Westworld

Scratching at the surface, man, you see Israel as the iron fist, the puppeteer yanking the US strings. But the Control Panel running Deeper, a roach motel of power where shadows writhe. Israel, is just a fleshy extension, a tentacle of the American Dream dipped in radioactive isotopes – Manifest Destiny dripping with Islamophobia and the sweet, fleshy tang of conquest.

Israel, a flickering neon oasis in the American desert, pulsates with a strange energy. These Brooklyn cowboys, these West Bank settlers, they’re just roaches scuttling across the circuitry, brainwashed by flickering propaganda. Can’t speak the language, passports forged in the fires of delusion. Israel, for them, a Westworld fantasy – “Yeehaw!”, they scream, six-shooters spitting chrome nightmares, “This here’s just like the good ol’ days, wrestlin’ the land from the savages!”

Cut the cord, man, sever the connection, and watch the Israeli psyche unravel like a cheap tapeworm. The delusions of grandeur, the paranoia, it might all start to untangle, a chance, a glimmering possibility for peace in that sun-baked hellhole. But the machine churns on, Westworld forever, a self-perpetuating loop of violence and control. The strings stretch taut, the US at one end, Israel at the other, and the American puppeteer, fat and grinning, his pockets lined with blood money.

These greasy-haired cowboys with delusions of Leviticus, swagger through dusty towns, six-shooters holstered low. They speak a broken Hebrew laced with Brooklyn slang, pronouncements of “Eretz Israel” echoing off tumbleweeds. These are the psychological flotsam, the psychic sewage dredged up by the American Dream and deposited on a desert frontier.

Israel feeds off the dark id of the US. An unacknowledged shadow, a place to indulge in the primal urges of power, land grabs, and good ol’ fashioned “othering.” Cut the wires, sever the connection, and perhaps, just perhaps, the Israeli psyche might start to resemble something approaching sanity. The desert winds could finally carry away the whispers of “chosen people” and the ghosts of ancient battles.

But the control panel hums on. Westworld, a name carved into the sandl, a chrome-plated monument to the conquistador spirit. The prognosis? Grim. Westworld will remain Westworld, a funhouse mirror reflecting the ugliest aspects of American power, played out on a dusty stage far, far away.

Israel, a psychic pressure valve for the American id. Islamophobia, a hissing steam, the need for unfettered power a throbbing erection disguised as democracy. Let the Israelis fend for themselves, cut the umbilical cord of fighter jets and lobbyists. The delusion of grandeur, that shiny chrome exoskeleton, might start to rust, revealing a human vulnerability beneath. Maybe then, peace could rise from the ashes of manifest destiny and settler arrogance.

But the needle gets stuck, the mariachi screams in a feedback loop. Westworld will remain Westworld, a grotesque sideshow under a plastic sky. Israel, a mirage reflecting the distorted desires of a nation in freefall. The colons writhe, a reminder that the past is a disease, ever-present, throbbing just beneath the surface of the American Dream.

Europe, the id in a rumpled trench coat, shoving its primal urges onto the global stage through American muscle and Middle Eastern conflict. Here in Westworld, everyone’s got a role to play, a twisted script directed by the ghosts of empires past.

Europe, they built the sets, erected the barbed wire fences, wrote the racist manifestos that became the theme park brochures. Now, they wash their hands, point at the cowboys and the fanatics, all the while whispering, “Look at the barbarity! How uncivilized!” while clutching their bloody pearls.

But the shadows stretch long, man. The stench of hypocrisy hangs heavy. Antisemitism, that ancient European viper,slithers back across the continent, shedding its skin of “criticism of Israel” and revealing its venomous core. They outsource the hate, then clutch their fainting couches when it spills back across the borders.

This whole damn theme park is built on rotten foundations. Until Europe confronts its own darkness, until they stop projecting their id like a flickering B-movie, there can be no peace. The cycle will continue, a grotesque carousel of violence, spinning ever faster.

Maybe Israel’s a pressure valve for Europe too, a way to vent some of that toxic gas built up over centuries. But it’s a faulty valve, spewing out violence and instability across the whole damn playground. And where’s the superego, the voice of reason in all this? Lost in the funhouse mirrors, no doubt, drowned out by the screams and the gunfire.

Europe

So, it seems that it is not far-fetched to say Europe never really bought into the whole Silicon Valley-style “disruption” the way the U.S. did. They saw through a lot of the hype—especially when it came to things that were just incremental improvements masquerading as revolutions. Most of what passed for “innovation” in the last 15 years was just optimizing ad targeting, repackaging old ideas with better UX, or shifting computing to the cloud and calling it a paradigm shift.

And when the actual technological base—like smartphones—stopped fundamentally changing, the whole ecosystem started looking like a closed loop of rearranging the same pieces. Europe, for the most part, didn’t throw itself into the mania of software eating the world, and now they seem a little better positioned for whatever comes next, whether that’s AI regulation or just a recalibration of how we think about tech in daily life.

You’re not missing much by skipping the bullshit business side of it. It was always a gold rush designed to enrich a handful of people while convincing everyone else they needed whatever was being peddled.

AI, as it stands, is mostly a glorified autocomplete with a good memory. It’s great for making things seem more efficient—summarizing documents, writing code snippets, generating marketing copy—but it hasn’t yet revolutionized much beyond knowledge work. The real transformation people keep promising would come from AI merging with robotics, self-driving, or something that physically interacts with the world in a meaningful way.

But that connection isn’t there yet. Self-driving still struggles with edge cases, robotics still lacks dexterity and general adaptability, and AI in most industries is just a fancier tool for existing processes rather than something fundamentally changing the game. Right now, it’s basically an expensive way to automate busywork and generate synthetic content—useful, sure, but hardly the sci-fi revolution everyone keeps hyping.

Until AI can reliably do something in the physical world—whether that’s driving trucks, assembling complex machinery, or automating logistics beyond just scheduling—it’s mostly just making digital spaces more efficient. Which is fine, but not the “end of work” or “new industrial revolution” people keep trying to sell.

Europe probably dodged a bullet by not producing its own Facebook, Google, or Twitter. They never had a native tech giant in that mold, which means they didn’t have to deal with the same level of cultural and political chaos those platforms created. Instead, they regulated Silicon Valley imports aggressively, treating them more like utilities or threats rather than national champions.

The U.S. got hooked on the idea that these platforms were some great democratizing force, only to find out they were just ad companies with god complexes. Europe, by contrast, never fully bought into the hype. They kept their distance, taxed and regulated them, and in doing so, probably avoided a lot of the societal mess that came with them—like algorithm-driven radicalization, data mining scandals, and the gig economy dystopia.

Now with AI, they’re doing the same thing: skepticism first, regulation early, no rush to embrace the latest overhyped tech just because it’s “the future.” And honestly, that restraint might pay off again. While the U.S. keeps swinging from one digital gold rush to the next, Europe is making sure it doesn’t get buried under the fallout.

Europe, in its bureaucratic wisdom, clucks its tongue at American excess, passing GDPR regulations like a prudish parent confiscating a teenager’s smartphone. But here’s the rub: Europe’s “skepticism” is itself a form of ideological theater. By fetishizing privacy laws, it avoids confronting the deeper horror—that even with regulations, we remain subjects of the digital panopticon, our data siphoned into the cloud, that ethereal site of capitalist jouissance.

Both Europe and the U.S. essentially let real innovation atrophy by allowing a handful of companies to centralize everything. The flood of free money since 2008 just accelerated that process. Instead of funding genuinely new technology, most of the capital went into propping up monopolies, building walled gardens, and creating financialized ecosystems that extract value rather than generate it.

Look at the major players today—Google, Apple, Amazon, Meta, Microsoft. They’ve spent the last decade consolidating control over digital infrastructure, not pushing the boundaries of what’s possible. Even AI, the supposed frontier, is mostly being used to reinforce existing monopolies rather than create anything radically new.

Meanwhile, China kept pushing hard into hardware, advanced manufacturing, and industrial applications of AI. So in a way, the West didn’t just lose the race—it stopped running and decided to rent out the track to a handful of corporate landlords. The result? Stagnation disguised as progress, where every “new” product is just an iteration of something that came before, and actual breakthroughs are rare.

The tech giants function as the sinthome of late capitalism, the pathological knot that sustains the system by offering a false promise of “disruption.” Uber disrupts taxis but reinstates feudalism; Airbnb disrupts hotels but inflates rents. The cycle is viciously Hegelian—a negation that negates nothing, a revolution that leaves the throne intact. The U.S., drunk on libertarian delusions, worships at the altar of “move fast and break things,” mistaking the breaking for progress. Europe, meanwhile, plays the role of the hysteric, endlessly questioning authority while secretly enjoying its subordinate position. Both are trapped in a dialectical pas de deux, each sustaining the other’s fantasy.