The Armageddon Economy

It can feel like an existential moment right now, one where many tech leaders are both warning against and accelerating the destructive forces of AI. But Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor argue that this could also be a turning point toward building something better. The authors of “End Times Fascism” talk to “Galaxy Brain” host Charlie Warzel about runaway wealth, the politics of AI, and how to prepare if the tech-bloated market crashes. - - - Get more from your favorite Atlantic voices when you subscribe. You’ll enjoy unlimited access to Pulitzer-winning journalism, from clear-eyed analysis and insight on breaking news to fascinating explorations of our world. Atlantic subscribers also get access to exclusive subscriber audio in Apple Podcasts. Subscribe today at TheAtlantic.com/Listener. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:19Speaker 01

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Moderesi-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:46Speaker 02

  Are there ways to deal with a crash that lets the people who perpetrated this, like, eat the downside? Like, could this be an opportunity to get rid of some of the excess wealth and the inequality in this moment?

• 1:04Charlie Warzel?

  I'm Charlie Warzel, and this is Galaxy Brain. There's all kinds of chaos in the world right now. Multiple wars, the ongoing climate crisis. It's a bizarre and existential moment, and Silicon Valley is not helping. AI researchers are quitting in droves. They're worried that what they're building might kill us all. And it's easy, in this moment, to dismiss all of this talk reflexively, to see this as little more than a form of tech marketing. Or conversely, it's easy to believe it all uncritically.

• 1:46Charlie Warzel?

  But my guests today have a different framework from which to process this moment, both in Silicon Valley and in the rest of the world. In their new book, End Times Fascism, the writers Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor offer up an idea that what we've seen from tech leaders in the last decade, from the AI buildout to the tech leaders pivot to supporting and working with Donald Trump, it's all part of a broader movement of politicians and titans of industry trying to consolidate power in a moment of global instability. That this movement is, in meaningful ways, circular. For example, the tech tools create the conditions for chaos, and then those same leaders capitalize on the chaos.

• 2:31Charlie Warzel?

  Klein is a New York Times bestselling author and a professor of climate justice who has been interrogating corporate power for decades. Astra Taylor is a writer, documentary filmmaker, and an activist. Together, their argument is an attempt to explain a theory of power here in this turbulent decade, and how it both builds off of and is different from the previous eras. But I really wanted to bring them on to zero in specifically on the end times part of their argument. Because whatever you think about what's going on with our tech leaders, it seems very clear that the industry has adopted a zealous, even religious, attitude in recent years. Promises of both utopian salvation and apocalyptic destruction are now commonplace.

• 3:16Charlie Warzel?

  Silicon Valley is currently enamored with and terrified by the prospect that they are building God. They're asking the rest of us to have faith, to put our trust in the technology and in that. But what world are they really trying to build here? And how did we get here? Klein and Taylor join me now to talk about it all. Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor, welcome to Galaxy Brain.

• 3:51Speaker 02

  Glad to be here.

• 3:53Charlie Warzel?

  So I want to just start straight off with definitions here. The book is called End Times Fascism. Let's start with defining end times fascism, and also how it both iterates on and is different from previous forms of fascism.

• 4:08Speaker 02

  We subscribe to a view of fascism as something that didn't just emerge as a kind of rupture in Europe in the 20th century, but something as a through line. Fascism has precedence. Fascism is a form of far-right reactionary politics that uses democracy against itself, that creates kind of vertical alliances between corporate and political elites. It is an elite-led, right-wing movement, creates kind of solidarities with a group of people we describe as the injured powerful. And so end times fascism is our term for a form of fascism that is in dialogue, that is responsive to novel planetary-scale crises. So Hitler and Mussolini did not know a world with atomic weapons.

• 4:52Speaker 02

  That's something that changes the nature of what it means to be human, the fact that we can cause that kind of annihilation. Wealth is extremely concentrated. It was concentrated then, but now is even more kind of globally connected and concentrated in the hands of single individuals, like someone like Elon Musk, the world's first trillionaire. We also live in a world that is being destabilized by climate change. So, you know, the fascists of yore understood, like, pollution in the sense of something localized, but they didn't understand the way we were altering the chemistry of the planet. That is a huge factor in our analysis. And of course, now, all of these threats are being compounded by artificial intelligence. And today's fascists are responding to these very real risks by basically accelerating,

• 5:36Speaker 02

  by slamming the foot on the gas and taking, basically, saying that they'll protect their in-group, and believing that they'll be safe no matter what. So that's why we see, you know, all of these high-tech lavish bunkers and this drive to fortress the nation. So fascism is always a response to real crises. It's always a response to threats from the left, threats of redistribution. But the nature of the threats that we're facing have changed, and we have all changed, I think, in response to these crises.

• 6:08Charlie Warzel?

  Well, Naomi, then, maybe this is a moment to ask, is there a distinction here between an opportunism with, you know, with taking some of this, these global crises, and, you know, you're saying that the reaction, the reactionary nature is in response to that? Is it opportunism, or is it trying to continue, in your minds, perpetuating that because it is also very helpful to, you know, the causes of an oligarchical class?

• 6:42Speaker 04

  Yeah, so fascism is always an alliance. This is something else that recurs through the history of fascism. The Latin word means bundle, fascia, right? So it always has these distinct elements. And the elements of the fascist bundle that we look at in the book, that we identify as being part of this far-right coalition that we're writing about, include people who have a very literalist end times religious belief, right? So they really do believe that we are entering the end of days. And we also look at people we're calling tech end timers, right, who are very focused

• 7:25Speaker 04

  on AI, and they have a story that really echoes these religious stories about how a new age is going to begin to change absolutely everything, maybe birth a new species, summoning a god. Like, there's a religious quality to the stories that some of the people at the forefront of AI are telling. And then we look at the mass ethno-nationalist base of the far-right around the world, not just in the United States, for whom the chosenness is citizenship, and the bunker is the nation-state.

• 8:07Speaker 04

  But only certain people get to stay, and they're very focused on keeping people out, right? So in terms of like, whether it's opportunistic or accelerationist, it depends on who we're talking about. I think that for the religious members of this coalition, you know, some of it is just identifying the crises that Astra mentioned, interpreting them as signs, right? I mean, as we face real ecological boundaries, those are things that are accelerating pandemics. So they are welcomed and interpreted as signs. But as this kind of millenarian fever takes hold, and there is this feeling among messianic

• 8:50Speaker 04

  Jews and Christian Zionists that we really have entered the end of days, then you get into a loop where, because you believe that the end times are upon us, you do accelerationist things, like you actively expand wars, right? So it isn't just opportunistic. It isn't just kind of like, these things are happening anyway. It's, hey, let's attack Iran. Let's expand the war to the whole region. All of this is good, the worse the better, right? And this is the danger of this kind of religion, is that it interprets things that really are objectively bad as good.

• 9:29Speaker 04

  It has a built-in incentive to accelerate them. Not true of everybody who is Christian, not true of everybody who is Jewish, but is true of people who are the most kind of fundamentalist believers of this, these end times prophecies. Then you have, in the tech world, definitely you have opportunism. You know, we quote this now kind of famous correspondence between Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein about, okay, Brexit has happened, the UK economy is going down, it's the era of collapse. You know, now it's all about making money on the collapse, right? Return to tribalism.

• 10:13Speaker 04

  This is Epstein writing, right? So I think that we are seeing a kind of Armageddon economy where, you know, when I wrote the shock doctrine, I wrote about disaster capitalism. This was more about taking advantage of punctuated shocks, right? Like a war, a natural disaster. I think there is an economic shift going on now where a lot of people are betting on bad times, right? They are looking at the same forecast that we are, but they aren't interested in thinking about how you mitigate them. They're thinking, okay, things are going down, but that doesn't mean that we have to stop profiting. There's money to be made in containing refugees.

• 10:55Speaker 04

  There's money to be made in building prisons and deportation flights, in mass surveillance. So it's a pretty bleak economy, but it creates, once again, these negative incentives, right? Because once you've really invested in it, then you don't want there to be good times, because good times are bad. And, you know, we quote Alexander Karp saying, "Bad times are good for a palantir." And that's not good for the rest of us. You know, we don't want, you know, we don't want large parts of our economy that aren't very invested in the, in times staying bad.

• 11:29Charlie Warzel?

  For this conversation, I want to focus on that tech portion of your book. And the, I think, you know, you were speaking about the religious leaders and the way that when you believe that you are in this end times moment, this apocalyptic moment, you do accelerationist things. And I think, you know, when we're talking about AI and the tech world as it is right now, a lot of people think, and you all write about AI as, you know, the creation of this, you know, godlike, superintelligence thing, or whatever it is, right? This, but I also think that-

• 12:09Speaker 04

  We quote them saying it, yeah.

• 12:11Charlie Warzel?

  Yes.

• 12:11Speaker 04

  We don't believe it, but yeah.

• 12:12Charlie Warzel?

  Yes. But I also think too, that the entire technology is in itself, it's not just religious in what it could do, but it's the, the entire technology is a, is a, I like to call it a faith-based technology, in the sense that you are always shadowboxing the future version of what this will be, right? The classic line is, "This is the worst the technology will ever be. Just wait, just wait, just wait." And this idea that you are never selling anything that you currently have, you are selling the idea, and the way that that, that that sort of religious nature exists now as the, as the main form of marketing in the industry, is the main way that venture

• 12:57Charlie Warzel?

  capital flows in and that people, you know, gain a foothold in the industry and power. And so I think that that is really interesting, the way that there is that, that parallel there, that the, the tech industry has sort of taken on a religious nature in how, just how it behaves.

• 13:15Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, and there is precedent for this in the sense, I mean, if you go back to the old days, before they all came out as far right, I mean, we talked about the cult of the founder, right? I mean, they were talked, they were described in the press as oracles, as prophets, right? I mean, they would be like pitching a delivery app and people were like, oh, you know, they're bringing democracy, they're bringing deliverance, like they, and that, so that was part of their brand. And I think, like any cult, when the evidence starts piling up against you, like you dig in all the more. So I think what your description of it as a faith-based technology feels like really apt, right? It's just like, just believe, just put all the money in there, just put all the resources

• 13:58Speaker 04

  in there, like, you know, don't doubt, don't doubt what we're making. But I think that the lesson maybe here is, is simple, is like, don't worship capitalists, right? But I think the imminence point is really, is really key, because I, I mean, there's always an imminence in capitalism where it's just kind of always about to get better. You know, the trickle down is going to happen, like just sort of pray, pray to those gods, right? But, so there were still like actual material products that were legible, that were kind of delivering the things that they said that they were going to deliver and that people were paying money for. So I don't think we have ever had as much of the global economy based on a bet of something

• 14:41Speaker 04

  that is supposedly about to happen, but that doesn't line up at all with the product that is actually being sold, right? So that sort of sense of, of, of living in the about to, living in the imminence, I don't think we've ever been so sort of not where we are, but, but in the about to be. And that is, that does feel quite religious.

• 15:07Charlie Warzel?

  And, and there's an odd dynamic to all of this as well, as you mentioned, the, the economics of the, of the AI boom and the, and everything being built towards this speculative future. But there's also now, because of the amount of investment, because of how predicated the economy is on Nvidia and the magnificent seven, you know, stocks, there is also this apocalyptic quality to all of this, where if the, if the, if the music stops, if the investment stops coming in, right, then you have this specter of an absolute bubble burst, a huge 2008 style crash, taking everything with it.

• 15:49Charlie Warzel?

  On the other side of it, there is this, we are fulfilling the promise of this investment, and then there is all kinds of economic upheaval and, you know, rewriting the social contract and all the things that these people are talking about, which are in their own sense very apocalyptic as they are so disruptive. And so it feels like, no matter where you are, you're boxed in, at least narratively, with this idea that something, something massive is, is going to happen.

• 16:18Speaker 04

  Well, and it's not our imagination. I mean, we are being conscripted into this dream, whether we like it or not. I mean, the way the SpaceX IPO was structured, right, where just like, rather than having a wait period before the stock is in everybody's pension who has a pension, right? They changed the rules, so you have no choice but to be part of this massive gamble, right? That is based on this extraordinary claim that in the future, this non-profitable, non-profitable part of the company, the AI division, will eventually be, have a market worth $28 trillion. It's just wild, right?

• 17:03Charlie Warzel?

  I'm curious, in your minds, what is the world that the tech right is trying to build? As in this, this whole group investing in all these different technologies from, you know, from the things that Musk is doing to things that Palantir are doing, like, what is the world that you see them trying to build right now?

• 17:22Speaker 04

  I think that there are different visions, and then there are hedges to those visions. And some of those hedges might be, well, if this all goes down, we're going to just go to our corporate city-state in Honduras. And if that doesn't work, we'll go to our bunker in New Zealand. Or if that doesn't work, we'll go to the one in Argentina, and maybe we'll also build a space colony. Like, there's a lot of different stories being told. I don't think there's one coherent, like, this is our Eden. And they need bunkers to protect themselves if this all goes very, very, very wrong. So I don't think that the kind of bunkers are their utopia. I think the utopia really is, is one of dematerialization, if that resonates at all. Like, I think that this idea of kind of being free from the material world, I think this

• 18:05Speaker 04

  is actually the most religious part of it, is that, that the whole kind of story of modern capitalism has been about leaving as much of the physical world behind and with its obligations as you possibly can. So like, first companies declare, well, we're not actually making products, we're making brands, and other people can make the products, right? But then it's like, well, even that, you know, we're not publishers, we're just platforms. So we want the profits, but we don't want the responsibilities. And AI is the ultimate version of this, where you actually kind of, you can upload your consciousness, you can live forever, you are free of the physical world, and you're

• 18:50Speaker 04

  just betting on a machine world. So if there is a utopia, I think it's being free of workers' infrastructure. Like, they don't want to own their own data centers. I think they want to float upwards.

• 19:14Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 19:47Speaker 01

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Moderesi-Tirani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 20:18Charlie Warzel?

  In your guys' estimation, has this always been the project? Because for some, it seems yes, right? You have the, Peter Thiel's always been reactionary, even, you know, early on, questioning democracy as a useful concept to him and other people. Musk has been obsessed with the transhumanism. But there's also a lot of people who I would argue have come into this kind of bumbling, right? Like, they just wanted to build social networks or apps, or, you know, make a website to rank who's hotter in their dorm, and, and kind of stumbling into these roles as, as these, like, you know, new titans of, of technology and industry. And, and there was this liberal bent in Silicon Valley for, for

• 21:00Charlie Warzel?

  a while, or at least a seemingly liberal facade in Silicon Valley. Does that feel like opportunism to you all in, in the recent rightward pivot that a lot of these tech founders have had? Or do you think that there is something inherent in, you know, the, the project that you said of, of, of sort of leaving the material world behind, being fully, you know, in the cloud, as it were, that would make it so that it was always going to lead to where we are now?

• 21:34Speaker 02

  So I think we would argue that different conditions bring out different responses, different potentialities in people, different facets of them. I mean, I, I don't think we should underplay how strong a right-wing bent there was in Silicon Valley. I mean, scholars have written about cyber libertarianism and the kind of, you know, right-wing politics. So yes, social liberal, you know, so socially liberal but economically conservative, or sometimes, in the case of Peter Thiel and his, his friends, like, just overtly reactionary and anti-democratic. So those ideas have been there, but they were tempered by the political and economic conditions. I mean, I think there was a period when they're building

• 22:16Speaker 02

  social media, they're promising to democratize our culture and, you know, make the world a better place, where they could justify their extreme, well, in terms of meritocracy, right? It's still kind of fit in that paradigm. Like, we're the smartest guys in the room, we're the, you know, the, the founders, and, and, and you all should bow down to us. But, you know, they were still kind of saying there would be these socially beneficial effects. In around 2014, 2015, when a tech lash started growing on the left or the right, that, that was challenged, right? I mean, so we argue that fascism, again, is always a response to crisis and a response to, like, threats of redistribution, a threat from the left. And the tech lash was really pivotal. I mean, workers started organizing at these companies

• 23:01Speaker 02

  and demanding unions, and Me Too happened, and that was a very active force in Silicon Valley. Workers were saying, we want stronger environmental protections. Cities were saying, we don't want your AI city, we don't want sidewalk labs, right? Countries were saying, we want privacy protections, like, modest privacy protections would be nice.

• 23:18Speaker 04

  European Union, yeah, really, yeah.

• 23:21Speaker 02

  Right. And so it was an affront to these guys and to their sense of themselves, but also to their business model. And I think they knew rationally that rolling out AI would be even more difficult, right? That it would receive even more of a pushback, because, like, most people are not clamoring for a technology that threatens to take all the jobs, fill the internet with slop, possibly cause, you know, delusions in their friends and family members and children. And so, you know, they knew that this would, this, and they were already losing popularity. So I think that, I think these guys, in that sense, you know, it's like, it's a time for using the power they had amassed, right?

• 24:03Speaker 02

  And that's, you know, we detail in the book, like, why we think that they went in so hard with Donald Trump. And ultimately, we think it's because of the material choice before them. They wanted to roll out AI without regulations, you know, with whatever energy they could get their hands on. They understood that to Trump, he'd love that it was going to burn a lot of fossil fuels and boost the economy. And so they made a conscious deal.

• 24:26Charlie Warzel?

  So this case that, that this rightward pivot has so much to do with the material needs of the tech companies responding to the AI buildout, what, what they need, both the, the lack of regulation, but also having, you know, friendly people like, like David Sacks, who is a, you know, a Silicon Valley insider who becomes the, the AI and crypto czar in the Trump administration for a while. You argue that-

• 24:55Speaker 04

  They don't have a lot of power in the Trump administration, though he doesn't have that position anymore.

• 24:59Charlie Warzel?

  Yeah, I mean, he, he just had, had dinner with a bunch of the AI executives as they're, you know, talking about trying to quote unquote, pace the frontier. He's definitely still, still in that mix. But there's also the side of the, you know, the, the founder psychology, as you said, as of the, you know, the, the tech lash being this, this big part of it. How much do you weigh that-

• 25:24Speaker 04

  Tech lash intersecting with AI, right? And this doesn't start with ChatGPT, as you know, right? Like, I, I wrote a piece about Eric Schmidt and his push, the way he was pushing AI during the pandemic. First of all, the pandemic was very profitable for these tech companies, right? Because we were all at home on our screens, those of us who were not, you know, frontline workers.

• 25:46Charlie Warzel?

  The Zoom, the Zoom revolution, yeah.

• 25:48Speaker 04

  Right.

• 25:48Charlie Warzel?

  The Zoom boom.

• 25:49Speaker 04

  The Zoom boom, and they all, like, they doubled their wealth in the first two years, the billionaires and the tech billionaires. And the data center buildout was frenetic in that period, right? Because so much streaming was happening, so much gaming was happening. And Eric Schmidt went on this big push of like, isn't Zoom School great? Isn't telehealth great? Isn't it like, maybe we should be more like China? And he made all these presentations in Washington about how, like, the biggest problem with the US in winning the AI race with China was all of these pesky privacy protections, like protecting people's health records, and the fact that people didn't want their kids under surveillance, and the fact that they didn't want smart cities. And the whole frame was like, China is able

• 26:33Speaker 04

  to do all of this because they have no privacy protections, and boo hoo, the US does, and the, and the European Union is, is placing even more, right? And so we see this, the moment that we're in, and the alignment with Trump, as a revolt of the elites against regulation, and a, and a very strategic alignment with someone who was sociopathic enough to let them do it, right? Because Trump's relationship to AI and any other existential risk is just like, we all die sooner or later, you know?

• 27:04Charlie Warzel?

  You know, if, if you simply list off what AI is as a technology and its promises, there's something that I think ends up being pretty striking, right? You have a technology that is trained on the ill-gotten, mostly, output of most of humanity, requiring these material economic investments that are essentially unprecedented and would yield unprecedented wealth and disruption, as, as we're saying. And then this, this arguably quite false idea of creating perfect automated efficiency in markets and workplaces, such that humans aren't really needed at all, right? And in that sense, it feels very end times-y to me, not in the sense that it will bring about the apocalypse, per se, but in that

• 27:49Charlie Warzel?

  there's really nothing left for capitalism to do if it succeeds. And, and so my question to you is, is AI the final boss of capitalism? Is there anything left after it?

• 28:04Speaker 02

  I mean, that's interesting. You know, other people phrase this like, so are these guys saying that AI is actually going to bring about communism, right? Like that that's the endpoint? Because it's like, you know, sustainable superabundance or whatever, like in this future, you'll never have to work again and it'll be like leisure for all. So, I mean, the answer is no, because their vision is not going to come true as they are, as they are describing it, right? I mean, one of the recurring motifs of our book is that a group's apocalyptic fantasies don't have to be literally true or rarely, are never literally true, but they can cause a lot of havoc. So, and a lot of damage regardless. So I think they're going to cause a lot of harm as they chase this vision. But there's all sorts of, of, you know, questions

• 28:47Speaker 02

  that they're, that they're, you know, in goal raises, right? Which is like, yeah, how does capitalism work? It's like, people don't have jobs and don't have money. Like, okay, so you're talking about like a no consumer future? Like, this gets to the point where like, they haven't really thought this out. They're just in the race and they're fine if they're raising us off a cliff. And in fact, the market seems to be catching up, right? With all the recent headlines about how the fact that so much of this AI debt is actually now distressed and the whole house of cards appears to be wobbling.

• 29:15Speaker 04

  And this is where I think their various escape plans do bear some attention, because I think that there is this way that this is just all a massive gamble. And they do know it, like whether they know that it's all going down or just part of it. Like, I, you know, I'm not gonna, I'm not gonna guess there. But I do think that all the hedges and all the ways in which they have plan Bs and Cs, right? Is like, if this goes down, you know, say SpaceX, like its valuation just seems to be fictional, seems to be notional, right? I mean, and laughable. And everybody's just agreeing to go in on it.

• 29:58Charlie Warzel?

  It's about extending the, the light of consciousness throughout the universe. That's like in the, you know, in the, in the, the perspective. It's, it's truly a, an actual dream. Like, it is, it is a fanfiction scenario.

• 30:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, right. But, but I guess the, the, I mean, we're pretty focused on what, what, what happens when this does pop, right? Whether it all goes down or partly goes down, what, like, if, if their, if their whole business model has been built on theft, Astro has called it theft tech, which I actually think is a very good phrase to describe a lot of AI. What are we owed before they get paid back? And how do we structure, like, how do we make sure that they aren't able to just leave us with all the distressed assets where a few ultra-rich people pull off what in the book we call the wealth rapture, right? Where

• 30:55Speaker 04

  they just ascend to their gated cities of various kinds and are like, sorry, suckers. Because I do think that that's one of the futures that we're looking at. And I think that they've structured their companies in a lot of cases where their personal wealth will be okay, and they do have various escape plans. And the rest of us get stuck with all of the risk of this. And we just have to have our eyes open about it.

• 31:30Speaker 00

  If you're trying to get news today, you'll find a lot of biased algorithms, rage bait and AI noise. Thanks, social media. That's where Inpress comes in. It's a social platform on top of factual journalism, not the other way around. Track your reading and earn points. It's like Strava for your brain. Plus, you can connect with other users in your city who share your genuine curiosity. Ditch the echo chamber for reality with Inpress. Download it today for iOS or Android at inpress.app. That's I, N as in news nerd, press.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  From Rethink, the creative marketing studio at The Atlantic and Walmart, On Solid Ground is a new podcast exploring the increasing threat of natural disasters. I'm journalist Caroline Moderesi-Turani, and I spoke with those on the front lines of disaster response to understand how communities build resilience before, during, and after a storm. Listen to On Solid Ground wherever you get your podcasts.

• 32:35Charlie Warzel?

  You mentioned a couple, that's one of the scenarios you're looking at if, if, if this goes sideways. What are some of the other ones that you're thinking about?

• 32:44Speaker 02

  I mean, I think that we, we saw this, right, with the recent Axios reporting that the heads of these companies are doing these disaster scenario planning, right? They're like, what if there's a massive cyber attack that uses our agents? And then the public gets really mad at us, right? So the disaster for them, I mean, this is also a tell. The disaster for them is less the potential catastrophe, the cyber attack, the critical infrastructure going down, than the public's response and the fact that it could be a PR disaster for them in a moment of democratic leverage. So I, I think, you know, we should hedge too, and we should prep too. Like, we don't know exactly what the, the unraveling of

• 33:26Speaker 02

  this bubble in the sector will be, right? It, you know, even the term crash implies something going down, like the sort of, you know, 1929 stock market vision. And it doesn't actually necessarily have to unfold like that. So there can, there could be, you know, financial collapse of some kind of the sector, or there could be some sort of disaster. So you mentioned the 2007 bailout. I mean, the thing about that is, you know, the, the money in that crisis, like, was much more systemic in the sense that it was banks in people's literal homes, right? I mean, so much of the capital in, there's huge amounts of capital in the data center boom right now in an AI. But a lot of it's like from

• 34:10Speaker 02

  private hedge funds, and a lot of it is from private capital markets. I mean, you know, are there ways to deal with a crash that lets the people who perpetrated this, like, eat the downside? And, and how, you know, I think we should really be like, how much, like, could this be an opportunity to get rid of some of the excess wealth and the inequality in this moment? We also know from the COVID pandemic that it's possible to pop up a welfare state almost overnight, right? That the government actually can do things pretty fast when there's a crisis. And I've also been thinking a lot about the Silicon Valley Bank bailout. And how that was not a, you know, critical systemic bank. And I'm not the only one to say this, Alexis Goldstein, who was at the Consumer Financial

• 34:54Speaker 02

  Protection Bureau, and others have written about how SVB should have, maybe they should have let it fail. And so I think we should look at the past and look at how moments like this, you know, too often have actually led to increased inequality and, and pernicious consequences. And just be like, how do we, if there's a, if there's a crisis moment, how do we respond? And how can we ensure that ordinary people are helped? And that the executives who perpetrated this are held accountable?

• 35:25Charlie Warzel?

  It does strike me, though, too, that the, obviously, the rub in that is, is the way that, you know, retail investing, and obviously not everyone has money in the stock market, but the, how, how much that retail investing in people's, you know, 401Ks and, and pension plans and all that are tied up in these, again, these like the, the quote unquote magnificent seven tech stocks.

• 35:48Speaker 02

  The organizer in me, though, I just want to say, the organizer in me is like, we need a mass movement that restructures retirement in America. 401K is a pretty recent invention. Why is this the mechanism through which we guarantee and don't guarantee, frankly, like undermine security in old age?

• 36:03Speaker 04

  I mean, social security came out of the, the market crash of 1929, right? I mean, what, the unfairness of that produced fairness, right? And the thing about AI, and this has been coming up for us a lot on book tour over the last month, is, you know, the offer of it really is only seductive, only appealing, once we've already destroyed and cut our social and care infrastructures to the bone, right? Like, you know, if you, if your kids are being taught by a teacher who's allowed to be as great a teacher as they want to be, in a, you know, with relatively good student-teacher ratios, and they're able

• 36:48Speaker 04

  to be, you know, use, use their creativity and, and love of learning, then the idea that they could be easily replaced with a chatbot is absurd, right? You know that, right? But if you already cut your public education system to the bone, right? I mean, if you're crowding 35Ks into a classroom, if your teacher is completely overworked and overstressed and being told that they need to teach to the test anyway, and that it's really all just about, you know, checking boxes and a multiple choice exam, that is something that, that if you then come in and be like, oh, everybody can have their AI tutors, that's a lot more appealing, right? Or if we're already neglecting our elders, and they're living alone and isolated, and we've destroyed the infrastructure where

• 37:32Speaker 04

  they used to be able to hang out and have fun, right? Then the idea that they could be made a little bit less lonely by talking to a chatbot then becomes appealing, right? So this will be a moment where we can decide to invest in people, in infrastructure, right? Which is one of the things that we hear, like, you know, from folks who are fighting data centers in places like Memphis. Like, why are we getting these massive data centers instead of, you know, a community center, or public transit, or any of the things that we need, right? And so there is this interplay between our neglect of the animate, human, physical world and the offer of AI. And that is, I think we need to go that deep in the correction of thinking about how do we respond to this crisis.

• 38:17Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I just want to say, though, you know, we, part of what's maddening is these, as you just said, the SpaceX prospectus, which is like, science fiction, is somehow taken as serious in our culture. But this, the idea that, hey, we could have a different kind of retirement system, where people are taken care of and all that, seems like completely absurd. But we, we got social security after the crash of 1929, after the Great Depression. But also, we only got it because old people were organized. There was something called the Townsend Movement. And like, millions and millions of old people who were broke and had no real power, were like, we deserve to have an income from the government. Like, we deserve to live. And they were incredibly persistent, and they put this demand on the table that was

• 39:01Speaker 02

  completely unprecedented because social security didn't exist. And now we live in the world they created. So we have to be ready. This is our version of prep, right? We have to be ready with the infrastructure and with the demands that, yeah, seem crazy today, but might just be common sense, you know, when we make it through to the other side.

• 39:20Charlie Warzel?

  So let's talk about one of the roadblocks to that, which is obviously the, the politics of all this. A defining feature, as you all have written about, as I've written about, of our era and this argument that you have, is that we're living in a time of genuine elite impunity.

• 39:37Speaker 04

  I'm so glad. I was excited to talk to you about impunity.

• 39:40Charlie Warzel?

  Here we go.

• 39:41Speaker 04

  That's a great and safe of yours.

• 39:44Charlie Warzel?

  This week, as we're recording this, The New York Times has reported that Musk, world's richest man, personally invested $366 million so far in this election cycle. It seems that Musk's wealth, especially here in politics, is just a genuine chaos agent, right? It is very hard to exact a financial toll on him as things are right now. And he's able to use his money, he's purchasing not only influence, but communications infrastructure, buying Twitter, turning it into X and this political weapon. What does the world do about this man?

• 40:16Speaker 02

  First thing, what do we do about this man? I think the first thing to do is to settle into how not okay this is, and how deeply anti-democratic this is, and how offensive it is. And then, yeah, we have to organize. I mean, he, you know, he has had some big losses, right? Remember the whole Wisconsin Supreme Court race, where he even went and like, danced around with the cheese on his head? So I think people need to show up, invoke. And then we need to build a serious mass movement that's focused on money out of politics. And I think that this is another issue that has the potential to be really bipartisan, like, just like the data center movement. You know, the polling is overwhelming on this issue, but there isn't a lot of mobilizing

• 40:57Speaker 02

  around it, in part because a lot of the civic infrastructure in this country is donor-funded. And so donors are not making this a key priority, but I think citizens have to, and the time is right for something that, you know, gets at that core poison in our politics, which is, you know, wealth and power. And then ultimately, yeah, I mean, ultimately, the point is, you know, we argue in the book that this really isn't about these individual men and their pathologies and their wounded egos or whatever. Like, it is about the wealth itself.

• 41:35Speaker 04

  And a belief that their wealth should buy them impunity, that, that, that the point of having hundreds of billions of dollars, or maybe a trillion dollars, is that, of course, the rules don't apply.

• 41:48Charlie Warzel?

  It does seem to me, and my kind of theory around a lot of the data center stuff, and the fact that you see a lot of protests from, from each side, and this very public distaste with not only data centers, but a lot of artificial intelligence technology being foisted on people, and, and then having Donald Trump kind of double down on this. To me, it, it feels like the beginnings of a politics that doesn't actually focus on this one guy. Like, it feels like an opportunity. It feels like a place that, you know, where you're, where this volatility could come in.

• 42:30Charlie Warzel?

  And that's what I think is really interesting about the fact that he doesn't seem to really, as someone who, you know, usually can ride a lot of these waves, he doesn't seem capable of doing that. But I want to actually use that to, to, to press here on feasible solutions and, you know, people are so mad about the incursion of AI into real communities and the, you know, the, the use of natural resources, or how loud they are, or the fact that, you know, the resources in their town are going towards a data center instead of towards other infrastructure that they need. And I talk to Democratic consultants who are like, this isn't just the issue, it's

• 43:12Charlie Warzel?

  like, the issue that should just be winnable. And yet, I don't know if there is a truly coherent politics around it. So in your minds, what does that politics around AI need to look like going forward, you know, into, into 2028?

• 43:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's different approaches and different debates within the Democratic Party. I mean, my, my position is always that, you know, it's good when people are at a place, like, the polling against data centers is encouraging, people are not fans of AI, they don't trust the tech oligarchs. But also, you know, we, as political actors, need to nurture that perspective and give it shape and, and, and expand it into something that is a broader politics, right? Like, we're not just engaging with something that's frozen. And so I think, you know, it is pretty inchoate, but I think, you know, and there are people who are like, this is just a NIMBY movement, or it's just about, you know, people just

• 44:14Speaker 02

  don't like the local data center, but maybe they actually kind of, they use AI when they say they don't like it. But I think my perspective is that it's, it's tapping into, you know, a bigger set of anxieties. Like, what is, you know, what, what kind of future is on offer? Like, who makes the decisions in, in our world, right? Because so many of these data centers come under the cover of NDA. It's like, what is work? What is purpose? These are really meaningful, powerful things for us to tap into, and they're about much more than tech. We have to understand it as embedded in a broader society, in social conditions. And I think with AI, we need to do the same.

• 44:53Speaker 02

  Like, this isn't, we can't separate AI from this question of like, how do we structure our retirements, right? Like, as Naomi said, are our schools well-funded? Do our jobs pay us enough to live? And I think that this is a moment when we really need to invest in the things human needs, that human beings need to live well, right? Like, we need to invest in our schools, invest in healthcare, invest in housing, invest in like, human beings doing the meaningful work. And I feel like that will resonate powerfully in this moment. And then, if people can deliver on that, I think it could change our politics, right?

• 45:30Charlie Warzel?

  I find that to be a really important point in all this. I've been writing a lot about this moment as a crisis of agency, right? On one side, it is this crisis of agency that's being manufactured by Silicon Valley, which is saying, we, you know, we're going to enact our agency to take away yours and give you these tools that do everything for you. But on the other side, I think there is this huge conversation of what is a human for, which is exactly what you're saying and alluding to. And, and thinking of the crisis of agency as an opportunity to reopen, because, because we are all having, whether we believe in it or not, we're having lots, very weird existential conversations, right?

• 46:13Speaker 04

  Some of them are good. You know, some of them are good, where we are, like, I've seen some really beautiful conversations happening where visual artists and musicians are really talking about like, what it takes to make visual art, and what it is like to, to, to do that labor, and why it matters. And, and I don't think that we've had many spaces to like, just talk about why making art matters, and what it is actually like from the artist's perspective to do it, or even an interesting conversation, like, that I heard, you know, with a mathematician about what it is like to like, solve a math problem.

• 46:58Speaker 04

  And I was just like, I've never actually heard a mathematician describe it so beautifully. So like, I think those conversations, where we're kind of getting back to basics about like, what, what is it that we love about what we do and what each other does, and can we find some wonder in that and marvel in that? So that we are less susceptible to Sam Altman telling us, intelligence is something that is like a utility that can be supplied, and so is art, and it's like a vending machine, and it can just spew it out, right? And so, but I think we've been, like I was saying before, like, the more mechanized we become... The easier it is to just let AI fill like in the last step, right?

• 47:42Speaker 04

  Like, the more we act like robots online, the more we're replaceable by AI bots. So we're going to have to become more human, like figure out how to become more human and irreplaceable. But yeah, I mean, I think, I think, I think it's quite a, like, it's a spiritual moment in a way. And a lot of people are stepping into that.

• 48:10Charlie Warzel?

  I want to end, I want to end on a point here and get your thoughts, which is that one reading of End Times Fascism, paired with the interpretation of the Right Word Pivot in Silicon Valley, is that a lot of people, I think, were fooled or simply unable to pay attention to what was going on. And that the tech giants and their leaders built these tools that they argued would democratize voices, that would bring people together, would expand opportunity, get rid of gatekeepers. And what they've done instead is create something different. This redistribution of power and control and money, all in their favor. Maybe it's, you know, a mirror world of the techno optimism, right?

• 48:55Charlie Warzel?

  And say that the end of Trump down the line marks the data center backlash, all that, marks a genuine resistance to this. And say we start to get some accountability for the end timers. We start to get, you know, steps towards regulation. How do we stop this from happening again? How do we, how do we recognize this before it's too late?

• 49:18Speaker 02

  I think this is why it's really important to have an understanding of and criticism of capitalism as a system, actually. Because that is part of what got us into this mess. So, you know, I'm, I'm thinking, again, about the sort of those, the era you just described, where they were promising to bring democracy through social media. And, you know, there was, I, I remember a piece by Lawrence Lessig, who is quite a, you know, influential critic of all the ways our democracy is broken, but who's essentially saying, you know, we need to cheer on the Googles and Facebooks of the world over the old media dinosaurs. And it was like, because they're new, right?

• 50:00Speaker 02

  Because they're new, they're the disruptors, they're disrupting the dinosaurs. And it was like, yeah, but they're, what, what, what is going to make them different, right? Once they disrupt the old media ecosystem and they are the new platforms, the new gatekeepers, like, why, why should we trust them anymore? So I think, understanding the way we are in an economic system that concentrates wealth, where people are relentlessly pushed towards endless growth, right? And endless resource consumption is really critical. I mean, at one point in the book, we describe fascism as capitalism's threat response, right? This is a movement of corporate and political elites to defend their power and their wealth.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  And I think we, it would do us a lot of favors to think systemically like that. Because then we can think about what are, what's the scale of the solutions, right? Like, how, what do we actually need to ensure that we don't just watch another, another terrifying sequel?

• 50:59Charlie Warzel?

  Naomi Klein, Astra Taylor. Thank you very much for coming on Galaxy Brain.

• 51:06Speaker 04

  Thank you so much.

• 51:07Charlie Warzel?

  That's it for us here. Thank you again to my guests, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor. If you liked what you saw here, new episodes of Galaxy Brain drop every Friday. You can subscribe on the Atlantic's YouTube channel, or on Apple, or Spotify, or wherever it is that you get your podcasts. And if you want to support this work and the work of my fellow colleagues, you can subscribe to the publication at theatlantic.com/listener. That's theatlantic.com/listener. And before we go, just another reminder, we're doing an upcoming AMA episode. You can ask me anything about the show, about the tech industry, about the end times.

• 51:52Charlie Warzel?

  It's up to you. Just email [email protected] with Galaxy Brain AMA in the subject line. Thanks so much, and I'll see you on the internet.

• 52:02Speaker 00

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