Five Things: Technocrats, Middle East, Department of Lies, White-Collar Myth, Multitasking
It's Sunday. Read this now.
Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
My wife and I try to show our support and our solidarity every year for the CSD Parade in Hamburg. We like the parade with all the music and dancing - it is just wonderful. After the islamist terror attack in Berlin last year, we felt it is even more important to be downtown for the parade.
It was amazing. It is so important to show our support for a free and open society. More than 300.000 people went to the streets in Hamburg this Saturday and I am really happy about this. We are more. Love is bigger than hate.
Resist the technocrats
Since Trump launched his Board of Peace, lingering worries about defunding and institutional fragmentation have certainly turned more tangible. The notion of populist pushback, then, no longer adequately captures what’s happening – if it ever did. The EU has recently rolled back climate regulations under the spell of Right-wing fossil-fuel enthusiasts; and campaigns for the DOGEification of the UN are already underway. We have come a long way from mere pushback: the anti-globalists are in power, but rather than reject multilateralism they repurpose it. We should not be too quick to assume that the technocrats will disappear, however. As the political scientist Jens Steffek argues, technocratic internationalism is ideologically highly flexible. Any part of the political spectrum can engage, and in the past has engaged, in technocratic expert mobilisation.
If this holds true, and if we want to retain some space for expert input in international affairs, resisting technocracy will become only more important. To do so, we need to accept that international organisations were never as separate from political turmoil as they claimed. While they were portrayed and, after a while, treated as expert-driven vehicles of technical cooperation, they facilitated and protected the unequal global order they had sprung from. Today, they need to abandon the denialism they were founded upon. International organisations cannot retreat to a space beyond power, because no such space exists. What they can do is shape how power is exercised, justified and contested.
Experts are running the world - is this good or bad and how strong is their influence really? How do we move to a more just system?
The New Old Middle East
All these changes are real and important, and they have caused millions of people to suffer. Yet overall, the Middle East emerging out of this upheaval looks a lot like the one that existed before it. Outsiders continue to play their balance-of-power games within the borders of weak Arab states, the Iranian-Israeli conflict endures, the Palestinian question remains unresolved, and the United States lacks the capacity or the will to impose order but is still too involved in the region to leave.
The cease-fire signed by Iran and the United States in June 2026 captures the Trump administration’s failure to fundamentally alter the region. After suffering a series of blows between 2023 and 2025, Tehran has affirmed its power by exercising a chokehold over the Strait of Hormuz and assaulting its Gulf neighbors. The prewar regime in Tehran is largely intact and is now dominated by members of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, who are just as committed as their predecessors to opposing Israel and meddling in weak Arab states. The U.S.-Israeli war that began in February 2026 was meant to sap Iran’s power, if not to eliminate its regime. Instead, it has given the Islamic Republic a new lease on life.
Bibi and Trump started a war, but did not at all think about possible outcomes. No prior alignment with allies and no idea how diplomacy works, that’s what happens when idiots run the show and play secretary of war.
The American People Need the Truth About the Iran War
This opacity seems to be by design: The president and his lieutenants appear unwilling to admit that they started, and are now losing, a war with one of America’s most dedicated enemies, and obfuscating probably seems less damaging than admitting this painful truth. Of course, some of their statements are merely mistakes. Some are spin. Others are exaggerations. But many of them are flat lies that Trump and his appointees dump into the public square seemingly without hesitation.
Well, obviously not just the American people deserve to know what’s gping on. I still think it was justified to stop Iran from funding terror in the Middle East, but I do wonder why the Iranians can still fly attacks on the Gulf states and wreak havoc in the Strait of Hormuz, especially after Bibi and Trump said that Iran was basically done. I know about truth in times of war and I expect that we won’t learn everything in real time, but this needs to stop.
The White-Collar Myth
By the middle of the 20th century, the share of white-collar workers was rapidly overtaking that of blue-collar counterparts. Their affluence shaped consumer society, popular culture, higher education, and a new suburban geography. Questions lingered—were they too comfortable, too conformist, too caught up in their status?—but from some perspectives, they seemed poised to rise even further. Knowledge work, a term first coined in 1959 by the management theorist Peter F. Drucker, described the idea that some white-collar employees’ specialized education and job-related expertise would become prized resources, giving the workers value that companies could not replace—a proposition that he later argued would be cemented by the internet. Now, four years into the age of artificial intelligence, the certainties about office labor are fading, and the questions returning. If knowledge, expertise, and other hallmarks of “brain-work” no longer have the same value, what will remain of the distinctions that once set white-collar workers apart?
We still need brain-workers, but jobs where people just do simple repetitive steps with their brains will be replaced by AI. Hard times for lawyers and tax advisors coming up.
Your Brain Can Rewire Itself to Allow True Multitasking
Our daily lives are built on multitasking, but are our brains actually doing two things at once, or just switching very quickly between them?
Well, it depends. The science shows it’s the latter, for cognitively demanding work.
But in a new study published in the Journal of Cognitive Neuroscience, researchers from Georgetown University Medical Center in the US have revealed that we can put certain tasks on autopilot in a way that enables something closer to true multitasking.
Awesome, so I can keep doing my emails while sitting in meetings? And write newsletters while watching TV and letting Claude code?
That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico