We’re joined by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, co-authors of the book End Times Fascism, for a wide-ranging conversation on the multitrillion-dollar global investment in artificial intelligence and its reverberating effects around the world.
Klein recently spoke at the People’s AI Assembly, alongside other critics of the artificial intelligence industry, including New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani and former chair of the Federal Trade Commission Lina Khan. “The resistance to AI is taking many forms, and it’s really a resistance to oligarch power, which is concentrated in the hands of these tech companies,” Klein tells Democracy Now! “After 50 years of outsourcing and hollowing out of public functions of the state, the very last stage is the outsourcing of thinking, of intelligence itself.”
Taylor, a co-founder of the Debt Collective, warns that the “circular” debt financing of much of the AI economy is “a waste of resources that also endangers the public.” The AI buildout “is so intense, so frenetic and so redundant” that it risks causing a major economic crash akin to the 2008 subprime mortgage crisis, Taylor says. If that happens, she adds, “Naomi and I think we need to use this moment, just like during the Great Depression and the New Deal era, to demand a real renovation, transformation, of our public services.”
This content originally appeared on Democracy Now! and was authored by Democracy Now!.
Democracy Now! | Radio Free (2026-10-21T12:30:25+00:00) “When the Bubble Bursts”: Naomi Klein & Astra Taylor on Reclaiming Democracy from AI Oligarchs. Retrieved from https://www.radiofree.org/2026/10/21/when-the-bubble-bursts-naomi-klein-astra-taylor-on-reclaiming-democracy-from-ai-oligarchs/
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