The Death Commodity: War Capitalism in the Age of AI

19 years ago, author and activist Naomi Klein turned the mirror on the ugly, sadistic face of our world’s economic system by coining the brilliant term Disaster Capitalism: what happens when industrialists with deep pockets and politicians with zero morals come together to engineer, create, and then exploit, large scale crises that the 1% can monetize. Klein’s thesis was an a-ha moment for humanity because it suddenly exposed something that deep down all of us had known: that war and environmental crime are often neither accidents nor side-effects, but products of deliberate scheming that takes place in company board rooms and oval offices so that an army of snake oil salesmen with fresh-out-of-the-assembly-line guns, and brand new solar panels, can keep their job as they go door-to-door pretending to save the world from the very disasters they have just engineered.

Klein’s concept opened the floodgates for me as a writer, pushing me to explore the concept of disaster capitalism from multiple angles. My essay on Replacement Economics postulates that our system is only ever interested in replacing lost revenue through new, time-limited albeit destructively disastrous products disguised as “solutions”. In YOLO Economics I suggest that death itself is an increasingly profitable commodity, while in The New Jews I talk about how genocide has become an organised business with its own profit margins, commissioned contractors and supply chains. In The Unholy Sin I talk about how carbon emissions became another commodified disaster, while in Capitalism Breaks The People I explain from my own experience how burnout is not an outcome of capitalism, but an essential element of its lifecycle cleverly hidden behind an urban myth of white collar lifestyle. But disaster capitalism is not only a ploy of the 1%, but an evolutionary trap we fell into long ago. Technophilia and many other essays I’ve written over the years delve deep into the invisible cognitive fingerprint of our blind trust towards technology, “the future”, and the technobroligarchs claiming to represent it.

All of my books, particularly In The Grip of Necrocapitalism and The Unhappiness Machine, are unashamedly haunted by Klein’s terrifying concept that disasters are created for profit by a system that sustains itself through destruction, and only knows how to grow through disaster. I called this system Necrocapitalism because it represents the monetisation of death itself, and I called the consumatronic PR machine that sits on top of it The Unhappiness Machine: the collection of narratives that the Epstein class of pedophiles, politicians and industrialists creates to sell us all the products we never needed, the wars we never approved, and the genocides we never imagined possible.

In the essay When Profit Grows a Brain I postulated how the process of creating and monetizing disasters is now moving out of human hands and into the cold digits of AI life forms. And this is where I pose a serious question: