Return of the apocalypse

The summer of how-did-we-get-here? books continues with three more titles – and there are at least two more to come in the next month. This latest crop take broader views than the last few, which were mostlsy centered on Silicon Valley and written by people who live there. In End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor treat the predations of billionaires as just one piece of a larger global turn to the right. They begin their tale at Davos and US president Donald Trump’s 2025 speech promoting New Gaza, a privately-owned model gated city built on the demolitions taking place as he spoke. As they acknowledge, Klein spotted spotted the exploitation of disasters as opportunities 20 years ago in The Shock Doctrine. Although Klein and Taylor nod at a variety of other causes, they think technological rightward swing has been driven by the promise of reaching AGI (or superintelligence, or the Singularity, whatever you want to call it) even though the…