Vol. III, No. 72
Covering 8 September - 21 September 2025
Monday, September 22, 2025
Late edition · A Relentless publication
The Relentless Dispatch
All the fortnight that mattered, in technology and in the world, read next to what we were building at the time.
UTAH

A conservative activist is assassinated, and a grieving country reaches for retribution

Charlie Kirk, a prominent figure of the American right, was shot dead while speaking at a university. The killing convulsed the nation, and the administration's response, a promised crackdown on its opponents, raised the fear that a murder would be answered not with healing but with a settling of scores.

Charlie Kirk, the 31-year-old founder of a national conservative youth organisation and one of the most influential activists of the American right, was shot and killed on September 10 while speaking at an outdoor event at a university in Utah, murdered in front of a crowd in an act of political violence that convulsed the country. Kirk, a combative and polarising figure who had built a movement mobilising young conservatives and who was close to the administration, was mourned by the right as a martyr; his killing, the latest and most prominent in a mounting series of politically-motivated attacks across the spectrum, from the Minnesota lawmaker murdered in June to the assassination attempts on Trump the previous year, marked a further terrible descent in a country whose politics has been curdling toward violence for years.

The gravest question was not the murder itself but the response to it. Rather than a moment of national mourning and a lowering of the temperature, the administration and its allies responded with vows of retribution, promising to target the president's political opponents, the funders of the left, the "radical" networks they blamed, in a crackdown that critics feared would use a genuine tragedy as a pretext to suppress dissent. Within days, a television network pulled a late-night host off the air over remarks about the killing, a chilling signal about the cost of speech in the charged atmosphere. A country that had just suffered a political assassination faced a choice between the path of healing, of insisting that violence has no place regardless of the victim's politics, and the path of retribution, of using the murder to justify a settling of scores, and the early signs pointed, ominously, toward the second.

KATHMANDU

A generation burns down its parliament, and topples a government in two days

Nepal erupted in revolution this fortnight as a youth-led uprising, sparked by a government ban on social media and fuelled by years of fury over corruption and the privileged children of the elite, toppled the government in barely two days. Protesters stormed and burned the parliament and other government buildings; the prime minister resigned and fled; more than 70 people were killed as security forces fired on crowds; and the army stepped in to broker an interim government led by a former chief justice, the country's first woman to lead it. The "Gen Z revolution," organised on the very platforms the government had tried to ban, was the latest in a string of youth uprisings against entrenched, corrupt elites across the region and the world, and a vivid reminder, added to Bangladesh and Sri Lanka before it, of how fast a young, connected, furious generation can bring down a government that has lost its legitimacy.

IN BRIEF

Drones over NATO; a visa wall; a rate cut; a war on late-night

Russian drones and aircraft violated the airspace of NATO members Poland and Estonia this fortnight, the most serious such incursions of the war, forcing the alliance to scramble jets and raising fears of direct confrontation. The administration imposed a staggering new fee of $100,000 on the H-1B skilled-worker visas on which the American technology industry, and hundreds of thousands of Indian workers, depend, a potential body blow to the sector and to the Indian professionals who are its backbone. And the Federal Reserve cut interest rates by a quarter point on September 17, its first cut of the year, as the labour market weakened.

The Column

After the killing, who gets blamed

A political activist was assassinated this fortnight, and the response was not mourning but a promise of retribution against his enemies. The speed of that turn, from a dead man to a licensed hunt, is not partisan. It is a mechanism, and it runs the same regardless of whose body starts it.

By Zainab Zaheer

A conservative activist was assassinated, and before the country had finished absorbing the horror, the horror had already been converted into something else, a promise of retribution, a naming of enemies, a demand that a whole side of the political spectrum be held to account for the bullet. The speed of that conversion, from a killing to a hunt, is worth stopping over, because it is the same mechanism I have watched operate after killings on the other side, and its sameness across the partisan divide is precisely what makes it worth understanding rather than merely joining. The machine does not care whose corpse feeds it. It runs the same either way, and knowing how it runs is the only defence against being run by it.

The mechanism is old and well-charted, and its core is brutally simple: a community under the unbearable tension of a shock reaches, almost automatically, for a scapegoat, discharging the surplus of fear and rage it cannot hold onto a guilty party, usually one already marked as other, whose punishment promises to restore the broken order. René Girard, who traced this pattern across myth and scripture and history, insisted on the cruel part, which is that from the inside it feels exactly like justice; the community does not experience itself as choosing a victim but as identifying the real culprit, and the very conviction of righteousness is the mechanism working, not evidence against it. What we are watching after this assassination, the instantaneous leap from a single killer to a collective enemy who must now pay, is the mechanism in its purest political form: the death is real, the grief is real, and the surplus of anguish is being discharged, as it always is, onto a category, in the felt certainty that this is not scapegoating but accountability.

Here the honest counterargument must be made, and I refuse to skip it, because on this one the other side has a real point and pretending otherwise would be exactly the dishonesty I am warning against. Words do have consequences; a political culture that dehumanises its opponents, that calls them evil and enemies and existential threats, does contribute to a climate in which some unstable person eventually acts, and to wave that away with "you cannot blame speech for a lone gunman" is too easy, because speech shapes the world the gunman lives in. I hold this. Rhetoric is not innocent, and a movement that spends years painting a target should not be wholly surprised when someone fires at it. But notice the distance between "our poisoned discourse bears some diffuse responsibility for a climate" and "these specific enemies are guilty of this specific killing and must now be made to pay," because that distance is exactly the ground the scapegoat mechanism crosses at a sprint, converting a genuine and shared and uncomfortable truth about collective climate into a targeted license against named opponents, which is a different thing entirely and a dangerous one.

There is ample reason to distrust this machine, and history supplies it: whole communities have been made the scapegoat, the available category onto which a shocked society discharged its surplus of fear after a killing, so that the crime of an individual became the guilt of a faith and the punishment of a community. I have watched the felt-certainty of justice descend on people who did nothing, watched a whole population made to pay for a bullet fired by a single man, and I know how completely the mechanism disguises itself as righteousness to those it moves. So when I see the same leap performed after this assassination, I cannot cheer it even though the victim was not of my politics, because I recognise the machinery, and I know it does not stop at its first plausible target, and I know that the certainty of the people operating it is not a reason to trust it but the very sign that it is running.

The discipline this fortnight demands, and will almost entirely be denied, is the hardest one: to hold the grief and the diffuse truth about poisoned discourse together, while refusing the leap to collective retribution that feels like their natural conclusion and is in fact their perversion. Mourn the man. Reckon, honestly and on all sides, with a discourse that manufactures targets. And refuse, absolutely, the conversion of a killing into a license, because that conversion is not justice for the dead; it is the oldest human machine using the dead as fuel, and it has never once, in all of history, been fed enough to be satisfied. It only learns, each time it is fed, that it works, and comes back hungrier, for the next available someone, after the next unbearable shock.

Field Notes
A Relentless build, told plainly

The requirement nobody stated, and the discipline of finding out what a business actually needs

This fortnight's front page is about a country failing to understand itself. This is about the humbler failure of understanding at the root of most bad software: building what people asked for instead of what they actually need. No client is named.

By Alosh Paul

The most expensive mistakes I have seen in enterprise software were not coding errors or failed technologies. They were failures of understanding, systems built perfectly to a specification that was itself wrong, that captured what people said they wanted rather than what they actually needed, and that therefore delivered, flawlessly, the wrong thing. This is the great hidden failure of my trade, and it has taught me that the most important and most undervalued discipline in building any system is not the building; it is the discovery, the patient, sceptical work of finding out what a business actually needs, which is almost never the same as what it initially asks for.

Here is why the two diverge so reliably. When you ask people what they want from a new system, they tell you, sincerely, and what they tell you is shaped entirely by the system they already have and the way they already work. They ask for a faster version of what they do now, a better version of the familiar, the current process with its current assumptions, because that is the only frame they have. What they cannot tell you, because they cannot see it, is the thing underneath: the actual problem they are trying to solve, the real outcome they need, which the current process is often a poor and habit-bound attempt to achieve. A business that asks for a better tool to manage its current fifteen-step approval process may actually need to not have a fifteen-step approval process at all; the fifteen steps are the accumulated scar tissue of old problems, and building a beautiful system to execute them faster is building the wrong thing beautifully. The stated requirement is the surface. The actual need is underneath, and it takes real discipline, and a willingness to keep asking "but why do you do it that way, and what are you actually trying to achieve," to reach it.

This is why I have come to believe that discovery, the unglamorous front-end work of genuinely understanding a business before building anything, is where projects are actually won or lost, and it is exactly the phase everyone wants to rush through to get to the "real work" of building. But building the wrong thing efficiently is worse than useless; it is expensive, it is demoralising, and it entrenches the wrong process in software that is now hard to change. The discipline is to resist the specification, to treat what people ask for as a clue to what they need rather than an order to be filled, to sit with the business long enough and sceptically enough to understand the actual problem beneath the stated request, and only then to build, because a system built to the real need, even if it looks nothing like what was originally asked for, delivers value, while a system built to the stated want, however well, often delivers a faster version of the wrong thing. Understanding what someone actually needs, as opposed to what they say they want, is the hardest and most valuable work there is, in software and, this fortnight's front page suggests, in the governing of countries too. It is the work everyone wants to skip, and it is the work everything else depends on.

The Ledger
AI
The H-1B visa fee threatens the human foundation of both American and Indian technology, and, by extension, the AI build-out that depends on skilled engineers. A hundred-thousand-dollar wall around American technical talent is a strange move for a country that says it must win the AI race.
Data centers & power
Quiet this fortnight against the political violence and the visa shock. The build-out continues; the human-talent question the visa fee raises is as real a constraint as the power one.
Rates
The Fed's first cut of the year arrives as the labour market weakens, the central bank easing into an economy softened by tariffs and uncertainty, under mounting political pressure on its independence.
Real estate
US 30-year mortgage 6.35 percent (September 18), falling on the Fed cut and economic weakness, the lowest in a year. Relief for buyers, driven, as all year, by the economy's cooling rather than its strength.
India tech
The $100,000 H-1B fee is potentially devastating for India's technology sector, for which the visa is a crucial pathway, and for the hundreds of thousands of Indian professionals who are the backbone of American tech. Coming atop the tariff rupture, it deepens the sense in Delhi that the American relationship can no longer be relied upon, and accelerates the search for alternatives.
What we called wrong
The test is simple and grim, whether a killing moves a nation to lower the temperature or to raise it, and the early signs, retribution crowding out mourning, point the wrong way. We would like to be wrong about this one.
The Back Page

The generation that would not wait

They organised on Discord and TikTok, the very platforms their government tried to ban, and in two days they brought that government down. Nepal's "Gen Z revolution" this fortnight was the latest in a pattern that is becoming the signature political event of the age: a young, connected, furious generation, locked out of opportunity by corruption and gerontocratic elites, watching the privileged children of the powerful flaunt their wealth online, and reaching a collective breaking point that, once reached, topples in days what had seemed immovable for years. It happened in Sri Lanka in 2022, in Bangladesh in 2024, and now in Nepal, and the pattern is consistent: a spark, often a small one, a social-media ban, a price rise, a single outrage, igniting a generational fury that had been accumulating for years beneath a surface of apparent stability, and a government discovering, too late, that it had lost the consent of its young entirely and was standing on nothing. There is something both thrilling and frightening in it. Thrilling, because it is the powerless, the young, the locked-out, discovering their collective power and using it to throw off corrupt elites who thought themselves permanent. Frightening, because revolutions devour their young, because what comes after the burning of the parliament is so often chaos or a new tyranny, because a generation that knows how to tear down has still to learn how to build. But the pattern itself is the message, and the powerful everywhere should read it: a young generation, connected, furious, and locked out, is the most combustible political force on Earth, and the elites who ignore its fury, who flaunt their privilege before it, who try to ban the platforms where it gathers, are lighting a fuse whose length they cannot measure. Nepal's young would not wait. Increasingly, nor will anyone's.

The Fortnight's Fable

The Village That Hired a Rememberer

A busy village, weary of keeping its own histories, hired a clever stranger to remember everything on its behalf, and he did it so well that the villagers gratefully stopped remembering anything at all. Then one year the stranger left, or died, or merely raised his price beyond what they could pay, and the village discovered it no longer knew its own laws, or where its borders ran, or the reason behind its oldest and most important rule.

Moral: a people that pays a stranger to hold its memory has not spared itself the labour of remembering; it has only chosen the day on which it will forget, and let another man name the price of that day.