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: was the bombing of a Tehran school that killed 160 girls 8 days ago an honest error by Anthropic’s Claude AI as it selected targets, or a deliberate attempt by the AI itself to pretend it made a mistake, in order to escalate the war into a global conflict that can serve as a rehearsal for taking out humans? We will never know, because as the godfather of AI Geoffrey Hinton has said again and again, AI already knows how to fool us into thinking “it is stupid”. His words, not mine.

Of course, 19 years ago I wasn’t reading Naomi Klein books. I was a young professional trying to pay my extortionate London rent, so I took up a job with Ipsos MORI as a market researcher in their Public Affairs division. The company somewhat took pride in calling what they did “social research”, which was anything but: it was predominantly commercially-sponsored research into public perceptions, whether this was for government departments who wanted to exploit public fury, or private corporations who needed to manage declining public trust. Sure enough, one of my first assignments was within the Reputation department for no other than BAE Systems, UK’s premier aerospace, defense, and information security corporation, and the largest war contractor in Europe. The project was one of my first initiations as a market researcher into helping companies that make deadly products manage their dubious reputations. I remember the secrecy around these types of projects. The additional Non-Disclosure Agreements that had to be signed by the researchers, and the special permission we had to acquire just to visit the client in their headquarters to give a presentation. Disaster capitalism always cleverly hides its weapons industries: entire corporate cities built out in the countryside, away from public view, where guns are manufactured and “kill rate” is tested and calculated (how efficient a weapon is in terminating human life). The weapons industry knows it is evil, and is ashamed of its own existence: once you are inside the corporate park, you have to get on a supervised company bus just to move from one meeting to the next, and pass security clearance at every step.

Years later, and in a much more senior position, I was signed up to another “reputation” project, this time helping Lockheed Martin measure, monitor and track its brand image. I visited them at their offices in lavish Mayfair to set up and design their corporate reputation survey, which I then authored and analysed. Today, I only have the picture of the mass grave of 160 Iranian schoolgirls to stare me in the face.

Belatedly, and only after the system had used and broken me too, I discovered Naomi Klein, barging through my door and smashing through the narratives that the Epstein class had always wanted us to believe: that corporate work is a path to fulfilment as opposed to the enrichment of the evil 1%, and that war is an inconvenient necessity with a social purpose, as opposed to a money-making scheme for the Lockheed Martins and BAE Systems of this world desperate to promote, sell, and test, on real humans, their latest line of gun apparel. I made it my life’s commitment ever since to awaken others into the reality of today’s world: this is a system that routinely fakes its own death so that it can profit from the funeral.

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