The fight over the future is rapidly unfolding before our eyes. With debates roiling Washington over calls to rein in artificial intelligence before it’s too late as the U.S. continues to wage official and unofficial wars around the world, many of the world’s most powerful players are licking their chops.
Yes, there’s destruction all around. But these players have carefully concocted a plan: to hasten a familiar vision that combines biblical, militant, and futuristic images of the end times so they can save themselves.
This week on The Intercept Briefing, host Akela Lacy interviews award-winning authors and documentarians Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, whose new book, “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World,” maps the players who want to speed up the end of the world.
“We didn’t feel that the old ways of understanding who Trump is, what he’s trying to accomplish — even what fascism is — was fully capturing what we were seeing. Here we’re thinking about invading Greenland, declaring Canada the 51st state, creating an ICE army, the relationship with El Salvador’s maximum-security prisons. So we’re trying to map this,” says Klein. It seemed to be “a fascism that had no vision of our world continuing. There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but there is a horizon for the in-group after the cataclysm, and we weren’t seeing that in this politics. It was much more about bunkering down in and taking breakdown for granted.”
“End times fascism is an alliance of three main components,” says Taylor. The religious fundamentalists who helped elect Donald Trump, wanting to hasten along a violent Armageddon so Jesus will return. The tech accelerationists “exalting in the possibility that some sort of super intelligence, some sort of digital being might take over.” The ethnonationalists who view immigration as an existential threat, so they fortress the border and hoard resources. “These different prongs find a kind of uneasy alliance in their conviction that this world’s going to hell and that their group will survive the wreckage,” says Taylor.
It may sound bizarre. And it is. But that doesn’t mean we should ignore it, Klein says. “This is a really dangerous pattern of thought: that out of the worst things possible comes the beautiful, glorious golden city. And that’s the template of all of these action films and video games, and it leads one to embrace the worst and to not fear what we should fear,” says Klein. “When Trump shares a video of a remade Gaza with a Trump Tower, he’s doing a version of that story. When Sam Altman says he’s summoning a digital god, and we’re going to have utopia with AI, and yeah, let me cover the whole world with data centers and accelerate the climate crisis because it’s going to be utopia … he’s doing the story. So we have to be able to identify it — because we’re all living with the consequences of this terrible story and we need better stories.”
“In this moment, we’re up against a fascism that is against all humans, in a way. We quote Kelly Hayes, an activist based in Chicago, and she says, ‘Every fascism has its subhumans, and for techno-fascists, it’s just humans in general.’ This is opening up a bigger fight beyond ‘I am a man’ to just like, this is life versus the machines, and there’s something very unprecedented about that and potentially very unifying,” says Taylor, noting that the collective uprising, across the political spectrum, against data centers shows people breaking free of one so-called inevitable future.
For more, listen to the full conversation of The Intercept Briefing on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you listen.
Transcript
Akela Lacy: Welcome to The Intercept Briefing, I’m Akela Lacy, senior politics reporter at The Intercept. Today, we’re going to talk about the apocalypse.
NBC: You truly believe AI can kill us all in less than a decade?
Jacob Coxon: Yes, I do.
AL: If you’ve been disturbed by the increasingly dystopian flavor of today’s world, you’re not alone. It can be hard to keep track.
And if you listen to this show, you’re familiar with the imagery: Masked agents in the streets. Soldiers clad in camo patrolling U.S cities. Mounting numbers of U.S. strikes committing extrajudicial killings of civilians in international waters. And a populace faced with a literal war against machines — not just at home but around the world.
U.S. Central Command’s Adm. Brad Cooper: First our war fighters are leveraging a variety of advanced AI tools.
AL: Washington is in turmoil over calls coming from inside the house to regulate AI before it’s too late. President Donald Trump has called the whole dustup a “hoax,” even as MAGA architect Steve Bannon appeared alongside Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders to promote human control over AI, as Congress balks at renewed public pressure to do something — anything — before they recess again until November.
Bernie Sanders: When the future of humanity is at stake, we need binding international safety rules, not voluntary standards from the industry.
Steve Bannon: All they’re trying to do is to use a crisis and turn it to their advantage, turn it to their advantage by creating a moat, a cartel, where not only can’t other aspiring companies get in, but more importantly, they’re going to have a liability shift to the American people.
AL: None of this would come as a surprise to our guests today, award-winning journalists and documentarians Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, whose latest book documents the end-times ideology that unites the players trying to hasten just the final doomsday AI leaders are warning us about.
Today, we’re discussing the players responsible for bringing the most Orwellian features of our collective imagination to life. And we’ll break down just what their project entails: prophecy as policy, and speeding up the end of the world to save the chosen few.
Klein and Taylor’s new book is called “End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World.”
Naomi Klein is an award-winning journalist and documentary filmmaker and also the bestselling author of “Doppelganger,” “No Logo,” and “The Shock Doctrine.” She is an associate professor of geography and a co-director of the Centre for Climate Justice at the University of British Columbia, and she writes a regular column for The Guardian.
Naomi Klein, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Naomi Klein: Thank you, it’s great to be with you.
AL: Astra Taylor, also an award-winning journalist and documentarian, is a co-founder of the Debt Collective. She is the author of “The People’s Platform,” which won the American Book Award; “Democracy May Not Exist, but We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone”; and “The Age of Insecurity.” Taylor regularly writes for publications including The New Yorker and the New York Times.
Astra Taylor, welcome to The Intercept Briefing.
Astra Taylor: Really excited to be here.
AL: I want to start with how you conceptualized this idea. How did you come to develop the notion of “end times fascism”?
NK: It was born of the early weeks of the new, the second Trump administration — really trying to put our fingers on the continuities and the ruptures of what we were seeing. Both Astra and I had been doing a lot of public conversations, webinars, and we both remember the first Trump administration.
So we were familiar with certain things that we were seeing, but we didn’t feel that the old ways of understanding who Trump is, what he’s trying to accomplish — even what fascism is — was fully capturing what we were seeing. Here we’re thinking about invading Greenland, declaring Canada the 51st state, creating an ICE army, the relationship with El Salvador’s maximum-security prisons. So we’re trying to map this.
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For me personally, I was finding that a lot of people were reading and talking about earlier books of mine, like “The Shock Doctrine,” as a way to understand it. I was feeling like it does not actually capture the full thing.
History does not just repeat on a loop. We often talk about how it accumulates, it compounds. So as people who are pretty keenly attuned to both political and ecological crises, we were noticing that the planet is a player in our politics, and that this seemed to be a kind of fascism that was different in that it didn’t have a future horizon. This was a fascism that had no vision of our world continuing. There’s always an apocalyptic quality to fascism, but there is a horizon for the in-group after the cataclysm — and we weren’t seeing that in this politics. It was much more about bunkering down and taking breakdown for granted.
Those are the origins of it. We’re not saying it’s wholly new; we’re saying that history moves and takes us to new places.
“This was a fascism that had no vision of our world continuing. … It was much more about bunkering down and taking breakdown for granted.”
AL: Astra, for people who haven’t read the book, can you tell us briefly, like, a top-level view of what you’re arguing?
AT: We’re arguing that the far right has taken a new apocalyptic turn. To emphasize what Naomi just said, we’re interested in the continuities, but we’re also interested in what has changed.
People for a while have been wondering, is this the F word? Is this fascism? If so, what does that mean for us? This book attempts to answer that question by really taking seriously what has changed. And as a consequence, how has the right wing changed?
The fascism of the 20th century emerged out of certain catastrophic conditions, the sort of classic fascism, which also had antecedents in colonialism and Jim Crow. It also didn’t come from nowhere. But it was a phenomenon that emerged in the wreckage of the First World War and the Great Depression. It was a response to those crises.
Today, we’re living in an age of crises that were unimaginable a century ago. Climate change, an era of nuclear weapons — nuclear weapons were not known to Mussolini or Hitler — artificial intelligence, forms of wealth that are incredibly concentrated and incredibly global, social media, incredibly networked media technologies. This planetary scale has shifted the kind of fascism that we’re responding to.
Our argument is that, as a response to these crises, the fascism of today has abandoned the idea of Armageddon ever ending, of there being a future horizon for their in-group. And that end times fascism is actually an alliance. Fascism is always an alliance, an uncomfortable alliance of different groups.
“These different prongs find a kind of uneasy alliance in their conviction that this world’s going to hell and that their group will survive the wreckage.”
But end times fascism is an alliance of three main components. The book analyzes them, in the ways that they overlap and the ways that they actually conflict.
The religious end-timers who are a major force in the U.S. government and the Israeli government, and more broadly, who have a messianic conviction that the end is nigh and that the Messiah will come, and they want to accelerate what they see as the fulfillment of biblical prophecy.
The tech end-timers — the tech-right — that is playing with a similar script in the sense that they’re imagining a future where they have created a digital super intelligence or maybe we’ve left the planet.
And then the ethno-nationalist end-timers who view immigration as an existential threat and believe the only response to the increasing disasters and insecurity is to fortress the border and bunker down and save their in-group.
So these different prongs find a kind of uneasy alliance in their conviction that this world’s going to hell and that their group will survive the wreckage.
There’s old, classic features of fascism: a supremacist thinking, eugenics thinking; a willingness to indulge in violence; a sense of woundedness. Fascism is always a movement of the powerful injured, so their sense that they’re under siege from below. These dimensions, though, have been updated for our new risk-filled era. So the book looks at the coalition and their strengths, but also their weaknesses.
“A sense of woundedness — fascism is always a movement of the powerful injured.”
AL: The book is an exploration of how deeply so much of the far right and its grip on sectors from tech to the military has been driven by what you’re talking about, this apocalyptic worldview.
One question I wanted to put to both of you is, when you think about this, how do you understand a vision that is so destructive also being so unifying for these coalitions that you’re talking about?
NK: As Astra was saying, fascism always arises during moments of crisis. Actually, there’s always a kind of a pincer of real crisis.
When Mussolini and Hitler rose up, the real crises of the wreckage of the First World War, economic desperation, cities choked with orphans, maimed soldiers. These were really genuinely horrific times. In response to what many people understood as the savagery of capitalism revealing itself was a rising militant left.
This was also the years after the Russian Revolution, and it was the years when socialists were saying, “We want a revolution in every country.” It was a global movement, and it was a movement that was saying, “You can’t actually have socialism in one country.”
So elites in every country were quite terrified that the response to these real crises would come for them, come up, would come for the system itself.
And so fascism pivots. It recognizes the rage, and it says, “Your rage is real. We feel it. Hey, here’s who to blame. It’s the immigrants crossing the border. That’s the real invasion. They’re coming for your stuff. They’re coming for your jobs. They’re the reason your life is painful,” and offers up all of the other scapegoats. So that can be unifying. It’s an old trick. That’s the Trump playbook. It’s the [Javier] Milei playbook. It’s the [Jair] Bolsonaro playbook. It’s a global playbook.
This is the other thing that we’re trying to do in the book, is wrench the U.S. out of its parochialism a little bit and be like, actually, the laboratory for this in many ways is more Latin America and Europe. It’s coming at a delay in the United States. And though it has particular characteristics in the United States, and in every country there’s particular characteristics, this is very much a global phenomenon.
But I think we wrote the book because we actually think it’s not that unifying. That scapegoat move is always going to be an effective move, but the nature of this alliance is almost uniquely unsteady because, where it’s useful to look at what is the same and what is different with 20th-century fascism, and — here I should add, massive asterisk: We’re not nostalgic for 20th-century fascism. Ye olde fascism. Don’t want that.
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But it is useful to look at the fact that Mussolini really did, and so did Franco, invest in major public works projects. Hitler did make the trains run on time, famously. Our fascists don’t care about trains, airports. They fly private. They can live with a level of chaos. They deliver less for their own base, for the people who elected them.
“Our fascists don’t care about trains, airports. They fly private. They can live with a level of chaos. They deliver less for their own base, for the people who elected them.”
We see these ruptures really clearly. In things like Steve Bannon going off on the tech oligarchs, which I never thought people should take all that seriously because he has his own tech oligarchs who’ve been funding him all along.
But we should take seriously these extraordinary uprisings against data centers, where people at the grassroots are finding they have more in common with the people they’ve been warring with over the culture wars they’ve been steadily fed, and going like, “Actually, we all really do agree that we don’t want to live under constant surveillance by Silicon Valley, and we don’t want this data center in our backyard, and we don’t want our kids taught by AI.” Hey, like this is a hell of a lot better than what we saw a few years ago at community meetings. It’s the instability that is really most interesting to us.
By taking them seriously and highlighting how nihilistic and how apocalyptic and how exclusive the vision is, we think we make them weaker, not stronger. We’re saying, “Don’t be afraid to look at this, because actually the more you look at it, the more we drag it into the light, the more vulnerable it is.”
AL: You mentioned this, Astra, laying out the major players in “End Times Fascism” as the religious right, Big Tech, and aspiring bunker-builders, as you describe them, namely those leading the anti-immigrant movement and trafficking in great replacement ideology that’s shaping U.S. policy.
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I want to start with the religious right. This is something we’ve discussed at length on this show, but I want to ask you all, what is something you think the general public understands the least about the extent to which messianism and the end times fixation that comes with it undergirds this political moment and shapes the Trump administration in particular?
AT: People have a vague sense that Trump wouldn’t have been elected if he hadn’t had the support of white evangelicals. He famously got around 80 percent of the evangelical vote in both 2016 and in 2024. So I think people have a sense that the religious right is behind a guy who is incredibly immoral — it feels like a cognitive dissonance there, right? How is this sexual predator who’s been divorced multiple times the hero figure for this group?
Part of what explains that, though, is that they are really occupying a parallel universe. Portions of the evangelical right or Christian Zionists are committed to a version of theology where they think what’s in the Bible is literally going to happen, and that what they need to do is hasten along the sequence of events foretold — most violently and strangely in the Book of Revelation — that bad things will happen on Earth, and that means we’re moving closer to the day when there will be Armageddon and Jesus will return.
Even to a lot of Christians, this seems ridiculous. But there are people at the upper echelons of the U.S. government today who really believe it, and who see acts of violence — acts of terror — as felicitous signs.
We quote pastor John Hagee, who’s a very popular leader of a megachurch in Texas, and he’s just like: Everyone! All my thousands of followers! Call the White House and tell them that you’re so grateful for the war in Iran because that means that the end is nigh, and that means we’re that much closer to being hoovered up in a magic escalator to heaven.
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They have this theological investment in war in the Middle East and this idea that Jesus won’t return until biblical Israel is restored, which is not just the West Bank and Gaza but large swaths of other countries. They’re making common cause with Messianic Jews in Israel who, again, aren’t the whole of the government but have managed to control very powerful portions of it.
What we’re trying to convey is that we actually need to pay attention to what these folks are doing. It doesn’t need to be the majoritarian strand to be an incredibly dangerous one.
“It doesn’t need to be the majoritarian strand to be an incredibly dangerous one.”
One of our recurring jokes — it’s not even a joke, really — as we wrote this book and also as we talk about it, is that to even quote these people makes us sound insane. Because they’re doing things like importing the perfect red heifers from Texas to bring them to the Middle East. Then literally the speaker of the House, Mike Johnson, is flying over to visit these cows and go: Oh my gosh, I don’t see any spots on them. This is so great. The Bible is coming true.
These people are running the government, and we need to take seriously the risk that that poses to all of us. Again, it’s based on this idea — we return to the narrative in the Book of Revelation because it’s sort of the fundamental mythological script that these three groups are playing with, it’s the root of this apocalyptic strain.
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It essentially is a narrative that says, in the end times, there will be war, there will be pestilence, there will be floods and fires, but that just means we’re getting closer to the end when the chosen few will reach their utopia. It’s a very dangerous script.
For this part of the end times fascist alliance, it’s a literal interpretation of that script. But it’s one that has suffused our culture more broadly. This linear narrative of: Out of catastrophe, the promised land. That narrative is being followed in different sometimes secularized ways by the other parts of the right-wing alliance.
NK: If there’s one thing I learned from writing a book about people who lost their minds during Covid and then became the U.S. government, it’s that nothing is too stupid to actually manifest in reality. I’m not being glib.
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In “Doppelganger,” I quote Philip Roth saying, “It’s too ridiculous to take seriously and too serious to be ridiculous,” being a kind of a mantra for our time. But that was before RFK Jr. was put in charge of Health and Human Services. There can be this smug response from liberals of like, “That’s just too silly for me to even have to care about.”
One of the things we dug up in the book is this story that was new to me, which was that in 1969 a Christian fundamentalist named Denis Rohan actually did succeed in firebombing Al-Aqsa [Mosque]. That’s very important to this theological story because the idea is that you have to build the “Third Temple” where Al-Aqsa is in order to create the conditions for the Messiah’s arrival or return, depending on which version of the story you believe. That relates to why you need those spotless red heifers, et cetera. So they are trying to fulfill this.
But as Astra was saying, this is both a literal threat of, like, it’s literally possible that there could be — as these ideas have become more and more powerful and more mainstream within the Israeli and U.S. government, and as people who were once seen as fringe terrorists like Itamar Ben-Gvir enter the government — it’s becomes more and more possible and more likely that people will do the self-fulfilling version of this prophecy.
Because the prophecy is, first, you have to have Armageddon. And if you were to actually destroy Al-Aqsa and try to rebuild the “Third Temple,” that’s a surefire recipe for World War III with nukes.
So they are creating the story that they claim is inevitable. It’s not inevitable, but they are actually doing their best to fulfill it for all of us. We can’t afford to ignore them. But it’s also a pattern of thought — this is a really dangerous pattern of thought that, out of the worst things possible comes the beautiful, glorious golden city. And that’s the template of all of these action films and video games, and it leads one to embrace the worst and to not fear what we should fear.
When Trump shares a video of a remade Gaza with a Trump Tower — he’s doing a version of that story.
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When Sam Altman says he’s summoning a digital god, and we’re going to have utopia with AI, and yeah, let me cover the whole world with data centers and accelerate the climate crisis because it’s going to be utopia, and we’ll all just be lying around just being in awe of the wisdom that AI has unleashed for us — he’s doing the story.
So we have to be able to identify it — because we’re all living with the consequences of this terrible story, and we need better stories.
[Break]
AL: This is a good segue into talking about perhaps one of the most visible manifestations of this apocalyptic project, as you mentioned, Naomi: AI and data centers, which you all situate as part of the doom cycle. You get into this question, but I want to talk with you both about how this particular issue has brought so many of us together in unified hatred.
I love this portion of the book where you talk about this. Across the ideological spectrum, why do people hate data centers so much? What exactly is so universally repulsive about them and what they represent?
AT: This is the kind of thing that gives you hope in humanity. Why do we hate data centers? Listen to the guys running these tech companies. They’re like, “Hi, we’re going to suck up all of the energy. We’re going to raise your electricity bills. We’re going to build these big, ugly city-sized buildings that have basically no jobs, that screech and scream all night long, destroy your property values. And guess what you’re going to get in return? You’re going to get no jobs in the future for you or your kids. You’re going to live in a world that is hollowed out because everybody’s talking to their chatbot, maybe dating a chatbot. Then also guess what? It might destroy everything, because it might turn on you. So how does that sound?”
AL: Doesn’t that sound great?
AT: Of course, people are like, “Actually, that sounds terrible. We never asked for this.”
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Now, what’s interesting is these guys also have all their little podcasts where they talk amongst themselves too, so they’re like, “Geez, did we market this wrong?” And you’re like, yeah, you did, because actually you told us what you really want — which is you foresee a future with no human workers, and full of human alienation and loneliness, where one or two companies control the entire economy and maybe destroy humanity.
The reasons people object to this are obvious. It’s also building on years and years of a mounting tech-lash on both the left and the right. For different reasons, people were critical of the tech sector, and so that is also part of the foundation.
It’s really important, when Naomi said that they’re utilizing the same template — this, out of catastrophe, some kind of renewal for the chosen few. When you hear these folks talk about it, one of the founders of Google said it was “species-ist” to care about the fate of humanity, as opposed to exalting in the possibility that some sort of super intelligence, some sort of digital being might take over. That somehow we’re just close-minded for wanting to actually make a better world for human beings.
They literally talk about AI as a god or as a demon. And so they’re playing with these religious tropes. Of course, somebody like Peter Thiel and other high-powered people in Silicon Valley are increasingly coming out as Christians. Most famously, in his lectures about the Antichrist, which — tellingly — he says is somebody who wants to bring about control of AI, or like Greta Thunberg, some climate rationality.
So they’re playing with these overt theological elements. But ultimately what’s underpinning it is a material drive to own as much of the economy as possible, even if it destroys the lives of billions of people.
“Ultimately what’s underpinning it is a material drive to own as much of the economy as possible, even if it destroys the lives of billions of people.”
NK: On that last point, it’s a very profitable dream. I think that that’s true, honestly, for the theologians as well, that this is always, as [Karl] Marx said, there are opiate qualities to the story that heaven awaits, and yes, you’re suffering in the here and now, but do these things and you’re going to be in paradise.
That’s always been a story that has been very helpful to elite interests. The fact that the richest men on the planet are now telling it to us about their tech that is rapidly making them into trillionaires. It doesn’t mean they don’t believe it, but they certainly have motivations for telling us these stories. For telling us that we’re being speciesist and that we have to go along in this way.
But just on your point, why are people rejecting it? There’s this little detail that we came across in the story of one of the data center fights that I think people are by now very familiar with or should be familiar with. I think Intercept readers are familiar with what Elon Musk has done in Memphis. It’s a story of unbelievable environmental racism. The siting of these massive data centers that are impacting a majority-Black part of Memphis, Boxtown, which has these long roots of resistance.
It’s called Boxtown because it was built with the discarded parts of railway cars that were then turned into homes. Because it was unincorporated — and this is true of many Black communities — it was also chosen to be a place with very high levels of industrial pollution. It has a very strong environmental justice community, and it has all of this historical resonance because this is where Martin Luther King Jr. went to stand with the sanitation workers, which the organizers that we interviewed in Memphis consciously see the struggle as being part of that lineage and see the sanitation strike in Memphis as being the beginning of the environmental justice movement in the United States because it was a fight against a toxic workplace and work conditions.
But the detail that I was referring to, in that fight that I think often gets overlooked, is that the reason that Musk chose Memphis to build what he calls Colossus — the largest supercomputer in world history, and then he built a couple more — was because he needed to do it quickly. So he decided that he needed to find a place that would give him all the giveaways, but also where there was an empty building. He didn’t want to have to build a building from scratch. He wanted to move into a preexisting building.
In Memphis, they found a factory that was empty and in very good condition, and it was an Electrolux factory. If you look into the history of the Electrolux factory in Memphis, it’s a story of de-industrialization and free trade and broken promises because this is a factory that actually was producing ovens and other appliances, and it was moved from Canada to Memphis — from Quebec to Memphis — under NAFTA rules chasing lower wages.
So 3,000 higher-paid jobs became less than 1,000 lower-paid jobs in Memphis with contractors and so on. You see this race to the bottom. All these things were promised. They didn’t create nearly as many jobs with the Electrolux factory as they said they would. The wages weren’t as good as they said they would be. They said that all these other factories would open up, too. They didn’t.
So the re-industrialization didn’t happen with Electrolux. But then there’s this empty building, and Musk moves in, and it’s barely any jobs. We call it a ghost factory. That image of the abandoned factory was the image of the de-industrialization of the NAFTA years. But now we have this new image, which is a reoccupied former factory that once had almost 1,000 workers and now is just a bunch of buzzing computers, and whose end goal is to eliminate everyone’s job.
So why would people accept the trade-offs of that, because Musk also rigged together all of these polluting gas turbines in order to get it online quickly?
This is what we mean by history compounds. It’s not a loop. It’s more like a spiral taking us somewhere.
AT: Martin Luther King, those were the famous protests, of course, with the “I am a man” sign, where the aspiration was like, “I’m a man, recognize me as equal and human.”
“In this moment, we’re up against a fascism that is against all humans, in a way.”
In this moment, we’re up against a fascism that is against all humans, in a way. We quote Kelly Hayes, an activist based in Chicago, and she says, “Every fascism has its subhumans, and for techno-fascists, it’s just humans in general.” This is opening up a bigger fight beyond “I am a man” to just like, this is life versus the machines, and there’s something very unprecedented about that and potentially very unifying.
AL: You both pointed this out, and you get into this in the book, as to why tech giants like Elon Musk were so quick to jump on this right-wing train with the explosion of AI and how they abandoned progressive promises on the environment to warfare.
For our listeners, I’m wondering if you can walk us through that. As you point out, many of those promises were largely performative in the first place. But what made it so easy for tech titans to switch political teams here? What, if any, responsibility do Democrats hold in this dynamic?
NK: Lots of responsibility. [Laughter.]
Huge amounts of responsibility because I think that it was the Democrats — and Clinton, Obama — who first under Clinton accepted the idea of the internet as a frontier zone that couldn’t possibly be regulated or taxed. And then this continued under Obama with this very tight relationship with Silicon Valley and a revolving door of lots of people from the administration going off and taking jobs at Uber and Google and Microsoft.
Buying into this idea that these companies were blue and green and a new era — leaving sort of the dirty industrialization behind — and I think really participated in a lot of rhetoric that many of us understood to be hollow at the time, that they could be trusted to do voluntary net-zero, and they were greening their businesses, and it was all solar power and rainbows.
Under Biden, there did begin to be some changes. Astra can maybe talk about this more in terms of the intersection of the tech-lash and the fact that the Biden administration did start — not doing enough — but started doing things like hiring Lina Khan and introducing some regulations.
AT: The actions that the Biden administration took I think also should be credited to grassroots pressure to the tech workers who were organizing in the major companies. There were Google workers who walked out, both demanding better policies around sexual harassment, but also into certain military contracts.
There was a general sense from progressives and liberals that the tech sector was actually not bringing about the democratic transformation that they had so loudly promised in the years before. The Biden administration was making some moves that I think to us seemed pretty modest. It’s not like there were baseline privacy protections. It’s not like they were breaking up the tech monopolies, but yes, they hired Lina Khan and started to put up some basic regulations on crypto. That said, they did bail out Silicon Valley Bank, which was a crypto scandal. Then the folks they bailed out immediately made huge campaign contributions to Donald Trump. So that to me is a sort of parable for everything that went awry.
Ultimately though, end times fascism is a response to material conditions. Part of the Democratic failure was that they didn’t rein in concentrated wealth while they could. They didn’t regulate Big Tech when it was smaller and easier to do so. They never put constraints on these companies, and then at a certain point, they’re so big, they’re so powerful, that they’re like, “We don’t have to listen to our customers or to the public or to elected officials anymore.”
The public is “not asking for a job-destroying technology. The tech sector knows that they’re going to have to shove this down people’s throats.”
This is part of what happens when they start the rollout of generative AI. ChatGPT comes on the scene in 2023, and, again, the public is not asking for this technology. They’re not asking for a job-destroying technology. The tech sector knows that they’re going to have to shove this down people’s throats. What they needed was a strongman to help them do that, and so the alliance with Donald Trump was a merger of convenience.
What they got was a government that was going to roll out the red carpet in the sense of, “Yes, here’s the frontier,” you know, “No rules. Go for it.” What the Trump administration got was a bubble to dramatically inflate the stock market, and also a partner for the fossil fuel industry because this has given a lifeline to the fossil fuel sector, along with the attacks on renewables. It was a win-win for both camps.
Silicon Valley has a long history of libertarianism, of anti-democratic thinking that was marginal. But its moment has come. Its moment has come because of these underlying material changes. At a certain point, you’re so rich you don’t have to pretend to be nice anymore.
“At a certain point, you’re so rich you don’t have to pretend to be nice anymore.”
AL: This is a good segue into the final thing I want to end on, which is, and we haven’t really talked as much about the bunkerism and the anti-immigration as much as I wanted to get into. But it’s part and parcel of the thing that was at least in the back of my mind as I was reading this, which is like, where is all of this fricking money coming from?
How is it possible to unleash endless amounts of capital to slash red tape, for not just AI infrastructure and data centers, but also the explosion of Trump’s nationalized police force going after immigrants. When on the flip side, all we hear about policies that actually the public is asking for — to your point, Astra — Medicare for All or substantial climate policy or like green infrastructure policy, all you hear is, “We can’t pay for it.”
So I wonder if you all could talk about that contradiction, and what is the path out of that in terms of flipping that argument on its head? We have the money to pay for anything. We’re just paying for the wrong things.
NK: This is often felt very acutely in the communities that are fighting back against the data centers. We quote KeShaun Pearson in Memphis who heads Memphis Community Against Pollution. He’s also Rep. Justin Pearson‘s brother. He talks about what kind of infrastructure they actually need. We’re getting this data center, but we’re not getting transit, we’re not getting books for our schools. There’s so much else, green energy, no shortage of ideas. The money clearly is there if we decided to spend it differently.
This is part of why we’re seeing a surge of support for democratic socialism, because people understand that they have been lied to, that there was way more that we could be asking of governments. Even if you look at Trump’s tariff regime and the abandon with which he breaks the trade deals that the U.S. has entered into, shows that these deals were not as binding as we were told, and that they also could’ve been changed, but they could’ve been changed in the interests of working people instead of in the interests of corporations. So a lot more is possible.
But that said, Akela, it’s very frightening. The decisions that are being made are clearly designed to both hollow out the state and create a time bomb in the stock market that is rigged to explode on working people, on pensioners — and for the people who created this crisis to rapture themselves out of it.
“The decisions that are being made are clearly designed to both hollow out the state and create a time bomb in