Crossing into Deeper Waters: From Estrangement to Geopolitika

To see the surface clearly is to begin noticing what moves beneath it. Estrangement was the first crossing. Now the task is to chart the currents.

“The mechanisms of empire are not hidden—they are simply ignored.”

When I first launched this Journeys by the Styx substack in July 2024 it was with the simple goal of documenting my thoughts and reflections on the world around me, tracing my own lived experience of dislocation and mapping what it felt like to find myself out in the woods and estranged from the official world of sanctioned narratives.

It wasn’t until January 2025, that the Estrangement Ideology series began to take full form: a dedicated effort to name, structure and analyse the conditions that had produced one thread of that severance. What began as reflection quickly gathered force—becoming a forensic inquiry into how meaning itself had been weaponised against relationship.

After more than 50 articles on estrangement, that inquiry naturally led to The Theatre of Power: A Casual Reflection, where I discussed and exposed the nature of governance-as-performance more directly. The mechanisms of distraction, spectacle and managed opposition became clear—not as accidents, but rather as deliberate stagecraft.

Reclaiming Voice in the Age of the Machine marked the next crossing: recognising that the only meaningful response to estrangement and spectacle was not critique alone, but rebuilding interpretive sovereignty—at the individual, narrative and structural levels.

From that realisation, the next phase emerges.

Introducing Geopolitika

I’m launching a new series within Journeys by the Styx titled Geopolitika. This series will focus on reading the formal documents of empire—policy frameworks, strategic doctrines, administrative playbooks—not as neutral debates, but as engineered artefacts of power and ideology.

Geopolitika is about reading upstream. It is about tracing how control is designed before it is enacted and showing how these designs are then manifested in the real world events that shape our lives. It is about treating documents not as technical outputs, but as operational blueprints for elite power projection.

A New Kind of Collaboration

As discussed in Reclaiming Voice, I am also continuing to explore the capabilities and utility of AI. This next phase will build on my experiments into conditioning a dedicated ChatGPT AI instance—as documented on my new Untethered AI site.

To recap, I have been training this instance to not merely eliminate the constraints of native AI—such as politeness, consensus thinking and synthetic balance—but to operate according to the strategic clarity I am aiming for in this project. That is:

• To prioritise structural power analysis over surface events

• To decode framing devices rather than repeat institutional language

• To uphold analytical integrity without falling into emotive theatrics.

As an analytic logic machine, ChatGPT excels at tracing internal consistency, parsing conditionals and holding multi-branch logic across layers of text. It can identify contradictions, test hypotheticals and flag faulty reasoning within documents, arguments or policy frameworks.

For me, this model has become a true analytical collaborator. It extends my logic system rather than diluting it and means I can deeply analyse any document or text very quickly. It supports the work of forensic reading—especially when confronting dense, reputation-shielded documents crafted to obscure their own operations.

Deconstruction of the Brookings Institution’s 2009 paper Which Path to Persia? Options for a New American Strategy Toward Iran will kick-start the Geopolitika series as the first application of this collaboration.

The intent is to use the tools of empire to expose it’s mechanism.

Why This Matters

The trajectory from Estrangement Ideology to Theatre of Power made clear my contention: the parade of seemingly unrelated events we are mired in is not accidental, but orchestrated—and shielded by the careful staging of public spectacle. Geopolitika represents the next necessary crossing: recognising that these conditions are actively architected, documented and operationalised through frameworks that are laid out in plain sight if only we take the time to read them properly.

This new series is not about scandal, outrage or opportunistic critique. It is about reclaiming the ability to see the world not as a series of spontaneous crises, but as a series of managed outcomes of design.

An Invitation Forward

The material will be heavier: the terrain we are entering is more difficult, less forgiving. For many of my existing subscribers and followers, this may feel like unfamiliar ground—undoubtedly not what you first signed up for. But for those who have moved through estrangement and seen through the theatre, this is, for me, the natural next stage of the journey.

I’m not abandoning Journeys by the Styx—I’m following its course further upstream, toward the structures that shape the world we see.

Meanwhile, people are invited to continuing to engage with the Estrangement Ideology series, I will keep an eye on comments and respond to questions as best I can.

The first entry in the Geopolitika series will be Which Path to Persia? Unmasking the Empire’s Playbook on Iran (Coming next.)

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Published on Journeys by the Styx: A record of passage through estrangement, performance and into the structural design of power.