A chorus of dignitaries assembles under the neon-lit heavens of Shanghai, where Premier Li Qiang, with all the hubris of a modern Prometheus, envisions an international order to tame the swelling chaos of artificial intelligence. He calls forth an alliance—not for mere trade, but for dominion over the most spectral and Promethean of our creations, beseeching the nations to harmonize their laws and hymnals, to strike a balance between progress and security in a world hemorrhaging both. There is talk of consensus—how quaint the notion, in an age that Nietzsche warned, in his midnight prophecy, would grow weary of truth and crave only convenience, only power.

And yet across the Pacific, amidst the clamorous din of self-congratulation, the thundering American juggernaut, embodied now in that cartoon titan, hastens not toward understanding but domination. With three signatures, President Trump unchains the Gorgons of commerce—AI technology to be exported to chosen allies, the writhing environmental strictures cast aside in service to sacred profit. He proclaims the technological race the “defining struggle of a century,” evoking a Wagnerian battle where only the strongest survive. China, in turn, dons the tragic mask of ambition, vying for mastery by 2030, its state-driven machinery grinding away despite the slow suffocation of chip embargoes, eager to barter monopolies of knowledge for pitiful morsels of rare earths.

Here is no common good, no Dike nor Nemesis to bind hubris—only the cold engine of progress racing with Thanatos. The showcase of Shanghai is but a grand stage where the tragedians enact their drama of Promethean overreach. Meanwhile, the chorus—those ordinary souls—pass by in the shadow of towers whose windows flicker with algorithms ignorant of beauty, virtue, or fate.

What we witness is not the birth of an international mind but the twilight reveling of civilizations receding from wisdom. “God is dead,” declared Nietzsche, and we have forged an idol clawing ever higher, offended by even nature’s boundaries. The agora is silent, save for the shrill clangor of capital, and the Socratic spirit suffocates beneath an avalanche of data. We barter away the Pearls of old Athens, the tragic sensibility that tempers excess with knowledge of man’s limits, in exchange for the monstrous child of our technological will. The modern world, in its frenzied optimism, sprints merrily toward its own abyss, heedless of the warning sung by the chorus: that every progress, unmoored from wisdom and humility, is a footstep closer to ruin.