👑 When the Fields Fought Back: Part VII — The Restoration Bloc
The kings of certainty tried to dam the digital flood, and drowned in their own reflection
2020 → present
🏛️ The Return of the Palace
As we have seen, every era breeds its reactionaries.
After the noise of the network came the promise of strong men with simple answers.
They spoke the old language of unity and manifest destiny, but ruled through dashboards, troll farms, and talk shows.
They were not emperors; they were influencers in uniforms.
From Moscow to Mar-a-Lago, Budapest to Beijing, each sold the same story in a different way:
The world has become too complex. Trust me to make it simple again.
🕹️ The Empire That Couldn’t Log Out
Putin called it “history’s correction.”
His invasion of Ukraine was Restoration by tank tread and genocide, a crusade for borders, myths, and obedience.
But his army carried smartphones, not faith.
Every massacre had metadata; every lie met a meme.
The empire’s muscle moved, but its narrative broke on contact with the network.
He wanted to roll back 1991, but we passed the point of no return,
and he got hi-def footage of his failure instead.
🧮 Xi and the Dream of Perfect Order
Where Moscow relied on myth, Beijing trusted math to restore the Han Dynasty.
Cameras, credit scores, content filters, the digital Mandate of Mao.
The promise: prosperity without freedom.
The risk: prosperity depends on feedback, not fear.
Lockdowns, supply shocks, youth unemployment, and tariffs,
each data point another crack.
The tighter the hierarchy, the slower it learns.
🧢 The Populist Twins
Across the West, Trump and Farage sold nostalgia like breakfast cereal.
“Make America Great Again.”
“Take Back Control.”
Simple slogans for complex grief.
Both men turned grievance into spectacle; both lived on television even after television had died.
They didn’t invent discontent; they just monetised it.
But their restoration will fail, for the same reason the English Bibles could not be stopped:
once people taste freedom, they don’t forget it.
Brexit didn’t return Britain to empire; it made it smaller and louder.
Trump didn’t restore greatness; he franchised chaos and sold the merch.
🇭🇺 Orbán’s Laboratory
Hungary became the showroom for 21st-century authoritarianism: elections kept, courts captured, media tamed, enemies invented.
He called it “illiberal democracy,” but it was a return to feudalism in AI clothes.
the village scaled up, hierarchies set in digital stone.
Now his model shrinks at home, despised abroad.
🔮 The Gospel According to Thiel
Peter Thiel fits perfectly into this cast: a heretic who now warns that Satan will destroy his order.
He financed the electronic frontier, then discovered that his new realms had no gates.
His “Antichrist” sermons read like a confession: he built the bazaar, lost control, and calls the chaos Armageddon.
He wants growth without democracy, freedom for those without empathy,
a restoration dream in machine code.
🌊 The Irony of the Bloc
Every Restoration leader believes he’s defending stability.
In truth, they are the creators of chaos.
Each dam they build diverts the flow; each crackdown multiplies their demise.
They can jail journalists, but not jokes; ban protests, but not signal proxies;
control the narrative, but not the memes that mock it.
They are Pharaohs building pyramids while the Romans ride into town.
And history has a dark sense of humour.
🇺🇦 The Counter-Attack
Ukraine shattered the Restoration thesis.
A plural, decentralised, improvisational democracy refused to die.
Where autocracies relied on hierarchy, Ukraine relied on bandwidth.
Its citizens crowdfunded reconnaissance, open-sourced logistics, and turned memes into morale.
NAFO, the cartoon legion born from and of the internet’s chaos, mocked propaganda faster than censors could delete it, and bought naval drones in their spare time.
Universe in your pocket, the cosmos in the kitchen, gave way to Logistics in the living room.
In the Restoration age of “strong men,”
Ukraine again proved that resilience can be diverse, and that unity doesn’t require compliance.
🌾 When the Fields Fought Back
The Restoration Bloc tried to save the world from difference and ended up multiplying it.
Their message, “Trust me, I’ll stop the chaos”, created the very chaos they feared.
Then came the harvest.
In Ukraine, the fields gave their reply.
Russian soldiers whispered that the ground was alive, that drones rose from crops and missiles flew out of the trees.
They came to fight the future but fertilised it instead.
The land they sought to possess became a network;
each tractor a relay, each village a sensor, drones became scythes,
every patch of soil a fortress.
Combines harvested tanks, and drones harvested men.
For ten thousand years the fields fed kings and empires.
This time they refused.
Next up 👉 Part VIII — The Restoration Paradox:
the epilogue that closes the loop. From bread to broadband, how every bid to freeze change creates the next revolution, and why our only way forward is to stop mistaking control for order.
yes. I am a fan of bob Dylan earlier stuff
Something about sowing the wind comes to mind