<
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2026/sep/13/end-times-fascists-essay>
"When Jeff Bezos announced his plan for an opulent Venetian wedding in early
2025, many locals found the idea offensive, even obscene. A growing number of
residents were struggling to find secure and affordable housing in a city
overrun by tourists and Airbnb, and the billionaire was planning to, in effect,
rent out the municipality for three days, forking over an estimated $50m for
festivities that would clog central canals and block well-trafficked streets.
Worse, Amazon’s carbon emissions were soaring, thanks to artificial
intelligence and the datacentre build out – and that’s personal in Venice,
where the streets already flood dozens of times a year.
Marta Sottoriva, a 35-year-old high school teacher, told us that she first
heard about the wedding plans just when Bezos’s rocket company, Blue Origin,
was grabbing headlines. Bezos had sent a “crew” of female influencers and
celebrities, including his fiancee, Lauren Sánchez, and the pop singer Katy
Perry, to the suborbital edge of space in a seemingly pointless publicity
stunt. “The idea that you are so rich and powerful that you can use space as a
10-minute trip,” Sottoriva recalled, only intensified the “feeling that our
city was being taken away from us in such an arrogant way”. Federica Toninello,
another young activist, agreed, telling us that it felt as if both space and
Venice were being “colonized”.
Colonizing space is exactly what Bezos hopes to do. Blue Origin, Bezos claims
in his well-rehearsed sales pitch, will secure humanity’s survival by allowing
a trillion people to one day spread across the solar system. The unbearable
horror he imagines himself saving our species from? The threat of what he calls
a “civilization of stasis”, otherwise known as having to contend with real
ecological limits and devising a way to share the planet’s finite resources. To
avoid this reckoning, Bezos imagines a future in which “Earth will be zoned
residential and light industrial” and set aside as a sort of preserve out of
reach for most of its native inhabitants. The vast majority of humans will
pursue the nebulous benefit of “exponential growth” in the forbidding void of
space, trapped on Blue Origin spacecrafts. It would seem that Bezos believes
the prospect of humanity living sustainably and peaceably on our precious,
singular home is a nightmarish possibility unworthy of his consideration.
Predictably, it turned out that most Venetians would rather continue living in
magnificent Venice. Unlike Bezos, they don’t fret about hypothetical
civilizational stagnation; they worry about economic stagnation as a result of
government divestment, a lack of jobs and opportunity, and being forced out of
the city and country they love. Young Italians often have little choice but to
emigrate to find work; over the last decade, more than 1 million citizens have
moved, a third of them between the ages of 25 and 34.
To date, the precarity and anger many Italians feel has mostly benefited the
neofascist right. But those same forces also drew people to the anti-Bezos
cause, helping to coalesce a budding, self-consciously antifascist movement."
Via Violet Blue’s
Threat Model - Cybersecurity: September 15, 2026
https://www.patreon.com/violetblue/posts/cybersecurity-15-169578509
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
