In an extraordinary feat of timing, just as we’ve been watching the tech titans tumble over one another to cover their gilded asses, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor’s new book has landed: End Times Fascism and the Fight for the Living World.

It is not the first time either writer has hit the moment with exquisite timing. Taylor was a key organizer and writer for the Occupy movement and, in 2023, The Age of Insecurity articulated the bewildering social currents that pollsters and researchers were struggling to define.

Klein, in particular, has a preternatural talent for defining the hinge moment — naming, exposing and giving voice to the inchoate torments of an age.

No Logo, back in 1999, articulated the callous commodification of human life and injustices of corporate hyperglobalization. This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate, recast carbon pollution as a matter of climate justice, crystallizing a climate critique of neoliberal economic fundamentalism. Doppelganger, in 2023, brought some clarity to the disorienting “mirror world” and conspiracy cultures that metastasized along with the COVID virus.

But Klein is probably best known for The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism. Her book embedded that concept so thoroughly into our thinking that it has become a kind of shorthand throughout the world. 

Perhaps too short and too deeply embedded, Klein worried aloud the last time we spoke. “Shock doctrine” was being widely used to explain the second rise of Donald Trump, the reignition of warmongering and the hyperscaling of wealth inequality and Big Tech.

But Klein didn’t think it was the right diagnosis for our current times. The old formula was: disaster strikes, power exploits the resulting shock. Now, Klein and Taylor argue, the powerful are embracing — and even accelerating — ongoing catastrophe. What we’re experiencing is not the disaster capitalism of the past, write Klein and Taylor in their new book. In fact, even the rising fascist movements are not truly analogous to their 20th century antecedents.

What’s new is the centrality of apocalyptic “end times” beliefs — one of the only things uniting an otherwise incoherent alliance on the far right made up of tech accelerationists, ethno-nationalists and religious fundamentalists. That alliance is most powerfully manifest in the government of Trump but appears in various forms, networked in countries around........

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