By Marc Eliot Stein, World BEYOND War, February 28, 2026
A few hours after I spoke to World BEYOND War’s board president for our monthly podcast, Israel and USA began a new war with Iran, and Trump declared that USA’s objective is regime change in a dreary speech. It was a hell of a time to celebrate an excellent conversation.
Kathy and I knew all along, as we spoke about topics ranging from anarchist philosophy to military exploitation of artificial intelligence to tax resistance, that our calm conversation amounted to an ethereal whisper of idealistic pacifism on a planet careening towards nuclear apocalypse (unless the people manage to take power back, and quick). Even though we weren’t sure that a new war with Iran was about to begin, we’d both been immersed in the terrible results from Trump/USA’s attacks on Venezuela and insane, inhumane blockade of Cuba, and we’d never stopped protesting about ongoing disasters in Ukraine, Gaza, South Sudan and Myanmar. How do we sit back and talk about abstract topics like anarchist philosophy at times like this?
But this is exactly why both Kathy and I thought it would be a good idea to spend an episode of the podcast being reflective, and restoring our sense of the fundamental philosophies of the peace movement. We had no agenda for this conversation, and some of the topics we swerved into include my own unique brand of technological optimism, which I have spoken about in other podcast episodes: even though today’s tech industry is dominated by war profiteers and creepy incels like Sam Altman and Elon Musk, as peace activists we must be willing to embrace the positive changes that technological innovation offers, because we need innovative tools to do our work. An example of a positive change arising from artificial intelligence is the ability to speak across languages in real time with automatic translation.
When we began diving into this topic, Kathy and I agreed that we need to spend an entire episode dealing with tough questions about technological intrusions into our lives, and about companies like Anthropic, OpenAI, Google, Microsoft, Oracle and Palantir. I hope we’ll do that episode soon.
One book I recommended in this episode is “Empire of AI” by Karen Hao. Musical excerpt: “The Best of Us” by Lowkey.
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