The core of the prepper fantasy: "What if the world ended in the precise way that made me the most important person?" The ultra-rich fantasize about emerging from luxury bunkers with an army of mercs and thumbdrives full of bitcoin to a world in ruins that they restructure using their "leadership skills."
Pluralistic: An end to the climate emergency is in our grasp (12 Jun 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The problem with good news in the real world is that it's messy. Neat happy endings are for novels, not the real world, and that goes double for the climate emergency. But even though good climate news is complicated and nuanced, that doesn't mean it shouldn't buoy our spirits and fill our hearts with hope.
Pluralistic: The billionaires aren’t OK (24 Sep 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Billionaires don't think we're real. How could they? How could you inflict the kind of vast misery that generates billions of dollars while still feeling even a twinge of empathy for the sufferer in your extractive enterprise. No wonder Elon Musk calls us "NPCs":
Pluralistic: End-stage capitalism (04 Apr 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Karl Marx predicted that capitalism would eventually fail, torn apart by its own contradictions. He called the bourgeoisie, who epitomized these contradictions, capitalism's "grave diggers":
Pluralistic: Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives (21 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
My latest Locus Magazine column is "Strange Bedfellows and Long Knives," about the secret engine of sweeping political upheavals (like Trumpism) and their inherent fragility:
Pluralistic: Millionaire on billionaire violence (10 Aug 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
For the past year, I've been increasingly fascinated by a political mystery: how has antitrust enforcement become a global phenomenon after spending 40-years in a billionaire-induced coma?
Pluralistic: MAGA crackup (18 Jul 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
It's been a year since Project 2025 became national news. At the time, I cited the great Rick Perlstein, an expert on the history of the conservative movement, who said that the most important thing about the P2025 document wasn't its extreme plans, but rather, its total incoherence:
Pluralistic: A world without people (05 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
To be a billionaire is to be a solipsist – to secretly believe that (most) other people don't really exist – otherwise, how could you live with the knowledge that your farcical wealth and power springs from the agony you have inflicted on whole populations?
Pluralistic: Making sense of Trump’s unscheduled sudden midair disassembly of the American empire (16 May 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
For generations, the American empire was the most powerful force on earth, and so we tended to assume that it was the most durable force on earth – surely anything so powerful must also be eternal?
Pluralistic: Conspiratorialism as a material phenomenon (29 Oct 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I think it behooves us to be a little skeptical of stories about AI driving people to believe wrong things and commit ugly actions. Not that I like the AI slop that is filling up our social media, but when we look at the ways that AI is harming us, slop is pretty low on the list.
End Times Fascism
The far right is on the march again – but this time it’s different from anything we’ve seen before. A new, apocalyptic alliance of religious fundamentalists, billionaire Silicon Valley tech kings and ethno-nationalists is on the move. They’re united in their belief that some kind of cleansing cataclysm is coming, and they welcome a future of shocks, scarcity and collapse, convinced they’ll be among the saved on the other side. This is the world of End Times Fascism. In this blistering reckoning with our age, Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor take us deep into this man-made Armageddon complex – and show us how to resist it. Around the globe, they investigate how those who are making our world unliveable through climate chaos and job-consuming AI are preparing to protect themselves from the fallout, whether it’s by repairing to luxurious private islands for the super-rich, rocketing off to Mars or bunkering nations against a dehumanized ‘other’. But, Klein and Taylor reveal, the new supremacist survivalists are far from impregnable. They have no vision of a shared future. All they offer are remixes of a bygone past: the nihilistic, sadistic pleasures of domination. If we’re to meet this critical moment and defend what’s left of democracy before it’s smashed up beyond repair, we must break the doom loop, and find a new way of living together, rooted in our existence on this earth, in the here and now. A story not of end times – but of better times. This book shows us how.
Pluralistic: Preparing for a post-Trump internet (03 Sep 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I know, it's tempting to think of Trump as a cause, rather than an effect – as an aberration who dragged America into fascism. Trump is exceptional, but the thing that makes him exceptional isn't his corruption, recklessness or cruelty. What makes Trump exceptional is his ability to cajole, intimidate and flatter America's most corrupt, reckless and cruel people into a coalition.
Pluralistic: Billionaire-proofing the internet; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 5) (14 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.
Pluralistic: Billionaire-proofing the internet; Picks and Shovels Chapter One (Part 5) (14 Jan 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
During the Napster wars, the record labels seriously pissed off millions of internet users when they sued over 19,000 music fans, mostly kids, but also grannies, old people, and dead people.
Pluralistic: A disenshittification moment from the land of mass storage (10 Oct 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Sometimes, you really can vote with your wallet. I know, I'm generally pretty down on this kind of thing, but sometimes, it works!
Pluralistic: America is a scam (28 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Donald Trump is many things: a racist, an authoritarian, a rapist… but what he is, and has always been, above all and from the very start, is a scammer:
'End Times Fascism' and the billionaires gambling with humanity's future
Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor expose how fascism, religious extremism and billionaire tech elites are pushing humanity towards catastrophe in their chilling new book, 'End Times Fascism'.
