In 2023, Ilya Sutskever, the co-founder of OpenAI, gathered a group of colleagues on a California beach. They were not there for a barbecue or to unwind. They had come to burn a wooden effigy representing a “misaligned” artificial general intelligence, or AGI — one that did not conform to human needs and values.
For Sutskever, the advent of AGI necessarily carried apocalyptic implications. At one OpenAI meeting, recounted by the journalist Karen Hao in her book Empire of AI, he reportedly said that the company would build a bunker for its employees before releasing AGI.
On other occasions, he suggested that artificial general intelligence would trigger a literal “Rapture”, in which only a small number of believers would be saved. This fixation on the end times partly shaped Sutskever’s effort, along with others, to push Sam Altman out of OpenAI — a move that ultimately backfired and culminated in Sutskever’s departure in 2024.
Sutskever is hardly alone in Silicon Valley in believing that artificial intelligence could wipe us all out. There are also the so-called “rationalists”, followers of the theorist Eliezer Yudkowsky’s catastrophist writings, as well as executives and researchers at the very companies developing A.I., as recent debates have made clear.
Many of them, as the philosopher Émile P. Torres has argued in the newsletter Realtime Techpocalypse, are concerned less with the extinction of humanity in itself than with the possibility that it might happen before we have created a new posthuman species — one enhanced by AGI and capable of colonizing space.
The techno-oligarchs are on much the same wavelength. Elon Musk, for instance, has described human beings as little more than “digital bootloaders for digital superintelligence.” Peter Thiel has expressed uncertainty about whether humanity should survive in its present form. And as early as 2017, Sam Altman was talking about a “merge” with machines.
The people building artificial intelligence, then, do not always seem to regard it simply as a technology. They treat it instead as something closer to a silicon deity, one capable of ushering in a kind of Judgment Day. Salvation will be reserved for them: barricaded inside luxury bunkers, they will use A.I. to transform themselves into superior beings. The rest of humanity — the rest of us — will meet a far less glorious fate, dispatched by viruses, Terminators and whatever else the apocalypse may bring.
This messianic, apocalyptic and fundamentally eugenic vision is part of what the authors Naomi Klein and Astra Taylorcall End Times Fascism, the title of their latest book, recently published in the United States and due to appear in Italy in November.
Beginning with Primo Levi’s observation that “every age has its own fascism”, Klein and Taylor argue that the global far right is undergoing a “disturbing evolution,” driven by the recognition that humanity has entered an era of unprecedented and interconnected crises: climate change, war, pandemics, authoritarianism, mass surveillance and migration.
Rather than attempting to address those crises, they write, “this new form of fascism has accepted the idea of a future marked by permanent shocks.” It therefore wages a “supremacist war over who will survive the world to come.” That war is being fueled, they argue, by “technological tools with previously unimaginable capacities both to create synthetic worlds and to destroy the real one.”
In other words, “the most powerful people on the planet are preparing for the end of the world, an end they themselves are frantically accelerating.” In a reversal of the biblical story, the oligarchic class is not content merely to build the ark, or even to decide who will be allowed aboard. It is actively trying to bring on the flood.
According to Klein and Taylor, end-times fascism consists largely of three factions.
The first is made up of religious fanatics who interpret every new catastrophe as a sign of an apocalypse that will ultimately cleanse and renew the world.
Klein and Taylor place in this category both Israeli Zionist supremacists such as Itamar Ben-Gvir and Bezalel Smotrich — the two far-right ministers in Benjamin Netanyahu’s government who, the authors argue, seek to carry the genocide of Palestinians through to its conclusion — and Trump-aligned Christian evangelicals who seek to strip women of the right to vote and replace the Constitution with the Ten Commandments.
For the apocalyptic fascists, religion is not so much Marx’s notorious “opium of the people” as an “amphetamine” that, rather than soothing anxieties, intensifies them and pushes them toward their most extreme conclusions. Faith, in this telling, functions as a kind of “incendiary and explosive accelerant.” A segment of American evangelicalism, for example, openly seeks to capture democratic institutions and transform the country into a theocracy worthy of a dystopian novel.
The second faction is made up of techno-oligarchs, eager to acquire “unimaginable power and wealth” through their technologies — above all, artificial intelligence. A.I. is treated as the “ultimate technology,” a “Promethean creation” destined to “build a glorious posthuman future,” albeit one from which supposedly inferior beings will be excluded.
“Every fascism has its subhumans,” Klein and Taylor write, “and for the techno-fascists, the subhumans are human beings themselves.”
Judging by their rhetoric, their escapist projects and the enormous problems their technologies are already creating — consider the environmental impact of data centers — the techno-oligarchs “do not live in the same world we do, do not share our concerns and do not act with the same degree of empathy or proximity to other people’s pain,” KeShaun Pearson, an anti-data-center activist in Memphis, told the authors.
It is a vicious cycle. The more techno-oligarchs retreat into their bubbles and bunkers, the less contact they have with the physical world. And the farther they travel from Earth aboard their rockets, pursuing the cosmic utopia of a multiplanetary civilization, the more willing they become to sacrifice the planet they are leaving behind.
The third and final faction of end-times fascism consists of far-right political leaders seeking to seize control of natural resources in a form of state-sponsored prepping, while turning their countries into vast fortified bunkers, guns trained both on internal enemies — “Antifa,” climate activists and the “radical left” more broadly — and on external ones, above all migrants.
Their apocalyptic worldview draws in particular on Jean Raspail’s racist novel The Camp of the Saints, which imagines France being overrun by a million Indian migrants and the ensuing disappearance of the “white race.”
That dystopian novel, first published in the early 1970s, helped inspire the “Great Replacement” conspiracy theory, which has since become one of the principal frameworks through which the European and American far right interprets migration.
Faced with a threat conceived in such existential terms, compromise becomes impossible. At one end are neo-Nazi terrorists such as Anders Breivik and Brenton Tarrant, who take up arms to kill those they see as invaders and the racial traitors who aid them. At the other is “remigration”, a term used for proposals involving mass deportations and the stripping of civil rights from citizens deemed “unassimilated” — meaning, in practice, those who are neither white nor Christian.
Klein and Taylor also argue that apocalyptic fascists have moved beyond climate denial, a position that has become increasingly anachronistic and politically difficult to sustain. They understand perfectly well that an intensifying climate crisis is already pushing — and will continue to push — growing numbers of people from their homes.
Yet that awareness does not stand in the way of their fossil-fuel policies, which are themselves deeply intertwined with the techno-oligarchs’ dream of an artificial paradise. The logic is simple: keep emitting greenhouse gases as though nothing were happening, seal the borders and forcibly expel those who are already inside.
The end-times fascists “are arsonists,” the authors conclude, because they “knowingly let the world burn” while simultaneously “blaming the people who have been deprived of their livelihoods and forced from their homes as a result of their policies.”
This new and monstrous ideology therefore has a “symbiotic relationship” with catastrophe and actively invests in a condition of permanent emergency. In that sense, it represents the final stage of disaster capitalism. Alex Karp, the chief executive of Palantir, once put the logic plainly: “Bad times are incredibly good for us,” given that the company sells products designed to respond to danger.
End-times fascism is not invincible, however, Klein and Taylor warn. Indeed, they argue, it has already been defeated more than once: on the frozen streets of Minneapolis, for example, where ICE encountered fierce resistance from local residents; and in New York, with Zohran Mamdani’s successful campaign, which celebrated the complexity of real life and the imperfect beauty of a pluralistic society.
Mamdani’s campaign, the authors write, represented “the kind of concrete, non-science-fictional, non-nostalgic, future-facing vision that end-times fascists are incapable of offering — and that, apparently, a great many people had been waiting for.”
In the end, the apocalyptic fascists are far more fragile than they may first appear. They are desperately clinging to a profoundly unrealistic illusion: that catastrophe will spare them, and them alone.
But the truth is that no one survives alone — not even the richest and most powerful person in the world.
Leonardo Bianchi