No sooner have you prepared for one apocalypse than another one arrives

Over the summer I read a series of apocalyptic pieces on climate change. I developed something of an addiction to them – as if they were a serialised novel, a massive Stephen King-style horror-dystopian thriller. By mid-July, I was feeling just as anxious as I had during lockdown. Around mid-August, I noticed a surge: articles growing ever bleaker and ever more certain in assuring me that we will all perish from the heat, and that the end is near—or very near indeed (I know what you are thinking: here is the right-wing Zionist climate denier. No, no. This summer I did indeed experience eco-anxiety: despair, a numbing of the will, and a vague sense of guilt toward my children, who will never experience the mild Italian summers I enjoyed as a child. That was all I discussed: the warm sea water, the stifling heat at three in the morning, and the ‘fifth wave’ that was coming).

Then the cool air arrived. In the evening, you can breathe again. You pull that thin jumper out of the wardrobe – you don’t put it on, but you take it out all the same. Death recedes, at least for a while. But here they come, with deadly and objectively sadistic timing – as if they’d agreed to take over from one another – the Silicon Valley exiles, the repentant gurus, the AI designers on the run from the corporations. Those who, until the day before yesterday, were building the Great Thing and are now travelling the world to explain to you that the Great Thing will wipe us all out. Here too, very soon, very, very soon.

AI has genocide on its mind. “If we don’t stop it straight away, it’ll happen by the end of the decade” (that’s how I read it; which, translated, means four years ago). Another round, another bout of anxiety: welcome to ‘AI-xiety’. Scenarios straight out of The Terminator or Philip K. Dick, but real – in fact, neorealistic by now. I try not to think about it. I try not to think about the heat. I try not to think about the AI genocide. I try not to watch all those videos where humanoid robots go haywire and kick and beat up some Chinese engineer (now a genre in its own right, like pie-in-the-face scenes in silent films). I open Instagram in search of comfort — and what do I find at the top of my feed? A New York Times special on the FASCIST APOCALYPSE. This one is also imminent. Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, with sombre expressions and fixed gazes, in the New York Times’s splendid black and white, in slow motion, launch their piece: ‘Apocalyptic Fascism and the Struggle for the Living World’. The argument goes something like this: watch out, there’s a caste of billionaires and right-wing fanatics selling us the end of the world. They’re capitalising on it. They’re using it to keep us in line. I find myself thinking: at last, someone is calling out the marketing of the apocalypse! Hurrah! Except that here too, in the end, we’ll all die. Exterminated, this time, by the fascists. There’s no set date. But at least it’s a more familiar scenario.

It is uncertain how much of this actually advances the causes in question: controlling the climate, managing AI, or exerting dominion over any other complex system. At first glance, the answer appears to be not much. Nevertheless, the trend is now unstoppable. It may begin with the best of intentions—who knows—but it often ends up fuelling panic that not everyone is equipped to handle. Then we continue to express astonishment that thirteen-year-olds are experiencing suicidal impulses on a scale unprecedented in previous generations and are consuming psychiatric medications in doses fit for a rock star in their twilight years.