Naomi Klein’s new book calls out end times fascism. What is this – and what’s the role of big tech?

“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.

End times fascism 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 .