“A moment of reckoning has arrived for the West,” reads a recent recruitment ad for Palantir, a Silicon Valley firm that increasingly provides data-driven “intelligence” for intelligence, police and military agencies – as well as blue-chip corporations and non-profits. “On the factory floor, in the operating room, across the battlefield,” the ad intones, “we build to dominate.”

How do we make sense of this convergence between advanced technologies and unapologetic violence, between “rational” AI and a primordial view of the world that seems to revert to a language of blood and soil, friends and enemies, “us” and “them”? In op-eds, talk shows, and political analyses, a single word has risen to prominence: fascism.

Review: End Times Fascism And the Fight for the Living World by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor (Penguin); The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by Gil Durán (Simon & Schuster).

As a term, “fascism” is highly provocative, but seemingly untimely. It conjures up powerful images of jackbooted throngs of followers repeating chants and salutes, visions of black-lettered and blood-red banners. Yet these images are typically associated with political orders from a century ago in interwar Europe, a dusty relic from a previous age where “evil” was identified and annihilated.

So what is fascism in the present? How can it help explain contemporary technological, social and political dynamics? Two recent books attempt to diagnose these conditions: End Times Fascism And the Fight for the Living World by writer Naomi Klein and filmmaker Astra Taylor, and The Nerd Reich: Silicon Valley Fascism and the War on Democracy by journalist Gil Durán.

For Klein and Taylor, what we see now is not a repetition but an evolution. Fascist ideologies have been injected into a broader apocalyptic vision.

“End times fascism is a fascism embedded in an understanding that something immense is ending, and it responds to this discomfiting truth with unabashed cruelty,” they write.

In this vision, it is taken for granted that our economic, institutional and environmental systems are collapsing. Financial inequality is surging, with unaffordable houses and skyrocketing cost-of-living. Ecologies are crumbling, with earth systems hitting planetary limits. And that’s just a few of these stacked crises.

But an apocalyptic mindset, grounded in fundamentalist religion, stresses that crisis is not to be fixed, but fast tracked. Dysfunction and disorder are necessary to arrive at something more glorious, the labour pains to a great rebirth. Here, apocalyptic religion and political fascism agree: the current world is corrupt and cannot be saved; it must be burned to the ground and remade from scratch – or escaped altogether, for a greater paradise.

For its proponents, the end times are here — and only by embracing and accelerating this winner-takes-all transition will the chosen elite assure they can survive and even thrive.

Klein and Taylor follow this thread across three core sections.

Messianic Dreams traces the birth and rise of the Zionist dream, through to its present vision of genocidal reset in Gaza – where the glorious next stage of one society is built on the ashes of another. The authors explain these moves are not just about “righteous revenge” or “national security”, but have a distinct cosmological goal: to “move us all significantly closer to the prophesied end of times.”

Escape to the Cloud unpacks big tech’s fervent faith in AI........

© The Conversation