KARENNA BIETENDUVEL BROCKMAN PRESENTS
The first act of rebellion is understanding the game you're playing…
Karenna Bietenduvel Brockman is an American writer, social scientist, and strategist studying the most fascinating, destructive, and occasionally ridiculous species on Earth: humans.
With a background in anthropology, consumer psychology, advertising, and artificial intelligence, her work explores the invisible systems governing human behavior, from the incentives that shape individual decisions to the institutions that shape entire civilizations.
Her research has rarely been confined to a classroom.
From the highly engineered social order of Singapore to the contradictions of American capitalism, from corporate boardrooms to unfamiliar cultures across four continents, Karenna has spent much of her adult life observing how people behave when confronted with power, money, status, fear, freedom, and change.
Her professional career has taken her through international hospitality, entrepreneurship, and the inner workings of global advertising and media. She has worked within the orbit of some of the world’s most powerful media empires, including organizations connected to billionaire family dynasties and oligarchs across Russia and Asia.
Her years in Singapore offered a particularly revealing vantage point. Behind the immaculate architecture, engineered efficiency, and carefully cultivated image of one of the world's safest cities, she encountered a far more complicated social landscape. A world where extraordinary wealth, private influence, status, and the contradictions of human nature existed beneath a veneer of near-perfect order.
These experiences offered an unusually intimate perspective on the machinery of influence, the psychology of consumption, and the often uncomfortable distance between what societies claim to value and what they actually reward.
Her first book, Champagne & Razorblades: The Untold Truth of Life in a Futuristic Society, brings those observations together in a provocative literary memoir exploring consciousness, human behavior, surveillance, artificial intelligence, and the beautiful absurdity of being alive during a period of extraordinary technological transformation.
At the center of her work is Civilization 0, a developing intellectual framework examining the psychological and systemic limitations that may prevent humanity from becoming a more conscious, autonomous, and advanced civilization.
Outside her writing, Karenna is a boxer, freediver, and lifelong student of the natural world. She has participated in coral reef rehabilitation in the Philippines and spent years living and working across radically different social environments.
She is interested in what happens when we stop confusing technological progress with human progress.
And whether the greatest threat to civilization has ever been anything other than human nature itself.
SEVERAL LIVES. ONE ABSURD GAME.
I’ve sold luxury, fought people for sport, explored the ocean, and developed a rather inconvenient obsession with human potential.
After years of studying human behavior across wildly different corners of the world, I've arrived at a fairly ridiculous question:
How does humanity beat the game of life and become a Type I civilization?
There's just one small problem.
We've developed artificial intelligence, mapped the human genome, and built machines capable of exploring other planets.
Meanwhile, we've somehow reinvented medieval feudalism. The castles are data centers, the kings are tech oligarchs, and the serfs are voluntarily surrendering their autonomy in exchange for convenience.
Extraordinary technological progress. Medieval psychological development.
Champagne & Razorblades is my attempt to expose the rules of the game before we lose it.
The objective? Beat Civilization 0.
Ideally, before someone figures out how to charge us rent for existing. 🥂