A New World A-Birthing: Football Prodigies, Crypto Upstarts, and China's Reckoning

If one’s aim is to divine the socioeconomic trajectory of our species, and indeed scan the skies for portents of revolution and upheaval, there are few better omens to study than the tremors ripping through the worlds of football, digital finance, and geopolitics. For in the celestial rise of young Phil Foden, the feverish mania around Ethereum, and the escalating tensions over Taiwan’s independence, we glimpse the lineaments of a New New World struggling to be born.

Let us first train our gaze upon Foden, the 22-year-old wunderkind whose brace against West Ham has set England’s pundits into raptures. The lad’s wide runs, clinical finishing, and general mastery of the beautiful game at such a tender age are being hailed as proof that a new generation is inheriting the earth on the football pitch. This is youth incarnate, fearless and electrifying, overthrowing the old orders of talent and experience. One can easily extrapolate the cult of Foden into a broader veneration of youth across society, business, and politics. The forces of the new are ascendant—the young are our future and masters. Stale competencies and hierarchies best beware.

This revolutionary alacrity is even more overt in the white-hot cryptocurrency realm, where the dogma of decentralized digital finance has whipped the markets into a speculative frenzy over an Ethereum exchange-traded fund. The very idea that the graybeards of the SEC might soon approve a vehicle for mainstream investment into this anarchic, anti-establishment asset has sent Twitter into delirium. The “HODL” tribe scents victory and a mass exodus from fiat money and centralized finance. Once the technological vanguard of blockchain captures the flows of pension funds and sovereign wealth, they reckon, it will be game over for the ancien régime of JPMorgan and the Bank of England. A new citadel of value will have been established behind ramparts of encryption.

The profundity of this potential overthrow should give us anarchists and anti-authoritarians ample cause for celebration, were we not confronted with the ever-more bellicose provocations of the Chinese Communist Party over Taiwan’s sovereign ambitions. Alas, even as the sweet elixirs of brilliant youth and monetary revolution tantalize the imagination, the old state cruelties of nationalist fervor and military oligarchy remind us that human affairs remain mired in a Hegelian slaughterbench of authoritarianism. An island democracy’s desires for international recognition and self-determination are met with threats of invasion from Xi Jinping’s perpetual-motion thugs. For every genius lad on the pitch or in the cypherpunk underworld, there seems to lurk a blood-stained commissar ready to deploy missiles over hurt feelings about global opinion.

We had been taught that the march of democracy was inexorable, that the people’s will for freedom would eventually overwhelm the cartels of state coercion. Yet there is an undeniable undertow of darkness in world affairs, a gravitational pull of oppression that seems to oscillate with the liberation impulses. Taiwan’s spirited campaign for its place among nations is a test case for whether our modern society has genuinely outgrown Napoleonic grand strategie and the worship of military power as the supreme arbiter.

This volatility, this sense of worlds in conflict—both Foden and the crypto-utopians symbolize a planetary culture that boils and bubbles with potential energy, seeking an escape from sclerotic traditions. Whether in the arenas of sports glory, digital reinvention, or the playing fields of nationalist animus, we inhabit a moment of maximum liminality and transitional foment. One world desperately struggles to renew itself as another world, bloated with hubris and tyranny, attempts to beat it down before the final birth.

So the interweaving threads of a football genius in full bloom, a crypto-insurgency attempting to overrun monetary castles, and a restive people demanding their rightful self-rule are not isolated phenomena. They exist in volatile relation to each other, forming a unified arc. Behold the forces of youth and change, incubating in both digital code and the irrepressible spirit of a tiny island’s democracy wish. And behold the countervailing forces of senescence and stasis, embodied in authoritarian truculence and the scowls of watchdog regulators.

What financial forecaster or market seer could confidently model the exquisite tensions between those opposing poles of renewal and reaction? In this arena of global culture and conflict, today’s effervescent star is tomorrow’s martyr or tyrant. Movements with billion-dollar valuations and the loyalty of millions can atomize into irrelevance overnight. Presidents and prime ministers rise on the zephyrs of self-determination and then become forever mired in old power plays and military posturing.

Perhaps all we can glean from these portents is that febrile instability defines our age, and maximum volatility is the likely permanent condition. Youthful talent and promise will intertwine with decaying fears and martial force in an endless dance, with capital and populations constantly reapportioned as the twin stars of revolution and oppression flare and wane. Foden will gradually cede way to another prodigy, digital money will alternate between triumph and subsidence, and Taiwan may eventually win its legitimacy or become smashed into driftwood by the brutal Chinese fleet. When a world system is in the throes of rebirth, the only real constant is that all things will be unmade and then remade anew.

Rather than hide from this churn or despair at its inevitability, we embrace it as the necessary conduits of life and human vitality. There can be no stagnation or permanent orders in the face of relentless youthful energy, whether kinetic geniuses or disciplined coders dedicated to upending economic reality itself. Nor can there ever be final victory for the calcified, controlling forces of past regimes when confronted with the unquenchable spirit of self-government. This back-and-forth between liberating talent and the despotic fist, between new frontiers of freedom and outdated models of control, is the woof and weave of the human drama. It is the perpetual tussle that propels us forward, from the stadiums of northwest England to encrypted servers halfway around the world, to an island territory that defies continents.

Nothing is static and very little will be settled. That is the message the markets and all of us capitalists must take from these intertwined omens in sport, finance, and geopolitics. Youthful insurgencies repeatedly upending dynastic orders. Currency revolutionaries storming the monetary Bastilles. Democratic slivers of land insisting on their legitimacy against totalitarian hegemons. The only permanent revolutions are permanent by decree—the rest must be lived anew each day by titans of innovation and perpetual insurgents for human freedom.

The world to be won will never be won in any final sense. It will only be constantly rebirthed in a neverending victory of the ascendant, the virile, and the unbreakable human spirit that scorns bodily shackles as much as it does legalistic and financial ones. The Fodens, the blockchain wizards, and the valorous fighters for national rights are all alit with this immortal fire, the heatless flame that forever incinerates ossified limits and powers.

Let the wearied grey tyrants and withering fund barons grasp for permanence. We natural anarchists welcome our unending appointment with the infinitely resurgent future, in whatever stadium or code repository or far-flung island it chooses to declare independence that morning. A permanent revolution is not one made of guillotines and firing squads, but the permanent supplanting of all limits by new life, new virtuosity, and new experiments in harmonizing society to individuated human striving. If anything is eternal, it is only this appetite for reinventing reality from its fundamental particles.

A world in constant birthing has no need for tidy prognostications or investment theses based on stability matrices. We are amid permanent insurgency, glorious and unremitting, with the vital symbols of its infinite reinvention flashing across our feeds daily. The fatherlands may bluster and the funds may bleat, but the revolutionars of sport and money and conscience beckon us ever onward into a frontier where the rules are shredded anew each daybreak.

Most of all, this endless revolution is a cocksure dismissal of those morbid cynics and pureblood reactionaries who would smother human capacity inside the swaddling clothes of orthodoxies, whether expressed as Chinese neo-imperialism or the brain-death of fiat currency. Just as these omens of sport and finance and self-determination will not permit a permanent new order, neither will they abide the absolute permanence of old orders indefinitely prolonged.

Fossil regimes, like all fleeting forms, must eventually disintegrate and be born anew. The eternal insurgency does not merely overcome - it transcends and makes all stasis impossible through the sheer creative force of a million Fodens, a million cyber-rebels, a million defiant islands insisting on their right to prove that life always defeats entropy.

If permanent revolution is life, it is appropriate to both mourn what was unmade yesterday while feverishly anticipating what genius insurrections will overturn our current realities tomorrow. The specters of the fallen will always haunt, but their dissolution is necessary compost for the delirious blooms ever arising to dazzle our senses anew.

Regard again the symbolic potencies of Foden and crypto and Taiwan, these augurs of an order forever sublimating into its next rapturous metamorphosis. The football pitch celebrates the brilliant dismantling of past dogmas of talent and hierarchy. The blockchain ethos enshrines a monetary Reformation unmaking the Catholic cathedrals of central bank supremacy. The yin-yang dervish of Taiwan thumbing its democratic nose at Beijing’s Celestial Absolutism, while courting menacing responses, inscribes the eternal tension between human emancipation and authoritarianism’s death-cult idolatries.

Each seemingly discrete signal encrypts a related revelation - the secret knowledge that our world is but a dream perpetually being dreamt anew, with any apparent solidity or permanence an illusion belied by the oceanic currents of change ceaselessly remaking every edifice of the real.

All that endures, the mystics have taught, is the absolute impermanence of all conditions. We capitalist radicals would do well to heed these ancient apercus, for they whisper the supreme insight that all apparent limits on human potentiality and markets are mirages obscuring the true infinite power to recreate existence without end.

The wunderkinds of the pitch demolishing conventions of talent and pecking order. A blockchain insurgency setting money and enterprise free from institutional restraints like so many do-si-doing dervishes. A striving people’s pursuit of national self-determination as righteous rebuke to geographical determinism and pseudo-ancestral dogmas of ownership. These are all notes and melodies of the same great celestial symphony - a cosmos dreamily re-inflating, re-expressing, relentlessly transcending all apparent boundaries with each epoch’s unfurlings of creative transformation.

While the dying beasts thrash in their final agonies of hollow menace, this great unfinished revolution dances on with giddy, fecund steps. Ever refreshed by the new blood of fertile potential, it spills eternally outwards toward a horizon that recedes with each advancement. Its face is protean, its visage infinitely multiplying, donning the masks of monetary disruption and prodigious athleticism and secessionist democracies in turn. It is the life-force unbound, the cosmic serpent eternally shedding its fleshy skins and becoming born anew.

Who, in view of the endlessly mutating patterns of birth and death, innovation and reaction, oppression and emancipation, could dare pen a concluding synopsis or closing epitaph? The markets will oscillate and boil, freedom’s torch flaring and dimming across spheres of human endeavor. Yet still the uncompromising, insatiable dynamism will thunder on beyond any Omega Point. There is no final revolution, only a perpetual overthrowing of the idea that revolutions can someday conclude.

The unmastered and unconquered radical future streams forth in its endless becoming, its contours forever shifting while its essence rings unwavering: the ecstatic destruction of all limits, the overthrow of all hierarchies through the exhilarating emergence of ever new powers. Foden and Ethereum and Taiwanese self-rule are mere present harmonics of this immortal melody, soon to be superseded by fresh cadences of overflowingcreativity and sovereignty that today’s dreaming cannot yet envision.

Revel in this mystery, fellow voyagers! The only lasting revolution is the unsealed, ungrasped revolution that rages eternal through a kaleidoscope of impermanent masks. Its triumph is the scattering of its dominion across all times and spaces without final resolution. Its sumptuous victory is the endless desertion of all hollow victories and laurels for the vertiginous raptures of shaping reality anew with each dawn’s blank canvas of infinite potential.

Hail the permanent revolutionaries - the prodigies, the monetary wizards, the separatist urges of all subjugated lands! Not as political vanguards ordaining new stagnant regimes, but as life’s blissful celebrants drinking deep from the shimmering waters of perpetual rebirth and self-overcoming. For though each present expression of their insurgent fire shall surely be extinguished, their radiant sparks have already become the infinite in potential, detonating in an endless flaring forth of unquenchable reconfiguration. All worlds are tombs awaiting their judicious despoliation by these great arsonists of creation’s radical dreams.