During the two weeks leading up to the September 15th publication of our new book, End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, the apocalypse was in the news.
While we were putting the final edits on an essay for the Financial Times, a clip of J.D. Vance saying his actions might be bringing the “end times” went viral. And then there was the former employee at Anthropic who grabbed the world’s attention with his warning that he retired from the company over mounting concerns that AI might cause mass human extinction. “Why Everyone’s Talking About the AI Apocalypse,” said a New York magazine headline. Meanwhile, a new landmark report from the UN warned that we are on the brink of triggering dangerous climate tipping points.
"End-time fascists" are feeding off our very real dread
We don’t think any of this is a coincidence. As we argue in our book, we live in a world of unprecedented and compounding threats, from intensifying wealth concentration to climate breakdown to accelerated technological development. And these very real planetary-scale crises are feeding a pervasive sense of instability and dread while also fueling a new manifestation of the far right – the “end times fascists” of our book’s title. That is our name for the dangerous alliance of religious fundamentalists, tech oligarchs, and ethno-nationalists who have given up on the possibility of a shared and sustainable future for everyone on earth, and who have taken power in the United States and beyond.
Instead of working to solve the many crises that plague us today, too many powerful figures are responding by pressing the gas. We see this as Trump and his minions gleefully gut the Environmental Protection Agency and the Endangered Species Act while aligning with religious zealots to wage a war on Iran, risking a larger conflagration in the region.
The AI race to the bottom
The same goes for Silicon Valley, which is desperate to win the AI “race,” even if it’s a race to oblivion. OpenAI founder Sam Altman, aware that public opinion is turning against him, recently posted that he’s “unapologetically on Team Humanity.” But that’s just rhetoric. In reality, his company and closest colleagues are spending millions lobbying against effective tech regulation and public officials and political candidates who are skeptical of the industry. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man, has already spent $90 million on the midterms this cycle, all in support of GOP candidates willing to follow his accelerationist lead. Donald Trump is their ideal ally. Forget AI safety. All that’s needed, he says, is “a STRONG AND SMART (High IQ!) PRESIDENT.”
Shortly before he died in 2022, the urban theorist Mike Davis observed that “We are living through the nightmare edition of ‘Great Men Make History.’” And he pointed out that “unlike during the high Cold War when politburos, parliaments, presidential cabinets and general staffs to some extent countervailed megalomania at the top, there are few safety switches between today’s maximum leaders and Armageddon. Never has so much fused economic, mediatic and military power been put into so few hands.”
But it's not a runaway train
There’s a lot to be worried about, which is why all the apocalypse talk resonates. But one of the most dangerous aspects of the concentration of all that military, monetary, and technological power is that it can make the trajectory toward Armageddon feel unstoppable. It can even convince us that the end times fascists might be right—maybe the vast majority of humans are truly doomed.
The ubiquity of postapocalyptic entertainment—all the shows, films, and video games set in radioactive, ravaged worlds—traps us deep in this dystopian story. We have imagined our collective demise so many times that it almost feels as if it has happened already. Doomsday weapons and hidden lairs? Tech zillionaires determined to destroy the living world to summon a digital god who might take over the nukes? Space colonies so a handful of people can repopulate the species when Earth is uninhabitable? These futures somehow manage to seem both inevitable and far too hackneyed to take seriously.
We have learned to be suspicious of this sense of unreality. After all, if someone had predicted twenty years ago that Donald Trump would be president of the United States, we would have reacted similarly. Because it seemed like bad fiction, many of us waited too long before taking him seriously as a threat. And yet here we are, again.
When figures like Vance and Altman start invoking the “end times” or the “end of the world,” we should listen. Not because we agree with their theological views or even their assessments of cutting-edge technology (for the record, we don’t think AI will become “superintelligent” and turn on humanity, though we do think even “dumb” tech can do a lot of damage). Their comments do, however, betray a willingness to gamble our collective fates to achieve even more wealth and power.
A glimmer of hope
The good news, to quote Andor (the best offering of the genre), is that we “have friends everywhere”—including where we may least expect to find them. The fact that Trump and his cohort have opted to betray large numbers of their own voters by aligning themselves with tech billionaires and religious fanatics who have abandoned the idea of a shared future on this planet has created huge vulnerabilities for them and opened up huge opportunities for the opposition.
As we recently told the New York Times, “We didn’t write the book because we think these people are fascinating. We wrote this book because we want people to fight them and beat them.” The vast majority of people don’t want an apocalypse, and doomsday is anything but inevitable. What we need is a movement dedicated to defending not just “Team Humanity,” but all of life on Earth.
Astra Taylor is the co-author of End Times Fascism: And the Fight for the Living World, available now from Macmillan
