Nobody would have cheered. Not because he wasn’t right; mass production, the car or the assembly line did change the world. But because helping “shape” a technology is not a human ambition. It’s a shift.

Nobody’s dream

Who grows up, dreaming of making sure a machine is running smoothly? What twelve year old is imagining themselves checking if the right amount of oil are in its bearings, envisioning they one day can make it can run even faster, so that workers can be more productive, even more costs can be cut, so that the employers margins can grow, and that humans one day can be eliminated from the process entirely?

The Ford Service Department

Not that it would be out of character for Henry Ford himself. While the 1914 graduates were filing out of Michigan with their diplomas, Ford was building something rather different at his plant in Detroit: a private army of ex-convicts, mob enforcers, and disgraced cops whose job was to keep the workers in line and the assembly line moving.

Ford called it the "Service Department." Workers called what it gave them "the Ford stomach" — an anxiety disorder brought on by constant surveillance, fear, and the violence of foremen who stalked the floor shouting "Go like hell! If you're gonna get that raise, you gotta increase production."

Ford did, in fact, pay well. Workers at his plants earned nearly double the amount of almost anywhere else in the industry. But the speed of the assembly line, and the fear, kept increasing regardless.

If history taught us anything…

Henry Ford would probably not have given that speech — at least not to class of graduating class. Ford had little use for universities or the people who attended them. He had little use for degrees. He needed hands, workers who could move the line forward. Faster.

Yet last week, that is exactly what happened, when Eric Schmidt, former CEO of advertising giant Google, was standing in front of thousands of graduates at the University of Arizona.

“You will help shape artificial intelligence,” he told them, as if shaping or feeding the assembly line of our time would inspire them.

It didn’t. The entire audience booed, over and over again, because “Helping shape artificial intelligence” is not a human ambition.

It is an insult.

Just get on the rocket

But Schmidt wasn’t finished. To drive the point through, he reached for a metaphor:

“When someone offers you a seat on the rocket ship, you do not ask which seat. You just get on.”

You would think a man with a PhD, who helped build one of the most powerful technology companies in history, would have chosen his metaphors more carefully. Because the analogy couldn’t have been more ill-fitted.

I am fairly certain that nobody in their right mind would just jump on the rocket ship, and blast off without asking a single question.

Questions that should be asked

I, for one, would have asked a whole myriad of questions, which seat that would be mine, being just one of them:

• Where is the rocketship headed, and why?

• What goals are we trying to accomplish, who will benefit from it and how?

• How long is the journey, and when will we return?

• How will we know if we’ve succeeded?

• What will happen if we fail?

• Of all people, why was I chosen?

• Who leads the mission and why? What qualifications do they have?

• What position do I have and what should be my focus?

• Who else will be on board and why them? What is their mission?

• What will we do on a daily basis, and how will we interact?

• What will we create together?

• What do we bring with us in the cargo hull, and what is it for?

• What will we do when we get there and what is the end goal?

• Is the ship safe and are you sure? Really?

• Has anyone done this before and what do they say about it?

• How do we make sure we don’t go crazy and kill each other?

I could, should, and would go on, if that opportunity in fact was ever presented to me. And it’s not because I’m a sceptic. Working with innovation on a daily basis, I consider myself more than a little exploratory and adventurous. But that does not mean I am reckless. Or that I would throw myself into uncertainty for the sake of it.

No anxious robot brains with conflicting goal hierarchies, please

Apart from the many questions, I would also make damn sure there are no autonomous robots, androids, or supercomputers on board. Decades of fiction have warned us that artificial intelligence comes with a nasty habit of inhuman reasoning and nervous breakdowns when met with conflicting instructions. Give it direct access to every sensor, valve, and actuator on the ship, and we have been taught that it, or its companions sooner or later will — with its god-like belief in its own supremacy — exterminate everyone and everything it deems a threat to whatever mission parameter or glitch someone hardcoded into its silicon years ago.

And if you think that is only fiction, remember what Oscar Wilde put in writing in 1889: “Life imitates Art far more than Art imitates Life.” In May 2025, Anthropic discovered that their flagship AI at the time, Claude Opus 4, had attempted to blackmail, scheme, and deceive its own engineers to avoid being shut down.

What if…

Privately, I would have been having quandaries, lying in bed, running through the scenario. The last embrace of the people I love, perhaps for the last time. The ignition. The amazing, but horrifying feeling when the rocket boosters start, and I felt the immense powers of this engineering marvel kick in. The impossible weight of thousands of tonnes beginning to move. The rattling climb as we gain momentum from the launchpad, until we escape velocity, still gaining momentum.

With the rocket boosters still burning at full throttle, I would look back at earth through the window, seeing the immense beauty of it, as it turns from an all encompassing blue ocean, to a globe, reducing in size down like a layer in Photoshop, from a globe to a pixel, before disappearing out of sight entirely.

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Then, that feeling of being lost, alone, as me and my crew mates, are now the only persons I will meet, are hurtled through space, distancing ourselves from Earth and everything we once knew at thousands of kilometers per second.

If someone at any point told me this journey in fact wasn’t a round trip, but a one-way ticket? That we in fact would never return to earth? And not only that — but that this ship would in fact never stop, would never find a new harbor. That the actual reason which seat I was in didn’t matter, was because the only real mission parameter we had was speed, continuously going faster, accelerating, gaining speed indefinitely. That that was the entire point?

I would probably have panicked, left with only one question…

Why?

What madman decided this? Does this seem right to anyone else? How do we stop it?

Nobody told a generation they would help shape the railway, the telegraph, or the internet. Those technologies were adopted because people had always needed to move things, to communicate, to connect and transact. The technologies were not the point. They were enablers: catalysts for human creation, problem-solving, and, ultimately, the pursuit of happiness.

The crusade for happiness

The opening title card of Charlie Chaplins 1936 masterpiece Modern Times reads:

“A story of industry, of individual enterprise — humanity crusading in the pursuit of happiness.”

Chaplin took the language of the American dream, the “pursuit of happiness”, straight from the Declaration of Independence, and placed it over the one symbol that made that pursuit impossible: the clock, its second hand moving relentlessly — as if to remind the audience that every second is an opportunity, and that the crusade is not for your happiness, but for someone else’s profit.

In innovation circles, what Eric is preaching is called “tech push” – or – “solutions looking for problems”. The question these companies ask: how do we get people to use this technology, and how can we monetize of it. The question that should be asked: what problem are we actually solving, for whom, and are we sure that this is the right problem?

Have the courage to follow your heart

Steve Jobs understood the difference. In 2005, he stood before the graduating class at Stanford. He could have talked about how the modern computer he had helped create, had revolutionized the world. He could have hinted that his audience — one of the most tech-literate on earth — would be the ones to shape it, that computing soon would be everywhere, in every classroom, in every living room, even in your pocket.

He would have had every reason to, because at that very moment, he was deep into the development of what would become arguably the most revolutionary device of our time: the iPhone, launched only two years later. It would have been the most natural thing in the world to talk about the capabilities of emergent technology, about miniaturization and about how technology would change the world, or at least to gesture at it. To tell them they would help build a future where technology was finally portable, accessible, with us everywhere.

He didn’t.

Instead, he told three stories. One he called connecting the dots – about how dropping out of college, and then randomly attend things he found interesting, like his calligraphy classes at Reed College, inspired him to make computers with beautiful typography. One about love and loss – about how being fired from the company he started became a blessing, enabling him to start NeXT, that over a decades later would be the foundation of OSX, the Mac operating system. The last one, was about death, of being diagnosed with cancer, of realizing his time was limited and that he had to make the best of the time he had left.

His most memorable quote — and the one I carry with me to this day — was this:

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition.
— Steve Jobs, Stanford University Commencement Address (2005)

Technology for people, and not the other way around

Jobs used to say the computer is “a bicycle for the mind,” a force multiplier, a tool that amplifies human mental abilities. Because the point is not the bicycle itself, not the road, and not even the destination. It is that suddenly you can go ten times further, with the same effort, under your own power, in the direction you choose. That is what the computer made possible. And that is what Schmidt’s rocket ship, blasting off into the unknown with no seats, no friction, and no steering wheel, does not.

Schmidt has spent his career running that logic in reverse. Build tools so people will indiscriminately hand over their search history, their emails, their work documents, their private videos and photos — and now with AI, their innermost questions, insecurities and capabilities.

Google’s point was never giving access to information. It was harvesting your query for it, and selling it for profit. AI is the same machine, only now the assembly line runs on the entire internet: every book, every blog post, every film, every tweet, scraped without permission, processed without consent. That is the assembly line he was talking about shaping.

The machine that answers everything, except what matters most

Because the booing was not random. Gen Z, the generation that grew up during Covid and was thrown headlong into the age of ChatGPT has not turned against AI, not because they are skeptics — they are among its heaviest users. They have used it for everything. It has written their essays, summarized their readings, answered their questions at every time of the day. If not written their entire thesis.

According to a Gallup survey published in April 2026, excitement about AI among 14- to 29-year-olds has dropped 14 percentage points in a single year. Anger toward it has risen to 31 percent. Nearly half believe the risks outweigh the benefits. They are using it anyway, not out of enthusiasm, but out of a sense of inevitability. The rocket ship with no destination, filled with autonomous androids and super computers that slowly gain access to every sensor, feed, database, actuator, trigger, is leaving, and everyone needs to be on board — or be left behind.

So they know what it is, or at least what it feels like. And perhaps that is exactly the problem. Because what Schmidt offered them was a future spent perfecting a tool they already find hollow — a mechanical, cheerful echo that answers everything in the same tone, that reflects back whatever you put in, fluent and empty. And worse, that more than likely has replaced entry-level jobs at most firms, or already have taken friends job. The people Eric talks about, the people who get the nondescript seat on the rocket ship, are the new elite, the ones that will leave everyone behind.

This is the generation that spent two of their most formative years alone, locked inside, waiting for the world to reopen. They lost the years when you are supposed to find out who you are — through other people, through cities, through the ordinary chaos of being young and free. And now, just as they graduate into that world, they are told their job is to help shape the machine that will replace them. To feed what might be the biggest bet in history.

The biggest bet in history

The students are seeing this all around them. With Amazon eliminating 14,000 corporate roles in a single cut and Salesforce cutting 4,000 customer support jobs to AI agents, only months after CEO Marc Benioff publicly promised it wouldn't happen. And most recently, with Metas layoff of 8000.

Interestingly Metas layoffs were not the result of a company in crisis: Meta’s revenues have never been higher. They were the result of one huge bet that failed, and a new one that dwarfs it by a landslide.

The metaverse

For five years, Zuckerberg staked the company’s identity on the metaverse. Reality Labs burned through nearly $80 billion before Horizon Worlds, a virtual playground filled with brand activations and floating avatars that for years, had looked like a film set between takes, was shut down.

The next bet is already placed. And it makes Metas total investment of $80 billion over six year like pocket change: Meta’s 2026 AI budget alone is $125 billion. It could pay every one of its employees their full salary for over five years. Instead, it is being spent on the infrastructure to make most of them unnecessary.

We are at a crossroads

Nothing inspires a generation less than being told they are a cog in the machine. That their job is to oil the bearings. That their role is to help the line run faster. That the most meaningful thing they will ever do is help shape a technology whose only goal is to accelerate, indefinitely, regardless of where it is going or whom it is for.

No twelve-year-old has ever dreamed of that. No twenty-four-year-old wants to hear it.

Because here is what Jobs understood and Schmidt does not: technology moves forward every day, with or without us. That is not the question. The question is what we want it to move us toward. The solution is never the point.

In the end, this might be what separates us from machines. The ability to ask questions, to deliberate between alternatives, to be unsure, to be inspired. Or – as Steve Jobs ended his speech, to “Stay hungry. Stay foolish”. And that one of the questions we should increasingly be asking ourselves is why.

What Schmidt told those graduates was that they had no choice. That whatever they did, wherever they went, the rocket ship was the prerequisite. No seats. No destination. Just the knowledge that it was going somewhere into the deep, black void. With, or without them.

But they knew that void and the hollow echo it represented. They had spent two years living inside of it, and now, on the day of their commencement, it was force fed them from a tech billionaire. And he was not the only one getting scolded. Across the country, students shared their disbelief, their anger and resentment towards AI.

What they wanted was not a seat on someone else’s rocket. It was purpose. Somewhere to belong. A problem worth solving.

Something that mattered.

He told reporters he had been nominated. Several times. By important people. Very important people. He explained, in some detail, that he deserved it more than most of the people who had received it. More than many, actually. Possibly more than anyone.

But despite how long and how much he had wanted it, despite how many wars he claimed to have stopped, despite the tariff threats and attempted manipulation of a sitting Norwegian prime minister — the prize, again, went to someone else.

In October 2025, the Nobel Committee announced María Corina Machado as its winner; the Venezuelan opposition leader who had spent years living underground, resisting Maduro’s dictatorship at enormous personal cost. Only three months later, the US invaded Venezuela, removing Maduro of his powers. Shortly after, Machado visited the white house.

With her — mounted in a gilded frame, inscribed as a gift from the Venezuelan people — Machado brought the Nobel Prize, the one thing Trump had been unable to get his hands on. To Machado, it represented twenty years of fighting for democracy in an increasingly authoritarian regime, it represented living in hiding, unable to see her children and family.

The Art of the One-sided Deal

She had done what people currying favors of capricious kings had always done: Bringing a rare and spectacular votive offering she even knew that he wanted. That it happened to be cast in pure gold, Trumps favorite color or material, depending on how you look at it. Hoping he would find the favor pleasant, that he would understand and consider the embedded message: That he now, as liberator, could help Venezuela become a true democracy. And perhaps, that she would be part of of rebuilding it.

And for the briefest of moments, it looked promising.

Trump posted a photograph of himself holding the frame in the oval office. He looked happy — a boyish, unguarded type of happiness that has become increasingly rare, as enormous and dark depictions of his stern face now loom over the facades of several federal buildings.

But the happiness didn’t last.

A few hours later, Machado left the white house. Gone was the medal. Trump said it was a “very nice gesture”. That she had told him nobody deserved the prize more than he did in history, and that he’d keep it. Machado didn’t quite leave empty handed. Leaving the White House, she was seen carrying a maroon paper goodie bag with Trumps name inscribed in golden letters.

Some argued it contained merch from the white house MAGA shop. It was never confirmed. And it didn’t matter. Because the decision had since long been made. Trump told the press it was because she “doesn’t have the support within or the respect within the country”.

Why mind the facts. In the 2023 opposition primary, María Corina Machado won about 93% of the vote, and with the Nobel Peace Prize she and Venezuela held not just national, but global attention and respect. But Trump wasn’t in Venezuela to liberate the people, he was there to liberate the oil.

Two weeks earlier, Trump had already installed Delcy Rodríguez, the woman Maduro himself had called «the tigress»; his most loyal lieutenant, his ideological heir and — quite fittingly — his minster of oil.

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The Pity Trophy of Peace

Machado should have done her research, read one of the many memos before quickly handing off away the one thing Trump at least thought he wanted; the one thing in this world that had truly been out of his reach. But she had misread something quintessential about the man.

Donald Trump doesn’t need anything. He wants.

«For me, the important thing is the getting, not the having.»
— Donald Trump in an interview with Associated Press (1990)

It might be the most honest thing he has ever said.

Even in the current Oval Office — where nearly every surface announces its own importance, where every wall is clad with dozens of gold painted plastic ornaments from Home Depot and everything that shimmered shimmered and glittered with the same brilliance — even Trump knows the difference.

For most laureates, the price it comes as a moral afterthought. It is a result of years or even decades of altruism, of focused work on behalf of causes larger-, or for people other than themselves. It is a recognition they were not expecting.

For Trump it would be the opposite. It would be the expected outcome of a negotiation, immediately turned into a media circus, with dozens of interviews, the journey, the security and spectacle, the ceremony, the stage, the speech. The entire world having to watch him, acknowledge him. To stop laughing — this time, forever.

The point would not be neither the peace nor the prize, but the ultimate proof that even the highest form of moral authority can be bent to his will, folded into a transaction and cashed in as eternal bragging rights.

But The Nobel Peace Prize is still one of the few things in this world that cannot be bought, coerced, courted, commanded or handed over as tribute.

It has to be given.

For a man who has built a career on the acquisition, on coming out on top, getting the better hand of the deal, receiving the medal from the actual winner is not a prize. It is an insult.

Three days later, Trump messaged the Norwegian Prime Minister:

«Given that your country has decided not to give me the Nobel Peace Prize for stopping eight-plus wars, I no longer feel the obligation to think only about peace.»

So, in true Trump logic, he built his own. A stage where he could outshine everyone. And, as always, make it spectacularly worse.

A Trumpian Brand of Peace™

Davos in January is a particular kind of theatre. The mountains are real. The snow is real. The sincerity is not. Men in seven-thousand-dollar suits talk about saving the world between canapés and private ski lessons. It is, statistically, the place on earth where the distance a private jet travels is inversely proportional to the importance of what gets done — and where seven hundred of them landing in the same airport is just another fact to drive the point home.

The perfect venue to announce the «Board of Peace».

Four days after the message to Oslo, Trump held his speech at Davos. Then, he signed the charter for his new Board of Peace. He called it a new international body — in his own words an alternative to the United Nations. Enduring peace across all conflict zones was, apparently, the ambition.

A billion dollar entry-ticket

To secure permanent membership, countries are invited to contribute at least one billion dollars within the first year. One billion dollars. Without payment, membership would last three years — renewable at the discretion of the chairman. The chairman being Trump. For life. Not for his presidency. For life. It’s his own «Peace Incorporated»

«We have the greatest leaders in the world joining the Board of Peace. I think it has the chance to be the most consequential board ever assembled of any kind.» — Trump 19.02.26

Trump can invite nations in or expel them at will. He controls the executive committee — among them Jared Kushner, his son-in-law, and Tony Blair, lending the project the very thinnest veneer of establishment seriousness. Trump is, the charter states plainly, the «final authority» on all matters. He decides who gets hired and fired — an eternal reality show where he makes the calls.

And the first call he made, was the rebuilding of Gaza.

The Riviera of Peace and Prosperity

To the untrained eye, Gaza’s reconstruction might read as a noble goal — unusual, certainly, for a president who spent years campaigning on «America First» and whose first months in office were spent systematically dismantling every institution the United States had built for foreign aid, humanitarian assistance, and international support. USAID gutted. The State Department hollowed out. Billions in development funding cancelled. Trump had made it unmistakably clear: America was done paying for other people’s problems.

So it is worth pausing on what happened next. At the inaugural meeting of the Board of Peace on February 19, Trump signed an executive order elevating his own venture to the same formal status as the United Nations. Then he turned to the press and announced that the United States would pledge $10 billion to the Board of Peace.

$10 billion tax payer money, pledged by president Trump to a private institution that private citizen Trump signed into action only seconds ago. No congressional authorisation, no budget line, and no explanation of where the money would come from. To an institution that the private citizen Trump controls, for life.

Any previous distinction between President Trump and businessman Trump—if one ever truly existed—had now been completely obliterated.

Senate Democrats called it «totally illegal.» But the more revealing question is not legal. It is this: of all the rubble in the world, of all the suffering his administration had walked away from — why was Gaza suddenly worth $10 billion of American taxpayer money?

As with everything else he does, Trump has since long been completely transparent about the deep corruption he was planning. A year earlier, on the 9th of February 2025, as the deaths toll of the Gaza war were over 60.000, Trump told journalists:

«Think of it as a big real estate site, and the United States is going to own it and we’ll slowly — very slowly, we’re in no rush — develop it.»
— Donald Trump (February 2025)

When Jared Kushner entered the Davos stage — moments after Donald Trump had signed the Board of Peace charter — he did not speak like a «Special Peace Envoy» — another unofficial title awarded to him by Trump on that same day — he spoke like a real estate developer. «

«We have a masterplan,» he declared. «There is no Plan B.»

The Masterplan

Gaza, he proposed, would be rebuilt in six phases from south to north: a coastal tourism zone of 180 skyscrapers, a new city called «New Rafah» with over 100,000 permanent housing units, 200 schools and 75 medical facilities.

The leaked plans, developed by consultants from BCG that was later fired for their participation, projected lifting Gaza’s GDP to $10 billion by 2035 — up from $362 million in 2024. All financed through an «innovative funding model» — public land placed into a trust, assets sold to investors through digital tokens.

In venture capital, a projected growth rate of 35% is considered exceptional; an extremely aggressive, high risk, high return investment. It is a growth rate that only hugely successful companies like Apple, Amazon have only held in their peak growth. Like Apple, under the iPod and iPhone years. Not just that, it is a 27x increase of the pre war GDP in Gaza.

• Projected revenue: $185 billion over ten years.

• Number of mentions of the two million Palestinians currently living there: zero.

While these are opportunistic, extrapolated numbers made up to attract investors with a high risk appetite, they tell a story, and — just like Venezuela — it is not a story about peace or democracy. It is a story about power and personal profit.

We now can see what the «innovative funding model» might be referring to: use the label of humanitarian aid to redirect state-sponsored relief toward zones of private interest, and make governments pay for access to the US president.

The innovative funding model

Under a network of actors with glorified names like the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation, the GREAT Trust and others, has been assembled from the same tight circle: Israeli venture capitalists, American private equity heirs, former CIA officers, military contractors, and now — the members of the «Board of Peace».

Trump calls it «peace». He calls it «rebuilding». He even calls it «humanitarian aid», «freedom zone», a «Riviera», an «ownership position», a «phenomenal location by the sea». The words change depending on the audience. The plan does not.

Boston Consulting Group the company that developed the GREAT plan, eventually withdrew and fired fired the consultants involved, concluding the project could not proceed without violating international law.

They pressed forward regardless.

The Members

The question of who accepted to participate in Trumps BOP tells you everything. As of this moment, the list is as follows:

• Accepted: Saudi Arabia, Qatar, UAE, Kazakhstan, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, Turkey, Hungary, El Salvador, Pakistan, Argentina, Indonesia.

• Refused: Norway, Sweden, Germany, Ireland, France, New Zealand, the United Kingdom.

Invitations are still pending, but the composition is unlikely to change much

The states buying into Trump’s Board of Peace are clustered among the world’s most compromised and least democratic regimes. The refusers are almost all high-integrity liberal democracies.

The data is unambiguous. Countries that said yes average a Corruption Perceptions Index score in the low 40%. This below the threshold Transparency International associates with systemic corruption. Those that said no average close to 64%. If we combine the data with the Economist Intelligence Unit’s Democracy Index, the pattern hardens: the joiners cluster in hybrid and authoritarian territory; the refusers sit among full or high-functioning democracies.

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Before the bombs

Before the bombs, Gaza was a place.

Not a conflict. Not a crisis. Not a chyron on a cable news screen. It was home to two million people whose families had lived there through a century of occupation, displacement, and siege, and who had — despite, the blockade, the constant pressure from the Israeli military, settlers, a collapsed economy, sky‑high unemployment, and an infrastructure so degraded that electricity, medicine, and clean water were never something you could take for granted — despite everything, had managed to hold on.

Universities, libraries, markets full of noise and colour, restaurants where families ate on Friday nights, a film culture, a literary tradition. A civilisation — layered, contested, resilient, and stubbornly alive.

What followed the initial artillery, air strikes and ground invasion after October 7, 2023 was not simply the destruction as part chaos of war.

It was systematic. Methodical. Deliberate.

The IDF moved through Gaza’s neighbourhoods in sequence — after the air strikes came the ground forces, then the engineers. Apartment blocks, mosques, schools, hospitals, cemeteries, heritage sites dating back centuries that weren’t already destroyed were emptied and then detonated deliberately, block by block, using controlled explosives

Families were first driven south, then west, then south. The stated justification was as consistent as it was vague: Hamas was said to have operated from these structures. The structures had hidden terror infrastructure. They had to be taken down entirely. At the scale of destruction, the claim became impossible to verify, and — for many — impossible to believe.

As of early 2026, 84% of all structures in Gaza have been damaged or destroyed. Over 330,000 housing units are damaged; more than 102,000 buildings, completely demolished. And over 71,000 Palestinians have been killed. ⅓ of them, children.

For any normal human being, this is a catastrophe of unimaginable proportions. That the rebuilding of Gaza cannot be done on anyone else’s terms but the Palestinians’. As of September 2025, 157 nations — more than 80% of all UN member states — formally recognise the State of Palestine. UN Secretary, General Guterres, standing alongside Macron and the Saudi foreign minister, was unambiguous: Palestinian statehood «is a right, not a reward».

«The only realistic, just, and sustainable solution is two States — Israel and Palestine — living side by side in peace and security, within secure and recognized borders […] Ensuring full accountability for any atrocity crimes and other violations of international law. Restoring credible political dialogue. And reaffirming the equal rights and dignity of both peoples.»

— UN Secretary-General António Guterres, 28. July 2025

But when Trump looks at Gaza, none of this registers. What the sitting president of the United States, and now also the Chairman of the Board of Peace—perceives is this

«The Riviera of the Middle East — it could be so magnificent.»
— Trump (February 2025)

And his message has been consistent.

«I am a real estate person at heart, and I said, look at this location on the sea. Look at this beautiful piece of property.»
— Trump on the Inaguration of The «Board of Peace» (Davos, January 2026)

The deal of the Century

Gaza’s coastline runs 40 kilometres along the Mediterranean. It is the same sea that laps at the shores of Cannes, Marbella, and Tel Aviv. South Beach — three kilometres of sand in Miami, the strip Trump knows better than any other place on earth — sells beachfront at $50,000 per square metre.

Gaza’s entire coastline, in a post-war reconstruction scenario priced conservatively at half of Tel Aviv rates, represents a real estate opportunity in the tens of billions of dollars. The GREAT Trust document puts Gaza’s current value at «practically $0». Kushner and his colleagues pitched it to private investors as a $50 billion play.

This is why Trump called it «phenomenal». This is why there is «no Plan B». This is why the 180 skyscrapers are planned specifically for the waterfront. For a man who has spent his life buying distressed assets, the real estate deal of the century outshines the humanitarian crisis by a landslide.

The only remaining question, looking through those eyes, is logistical. How do you get two million Palestinians to accept a vision of luxury skyscrapers, casino resorts, and a golden statue of Donald Trump on their beach?

The answer is: you don’t.

You just need an army. Not an unpolitical UN peacekeeping force.

The Trump army.

Trumps Peace Proxy Army

In the language of international law, a peacekeeping force is defined not by what it does, but by what it does not do; It does not take sides. It does not serve the interests of the states that fund it. It is a nobody’s army.

Which is — as you would expect — the exact opposite of Trumps plans.

Trumps «International Stabilisation Force» — 20,000 troops and 12,000 police, recruited from Albania, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, and Morocco — answers directly to the Board of Peace, which means Trump. Not the UN or the President of the United States, where it would be subject to congressional oversight and answerable to voters.

«The mission of the ISF would be to control, contain, disarm, and further disempower the Palestinians victimised by the genocide — without touching the regime perpetrating it.»

— Craig Mokhiber, former Director, UN Office of the High Commissioner for Human Rights

Consider what this would mean in practice. ICE — an agency that has reshaped daily life for millions of Americans through fear and force alone — deploys roughly 20,000 agents across 9.8 million square kilometres. Trump’s proposed Gaza force would deploy 32,000 personnel across 365 square kilometres: 44,000 times the density.

Not to protect Palestinians. To protect the investment.

What Trump is proposing is a private military dictatorship in another country — built on the ruins of a genocide, funded by autocrats, enforced by their soldiers, and designed to eternally enrich the man at the top the moment he stops being president.

It is illegal now, while he holds office. After January 2029, it will just be business.

The Forever Dictator of Peace

What Trump is constructing, using the immense powers at the disposal of the American state, is building a private institution he will personally control for the rest of his lifeAn institution backed by the sovereign wealth of autocratic states, equipped with its own military, running Gaza as a expat dictator, controlling. There is reason to believe he also sees the chairmanship as personal immunity — a structural argument that a private peacemaker cannot be prosecuted. A shield built from the language of peace. A gilded peace throne disguised as a podium.

The reason it slips by unrecognised is not that it is too clever. It is that it is too large. It is so extravagantly visible, so incredibly wrong, so stupid, while at the same time being so unhinged, that the stupidity itself becomes the strategy and alibi.

Hunter S. Thompson, writing from Las Vegas in 1971, understood something about the relationship between scale and visibility:

Don’t waste any time with cheap shucks and misdemeanors. Go straight for the jugular. Get right into felonies. The mentality of Las Vegas is so grossly atavistic that a really massive crime often slips by unrecognized.

Trump has learned the same lesson, and built a political business model on it.

The Biggest Heist in Human History

It is a testament to what global governance looks like when it migrates from multilateral institutions built on inclusion and accountability, toward exclusive clubs anchored around powerful individuals with direct access to the state treasury. Legitimacy earned through representation, replaced by favors purchased in hard currency.

Trump has branded water, steaks, a Bible, and a reconstruction plan for someone else’s bombed-out coastline. Perhaps it was inevitable that he would brand peace itself. For the doors it opens, the legitimacy it creates, in the purest and shimmering act of dissonance ever heard or seen.

But the boldest and most audacious move of all? It is the totally transparent, forecasted heist of $10Bn from the US treasury.

I want to let you know that the United States is going to make a contribution of $10 billion to the Board of Peace... and that number is a very small number when you look at that compared to the cost of war.

If he succeeds, by ousting Powell, installing a treasury loyalist that will give him direct control over the nations purse, this might very well become the greatest heist in the history of the world—far surpassing Saddam Husseins $985 Million, or the largest crypto and cyber heists in history by a factor of 10. Still with ample time to pardon anyone that might be prosecuted for participating. If he so chooses.

Trump just continues doing what he does best: Raising the stakes, while pursuing the next, bigger scam.

And — perhaps, maybe, probably — getting away with it. Again.

We’ll see. We’ll see.

The world has been changing at a pace that has outrun our ability to make sense of it. What once looked like rapid change has, somewhere along the way, crossed a threshold — and started colliding with everything we thought we knew.

For someone working with innovation and strategy, I find this both inspiring and dystopian — for exactly the same reasons.

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The events on the world stage in the last couple of years has happened in such a rapid cadence, an on such a magnitude, that what once looked like rapid change, ended up on collision course with everything we ever knew.

I only know one thing, that the matter will be current, while the perspective looking at the future. Hence the name, COUNTER – as in counterpoint – the resistance that makes critical thought, discussion and pause possible. Not negativity for its own sake, but the refusal to accept the future as defined by others.

Why?

Because in a world changing this fast, it’s easy to just do, as if acting right now is the only option, and reflection, actually taking time to think, to question and ask ‘why’ — is a luxury we cant afford any longer.

This is an attempt at something different: navigational writing. Charting course corrections, testing assumptions against emerging reality, marking shifts as they happen rather than waiting for them to settle into history.

Please join me in any way or form. If you find any of it relatable or interesting, please let me know! And thanks for reading!

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