The Modern Enquirer

Who benefits most from AI safety panic?

The Modern Enquirer — Wed, 23 Sep 2026 10:13:49 GMT

On 9 September, CNN’s Anderson Cooper asked a former Anthropic researcher how artificial intelligence could kill everyone on Earth.

The day before, Jacob Coxon had announced his departure from the com…

Mass Migration Is the Drug Australia Uses to Avoid Economic Reform

The Modern Enquirer — Mon, 07 Sep 2026 22:38:05 GMT

Australia has found an unusually effective way to avoid fixing its economy.

Whenever growth weakens, productivity stalls, the population ages or businesses complain about labour shortages, we add more…

The Iran War Is Making the Strait of Hormuz Obsolete

The Modern Enquirer — Tue, 01 Sep 2026 22:02:38 GMT

Iran’s leverage over the Strait of Hormuz depends on the world having no easy alternative. By making the chokepoint more dangerous, the war is giving Gulf producers a stronger reason to build one.

For…

Top 10 Biggest Promises Trump Has Failed to Keep

The Modern Enquirer — Sat, 29 Aug 2026 05:32:09 GMT

America Is Regulating Social Media Without Passing a Law

The Modern Enquirer — Wed, 26 Aug 2026 21:29:27 GMT

For most of the past decade, governments have debated what to regulate about social media: misinformation, pornography, political advertising, hate speech, privacy, bullying and extremist content.

Th…

The Regulated Country

The Modern Enquirer — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 23:19:00 GMT

Perhaps the greatest threat to Australian productivity isn’t that we’ve stopped trying. But that we’ve stopped being allowed to.

Try opening a storefront, building a retaining wall, or giving someone …

Trump’s Trade War Isn’t Just About Trade, It’s About Access

The Modern Enquirer — Mon, 24 Aug 2026 01:34:10 GMT

Trump’s trade war is best understood not as an attempt to reduce imports, but as an attempt to use access to the American consumer market to redirect global capital and productive capacity into the United States.

For most of the past year, Donald Trump’s trade war has been reported as a story about tariffs.

How much will they raise prices? Who ultimately pays them? Will China retaliate? Will American manufacturers benefit? Will they reduce the trade deficit?

These are reasonable questions. But they may be measuring the wrong thing.

Trump’s emerging trade system increasingly looks less like conventional protectionism than an attempt to change where the world builds things.

The instrument is the tariff. The leverage is access to the American consumer. But the objective increasingly appears to be productive capacity.

The clearest evidence is in the deals themselves.

Under the agreement reached with Japan last year, most Japanese imports face a baseline tariff of 15 per cent. Alongside that came something potentially more important: a $US550 billion Japanese investment commitment in the United States.

The framework identifies energy, semiconductors, critical minerals, pharmaceuticals, shipbuilding and artificial intelligence among the sectors into which that capital can be deployed.

The European Union struck a similar bargain: a 15 per cent tariff framework alongside expectations that European companies would invest an additional $US600 billion in the United States through 2028, while the EU intends to procure $US750 billion of American energy over the same period.

Tariffs create the pressure. Negotiations then produce concessions involving market access, purchases, investment and production.

This changes what Trump’s trade war actually is.

US Regulators Move to Reshape Financial Markets With Stablecoins, Tokenisation and Blockchain

The Modern Enquirer — Sat, 22 Aug 2026 04:45:42 GMT

For most of its short history, cryptocurrency has been presented as an alternative to the financial system.

Bitcoin emerged from the global financial crisis with a radical premise: digital money could…

The Two Minds of Artificial Intelligence

The Modern Enquirer — Thu, 20 Aug 2026 05:41:51 GMT

Artificial intelligence began with a surprisingly simple proposition.

Reasoning might be mechanical.

Not easy. Not necessarily human. But reducible, at least in principle, to operations that could be d…

The Recession That Hasn’t Arrived

Nick Holt — Tue, 18 Aug 2026 00:24:53 GMT

Something strange is happening in the American economy.

Job creation has slowed sharply. Labour-force participation is falling. Inflation remains above target. New delinquencies on credit cards and au…

The Invisible Infrastructure

Nick Holt — Sun, 09 Aug 2026 09:46:24 GMT

Something important has happened to artificial intelligence over the past two years, but I am not sure we have named it correctly.

We still talk about AI as though it were a product.

A tool. An assista…

The More Digitally Dependent Australia Becomes, the Less Resilient It Gets

The Modern Enquirer — Sat, 11 Jul 2026 02:36:26 GMT

One software fault disrupted phones, payments, trains and access to Triple Zero.

Those systems appear separate, but the Telstra outage revealed that they increasingly depend on the same digital infrastructure.

The outage didn’t break Australia, but it exposed the architecture through which Australia can now be broken.

The War Didn’t End Iran’s Nuclear Problem — It Concentrated It

The Modern Enquirer — Sun, 14 Jun 2026 05:08:40 GMT

America Has No Exit Strategy Because Iran Has No Incentive to Stop Fighting

The Modern Enquirer — Sat, 14 Mar 2026 02:44:30 GMT

The central assumption guiding much of the commentary on the current conflict is that Iran will eventually look for a way out.

That assumption may be wrong.

And if it is wrong, the United States has a …

AI Has Entered The Kill Chain

The Modern Enquirer — Thu, 12 Mar 2026 04:32:51 GMT

Artificial intelligence is changing how wars are fought. It doesn’t fire weapons. It decides what human commanders see as targets—and the race between great powers means the system will only move fas…

Australia gutted its energy infrastructure chasing net zero — now we’re running on empty

The Modern Enquirer — Wed, 11 Mar 2026 01:21:20 GMT

Australia’s political class has spent the last decade dismantling its own energy infrastructure in pursuit of perhaps the most economically self-destructive policy in the nation’s peacetime history.

…

How Britain’s Oil Crisis Led to the CIA-Backed Coup in Iran

The Modern Enquirer — Mon, 09 Mar 2026 22:23:20 GMT

Mohammad Mossadegh addresses supporters during the crisis over Iran’s nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil Company, early 1950s.

The First AI Infrastructure War

The Modern Enquirer — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 07:52:18 GMT

The U.S. strike on Iran in February 2026 was the result of converging pressures: a global AI race with China, the degradation of Iran’s regional proxies, and the transformation of warfare around tech…

Bombing the Same Problem Twice

The Modern Enquirer — Wed, 04 Mar 2026 22:18:38 GMT

Last June, Donald Trump declared that American airstrikes had destroyed Iran’s nuclear program. One year later, the United States is bombing Iran to stop it.

It’s an impressive feat of logic.

After str…

The Return of Regime Change — and the End of America First

The Modern Enquirer — Sun, 01 Mar 2026 23:54:04 GMT

By Nick Holt
Monday, 2 March 2025