PERSON

Naomi Klein

The investigative journalist and political theorist who documented across three decades how genuine crises are converted into opportunities for institutional redesign that the affected communities would never have permitted under ordinary circumstances—and whose shock doctrine analysis maps the AI transition’s concentration of gains, exploitation of disorientation, and closing window of democratic institutional design with structural precision.

Naomi Klein has spent three decades doing the same thing: arriving at the scene of a crisis and refusing to accept the story that the people who caused it are telling about what happened. From Chile and Iraq to New Orleans and Buenos Aires, she documented a recurring structural pattern—shock, disorientation, rapid institutional redesign—with the rigor of an investigator who understands that the victims of a disaster and the beneficiaries of its aftermath are rarely the same people. The AI transition of 2025–2026 exhibits every structural feature of what Klein named disaster capitalism: the speed that denies affected populations the time to organize, the disorientation that prevents the informed deliberation democratic participation requires, the ideology of inevitability that forecloses the perception that alternative arrangements are possible, and the concentration of gains among the actors who set the pace while

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