new religion. ~Vandana Shiva

“The richest 1 percent grabbed nearly two-thirds of all new wealth worth $42 trillion created since 2020, almost twice as much money as the bottom 99 percent of the world’s population, reveals a new Oxfam report.” This is hardly news. But it indicates the extraordinary control that the 1% have over geopolitics, global economy, our ‘democracies’, and all aspects of our lives.

Hence, the imperative to collectively bring to fruition our vision of a pluriversal world — one where many worlds fit.

This Eurocentric hegemony that seems all powerful, pervasive, and ubiquitous is a superficial construct imposed on the rest of the planet as an imperial-colonial-modernism project, further enforced through globalization and neoliberal capitalism. The myth of its universality has been carefully constructed and enforced through military might and media machinery. The dominant narrative is merely one of many, neither infallible nor indestructible, but disastrously trying to play the ‘god trick’. The world has always been pluriversal. That’s the default.

This imposition of hegemony is a bid to forcefully constrict and contain a diverse, abundant, myriad, and mysterious world. It is an effort to confine an ‘unruly’ and ‘capricious’ world within the narrow bounds of hegemony. What doesn’t fit the dominant narrative is usually ruthlessly erased or rendered invisible. Universalization is, thus, an essentially violent process requiring the use of unmitigated force to obliterate other ways of being, seeing, sensing, and relating to the world. Embodying pluriversality is, therefore, to reclaim and remember our inherent multiplicity and diversity, our indelible interconnectedness, and our gloriously entangled and messy abundance.

What is the purpose of resisting hegemony if not to protect the obscure, the ineffable, the unmarketable, the indescribable, the local, the poetic, and the eccentric? Radical geographer Iain Boal had prophesied, “The longing for a better world will need to arise at the imagined meeting place of many movements of resistance, as many as there are sites of closure and exclusion. The resistance will be as transnational as Capitalism.”

Today, in an organically rising movement, hundreds of thousands are marching across the world in different cities and nations, asking for a ceasefire in Gaza.

A march is when bodies speak by walking, when private citizens become that mystery the public, when traversing the boulevards of cities becomes a way to travel towards political goals. A moment when history would not be made by weapons but by walkers under the open sky. ~Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

A new imagination of politics and change is already here. History is being made out of common dreams, groundswells, turning points, watersheds. Therefore, the stories we nurture and tell ourselves at this civilizational juncture between collapse and creation, between chaos and care matter more than ever. As John Berger poignantly wrote: “Never again will a single story be told as though it is the only one.”

Stories trap us, and stories free us; we live and die by stories. Pluriversality is an invitation to recognize that we have the power to be storytellers, not just listeners. It is an invitation to participate in creating a dialogic, convivial, and democratic world. To reclaim our agency to be creators, disruptors, dreamers, story-tellers, and scribes of an emerging future. Stories lie in the realm of the metaphorical, the symbolic, and ‘the terrain of their action is collective imagination’.

Stories have a way of seeping out of cracks and crevices, out of rubbles and ruins, and colonize our imagination. They refuse to let go. They beckon and inspire, tantalize and tease us with their hidden possibilities. They demand articulation. These are the stories with the powers to shift what seems immovable, implacable, impervious. When such stories coalesce, connect, interweave, there is no stopping the tidal wave of transformation. Sometimes, this happens incrementally, in invisible ways, and then crashes forth one day. This is how, for example, Mahatma Gandhi’s Satyagraha and non-violent resistance movement gathered momentum.

Sometimes, stories also reverberate across centuries providing inspiration and wisdom. I believe stories don’t die. They are sometimes forgotten, go into hibernation, and then emerge anew, with new significance and meaning. As the hegemony disintegrates into incoherence, the lost stories are reappearing from the shadowy, ignored, and invisible corners of the world. Those corners where people escaped the globalization matrix, thus becoming invisible.

They retain the power of ‘invisibility’ — an authenticity denied to those infected by the hegemony virus. Their stories are as yet untainted and unsullied, still containing the wisdom that allowed them to coexist harmoniously. In these neglected places lie radical power. Countless such unseen, unheard, unacknowledged stories are emerging and claiming their rightful place in the process and praxis of worldbuilding.

Even as Gaza is being pulverized, the stories of Gaza’s destroyed olive groves are reappearing, inviting us to imagine a vibrant, beautiful Gaza where olive harvesting was a time of celebration, where olives not only provided livelihood but was a way of life. “During the festival, Palestinians sing national songs and sometimes dance dabka while enjoying traditional Palestinian bread with olive oil and thyme. Palestinians consider the olive harvest to be as traditional as a Palestinian wedding.” Such stories take us beyond the hegemonic horrors, and open the doors to an enchanting world of community, care, and celebrations.

Am I saying their existence is all trouble-free paradise? No. I am saying that they have managed to lead a more convivial and communal existence away from the grip of the metropole. Instead of expropriating their land for the next mining project or the next Ben Gurion canal, it would be way more worthwhile to learn from and integrate their wisdom without usurping their sovereignty. Countless such pockets of alternative living exists that can serve as role models for a pluriversal and coherent world.

Arundhati Roy describes this as “the dismantling of the Big — big bombs, big dams, big ideologies, big contradictions, big heroes, big mistakes. Perhaps it will be the Century of the Small.”

Small stories rising from the edges and margins have a way of percolating and seeping out into the stratosphere. If the big media houses function to manufacture consent on behalf of the hegemony, the millions of blogs, podcasts, tik tok videos are the edge voices shredding the hegemony’s veil of illusion to bits. This organic rising of collective imagination is the death knell of the hegemonic powers. The animating spirit driving collective vision is often unexplainable, supple and fluid as art, gathering impetus as it moves through the hearts and minds of many. There are no defined designs, no rigid dogmas, and no specific isms. They arise from a spontaneous meeting of visions and beliefs whose time has come.

Dismantling the hegemony requires embracing and embodying all that the hegemony is not. This means recognizing our inherent interconnectedness and interrelatedness, eschewing all fallacious narratives of separation and otherization, rejecting the productization of every facet of life, and pathologizing of all that makes us human — kindness, care, empathy, connection. This means untangling ourselves from hegemony-imposed notions of separation, hyper-individualism, endless consumption, and extreme fear of the unknown. This means escaping — even if occasionally — from hegemony’s narrow confines to weave other tales of togetherness. This means becoming conscious of all the tools in hegemony’s arsenal, and refusing to be indoctrinated.

Pluriversality also eschews anthropocentrism and an anthropocentric worldview. The very notion of the pluriverse embraces stories of the other-than and more-than human. It’s not only ecocentrism, which again centers the human. Its about listening — deeply, with humility, with amazement. As Mary Oliver writes in When Death Comes:

When it’s over, I want to say all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.

When it’s over, I don’t want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.

I don’t want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.

I don’t want to end up simply having visited this world.

Forests tell stories as do oceans and mountains. Bears and otters, sunbirds and beavers, seals and salmon — all have their stories. How do we learn to listen? How do we listen to a tree? To the rhythms of life pulsing through her? Maybe, occasionally we can learn to live by ‘Tree Time’.

It was impossible to rush plants, to tell a tree to ‘hurry up’. In envy, in admiration and with ambition, I began to call that pace ‘Tree Time’. ~Sumana Roy, How I became a Tree

The very notion may appear impossible or idealistic or both. Nonetheless, it’s now apparent that ignoring the myriad other stories have led us down a dangerous path of civilizational annihilation. Rather than the manufactured clash of civilizations, we need to concentrate on the slow working together and intermingling of cultures that overlap, learn and borrow from each other, and live together in far more interesting ways than any limited or inauthentic mode of understanding can allow.

Sooner or later, the time will have to come to draw attention to the manner in which the exclusion of other traditions of knowledge by reductionist science is itself part of the problem that has led to myriad failed development initiatives all around the world. — Catherine Odora Hoppers, Indigenous Knowledge and the Integration of Knowledge Systems

I wrote a series on the Dangers of a Single Story some time back; the hegemony survives by keeping our imagination constricted, our creativity restrained, and our artists and dreamers silenced or incarcerated. This is how hegemony perpetuates a single, homogenous, economic monomyth of endless profit and accumulation of capital by a few.

Hence, the need to reimagine pluriversal futures. The best way to resist monolithic homogeneity is with multiplicity, pluriversality. Will the hegemony vanish overnight? Of course not. It will continue to wreak havoc on its way out. However, reimagining possible futures is not premised on the end of the old. Acts of co-creation are already happening as tens of thousands take to the streets in support of Palestine.

Prior to this global uprising, many movements have been erupting across the globe as antidotes to the hegemonic narrative — creating reservoirs of hope, resilience, and respite. Some movements like the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street gained global prominence, while others stayed in their corner of the planet impacting local laws and regulations like the Farmers Protest in India. Nonetheless, ripples of these stories floated out disseminating their energy far and wide in defiance of hegemonic repression.

Will we achieve a perfectly pluriversal world? No. But the aspiration of it, embodying it, envisioning it, imagining it will be worth it. The needle of the world will shift — sometimes imperceptibly and sometimes with a wild swing that can exhilarate and astonish. And for us to embody a pluriversal world, I invite us to listen to trees.

Not that I want to be a god
or a hero
Just to change into a tree,
grow for ages, not hurt
anyone.
~Czeslaw Milosz

Pluriversality is in profound ways anti-ideological, where ideology means ironclad prescriptions about who’s an ally and what makes a better future. It’s improvisational, collaborative, creative — constantly in a state of forming and reforming, interweaving and intersecting, reimagining and refining. There’s an openheartedness, a hopefulness, and a willingness to trust.

To be anti-doctrinal is to open yourself up to new and unexpected alliances, to new networks of power. It is an ideology of sorts, which is to say it is an ideology against ideologies. An ideology of absolute democracy that is about preventing authority from rising, with the concomitant limits on imagination, participation, and adaptation. ~Rebecca Solnit, Hope in the Dark

Pluriversality is a convivial, dialogic, and democratic vision of a world that is not bound to an ideology or an ‘ism’. It eschews the constraints that such isms pose, and instead opt for the fluidity, flexibility, and fecundity of collaboration, improvisations, and wholehearted hopefulness. The people on the streets today asking for a ceasefire in Gaza are demonstrating what an intersection of boundaryless allyship, hope, and resistance look like. This is how pluriversality emerge from the unexpected, the organic, and the creative acts of rebellion and resilience. It is a mode of being, a way of seeing and sensing the world that refuses binaries, linear causalities, easy tropes and simplistic stereotypes.

Naomi Klein says, “when critics say the protesters lack vision, what they are really saying is that they lack an overarching revolutionary philosophy — like Marxism Socialism, deep ecology or social anarchy — on which they all agree. That is absolutely true, and for this we should be extraordinarily thankful.”

Reconstructing the ‘Pluriverse’ as the Hegemony Unravels — IV was originally published in Age of Emergence on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Active Hope is an antidote to Hegemony

“Hope is not a guarantee for tomorrow but a detonator of energy for action today.” ~John Berger

There are times in life when the firmament of our being seems to collapse, taking all the light with it, swallowing all color and sound into a silent scream of darkness. It rarely looks that way from the inside, but these are always times of profound transformation and recalibration — the darkness is not terminal but primordial; in it, a new self is being born, not with a Big Bang but with a whisper. Our task, then, is only to listen. What we hear becomes new light. — Maria Popova

We stand on the edge of a time when the very firmament of our civilization is shifting. The tectonic shifts in geopolitics are redrawing the contours of our civilizational trajectory although that may not be immediately apparent from within this moment. History is being made. Recalibration of what it means to be human, to be a global community, to hold each other in the center of our being, to eschew the human-made boundaries of nations and countries, and rise like a tidal wave of hope is unfolding. Social contracts are being rewritten, rejuvenated, crafted anew. As Gaza crossed 100 days of relentless bombing, it has become a litmus test of our humanity and a harbinger of transformation.

Even as Western mainstream media ‘invisibilized’ South Africa’s presentation on behalf of Palestine at the International Court of Justice, we have the Game of Thrones stars read it out, using their platform to amplify the counter-hegemonic voices as an act of solidarity.

The struggle for justice should never be abandoned because of the apparent overwhelming power of those who have the guns and the money and who seem invincible in their determination to hold onto it. This apparent power has again and again proved vulnerable to moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience…” ~Howard Zinn, quoted in Hope in the Dark by Rebecca Solnit

The hegemony would like us to believe that it is invincible, inevitable, and immutable. However, its desperation is evident. The Eurocentric hegemony is visibly stumbling and stuttering, it’s narrative becoming increasingly incoherent and paranoid. “All we seem to be left with now is paranoid gibberish about a War on Terror whose whole purpose is to expand the War, increase the Terror, and obfuscate the fact that the wars of today are not aberrations but systemic, logical exercises to preserve a way of life whose delicate pleasures and exquisite comforts can only be delivered to the chosen few by a continuous, protracted war for hegemony — Lifestyle Wars” ~Arundhati Roy, Things That Can and Cannot be Said: Essays and Conversations, Arundhati Roy and John Cusack

The paranoia of profit and capital accumulation has led to ludicrous levels of insanity. It’s evident in the bombing of Yemen, in the razing of Gaza. The countries have billions of barrels of oil that the hegemony wants. So, a delay in shipping becomes reason enough to bomb one of the poorest countries … but all this is no longer hidden. A deadly and fallacious combination of Supremacy, Separation, and Secrecy has kept the hegemony going. But let me clarify a few points about hegemony before proceeding further.

By hegemony, I refer to the nexus of Western nation-states led by the government of the USA aided by big money, big tech, and surveillance mechanisms and other enabling bodies like the Pentagon, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and regulations like the Structural Adjustment Programs. The USA has a long history of meddling in other countries, toppling governments to install ones of their choice and destabilizing countries for decades. The 1% billionaires who have the ability to shape geopolitics, economics, education and everything in-between are of course close allies. “In a startling revelation coinciding with the World Economic Forum in Davos, Oxfam has reported that the combined fortunes of the world’s five wealthiest men have soared from $405 billion in 2020 to a staggering $869 billion last year”.

We have either disappearing democracies or staged ones, and performative politics with citizens as vote banks. ‘Trickle-down’ economy has been an utter failure; but ‘gush-up’ has definitely worked. Mass Media functions to manufacture consent through propaganda, misinformation, omissions, and elisions. A tightly woven web of all these aspects are necessary for the maintenance of this hegemony.

The hegemony is morbidly fearful of alternative narratives that demonstrate human solidarity, community, and love. Nonetheless, they continue to exist proving rather inconvenient for the hegemony while becoming harbingers of hope to many. The many movements that define the past decade from Arab Spring to Occupy Wall Street, from Extinction Rebellion to Black Lives Matter, from Farmers Movement in India to Anti-CAA protests, and many many more appear like nodes of light spanning the globe. Seemingly disparate, nonetheless they are indelibly connected through their counter-hegemonic narratives, defiance of corporatization and state powers, and an overarching call for justice, equity, and dignity for all, human and more-than-human. Therefore, it is our responsibility as acts of sacred activism, to amplify such narratives, to draw attention to the movements of solidarity rising across the globe because they hold the seeds of pluriversality.

Hegemony wants us to forget our history of resistance, of community, of solidarity. It deliberately pits people against people, emphasizing differences, exacerbating grievances, weaponizing unhealed wounds, and widening fault lines. It constantly weaves tales of divisiveness to prevent the emergence of a collective ‘we’. Therefore, it is crucial to ask, ”Who benefits from keeping us fragmented, fighting, and fearful?” “Who benefits when billions of dollars are spent on warfare?” “Who benefits from the hegemony?”

It is definitely not the common people struggling to make ends meet. Ordinary people in their thousands are out in the streets, scripting new narratives, recalibrating in real-time what it means to be human, to be a global community, to hope in the face of devastating loss and grief. The propaganda has lost. Hope has risen.

Patrisse Cullors, one of the founders of Black Lives Matter, described the movement’s mission as to “Provide hope and inspiration for collective action to build collective power to achieve collective transformation, rooted in grief and rage but pointed towards vision and dreams.”

Today, in these times of profound transformation, the screams rooted in grief and rage has become the guiding metaphor nudging us towards a different world. Hope, writes the inimitable Rebecca Solnit, is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists.

This is precisely what is unfolding as Gaza continues to resist annihilation; South Africa, in a profound act of poetic justice, stepped up to invoke the genocide convention. against Israel at the International Court of Justice with most of the Global South countries joining in support. And Namibia’s support for South Africa and condemnation of Germany for committing what is considered as 20th century’s first genocide — the killing of the Herero and Nama people speaks volumes about the shifting narratives.

Whatever may be the outcome, this is a profound moment of civilizational import that may not be immediately evident. It heralds the breakdown of the hegemonic, unipolar order, and the emergence of a very different form of world-building. Will this happen overnight? Of course not. But the cracks and fissures are deepening, the old order is tottering, and the masses have risen from their propaganda-induced torpor. And once you see, you cannot unsee what was hitherto deliberately hidden.

In these moments of rupture, people find themselves members of a global community, a massive ‘WE’ throbbing with life and passion, an entity with agency and power. This ‘we’ had the power to abolish slavery, end segregation, win political enfranchisement for women, end British rule in India. This ‘we’ is rising again as the old dreams of a decolonized, humane, and just society reemerge.

This is active hope that refuses to surrender, that continues to sow the seeds of possible futures as yet unrealized but visible to the discerning heart. “It recalls that power comes from the shadows and the margins, that our hope is in the dark around the edges, not the limelight of center stage.” ~Rebecca Solnit

Active hope is an antidote to hegemony. “Its the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand”. This is perhaps what the hegemony fears most. They are afraid of our hope and resilience, of community and solidarity, of love and joy. Because hope implies a refusal to be crushed, a promise of return, a crack in the apparent invincibility of the hegemony.

Colonization, therefore, is heavily dependent on crushing the spirit, eradicating culture, eliminating memories, and erasing all aspects of meaningful and meaning-making existence. Therefore, they go for universities, libraries, ancient archeological structures, artists, writers, poets, and teachers in a futile attempt to erase history and hope. This has repeatedly failed. People have risen time and again literally from the ashes and rubbles of their razed homes to bring hope.

Perpetuating colonialism also requires decontextualization of events and actions. Histories are eradicated, rendered invisible. New indignations are manufactured as curtains are drawn on old atrocities. Resistance to the hegemony in any form is forbidden. They are seen as unforeseen attacks of terrorism by the ‘inherently violent Other’; hegemony’s response is always marked by overwhelming and disproportionate use of force, brutality, and mass killing. There is absolutely no acknowledgement of hegemony’s role in the perpetration of violence. This total decontextualization of and delinking from past atrocities is a tool to justify the mayhem, whether in Iraq or Syria, Palestine or Namibia. The list is endless.

Rudolf Steiner says that any perception or truth that is isolated and removed from its larger context ceases to be true. Hegemony thrives on this erasure of context, on fragmenting history, creating identity wars, and manufacturing new outrages. The beleaguered masses, crushed from the efforts to survive, are kept disjointed, polarized, insecure, and isolated — deeply alienated from others, from community, and from Self.

This decontextualization creates an impression of incidents happening in a vacuum giving the hegemonic powers a free hand to propagate a narrative of their choice, leaving people bewildered and anguished. The Hamas atrocities of 7th October were painful and traumatizing for the sufferers. But removing the context of the previous 75 years of Israel’s occupation and harassment of Palestinians created further distress, dissonance, and fear laying the ground for escalating bitterness and brutality.

Nonetheless, the past has a way of showing up at the most inconvenient moments — at least for the hegemony. Namibia’s memory of the genocide of their peoples is one such where they condemned Germany for supporting Israel, reminding Germany of their genocide against the Herero people because they dared to resist the takeover of their land. Because there is neither acceptance nor atonement, the wounds do not heal, and past patterns continue to play out.

The old toxic patterns are still being repeated but the facade has crumbled. The Western hegemony is struggling to come to terms with its own demise. Rather than opening up (the status quo is incapable of that), they are doubling down doing more of the same — more bombing, more surveillance, more silencing, more more more in a never-ending paranoia of control. They are annihilating Life so that Capital can flow unhindered.

Indoctrination is another tool that the hegemony uses profusely. The hegemonic narrative has infiltrated the education system, where children from a very young age are presented with the hegemony’s version of the world.

For example, we are shocked when we see videos of very young Israeli soldiers barely out of their teens gloating over their massacres. Perhaps probing a little deeper will reveal how generations are indoctrinated into hate right from a very young age, fed falsehoods to deliberately stoke fear and anger against the Other (Arabs in this case), and their painful memories of Holocaust weaponized to keep the fires of vengeance burning. Because it serves the hegemonic powers to be in control of the Middle East through an outpost, Israel.

What happens to the children? Their humanity is sacrificed to the delusional aspirations of the political overlords. Therefore, we have generations of orphans — destitute, displaced, and despairing, on one hand who will grow up with memories of painful injustices. On the other are generations of dehumanized, soulless, indoctrinated youngsters who never got to be who they could be — beautiful, compassionate, loving humans. Instead they have been ruthlessly manipulated by the hegemonic powers to become ruthless killing machines. There are lost generations on both sides.

Price of hegemony is high; its fruits are bitter; its roots, toxic; its shadow, kills.

Ecocide, epistemicide, and genocide are inevitable outcomes of hegemony as Gaza is demonstrating. It is an extermination of life — beyond human. The ancient olive groves of Gaza were home to numerous species of birds including ‘the Eurasian Jay, Green Finch, Hooded Crow, Masked Shrike, Palestine Sunbird, and Sardinian Warbler rely on the biodiversity provided by Palestine’s wild trees, six species of which are often found in native olive groves’. White phosphorus is completely decimating the land making it unfit for all purposes. The mad attempts to flush tunnels with seawater have already destroyed Gaza’s tiny number of depleted aquifers. Ecocide is another colonizer’s tool. In the midst of sixth mass extinction, we have a hegemonic power gone berserk. They are literally ‘killing the environment’.

Wild groves of olive trees have been harvested by inhabitants of the region for thousands of years, dating back to the Chalcolithic period in the Levant (4,300–3,300 BCE), and the razing of such groves has had calamitous environmental consequences. “[The] removal of trees is directly linked to irreversible climate change, soil erosion, and a reduction in crops,” according to a 2023 Yale Review of International Studies report. “The perennial, woody bark acts as a carbon sink … [an] olive tree absorbs 11 kg of CO2 per liter of olive oil produced.” The poisoning of Gaza — from above and underground

According to the study, which is based on only a handful of carbon-intensive activities and is therefore probably a significant underestimate, the climate cost of the first 60 days of Israel’s military response was equivalent to burning at least 150,000 tonnes of coal. ~Emissions from Israel’s war in Gaza have ‘immense’ effect on climate catastrophe

Hegemony doesn’t care about Life in any form. It is solely dedicated to Capital and Power. Therefore, deconstructing and dismantling the hegemony is not merely a decolonial act but also one of social justice, ecological justice, economic justice, and planetary justice.

Dismantling the hegemony requires recalibration of what countries mean, what happiness means, and what love and joy mean. It’s a recalibration of what construes life. Most importantly, it is a recalibration of what Power means. The power that resides in the collective ‘we’ is far greater than hegemony’s oppression and fear induced power. The power of the ‘we’ arises from a profound consciousness of our indelible interconnectedness from our deepest selves. It is a resounding cry of belonging to a greater humanity, to all that is life-affirming and life-giving. This apparent power [of the hegemony] has again and again proved vulnerable to moral fervor, determination, unity, organization, sacrifice, wit, ingenuity, courage, patience…

We see people organically coming together, showing up in droves for a beleaguered country thousands of miles away. Because, in our inmost being, we know. We know that hegemony cannot bomb peace into existence. We know that the hegemony’s power lies in our willingness to buy into their propaganda. The moment we cease to believe, see through the charade, and debunk their fabricated narratives, their power dissolves. And as Maya Angelou said, let’s remember,

Each child belongs to all of us and they will bring us a tomorrow in direct relation to the responsibility we have shown to them. ~Maya Angelou

The Narrative is Shifting

Only a failure of our imaginations can prevent us from stepping into this liminal space. Yes, morbid symptoms abound. Just as Gramsci predicted they would when the old world is dying and the new is struggling to be born. Bombing of Yemen is one such globally visible morbid symptom manifesting itself.

Nonetheless, this liminal space holds possibilities, potentials, and power. The power to shift our civilizational narrative is gathering force. It’s in the voices of people rising across countries and nations, it’s in the rubbles of Gaza and in the solemn dignity of South Africa’s legal team. It’s in the relentless coverage by journalists and dedication of doctors. This power doesn’t seek to conquer or control, doesn’t seek to oppress or dehumanize, doesn’t seek to weaponize and abuse. This power is that quiet indomitable grit that rises from the depth of one’s being and says, Yes. It’s a resounding affirmation of the sanctity of life, of dignity, grace, and beauty.

However, it will be another fallacy of reductionist, binary thinking to say that the emerging narratives will be about Global South vs Global North. That would indeed be misguided and erroneous thinking, a mirror image of the current order. I explore the danger of this binary thinking in my next article.

The new narratives are emerging from existing cracks and crevices, from the borders where cultures, contexts, and countries merge, from the fluid edges where there is no ‘this is it’. They embody border thinking, border sensing, and border existing where there is no certainty but many possibilities, no guarantee but myriad openings. The new narratives eschew domination in all its forms; it is not ensnared by ‘isms’ and avoids the trap of homogenization.

They embrace the power and potentials of diversity without the need to ‘know it all’. Context, culture, and creativity merge with past wisdom, tribal knowledge, and a yearning for justice. Therefore, everything is in flux, fluid, forming, and unforming in an endless dance of dialogic conviviality. No one tries to play the ‘god trick’.

Joanna Macy called this juncture in our civilization, The Great Turning — a shift from the Industrial Growth Society to a Life-Sustaining Civilization. I will take this a step further; we are poised on the brink of a momentous shift from a Hegemonic world order to a Pluriversal one. This may not be immediately apparent as the apparatuses of control are still in the hands of the Eurocentric hegemony. Nonetheless, tectonic shifts are already underway as nation-states reorient themselves in hitherto unprecedented ways.

Having suffered intense apartheid, South Africa has chosen to turn their historical injustices into healing. Is everything perfect? No. And it will never be because ‘perfection’ is another myth imposed on us. Who defines perfect? What is the benchmark? Who are the judges of perfection? Moving beyond all of these tortuous reasonings, South Africa has gone directly to the heart of the matter. The absolute imperative to stop atrocities and honor all lives.

We are witnessing decolonization in action. And in the space that has opened up, millions of people are stepping in with their voices. Defying the hegemony, demonstrating the power of the ‘WE”.

Conclusion

In Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, I focused on unraveling the The Playbook of Hegemony and highlighting some of the tools it uses to create a web of illusion, manufacture consent, and control the dominant narrative — the monomyth of endless profit and ever-rising GDP as the path to redemption. Here, I will wrap up the deconstruction of the hegemonic monomyth with a few more examples to tie up some lose ends before moving on to the reconstruction of the Pluriverse.

Colonization in myriad forms precede the establishment of hegemonic control, and is therefore innate to any form of hegemony. As a corollary, hegemony can neither be deconstructed nor dismantled without decolonizing our imagination and worldviews.

Without the worldview and supporting structures of colonization, it wouldn’t have been possible to impose the Eurocentric geopolitical dominance on a large part of the planet. Colonialists have always offered, with the smug self-assurance arising from a supremacist mindset, the preposterous inducement that colonization, and ultimately the usurpation, of their land by strangers would benefit the people of that country. This absurd conviction rests on three interconnected beliefs: Separation (from Nature, Self, and Others), Supremacy (over Nature and Others), and Patriarchy (the right of a handful of men to call the shots).

A combination of all these aspects of colonization can be seen in the example of exploitative mining in the DRC, where “the expansion of industrial-scale cobalt and copper mines in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) has led to the forced eviction of entire communities and grievous human rights abuses including sexual assault, arson and beatings.” In the name of energy transition, the poorest and the most vulnerable are being rendered homeless and forced into horrendous slave-like labor conditions. This isn’t really all that different from the plantation slavery of the 17th and 18th Centuries — a colonization of land, bodies, resources, and culture.

As always, the most vulnerable who have the least to do with the impending climate crisis pay the price while e.g., in 2019, the super-rich 1% were responsible for more carbon emissions than 66% of humanity (5 billion people). This emphasizes the absolute necessity and the imperative for a decolonial vision of social justice and pluriversality when envisioning regenerative world-building.

A hegemonic, unipolar world driven by a mechanistic monomyth of free market and globalization controlled by a handful is in absolute contradiction to the vision of regeneration and pluriversal futures. In a dystopic manifestation of this worldview, the peripheral parts of the world, away from the gaze of the metropole, continue to be colonized in the name of industrial agriculture, energy transition, carbon credit, open cast mining, deep-sea trawling, and much more.

Today, the global 1% forms the power center — the unipolar entity. Even in self-proclaimed democracies, the voice of the people are rendered powerless as politics, big money, and big tech form a seamless nexus of control. They span countries and nations, but their overarching interests are the same — expropriation, extraction, exploitation, and consolidation of power. Their modus operandi are aligned.

I have briefly summarized the overarching impact of the colonial belief system below:

On Nature. It is manifested in the form of ecocide (mindless destruction of nature for profit), eco-apartheid (the deliberate use of the environment to marginalize racially defined groups, as well as the subsequent consequences of that marginalization, biopiracy (also known as scientific colonialism), and defined as the unauthorized appropriation of knowledge and genetic resources of farming and indigenous communities by individuals or institutions seeking exclusive monopoly control through patents or intellectual property).

On Others. According to Edward Said, “othering” is the invention of difference (an “Us versus Them”) to separate a dominant culture or group from a supposedly inferior “other.” Said further explained that European and American powers use “othering” in order to justify their ongoing colonization. Colonization in its varied forms have thus been inflicted on the Other through centuries — overtly and explicitly in the form of invasions and capture, and then covertly and implicitly through appropriate bodies like the World Bank and the IMF.

On Self. The colonized suffer the ignominy of loss of freedom over their resources, their bodies, their culture, their very way of being, and are often annihilated when deemed too inconvenient for the colonizer. However, the colonizers, in the process of exterminating others annihilates themselves. Their humanity is extinguished, their disconnection from the Other permeates all aspects of their own beings, rendering them fragmented and diminished.

Rabindranath Tagore summarized this eloquently in his seminal work Nationalism, 1917:

…the western nations are following that path of suicide, where they are smothering their humanity under the immense weight of organisations in order to keep themselves in power and hold others in subjection.

But now, where the spirit of western nationalism prevails, the whole people is being taught from boyhood to foster hatreds and ambitions by all kinds of means — by the manufacture of half-truths and untruths in history, by persistent misrepresentation of other races and the culture of unfavourable sentiments towards them, by setting up memorials of events, very often false, which for the sake of humanity should be speedily forgotten, thus continually brewing evil menace towards neighbours and nations other than their own. It is holding up gigantic selfishness as the one universal religion for all nations of the world.

To imbue the minds of the whole people with an abnormal vanity of its own superiority, to teach it to take pride in its moral callousness and ill-begotten wealth, to perpetuate the humiliation of defeated nations by exhibiting trophies won from war, and using these in schools in order to breed in children’s minds contempt for others, is imitating the West where she has a festering sore, whose swelling is a swelling of disease eating into its vitality.

Deconstructing the Hegemony; Reconstructing the Pluriverse — III was originally published in Age of Emergence on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Exploring Hegemony’s playbook through different lenses

To re-member and co-create [a Life-Sustaining Civilization], it is absolutely essential to accept the decolonial vision of a pluriversal planet where the edges and the margins flow into the center. To be precise, there is no center. It is a vast network of living and thriving ebb and flow of intermingling and interconnected narratives and cosmologies shaping life. It is neither a dogma nor an ‘ism’. It fetishises neither the market nor profit.’ ~ The Dangers of a Single Story - Part III

I believe participatory democracy is a myth in a world largely run by a Eurocentric and hegemonic monomyth predicated solely on economic growth and profit. The very foundations of a regenerative world cannot be created unless it’s a pluriversal one. Hegemony and regeneration are inherently contradictory philosophies: the former seeks to exploit, expropriate, expand, and exclude; the latter seeks to include, bring alive, and go beyond anthropocentrism to ecocentrism.

All efforts to co-create and design a pluriversal and regenerative world will be thwarted by hegemonic forces; sometimes overtly and explicitly but often covertly and imperceptibly, disguised in benign garbs. Therefore, in this part, I have tried to shed light on some of the more covert and unquestioned methods used by the hegemonic powers to maintain the dominant narrative.

Before that, let me try to summarize why I am taking the pains to write so much about hegemony and its invisible building blocks. I believe, we cannot deliberately de-design and dismantle hegemony unless we understand and learn to see its manifestations. The crude and brutish colonial presence of the past was easy to see and resist. However, the more subtler forms of coercion and control that permeate every facet of our lives are more difficult to pin down. And for this to happen, it is important to understand the building blocks of the hegemonic narrative.

We tend to see hegemony through different lenses depending on our interests and areas of experience and expertise — for some dismantling the hegemony will sound like degrowth, for others, it is social justice; for some it is decolonization, and for others, ecofeminism. What is critical to understand is that they are all interlinked parts of a vision for a world that is post-hegemonic, post-growth, beyond anthropocentric, and truly life-sustaining and life-affirming. No matter where we stand, we are all in this together. The hegemony serves no one except a handful of billionaires and tech barons.

In this part, I will continue with the dismantling of the The Playbook of Hegemony so that we are better equipped to spot the patterns, connect the dots, and see the linkages between seemingly disparate and discrete areas of our lives. As I have mentioned in the previous part, dismantling the hegemony requires understanding certain criteria. I have added four more here to the earlier six.

1. Eschewing the myth of human supremacy (anthropocentrism) and the hierarchy of humans (its usually called racism, casteism, etc.). In this context, I recommend reading Caste: The Origins of Our Discontents by Isabel Wilkerson
2. Recognizing that the Eurocentric ontology, epistemology, and cosmology are just one among many
3. Acknowledging that its self-proclaimed universality and superiority is a facade, a myth.
4. Renouncing the conviction that the world must be conceived of as a unified totality; stop playing the ‘god trick’ as Donna Haraway eloquently put it.
5. Accepting that many ontologies (ways of being and relating), many worldviews, and many epistemologies (knowledge systems and ways of knowing) exist.
6. Realizing that when diverse cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies are allowed their own place in the civilizational unfolding, only then can we dream of possible futures different from the hegemonic past.
7. Recognizing that the unheard, unseen, unacknowledged voices from the borders and edges carry the seeds of a post-hegemonic world; they are delegitimized and silenced for a reason.
8. Rejecting the projection of humans as isolated individuals in endless competition with each other.
9. Renouncing the endless cycles of consumerism and meaningless production, and the apparatuses put in place to turn us into mindless consumers (the entire industry of advertisement and marketing)
10. Recognizing that the hegemonic forces want us to feel there is no other alternative, and that it is the biggest con game ever.

In part 1, I roughly sketched out the rise of the Eurocentric imperial-colonial power, and its imposition as a hegemonic force through colonization of the greater part of what is known as the ‘Global South.’ I also highlighted how Global South was forced to become the provider of raw materials and cheap/free labor (and I am not even getting into the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade that practically built America) as well as a captive market for Europe’s products. Colonies like India were also forced to grow the cash crops required for wealth accumulation by the Empire.

This meant, for example, demolition of the existing agricultural system and seasonal food crops to grow cash crops like Indigo (required as a dye by the textile manufacturing industry of Great Britain) and Opium at industrial scale. Opium was forced on China with the intention of creating a docile population addicted to this drug who could then be manipulated to do ‘trade’ with the Empire. I highly recommend reading the Ibis trilogy by Amitav Ghosh: Sea of Poppies, River of Smoke, and Flood of Fire. Apart from being eminently readable, they are excellent documents of a period of colonial history that spans the subcontinents of India, China, and the metropole, Europe. The trilogy shows the interlinked chain of events that caused the Opium Wars, the rise of indentured labor, and the demolition of the economy and ecology of country.

Often, a myth of subservience is perpetuated to show that the oppressed did not resist. This is however blatantly false. A play Nil Darpan (The Indigo Mirror) highlighting the plight of farmers and bringing it to the notice of the elites of Kolkata was shut down for abetting Indigo Revolt, a farmers’ uprising to reclaim their rights.

Ryots were forced to plant indigo, a crop which was in demand by the international textile industry but which degraded the land. They had to take out loans and sell the crop to planters at fixed (low) prices, forcing them into a cycle of debt and economic dependence that was often enforced with violence. The play reflected the realities of intimidation, exploitation, violence (including sexual violence), and lack of redress through the judicial system experienced by many in Bengal.” ~The Indigo Revolt

In short, through a combination of siphoning away raw materials, forcing the abjectly poor into indentured labor, and selling back the finished products to the colony, Europe accumulated massive wealth that helped materialize its Industrial Revolution while laying waste to vast parts of the Global South. I highly recommend reading Shashi Tharoor’s Inglorious Empire: What the British did to India to understand the machinations and manifestations of imperial colonization.

This is to highlight a few instances of constant exploitation and intimidation that accompanied the colonization of India, and other countries of the Global South. Another tool in the colonizer’s toolkit of oppression was ‘famine’. Today, this is playing out in Gaza as the hegemonic powers of Israel and its supporters deliberately prevent aid from entering. UN agency says 40 percent of Gaza’s population ‘at risk of famine’.

Israel’s war in Gaza has created a humanitarian catastrophe, with half of the population of about 2.2 million at risk of starvation and 90 percent saying that they regularly go without food for a whole day, the United Nations said in a recent report.

This is not an article on history, but an attempt to show the ingrained violence that accompanies colonization and the many tools in its arsenal. This violence takes many forms that can be primarily classified under:

1. Outright genocide of indigenous peoples as happened e.g., in the Americas
2. Violent Ecocide in the form of destruction of the natural cycles of agriculture and nature that happened almost everywhere, and I have just highlighted above. I recommend reading Vandana Shiva’s work for a more comprehensive understanding, primarily Staying Alive Women, Ecology and Survival in India and Soil Not Oil: Climate Change, Peak Oil and Food Insecurity; Naomi Klein’s book This Changes Everything is a fascinating exploration of capitalism’s impact on global warming. All the books mentioned call out the hegemonic monomyth built on the nexus of big money, big tech, big pharma, politics, and power.
3. Ongoing Epistemicide that is a form of invisible violence that has never stopped. This is a term coined by Boaventura de Sousa Santos, which implies the irreparable loss of knowledge through exclusion, silencing, and deliberate distortion and misrepresentation of all epistemologies — especially those of the Global South — that were in contradiction to the dominant myth.

Fast forward to the present. Let’s admit that it is not easy to maintain hegemony. It requires a lot of hard work, lobbying, cunning, money, and a pathological lust for power. Oh yes, also a sense of entitled supremacy. However, even the most imperial colonialists know that its maintenance requires an ongoing participation of people, and this needs to be achieved through various means. I have touched upon some of the explicit ones so far. The implicit ones are even more insidious because they are invisible, and often camouflaged as beneficial. I have briefly covered a few to highlight the influence and impact they have on society at large.

Philanthropy. this is one of the tools in the hegemony’s arsenal. Look at all the philanthropic work of foundations — Rockefeller, Ford, Bills and Melinda Gates, just to name a few. Let’s take Rockefeller, for example: “Through a network of over 13 foundations, 75 family trusts and other mechanisms of high finance, the Rockefellers maintain a dominant interest in some of the world’s largest oil companies: the Standard Oil companies of New Jersey, Indiana and California and Mobil Oil; the second largest U.S. commercial bank, Chase Manhattan; the second and third largest U.S. life insurance companies, Metropolitan and Equitable; Eastern Air Lines, Consolidated Natural Gas, Union Tank Car, Itek and the world’s largest real estate development, Rockefeller Center.”

When Bill Gates pours money into Africa for feeding the poor in Africa and preventing famine, he’s pushing the failed Green Revolution, he’s pushing chemicals, pushing GMOs, pushing patents,” tells Vandana Shiva to FRANCE 24’s Marc Perelman. ~An Interview with Vandana Shiva

Philanthropist billionaires are not really interested in shifting or transforming the status quo. In fact, they are vehemently against it. Their main aim is to maintain, perpetuate, and imperceptibly block all other alternatives so that their profit and capital accumulation do not reduce. Vandana Shiva calls this ‘philanthro-capitalism’. I also recommend reading Vandana Shiva’s Philanthrocapitalism and the Erosion of Democracy: A Global Citizens Report on the Corporate Control of Technology, Health, and Agriculture

When corporate-endowed foundations first made their appearance in the United States, there was a fierce debate about their provenance, legality, and lack of accountability. People suggested that if companies had so much surplus money, they should raise the wages of their workers. (People made these outrageous suggestions in those days, even in America.) The idea of these foundations, so ordinary now, was in fact a leap of the business imagination. Non-tax-paying legal entities with massive resources and an almost unlimited brief — wholly unaccountable, wholly nontransparent — what better way to parlay economic wealth into political, social, and cultural capital, to turn money into power?

What better way for usurers to use a minuscule percentage of their profits to run the world? How else would Bill Gates, who admittedly knows a thing or two about computers, find himself designing education, health, and agriculture policies, not just for the US government but for governments all over the world?” ~Arundhati Roy, Capitalism: A Ghost Story

Philanthropy by the elites is often a means of maintaining and capturing social and political power. It ensures that the status quo remains unquestioned, and the so called ‘developing nations’ are duly grateful. “The common assumption that philanthropy automatically results in a redistribution of money is wrong. A lot of elite philanthropy is about elite causes. Rather than making the world a better place, it largely reinforces the world as it is. Philanthropy very often favours the rich — and no one holds philanthropists to account for it.” ~How Philanthropy benefits the super-rich

Dig a little deep, and you will see that the philanthropists seek to control the global narrative by any means at their disposal. “Pursuit of profit by Western companies — and their political allies — stalled South Africa’s fight against HIV” reported Ed Vuillamy in How drug giants let millions die of Aids. The article reveals a sleazy nexus of politics, big pharma, and big money across the key imperialist powers.

My intention is to highlight the myriad ways that the Empire retains control; the invisible ways that hegemony stays unchallenged and unfettered, insidiously disguised and disseminated.

Propaganda. This is the most favored tool in their arsenal. Billionaires have been buying up media houses like candies from a local store. Needless to say, billionaires owning media is bad for democracy. This doesn’t require much explanation, and material on this abound on the Internet. Propaganda is all about ‘perception management’ and the manufacturing of consent. This has now been elevated to an art form by state-sponsored and billionaire-supported media houses. Some direct quotes from Noam Chomsky’s, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media shows the crafty and deceptive use of media in maintaining the status quo, the dominant narrative, and overarching invisible hegemony.

The beauty of the system, however, is that such dissent and inconvenient information are kept within bounds and at the margins, so that while their presence shows that the system is not monolithic, they are not large enough to interfere unduly with the domination of the official agenda.

Large corporate advertisers on television will rarely sponsor programs that engage in serious criticisms of corporate activities, such as the problem of environmental degradation, the workings of the military-industrial complex, or corporate support of and benefits from Third World tyrannies.

“Genocide” is an invidious word that officials apply readily to cases of victimization in enemy states, but rarely if ever to similar or worse cases of victimization by the United States itself or allied regimes.

Finally, mass media plays a huge role in maintaining the consumerist culture, which is precisely the gameplan of large corporations and the politicians. Depoliticized, isolated, insecure, and atomized individuals will hardly construe any threat to the current hegemony; whereas, a thinking, well-informed, connected and caring community of people can upend the very status quo.

This is precisely what is happening as the propaganda machines run aground, their willful deception made visible. People across the world are taking to the streets, posing a serious threat to the current hegemonic power balance. The nation-states of the Global North — the upholders of the hegemonic order — are imploding from within.

Education. This has, of course, been long recognized as a machine of production creating well trained minds to serve the various areas of the hegemony and support its expansion and maintenance. Colonization of education began as early as colonial invasion. The hegemonic power realized the importance of controlling young minds from early on: a) to prevent any disruptive thoughts and questions from arising that would inconvenience the invading power; b) to train the upcoming generation to think favorably of the occupying power; c) to create workers who understand the necessities and dynamics of the evolving colonizing entity.

This resulted in generations across the global south untethered from their own epistemologies and ontologies, and indoctrinated into a worldview that was not only alien but also falsely presented as universal, superior, and the only way of to understand reality.

However, imposing this dominant worldview through the education system often required violence as documented by the unmarked graves of Canada’s residential school system for the indigenous children. “The school system was created to isolate Indigenous children from the influence of their own culture and religion in order to assimilate them into the dominant Canadian culture. Over the course of the system’s more than hundred-year existence, around 150,000 children were placed in residential schools nationally.” The schools, scattered across the country, were aimed at eradicating the culture and languages of the country’s Indigenous populations.

Thomas Babington Macaulay became famous in India for Macaulayism, which refers to the policy of introducing the English education system to British colonies. I was born a couple of decades after India gained independence, and grew up in a completely Macaulified education system. This meant I read more of Shakespeare and Wordsworth than Gandhi or Tagore. It has been a painful and uphill battle to familiarize myself with the roots of my own culture and my mother tongue.

Having said that, let me acknowledge that I don’t regret learning about another worldview; I regret that it had to be an imposition of a manner that sought to give the Western worldview primacy while erasing all others, and especially those that appeared contradictory.

The maintenance of hegemony is thus a highly interlinked project, and requires taking over of and productization of education in a way that is invisible to us. Today, most universities across the world are bent on ‘corporatizing’ their syllabus; education is seen through the lens of market value. Liberal arts and humanities feature low down the scale in the world of free market capitalism. Suddenly, STEM education is the in thing. Now, one has to make an economic case for education. The demands of big businesses become trends in education with parents paying eyewatering fees to make sure their children can make a living. The entire education system is deeply implicated in maintaining the hegemony, and the status que ensures it stays that way.

That education was to be an innovative mechanism for the attainment of foreign policy objectives as proposed by Senator Fulbright in the midst of military demobilization from World War II with legislation to “commit the United States government deeply to international education but, at the same time, in a sophisticated way to integrate such educational activity into foreign policy of the nation”. ~Education As A Strategy in Foreign Policy of the United State

To this day, being a Fulbright Scholar carries enormous credibility and prestige. While there is undoubtedly rigor and excellence required to attain the scholarship, I wonder how it also influences and maintains the hold of hegemony over young minds.

Can this become a vehicle of a truly pluriversal world-sensing where myriad and diverse ontologies, epistemologies, and cosmo-visions are celebrated, integrated, and woven together in a matrix of learning that celebrates our indelible interconnectedness?

This is by no stretch of the imagination a comprehensive overview of the tools used by the hegemony to assure its continued propagation. This is more like an overview and glimpses of the some of the most visible. Needless to say, the hegemonster has penetrated all the recesses of our lives — education, healthcare, economics, ecology, politics, and even spirituality. Everything has a price tag attached; ‘thingification’* is the norm; efficiency, the mantra; Otherization, the goal; and oppression and isolation, the price.

However, the tides are visibly turning. The people are on the streets. Voices can no longer be silenced. For all its ills, social media has democratized communication and broken through the barricades of propaganda. The hegemony is unraveling. Its facades have flaked off exposing the sordid and immoral underbelly. Nonetheless, we still have a long way to go. And we have to be ready to midwife the futures that are seeking to be born.

Once again, we are in a liminal space filled with possibilities and potential. But as Antonio Gramsci wrote: The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear’. We have to look out for the morbid symptoms; and actively build capacities to deliberately design for a pluriversal world in our spheres of activity and influence.

Today, I believe, it is important to recognize that colonialism and neocolonialism is no longer geographically dictated; the modus operandi of colonization and the narrative of hegemony have now been appropriated by a handful through the tools of neoliberal capitalism. The rest of us are products, manipulated and colonized in various ways, whether we sense it or not. Therefore, this article is not only about decolonization of the Global South but decolonization of our collective humanity, our imagination, and our planet.

*In a treatise on Discourse on Colonialism, Aime Cesaire writes:

Between colonizer and colonized there is room only for forced labor, intimida­tion, pressure, the police, taxation, theft, rape, compulsory crops, contempt, mis­trust, arrogance, self-complacency, swinishness, brainless elites, degraded masses. No human contact, but relations of domination and submission which turn the colonizing man into a classroom monitor, an army sergeant, a prison guard, a slave driver, and the indigenous man into an instrument of production.

My turn to state an equation: colonization = “thingification.”

Deconstructing the Hegemony; Reconstructing the Pluriverse — II was originally published in Age of Emergence on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Exploring the process of colonial-imperialism

This article may irk a lot of historians because it deals very loosely with certain historical events merely as hooks to show the civilizational trajectory. This will definitely vex proponents of the free market and eternal growth. It might annoy those who are diehard believers of the supremacy of Western civilization because this article resoundingly rejects it.

It is in solidarity with and for those who are seeing and sensing the collapse of the hegemonic narrative, who are staring into the heart of darkness but still refuse to give up hope. Who refuse to un-hear the voices buried under the rubbles, who refuse to un-see the trauma, and above all stubbornly continue to believe in the possibilities of a different world — a world where many worlds fit.

As Ben Okri eloquently wrote:

There is a time for hope and there is a time for realism. But what is needed now is beyond hope and realism. This is a time when we ought to dedicate ourselves to bringing about the greatest shift in human consciousness and in the way we live. We ought to consecrate ourselves to bringing about a conscious evolutionary leap forward. No longer can we be the human beings we have been: wasteful, thoughtless, selfish, destructive. It is now time for us to be the most creative we have ever been, the most far-sighted, the most practical, the most conscious and selfless. The stakes have never been, and will never be, higher (italics are mine). ~ Artists must confront the climate crisis — we must write as if these are the last days

While Okri wrote in the context of the climate crisis, I am taking the liberty to expand his plea to the larger arena of human consciousness and conscience that is currently visibly unraveling with the devastation of Gaza. Today, we stand on the cusp of not only a polycrisis of entangled and cascading outcomes but also a crisis of human conscience.

Bearing witness to this unfathomable destruction ineradicably shifts our consciousness. Sides are taken, justifications given. History is quoted, and misquoted. Through it all, the bombing continues defying all reason. And the shiny facade of our 21st century high-tech civilization crumbles and shatters into a million pieces never to be exactly reconstructed in the same way. The very word ‘civilization’ mocks us; its meaning wrenched out of shape, disfigured and distorted.

A vast void has opened up. Waiting to be filled. And slowly people have stepped into this void — filling it with their voices, thousands of feet echoing in unison, reclaiming their humanity, choosing to stand with life in defiance of all the controlling mechanisms unleashed by the hegemony.

David Whyte wrote:

Just beyond
yourself.

It’s where
you need
to be.

Half a step
into
self-forgetting
and the rest
restored
by what
you’ll meet.

There is a road
always beckoning.

The churning times are a call to go ‘beyond ourselves’. Once again, we stand on the cusp of another of history’s defining moments that asks us:

Who do you choose to be? What do you stand for? What defines your humanity? Who are you?

The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade posed such a question, and led to the Civil War and the abolition of slavery. The Holocaust posed such a question. And the resounding cry of Never Again — a slogan used by the liberated prisoners at Buchenwald concentration camp to express anti-fascist sentiment became the mantra! Wherever there has been oppression and suppression of the human spirit, voices have rung out in their cry for freedom. The human spirit must be free or perish in its pursuance.

There are many other such moments lost in the dust and fog of history or not captured within the dominant narrative. Birsa Munda, an Indian tribal leader from the Jharkhand district rose up against the British and became an important figure in the Indian Independence Movement. “The cause of the Munda revolt was the ‘unfair land grabbing practices by colonial and local authorities that demolished the tribal conventional land system”. Did Birsa think his lone voice wouldn’t make a difference? No. He dared to stand for who he was. Matangini Hazra, a staunch Gandhian and fondly called, ‘old lady Gandhi’ was shot dead by the British Indian police in front of the Police Station, becoming the first “Quit India” movement martyr in Midnapore.

I’m raising these obscure examples — obscure to the international readers — because the fear of showing up holds us back. Gaza has become a microcosm for all that drive today’s necro-capitalism and the Eurocentric hegemony. And we have to rise from our obscure corners to make our choice. Five hundred years of colonial history and hegemonic dynamics are playing out on that tiny strip of razed land; the scorched earth and rubbles of Gaza stand testimony to the civilizational narrative created by the Eurocentric colonial-imperial power. The levers and mechanisms of the hegemony, rather aptly called the ‘hegemonster’ stand revealed.

The conquest of the earth, which mostly means the taking it away from those who have a different complexion or slightly flatter noses than ourselves, is not a pretty thing when you look into it too much. ~Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad

We are at another such defining moment in our civilizational trajectory, which requires not only our courage but our truths — the truths of who we are; what do we stand for; we do we choose to be. People across nations the world over are making their choice. They are showing up in their truths. And this, I believe, is the final blow to the hegemony. When ordinary people rise, the hegemony has already lost. Its propaganda machines have run aground. The disinformation and misinformation sound mindless and hysterical. As the Eurocentric narrative of civilization implodes and disintegrates, new, pluriversal ones are being scripted.

Will everything shift overnight? Absolutely not. Even as the hegemonster falls, it is going to take down everything that stands in its way. I am going to zoom out and roughly sketch how we arrived at this point where a hegemonic monomyth has completely taken over, where the complete annihilation of a people has become acceptable, condoned, and bankrolled by the current unipolar world order.

The story running the show today roughly dates back to the late 15th Century with the discovery of the Americas by the Europeans. The rest is history. In this context, I highly recommend watching the documentary, The Uprising by musician and activist Pravini Baboeram. The colonization of America became a model for later colonizations; the ensuing decades and centuries gradually consolidated the narrative of the “self-proclaimed universality and superiority of Western civilization”.

This received a further boost with the Scientific Revolution followed by the European Enlightenment roughly from the late 17th to the 18th centuries. This was accompanied by a decisive move towards the rise of the individual separate from nature, an emphasis on rationality and logic, and a spirit of skepticism which was a break from the earlier age of Theocracy. The ideas of Enlightenment were further carried into the Industrial Revolution.

While all of these shifts were permeating Europe, its representatives were out colonizing different parts of the Global South. This was achieved through conquest, trade, military domination, and administrative control. This manifested in different ways across the Global South nations, and provided Europe with the necessary funds, raw materials, and free labor for its industrial expansion. “Between 1503 and 1660, 16m kilograms of silver were shipped to Europe, amounting to three times the total European reserves of the metal. By the early 1800s, a total of 100m kg of silver had been drained from the veins of Latin America and pumped into the European economy, providing much of the capital for the industrial revolution. To get a sense for the scale of this wealth, consider this thought experiment: if 100m kg of silver was invested in 1800 at 5% interest — the historical average — it would amount to £110trn ($165trn) today. An unimaginable sum.” ~Enough of aid — let’s talk reparations by Jason Hickel

Just to give another perspective: From the 1st century CE to the start of British colonization in India in the 17th century, India’s GDP varied between 25% and 35% of the world’s total GDP, more than all of Europe combined. It dropped to 2% by the time Britain departed India in 1947. Ironically, as the Industrial Revolution was unfolding in Europe, the first ‘deindustrialization’ happened in India. The British shut down the Indian textile industry to boost its own growth, and forced India to become a supplier of raw materials. Sounds familiar? The peripheries have always been made into suppliers of raw materials, cheap labor, and land for the metropole — the colonizer’s territory. India was manufacturing 25% of the world’s textiles in the 17th century, and that this share plummeted to just 2% at the end of British colonialism in 1947. In this context, I highly recommend listening to Shashi Tharoor’s Looking Back at the British Raj in India

My intention here is to briefly and quickly highlight the rise of a particular narrative emerging from a very specific worldview and culture, and its imposition on the rest of the planet as a colonial-imperial project. There are very obvious gaps in this outline. I don’t profess to be able to fully synthesize 500 years of colonial history across different countries and cultures with unique experiences of the impact. I have roughly sketched it to show the process of colonization and the imposition of a worldview as a hegemonic force.

Fast forward to the period of ‘decolonization’: After the waves of ‘decolonization’* from the early to mid-twentieth century, some of the colonized nations sought to reclaim not only their physical sovereignty but also economic independence by focusing on nation-building. These efforts were brutally suppressed by the Western powers, that pathologically feared the loss of advantages gained during the colonial era. For a comprehensive understanding of how independent nation-states in the Global South were prevented from rising, I highly recommend Jason Hickel’s The Divide.

I am jumping decades here as we enter the rise and apparent success of neoliberal capitalism and the free market. We see neoliberal capitalism (neocolonialism) rising, ably supported by the World Bank, the IMF, Structural Adjustment Programs, and other Trade Agreements favoring the USA and their allies. I recommend reading Globalization and Its Discontents by Joseph E. Stiglitz, the former chief economist of the World Bank, to understand the insidious nature of global macro-economics.

As neoliberal capitalism was forcefully imposed, free trade and free market became the mantra of economists and politicians alike. The underlying narrative became completely invisible. This Eurocentric, hegemonic, and purely economic monomyth perpetuating endless growth, accumulation of capital, and dominance was disguised under the palatable garbs of growth, progress, and development. This was sold as the only path to civilizational progress and modernity to the rest of the planet. And less ‘powerful’ and ‘developing’ nations were coerced into adopting this roadmap. I highly recommend Jason Hickel’s Less is More for an in-depth understanding.

This unhindered rise of capitalism led to the unfettered rise of corporations to the point where corporations have more power than many nation-states. Today, corporations own the media, the politicians, and everything in between. They can sue sovereign nation-states for deemed loss of imaginary profit. I highly recommend reading Silent Coup: How Corporations Overthrew Democracy by Claire Provost and Matt Kennard to understand the treacherous path the hegemony is treading.

As of 2023, “we have transgressed six of the nine planetary boundaries and pressure is increasing on all boundary processes except ozone depletion” as per the Stockholm Resilience Centre, based on analysis in Richardson et al 2023. Through it all, the propaganda machines have been at work obfuscating the truth and confounding the general population. “The founder of modern propaganda, Edward Bernays, described this phenomenon as “the conscious and intelligent manipulation of the habits and opinions” of democratic societies. He called it an ‘invisible government’.”

This ‘invisible government’ completely camouflages the real narrative effectively making it invisible. If we zoom out, it is possible to see the defining patterns of the hegemony — a narrative predicated on expropriation, extraction, and exploitation coupled with genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide has finally led us to the brink of planetary collapse. What is playing out in Gaza is a manifestation of all the dimensions of this narrative in hyper-accelerated mode, concentrated on a tiny strip of land. This is the playbook of colonialism.

This entitled hegemony premised on supremacy is directly linked to the imperative to control and access the natural resources of the land of Gaza. One is to build the Ben Gurion Canal, which if the project takes off, will pass very close to Gaza or almost through it. It is seen as a geopolitical necessity for the USA and its allies to stay on top of the power equation in a rapidly energy-depleting world.

Fossil fuel energy is nonrenewable, at least within the human timeframe. The Suez Canal is controlled by Egypt. Suez Canal Authority (SCA) is an Egyptian state-owned authority which owns, operates and maintains the Suez Canal. It was set up by the Egyptian government to replace the Suez Canal Company in the 1950s which resulted in the Suez Crisis. ~Suez Canal Authority. This doesn’t bode well for the Middle East because the USA has never believed in sharing power; it has always endeavored, willy-nilly, to dismantle those governments that appeared to be a threat to its hegemony — from Latin America to Africa, and elsewhere.

To construct the canal, the Gaza strip needs to be cleared. There is also the possibility of gas reserves in Gaza which can be tapped. However, there is a problem. The pesky Palestinians are refusing to move in spite of the 1948 Nakba, the constant dehumanization and harassment by the Israelis, the threat of settlers, and loss of all dignity and freedom. Their resilience, recalcitrance, and occasional rebellions are a thorn in the flesh and a deterrent to the realization of these plans.

Hamas gave them the perfect opportunity and reason to eliminate and evacuate the people and devastate their lands. Olive groves, a symbol of Palestinian resistance, has long been targeted. Settlers have long targeted Palestinians during this period, aiming to disrupt their agricultural livelihoods. Since 1967, settlers have uprooted more than 800,000 Palestinian-owned olive trees. Schools, libraries, and institutes of education, research, and learning are wantonly destroyed and demolished as the process of elimination of a people’s past, present, and future — their very existence from the annals of our civilization’s trajectory.

Hence, we see the triad of genocide, ecocide, and epistemicide playing out with the complete approval of the USA and their allies. They are desperate to not let the unipolar world order shift in anyway. This requires, what is being euphemistically referred to as ‘voluntary migration’ of Palestinians. The evacuated and empty land of Gaza will be free for expropriation and exploitation. This is the hope and vision driving the hegemonic Western-world leaders today. And of course, needless to say, the fact that Palestinians are brown and Arabs make the genocide just so much easier to condone.

Shifting this hegemonic narrative requires accepting the following criteria:

1. Recognizing that the Eurocentric ontology, epistemology, and cosmology are just one among many
2. Acknowledging that its self-proclaimed universality and superiority is a facade, a myth.
3. Renouncing the conviction that the world must be conceived of as a unified totality; stop playing the ‘god trick’ as Donna Haraway eloquently put it.
4. Accepting that many ontologies (ways of being and relating), many worldviews, and many epistemologies (knowledge systems and ways of knowing) exist.
5. Realizing that when diverse cosmologies, ontologies, and epistemologies are allowed their own place in the civilizational unfolding, only then can we dream of possible futures different from the hegemonic past.
6. Recognizing that the unheard, unseen, unacknowledged voices from the borders and edges carry the seeds of a post-hegemonic world; they are delegitimized and silenced for a reason.

Writers, journalists, and educators pose the greatest threat to the hegemony. ‘Words’ shape narratives; and narratives shape values and beliefs; values and beliefs manifest in choices and decisions. Therefore, the hegemony is terrified of the wordsmiths, the narrative-builders, the movers and shapers of minds and hearts. No wonder then that Israel has targeted poets, writers, and journalists relentlessly. The hegemony doesn’t want the scripting of alternate narratives. The only alternatives acceptable are those that exist within the hegemonic paradigms and are offered by the hegemony.

In his contribution to the 2022 collection Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire, titled “Gaza Asks: When Shall this Pass?”, Refaat Alareer wrote: “It shall pass, I keep hoping. It shall pass, I keep saying. Sometimes I mean it. Sometimes I don’t. And as Gaza keeps gasping for life, we struggle for it to pass, we have no choice but to fight back and to tell her stories. For Palestine.”

This brings me to my favorite theme of pluriversality — a world where many worlds exist.

The word pluriverse was first used by the Zapatistas in their “own decolonial political vision of a world in which many worlds would coexist that announced the pluriverse”. Pluriverse is an embodiment of an essentially entangled and enmeshed world — a world where not only many worlds of asymmetrical powers and positionalities coexist but also where our indelible interconnectedness to all of life is a felt sense. In that sense, to describe and inhabit a pluriverse requires not so much a worldview but world-sense. It requires an understanding of our entangled lives on this sentient planet, and how our wellbeing is deeply enmeshed with all of life.

I will unpack the foundational premises for a Pluriverse in the next part. Maybe, we can reconstruct our civilization along more pluriversal lines to move towards a truly regenerative world.

Deconstructing the Hegemony; Reconstructing the Pluriverse — I was originally published in Age of Emergence on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.