War will increase. Collective action is needed to avoid it.

When does tension and violence become a "world war"? Jared Yates Sexton writes a few days ago (bolded emphases mine):

"We could debate for hours where and when the Cold War began and whether it, with its assortment of coups, proxy battles, and background struggles, should officially be known as World War III. Same with the so-called War On Terror, which was the final push for global capitalism in the wake of the Cold War. Now, parsing headlines and new geopolitical developments, I continue to receive questions as to whether we are already in World War III. You could make the argument this is World War III or IV or V. For the sake of clarity, here, I will refer to the New World War, which I believe we are watching struggle to be born.

Though descendants of the V-2 would be used in this possible war, what we are watching manifest now would take the theoretical applications of that program and bring them into a new age that the Nazis and the Fascists and the Allies might never have imagined. And, because this is so, I believe it is imperative that the New World War never happen."

— Jared Yates Sexton, The War We Must Never Let Happen: The New World War and the Fall of American Empire: We’re sitting on a tinderbox unlike any before and we have choices, Dispatches From a Collapsing State, October 15, 2026

The thing is: "Capitalism has used us for everything we were worth. The parasite sucks the last of the blood and goes looking for the next host. And very rarely does it make the jump without war."

So: "The infrastructure of global capitalism will likely be one of the main battlefields of the New World War. We have seen it with the weaknesses and vulnerabilities of the global trade network as the Strait of Hormuz has been blocked, but it will also manifest in places we cannot and could not possibly hope to see."

"Elon Musk has repeatedly turned off his Starlink systems to benefit Russia in its crimes against Ukraine, most recently this Wednesday when Musk unilaterally, we believe, cut service. These weapons of war and supporting services are under the monopolistic control of oligarchical individuals, not governments, and the oligarchs have contracts and business relations with every major nation state and prefer authoritarian states for business. The New World War would be fought with their weapons, with their systems, and they have no loyalties beyond who can give them the most money, the most power, and the most control."

(On the oligarchs' lack of loyalty to any country: Gil Durán has a new book on the Nerd Reich, which I wrote about.)

Start today, says Sexton:

"...collective action is the answer and it needs to happen well before the New World War starts in earnest and before systems of surveillance and control are fully operational and omnipresent. ... There’s no moderation that will defeat this. No “pragmatic” politics, only paradigm change that is forced and revolutionary in nature."

Similarly, Damian Valdez says:

"The disconnection transmitted from society to the world order is hampering our ability to contain conflict and to confront climate change, our two most salient problems. The world needs a moral authority that can offer impartial arbitration backed by military force and a coherence that can harness all dimensions of the climate effort. Yet such authority requires not that we be in helpless awe of it but that we meet it with our own agency. A clue about where this agency may be cultivated is given by a university degree set up recently in China: “embodied intelligence.”"
— Damian Valdez, We are living in an age of disconnection: The great powers that shape our world compete not only for money and resources, but exploit our isolation. Prospect Magazine, October 7, 2026