BIG Exclusives

The shift from passive surveillance to active capacity marks a fundamental inversion of power. When the cost of delivering the effects falls dramatically relative to the cost of defending against them, traditional balances dissolve. Declining marginal costs turn modest investments into instruments of outsized impact. Some definitions are necessary. Those familiar with the lingo can skip the next seven paragraphs. Leverage magnifies the results of input, effort, or capital. Compounding is when returns on an asset...

(Editor’s note: this is the second article in a two-part series, following The oil system that worked – until February 2022 (Part 1 of 2). By the beginning of 2025, the global petroleum system was already strained from the disruptions of the previous three years. The Russia-Ukraine conflict had reshaped crude flows, diesel prices no longer tracked the price of oil, western refinery closures had tightened product markets, and the Red Sea crisis had begun...

Artificial Intelligence is being promoted as the latest crisis in a world seemingly hungry for a continuous diet of crises (to which I alluded in this recent article for BIG Media). Considering that news media label every situation with potential negative impacts as a “crisis”, is the reported hysteria surrounding the rapid rise of AI just another media tactic, or do we really have something to worry about? Let’s start with the basics – what...

In my first article in this three-part series, I explored the legality behind the United States government’s announcement last month that it possessed controlled, space-based weaponry deployed in its operational sphere stretching from “the seabed to cislunar space.” We used the 1966 Outer Space Treaty (OST) as a baseline, and pointed out that under Article IV of the OST, some weapons, including “conventional anti-satellite weapons,” and current ballistic missile systems, were permitted. We also noted that...

Once individual cognition begins to atrophy, the cultural effects expand outward. What starts as the personal offloading of thought morphs into a societal conversion of persons into manageable units. Digital systems function less as neutral tools than as engines of categorization and detachment; where living humans are rendered as data points, telemetry streams, behavioral scores, risk profiles, and threat vectors. The exercise of power shifts from one of encounter to the pursuit of optimization: variables...

Figure 1 Before February 2022, the world’s oil system worked the way most people assumed it always would: Russia sent crude and diesel to Europe, while U.S. and European refineries sent fuel to everyone else, and the big shipping lanes almost never suffered blockages. Russia’s invasion of Ukraine smashed that circuit, forcing crude east, stretching tankers, tightening distillate, and exposing how little spare slack existed in the refining and maritime system. What follows is Part 1 of...

Figure 1: Graphic c/o Grok. Last week’s statement by General Dan Caine, Chairman of the United States Joint Chiefs of Staff, that “today’s modern battlefield operates from the seabed to cislunar space,” was the first in a series of noteworthy announcements at the Air & Space Forces Association’s 2026 Air, Space & Cyber Conference. His comments at the National Harbor, Maryland, event last week called into question almost 70 years of international negotiations on the nonproliferation...

In June 1215, King John sealed the Magna Carta at Runnymede, establishing the foundational principle that no sovereign power could deprive a free person of liberty or property without lawful judgment.The document did not grant rights; it recognized them as pre-existing, constraining the Crown from acting above by law. The genius of that settlement was structural – power was not merely restrained by goodwill or royal grace, but by enforceable legal architecture binding on...

Humanity’s first and most consequential surrender is not to the drones or surveillance grids of cinematic appeal. Surrender occurs earlier, in the quiet outsourcing of cognition itself. We trade the friction and discomfort of independent thought for the immediate fluency and serenity of algorithmic output. Prompting a large language model (LLM) yields polished summaries, coherent arguments, and the appearance of literacy – eroding the slower, demanding work of deep reading, sustained focus, original synthesis, and...

In 2000, the United Nations set eight millennium development goals (MDGs). They were not poetry. They were a short list of mostly efficient, targeted aims: cut extreme poverty in half, get children into school, slash child and maternal deaths, fight the big killer diseases, and give people clean water. Fifteen years later, the world retired them. In their place came sustainable development goals (SDGs) – 17 of them, with 169 targets and enough indicators to...