The Shock Doctrine

Astra Taylor is a seasoned organizer with several documentaries and books to her name, including the fabulously titled Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone.

Naomi Klein is an award-winning activist and writer whose books include No Logo, The Shock Doctrine, and Doppelganger.

Naomi and Astra, so nice to have you here.

Thanks for having us.

Very on brand.

[laughs] Um, to begin with, your work was overlapping long before you teamed up on this book, and I just wondered how long have you known each other? What, in what circumstances did you come together originally?

I actually met Astra when The Shock Doctrine first came out because Astra made, like, a little film about the book for The Nation magazine in the US.

Uh, so that was 2007.

And you know, I just, just, you and I do know each other with different hats on.

We have this segment called Unshocked where we build on ideas that I've been developing since I wrote The Shock Doctrine, which came out, um, almost 20 years ago now, 19 years ago.

Um, and when Trump was reelected and he was just hitting us in the face [laughs] again and again and again, and every day there were, you know-

Yeah

... 15 news items that were unbelievable, um, people were referencing The Shock Doctrine, and I was feeling uncomfortable because I, that is not what I described in that book.

What I described in that book were punctuated, like, moments af- that were taken advantage of, after which we return to something sort of approximating normal, right? And that's not the way we're living now.

We are living in these roiling shocks, and you have figures like, um, you know, led by Peter Thiel, Elon Musk, who really understand it's kind of go time now, and their whole investment portfolios-

...

The latest attempt and one of the most ambitious comes from Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, who are my guests on this episode.

Klein is the author of Doppelganger and the Shock Doctrine, among other books.

Taylor is a writer, activist, and documentary filmmaker, and the author of Democracy May Not Exist, But We'll Miss It When It's Gone.

Their name for what threatens what they call the living world is end times fascism, and they've just published a book on it.

You know, Israel is a bunker nation and it is in the post-Oslo era openly uninterested in anything that one might define as peace with justice and believes staunchly across political lines now that you can have security and a good life and have you know, in the discourse of Israel, surrounded by a sea of enemies, right? But literally garrisoned against not an oppressed population, but a contained excess population.

And of course, that process has become openly genocidal now.

But, you know, when I wrote The Shock Doctrine, I had the last chapter was about That shift in Israel, and I wondered at the time, the book came out in 2007, whether Israel's economy, which had found a way to thrive, it's kind of a palantir economy, right? The reason why they realized that they didn't need peace was because of the startup nation dot-com boom, which was really a security tech boom.

Or you could call it a Pegasus economy.

Within a few years, that ratio had almost completely reversed, with the overwhelming majority of New Orleans schools now run as charters outside the traditional public system and, for years, largely outside the reach of the union that had just been dissolved.

Writer Naomi Klein, covering it at the time and later in her book The Shock Doctrine, gave this pattern a name: disaster capitalism.

Using the shock and disorientation of a catastrophe to push through changes a population would never accept under ordinary circumstances.

Public housing went the same direction.

I'm Hugh Linehan.

Naomi Klein is the author of many books, including No Logo, The Shock Doctrine and Doppelganger.

Astra Taylor is a documentary filmmaker.

She's the co-founder of the Debt Collective, and she's the author of The Age of Insecurity.