PERSON
Naomi Klein
The journalist and theorist who named disaster capitalism—the systematic exploitation of collective disorientation to push through radical restructuring that would be voted down under normal democratic conditions—and applied that lens to the AI transition with unflinching structural precision.
&#x{44};}Naomi Klein is the chronicler of power in crisis. Her career-defining insight, forged across four decades of reporting from Chile to New Orleans to Baghdad, is that radical restructuring of economic and social arrangements does not happen
despite crises but
through them: shocks dissolve the collective capacity for organized resistance, and the actors who arrive with pre-existing plans exploit the window before clarity returns. This pattern—which she called
disaster capitalism in her landmark 2007 book
The Shock Doctrine—she has tracked into the AI transition with the same structural rigor. The AI moment, she argues, exhibits every signature of a
shock doctrine event: unprecedented adoption speed that prevents affected populations from organizing a response, a blank-slate ideology that frames accumulated professional knowledge as “legacy” to be cleared, and a three-legged stool of tech, fossil fuels, and the security state making consequential institutional decisions while the public remains, in her phrase, “really not part of this at all.” Where