Apocalypse Now?

By Michael Albert

May 23, 2024

Source: Originally published by Z. Feel free to share widely.

Eyes open. Look around. Ears attuned. Listen up. Something is happening here, there, and everywhere. Ignore it, avoid it, deny it , whine or weep over it and it will keep happening. Fight it and envision and seek better, and we can stop it. You know it, don’t your? We can abide or we can fight. Which will we choose?

I hate apocalyptic attitude, entertainment, and organizing. Even if often unintentionally, Apocalypse says don’t seek better. Apocalypse parades lies to paralyze hope and pervert action. Apocalypse says there is no better. Doom alone awaits. We will lose.

I prefer to welcome, seek, and urge vision-inspired attitude, vision-seeking entertainment, and vision-informed organizing. Vision tells truths to reveal hope and mobilize action. Vision says there is better. We can win.

Maybe it’s merely getting old. Maybe it’s the cacophony of apocalyptic utterances that now fills every silence. Maybe it’s what bellows down every byway. Whatever the cause, as much as I still hate to say it, I now hear apocalypse at our door. I can no longer deny it. But I still know vision and willful strategic effort remain essential. They must predominate.

To ignore apocalypse as if it isn’t there, as if it is only naysaying cynicism, conveys delusion. Apocalyptic fear is now warranted. Visionary hope is needed. So the latter must now harmonize with the former rather than for the latter to ignore or deny the former.

And what has made apocalypse into half of realism? It’s no secret. We all know the answer.

War has attained infinite reach and power. War’s bombs have eyes. War explodes and starves. Look at Gaza. Where there were cities of homes, schools, hospitals, auditoriums, and souls, now there is rubble. Now there are corpses. And off-site way too many people cheer.

Human choice has bent the skies and seas into cauldrons of collapse. Tornadoes meet tsunamis. High water marries record temperatures to produce still higher and still hotter. There are cities of homes, schools, hospitals, auditoriums, and souls. Look north, south, east, and west. Climate threatens them all. Rubble multiplies. Corpses decay. And off-site too many people sunbathe.

Fascism has metastasized so that hate flourishes, lies suffocate truth, and nightmares become daily facts. Reason vacates. Fundamentalism flourishes. We all become clickbait linked to our worst selves. Books burn. A new Reich. A new Reich. A new Reich. Literally, that’s what the maximum U.S. reactionary thug now says he wants. There were cities where thinking souls lived. Now city’s zealots yell hooray for our side while they seek to clear the stage of all but themselves. Some celebrate. Others tremble or hide. Off-site too many people walk an empty Mall or imbibe a soundless film. Eyes on the ground, ears shut down, lemmings prowl their way off cliffs.

And finally, as if the familiar horrors weren’t enough, a new apocalyptic threat, AI, advances at breakneck pace. It reads, writes, codes, hears, talks, paints, sees, questions, sings, designs, jokes, flirts, emotes, explains, originates, and plans—all while it instantly accesses a mind-bogglingly huge store of factual knowledge about us, until it is trained on itself. Talk of care and safety is already sidelined by odes to progress. But so what? What’s apocalyptic about that? Why can’t we use AI, welcome AI, worship AI to do more, do it easier, and enjoy ever bigger gains? Perhaps we can, but existential dangers also beckon. Further escalated capacities may go rogue and dance death and rubble on us. Less noticed, escalated AI capacities may increasingly do exactly what we ask them to until AI does steadily more of what makes us human while we humans are left to do only what is machine-like. Meanwhile, geniuses cheer on encroaching vapidity. That is not rubble. That is not death. But I fear it is a living coma. Even without corpses I find AI potentially apocalyptic.

Four crises. Four facets of apocalypse. So why is vision and willful organizing for better still essential? Because it is now the only path to better. Not overnight, but ever. To we seek suicide, we can just continue to cheer on apocalypse. Or to weep or whine about it. Or to deny it. Those paths bring disaster. If we want to attain better much less to attain best, we can’t cheer apocalypse on. We can’t just weep about it. We can’t ignore it. We have to instead find flexible vision. We have think flexible vision through and flexibly share it to create and constantly update effective strategy. And with shared vision and effective strategy we have to forge our own activist paths toward liberation. That is the hard truth. Apocalypse is no lie. What are we going to do about it? What do we want? How much do we want it? Collective action for progress? Or private slumber for death? We can’t side step responsibility. We must decide.

Michael Albert`s radicalization occurred during the 1960s. His political involvements, starting then and continuing to the present, have ranged from local, regional, and national organizing projects and campaigns to co-founding South End Press, Z Magazine, the Z Media Institute, and ZNet, and to working on all these projects, writing for various publications and publishers, giving public talks, etc. His personal interests, outside the political realm, focus on general science reading (with an emphasis on physics, math, and matters of evolution and cognitive science), computers, mystery and thriller/adventure novels, sea kayaking, and the more sedentary but no less challenging game of GO. Albert is the author of 21 books which include: No Bosses: A New Economy for a Better World; Fanfarefor the Future; Remembering Tomorrow; Realizing Hope; and Parecon: Life After Capitalism. Michael is currently host of the podcast Revolution Z and is a Friend of ZNetwork.

With Netflix’s Ancient Apocalypse, Graham Hancock has declared war on archaeologists

The Conversation
November 21, 2022

Mysterious: The carved T-shaped megaliths at the prehistoric Gobekli Tepe near Sanliurfa, Turkey Ozan KOSE AFP

Netflix’s enormously popular new show, Ancient Apocalypse, is an all out attack on archaeologists. As an archaeologist committed to public engagement who strongly believes in the relevance of studying ancient people, I feel a full-throated defense is necessary.

Author Graham Hancock is back, defending his well-trodden theory about an advanced global ice age civilisation, which he connects in Ancient Apocalypse to the legend of Atlantis. His argument, as laid out in this show and in several books, is that this advanced civilization was destroyed in a cataclysmic flood.

The survivors of this advanced civilization, according to Hancock, introduced agriculture, architecture, astronomy, arts, maths and the knowledge of “civilization” to “simple” hunter gatherers. The reason little evidence exists, he says, is because it is under the sea or was destroyed by the cataclysm.

“Perhaps,” Hancock posits in the first episode, “the extremely defensive, arrogant, and patronizing attitude of mainstream academia is stopping us from considering that possibility

Trailer for Graham Hancock’s Netflix series, Ancient Apocalypse.

The pseudo fish defense

In the opening dialogue of Ancient Apocalypse, Hancock rejects being identified as an archaeologist or scientist. Instead, he calls himself a journalist who is “investigating human prehistory”. A canny choice, as the label “journalist” helps Hancock rebut being characterized as a “pseudo archaeologist” or “pseudo scientist”, which, as he puts it himself in episode four, would be like calling a dolphin a “pseudo fish”.

From my perspective as an archaeologist, the show is surprisingly (or perhaps unsurprisingly) lacking in evidence to support Hancock’s theory of an advanced, global ice age civilization. The only site Hancock visits that actually dates to near the end of the ice age is Göbekli Tepe in modern Turkey.

Instead, Hancock visits several North American mound sites, pyramids in Mexico, and sites stretching from Malta to Indonesia, which Hancock is convinced all help prove his theory. However, all of these sites have been published on in detail by archaeologists, and a plethora of evidence indicates they date thousands of years after the ice age.




The Neolithic archaeological site Göbekli-Tepe in Turkey is one of the locations Hancock visits in Ancient Apocalypse.Teomancimit, CC BY-SA

Hancock argues that viewers should “not rely on the so-called experts”, implying they should rely on his narrative instead. His attacks against “mainstream archaeologists”, the “so-called experts” who “practice censorship” are strident and frequent. After all, as he puts in in episode six, “archaeologists have been wrong before and they could be wrong again”.

Steph Halmhofer, a PhD candidate at the University of Alberta who studies the use of pseudo archaeology and erasure of indigenous heritage by far-right groups, suggests that these attacks on archaeologists function to increase his sense of authority with viewers. As Halmhofer explains:

It’s about conspiracism and the positioning of Hancock as the victim of a conspiracy. The repeated disparaging remarks about archaeologists and other academics in every episode of Ancient Apocalypse is needed to remind the audience that the alternative past being proposed is true, regardless of the lack of conclusive evidence for it. And the vagueness of who this supposed advanced civilisation was, combined with the credence given to it by being in a Netflix-produced series, is going to make Ancient Apocalypse an easily mouldable source for anyone looking to fill in a fantasied mythical past.



The Serpent Mound in Ohio, another site Hancock visits in Ancient Apocalypse

Eric Ewing, CC BY-NC-SA

Dangers of pseudo archaeology

In the last decade we have seen how conspiracy theories and distrust in experts impacts the world around us. And research has shown how pseudo archaeology – especially when couched in anti-intellectual rhetoric – can overlap with more dangerous conspiracy thinking.

Of course, archaeologists frequently admit when we have been wrong. Any academic teaching “Archaeology 101” or applying to fund a new study points out how new evidence updates our picture of the past. Despite the fact that every scientific field updates its thinking with new evidence, according to Hancock, any rewrites to history mean that archaeologists, his “so-called experts,” should not be relied upon.

Despite repeated claims made by Hancock, no archaeologists today see stone age hunter-gatherers or early farmers as “simple” or “primitive”. We see them as complex people. Priming viewers to distrust archaeologists, also allows Hancock to use circular logic to re-date these sites.

The murky origins of Hancock’s theories

Hancock claims in his book Magicians of the Gods that as the “implications” of his theories “have not yet been taken into account at all by historians and archaeologists, we are obliged to contemplate the possibility that everything we have been taught about the origins of civilisation could be wrong”. However, archaeologists have repeatedly addressed his theories in academic publications, on TV and in mainstream media.

Most glaring to scholars investigating the history of Hancock’s pseudo archaeology is that while claiming to “overthrow the paradigm of history,” he doesn’t acknowledge that his overarching theory is not new.

Scholars and journalists have pointed out that Hancock’s ideas recycle the long since discredited conclusions drawn by American congressman Ignatius Donnelly in his book Atlantis: The Antediluvian World, published in 1882.


Another site Hancock discusses in Ancient Apocalypse, the Cholula Pyramid in Mexico.

Ernest Mettendorf, CC BY-SA

Donnelly also believed in an advanced civilisation – Atlantis – that was wiped out by a flood over 10,000 years ago. He claimed that the survivors taught Indigenous people the secrets of farming and monumental architecture.

Like many forms of pseudo archaeology, these claims act to reinforce white supremacist ideas, stripping Indigenous people of their rich heritage and instead giving credit to aliens or white people.

Hancock even cites Donnelly directly in his 1995 book Fingerprints of the Gods, claiming: “The road system and the sophisticated architecture had been ‘ancient in the time of the Incas,’ but that both ‘were the work of white, auburn-haired men’.” While skin colour is not brought up in Ancient Apocalypse, the repetition of the story of a “bearded” Quetzalcoatl (an ancient Mexican deity) parrots both Donnelly’s and Hancock’s own summary of a white and bearded Quetzalcoatl teaching native people knowledge from this “lost civilisation”.

Hancock’s mirroring of Donnelly’s race-focused “science” is seen more explicitly in his essay, Mysterious Strangers: New Findings About the First Americans. Like Donnelly, Hancock finds depictions of “caucasoids” and “negroids” in Indigenous American art and (often mistranslated) mythology, even drawing attention to some of the exact same sculptures as Donnelly.


A page from Donnelly’s now debunked 1882 book, Atlantis: The Antediluvian World

.via the author

This sort of “race science” is outdated and long since debunked, especially given the strong links between Atlantis and Aryans proposed by several Nazi “archaeologists”.

These are the reasons why archaeologists will continue to respond to Hancock. It isn’t that we “hate him” as he claims, it is simply that we strongly believe he is wrong. His flawed thinking implies that Indigenous people do not deserve credit for their cultural heritage.

Netflix labels Ancient Apocalypse a docuseries. IMDB calls it a documentary. It’s neither. It’s an eight-part conspiracy theory that weaponises dramatic rhetoric against scholars.

Flint Dibble, Marie-Sklowdowska Curie Research Fellow, School of History, Archaeology and Religion, Cardiff University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

SEE LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for ATLANTIS 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for LOST CIVILIZATIONS 

LA REVUE GAUCHE - Left Comment: Search results for LEMURIA 

Books

‘We’re going to pay in a big way’: a shocking new book on the climate crisis

In An Inconvenient Apocalypse, authors Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen write that society needs to be better prepared for an inevitable collapse

‘We don’t have a solution. But the fact that there aren’t easy and obvious solutions doesn’t mean that you can ignore the issue’ … An Inconvenient Apocalypse. Photograph: Zoonar GmbH/Alamy

Veronica Esposito

THE GUARDIAN

Wed 31 Aug 2022

In An Inconvenient Apocalypse, authors Wes Jackson and Robert Jensen style themselves as heralds of some very bad news: societal collapse on a global scale is inevitable, and those who manage to survive the mass death and crumbling of the world as we know it will have to live in drastically transformed circumstances. According to Jackson and Jensen, there’s no averting this collapse – electric cars aren’t going to save us, and neither are global climate accords. The current way of things is doomed, and it’s up to us to prepare as best we can to ensure as soft a landing as possible when the inevitable apocalypse arrives.

“The book tries to be blunt and honest about the depth of the crisis,” said Jensen, “and to be blunt and honest about the current solutions, which do nothing to deal with the depth of the crisis.” Jackson added: “Now humanity is on a whole different journey than a gathering-hunting society. I saw that we were going to pay for this some day, and we’re going to pay in a big way.”


Earthly Order: ‘mercurial professor’ with urgent ideas on climate change

Jackson and Jensen make for an interesting pairing. The former is an agronomist, having spent his career studying the problem of soil erosion and developing The Land Institute, which seeks to develop grains that can be used for sustainable agriculture. For his efforts he has garnered a MacArthur “genius” grant and a Right Livelihood Award, among other honors. Jensen is a longtime journalist who has written books on ecology, masculinity and radical feminism. He has received backlash for propounding exclusionary and harmful views against transgender people, specifically targeting transgender women, and in response to the criticism he has doubled down on these viewpoints, continuing to promulgate them.

In Jackson and Jensen’s view, the dawn of agriculture represents something like original sin. This is what got humanity on to the course of increasing energy use and material wealth that has brought us to the current ecological crisis. Via this reading of human history, the authors seem to be arguing that our trajectory as a technological species capable of high energy use and large-scale agriculture is a mistake that has taken us to a place we never should have been, and has doomed us. In conversation Jackson endorsed this viewpoint, telling me that our way of life has us “caught in a big Ponzi scheme that we’ve probably had for 10,000 years. We know how Ponzi schemes tend to end. They’re not nice things to have to deal with.”
 

Photograph: University of Notre Dame Press

The answer to this Ponzi scheme involves shrinking humanity from the current 7.7 billion people to a more sustainable 2 or 3 billion. An Inconvenient Apocalypse doesn’t describe how exactly this decline in population will occur, nor reckon with the enormous trauma that the elimination of the majority of humanity will inflict on humans and our societies. Although the book is nominally oriented toward social justice, the authors make no effort to address the fact that such a population decline would probably be an absolute disaster for marginalized ethnicities and sexualities, those who are disabled or mentally unwell, and basically anyone not deemed fit for survival in the new world. In conversation, Jensen offered this explanation:

“A lot of past talk of population control has been based in white supremacy, but that doesn’t mean we can ignore the question of what’s a sustainable population. That’s the kind of thing that people have bristled against. We don’t have a solution. But the fact that there aren’t easy and obvious solutions doesn’t mean that you can ignore the issue.”

According to Jackson and Jensen, once the collapse occurs and the Earth’s population declines, it is up to humans to figure out how to live in a “low-energy” future – that is, one where fossil fuels are no longer used and we essentially are back to relying on our own muscles and those of beasts of burden. In terms of what that low energy world might look like, An Inconvenient Apocalypse articulates an ethos that might be summed up as the paleo diet, but for society. Because 10,000 years of so-called progress has left us in “dire straits”, the answer involves looking back to the prehistoric millennia before humans developed agriculture, began writing down their history, and built societal hierarchies. Insofar as An Inconvenient Apocalypse describes how this future could look, it involves tradespeople and agricultural workers elevated to the high-status ranks of society, the affluent getting taken down some notches, a wholesale elimination of the cosmopolitan, consumerist world, and religion playing a prominent role. One is tempted to sum it up as “make the Earth great again”.

The world of An Inconvenient Apocalypse is a very bleak one, and also one with no middle ground. The authors write that “the future of continued endless expansion that we have long imagined is over and a new future defined by contraction is coming”. Any attempt to find some kind of middle way through these two poles is simple “denying, minimizing and ignoring” a problem that we must all face. The emphasis on this book is on being blunt and stating truths that the authors believe to be self-evident – there is little effort by Jackson and Jensen to argue their case or to convince others. To be fair, Jackson and Jensen seem to be aware that their style will put off many, stating their expectation that many readers will simply abandon their book. Jensen said: “We set out to write a book that, in some sense, everybody will have a reason to dislike.”

For a book predicting the mass death of most of humanity and the end of life as we know it, An Inconvenient Apocalypse is chillingly cerebral. There is virtually no room for acknowledging – much less processing – the emotional toll that such a message will take on both the authors and their readers. That can make the book feel cold and condescending. In conversation, Jensen showed more vulnerability, offering some of the feelings that his vision for humanity raised within himself. In this reader’s opinion, letting this vulnerability through more often in An Inconvenient Apocalypse would have made for a more relatable and ultimately more compelling read.

“I’ve wrestled with what this means in everyday life,” and Jensen, “and these are distressing questions. It’s about wrestling with that sense of grief, rather than trying to avoid it. And when you wrestle with that, it means you don’t wake up every day on the sunny side of the street. It’s weighing on a lot of us. My goal is just try to open up space for people to say what’s on their mind.”

An Inconvenient Apocalypse is out on 1 September

U.S. CDC’s zombie apocalypse tips rise again for pandemic times

Josh K. Elliott 

© CDC A depiction of a zombie is shown in this promotional image from the CDC's website.

If there's one lesson that horror movies can teach, it's that you should always be prepared for a zombie outbreak — especially during a pandemic.

A decade-old guide to preparing for a zombie apocalypse has resurfaced on the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) website, amid fresh paranoia caused by the coronavirus pandemic.

Social media and Google traffic surged around the topic on Wednesday and Thursday, after a handful of news outlets recirculated the CDC tips alongside a zombie-related "prophecy" supposedly attributed to Nostradamus, the 16th-century French astrology. The prophecy mentions "half-dead" people and "great evils" leading to the end of the world.

Read more: Iran sentences ‘Zombie Angelina Jolie’ to 10 years in jail for photos

The reports quickly prompted people to make tongue-in-cheek plans for a real-life World War Z, the book and film in which zombies rise up against all the nations of the world.



There are no signs of a zombie apocalypse on the immediate horizon (yet). Nevertheless, the CDC's advice is useful with or without a horde of brain-hungry corpses hammering at your door.

The CDC has used zombie preparedness to teach people about disaster preparedness for nearly a decade, according to its website. It also appears to be making occasional tweaks to the plan, including an update on Feb. 23 of this year, according to its site.

"What first began as a tongue-in-cheek campaign to engage new audiences with preparedness messages has proven to be a very effective platform," the CDC says.

Video: A zombie apocalypse live action role playing game invades St. Laurent

The CDC campaign encourages everyone to set up a zombie apocalypse kit consisting of all the supplies you'd need in the event of a global catastrophe, a localized outbreak of brain-eaters or something more pedestrian, such as an earthquake or blackout.

Recommended supplies include food, water, tools, clothing, a radio, personal hygiene products and medications, important documents and first aid supplies.

Read more: Toilet paper panic: Fear, fights and memes spreading faster than coronavirus

"Although you're a goner if a zombie bites you, you can use these supplies to treat basic cuts and lacerations that you might get during a tornado or hurricane," the CDC says.

The preparedness blog also recommends setting up an emergency plan with your loved ones, so that everyone knows who to call and where to go "if zombies start appearing outside your doorstep."

"You can also implement this plan if there is a flood, earthquake or other emergency."

Video: How would public health officials deal with a zombie apocalypse?

The zombie (and everything else) survival plan has become a popular messaging tool for many public health agencies over the last decade. British Columbia has run its own zombie survival campaign in the past, and the Canadian Red Cross has also adapted the CDC plan to fit its needs.

Read more: Amazon’s terms of service won’t apply in the event of a zombie apocalypse

There have been no zombie uprisings since the original tips were issued in 2011, though Denmark came close with its COVID-19-related "zombie mink" crisis last year. There have also been plenty of natural disasters in the intervening years, proving that it doesn't hurt to be prepared.

Because you never know when a flood, an earthquake or a flesh-eating monster will smash down your door.

 A ‘weird mirror that is Brazil': New film examines link between evangelicalism, far-right political power

“It’s very hard to overstate the importance of the Book of Revelation and those symbols in our politics today, Not only as a seminal book for dominion theology, but also as a force … that then has very concrete influence over geopolitical events around the world.

(RNS) — Netflix released the documentary ‘Apocalypse in the Tropics,’ which seeks to understand how the far right mobilizes faith for political interest.

Supporters of Brazil's former President Jair Bolsonaro kneel to pray as they storm the Planalto Palace in Brasília, Brazil, Jan. 8, 2023. Planalto is the official workplace of the president of Brazil. (AP Photo/Eraldo Peres)

Helen Teixeira

July 15, 2025

(RNS) — Protesters were dressed in national colors, holding Bibles and signs with crosses, singing Christian hymns and shouting battle cries as a mob violently invaded and vandalized the federal government’s headquarters. This scene of red, white and blue is familiar to audiences in the United States, recalling the events of Jan. 6, 2021. But for those more familiar with the political landscape farther south, the scene might instead feature green and yellow in Brasília, Brazil, two years later, on Jan. 8, 2023. 

“Apocalypse in the Tropics,” a new documentary by Oscar-nominated director Petra Costa, released on Netflix on Monday (July 14), shows footage of the latter uprising in exploring the intersection of faith, politics and power in the country. The film follows five years of political developments in Brazil, which elected far right President Jair Bolsonaro in 2018, with massive evangelical support. Under his administration, the country endured the COVID-19 pandemic, witnessed an alliance between religious leaders and the federal government strengthen, and saw violent attacks on democratic institutions after his electoral defeat. 

RELATED: Christians represented significant faction of capital rioters in Brazil

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The consequences of Brazil’s religious transformation and its relation to the configuration of political power are investigated in the film. Alessandra Orofino, the film’s producer and co-writer, spoke with RNS about the parallels between the politics of Brazil and the U.S. and about what the documentary aimed to capture. 

“The rise of religious fundamentalism as a powerful force in authoritarian politics is a vital component of democracies’ deterioration in Brazil, in the U.S., in Hungary and India, in Israel, and many places around the world,” she said. “So we hope that (this film) is part of the debate that will go beyond Brazilian borders and help people around the world and invite them to have this conversation.”

Costa, a Brazilian filmmaker, began her career making more intimate, personal films. In “The Edge of Democracy” (2019), which was nominated for an Academy Award, she preserved that tone by weaving Brazil’s recent political crisis, which she interpreted as the erosion of a young democracy, with her own family’s history as the daughter of left-wing activists persecuted by the military dictatorship, and the granddaughter of a businessman tied to the political and economic elite.

“Apocalypse in the Tropics” film poster. (Image courtesy of Netflix)

“Apocalypse in the Tropics” works almost as a sequel. But this time, Costa immerses herself in a world less familiar to her: evangelical Christianity — which has become increasingly decisive in shaping Brazil’s political future.

The connections between Brazil and the U.S. reflect decades of transnational circulation of ideas, theologies, strategies and resources involving missionaries, Christian publishing houses, seminaries and religious think tanks. It’s a story of mutual influence, but also of dependence and asymmetry.

A predominantly Catholic country since its colonization, Brazil has experienced a rise in evangelicalism that is one of the more striking religious transformations in recent decades. In the 1970s, around 5% of the population identified as evangelical, while today, about 27% of Brazilians do, according to 2022 census data released last month. Catholics, who 30 years ago represented more than 80% of the country, now make up a little more than half of its population. 

The most visible result of the Cold War in many Latin American countries was the rise of military dictatorships, supported by the U.S. and fed by fear of communism, which the documentary looks back on to understand the roots of the evangelical growth. In Brazil, the dictatorship lasted from 1964 to 1985, a period when evangelists such as Billy Graham had strong influence and when seminaries and churches often received direct and indirect support from U.S.-based institutions. 

RELATED: Evangelicals for America apologizes, takes down anti-Trump Billy Graham ads

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“The influence of American evangelicalism and the American government in the rise of evangelicalism in Brazil is a very interesting frame of analysis to understand the growth of the movement,” Orofino said.

American audiences can learn from the documentary in two ways, the producer said. The first is by “seeing themselves reflected in this kind of weird mirror that is Brazil.” Second, they can gain a “better understanding of how these networks of power, in many ways, use the resources and the centrality of the American government to impose, or at least to influence, the political life of other countries,” she said. 

In a country marked by extreme social inequality, evangelicalism has expanded rapidly among low-income Brazilians. At a Q&A after the film’s screening at DOC NYC last Wednesday (July 9), Costa and Orofino spoke about the role churches play in people’s lives. They discussed how social and humanitarian aid networks are sometimes used to reinforce political power projects led by church leaders.

“Apocalypse in the Tropics” director Petra Costa, center, and producer Alessandra Orofino, right, participate in a Q&A after a DOC NYC screening of the documentary, July 9, 2025, in New York. (Photo by Helen Teixeira)

Churches “form solidarity networks and create community around them,” Orofino said. “Their leaders have a strong presence locally, in territories where they know the families, the people who live there, supporting them through difficult times. And in many ways, that’s lacking from so many of our democratic movements, and people are looking elsewhere for that kind of connection.”

Often, the price of that presence is political influence, they explained. As Costa pointed out, in 2018, “70% of evangelicals voted for Bolsonaro. That’s more than any other segment of the population.”

“I really do believe that the evangelical base itself will become more attuned to the fact that the people who are representing themselves as their leaders and amassing enormous amount of political power in the process are not even true reflections of what the communities of faith actually look like,” Orofino said, noting that while the evangelical base is largely made up of women, Black Brazilians and working poor citizens, its leadership continues to be dominated by white men from Brazil’s wealthier urban centers.

The question that’s then raised, Orofino said, is, “How can we offer alternative versions of that – forms of community that could be spiritual as well, that are not intrinsically authoritarian and do not try to bridge that separation of church and state?”

They also addressed internal tensions within evangelical communities. “There are other progressive pastors who have been shunned and persecuted by their churches because they declared that they would not vote for Bolsonaro or declared support for Lula,” Costa said, referring to Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva. “So that is religious persecution, and that’s the reason why the separation of church and state was invented — to protect Christians from religious persecution. It was Christians who invented it, and we’re seeing it play out in Brazil.”

Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva, center, in the “Apocalypse in the Tropics” documentary. (Photo courtesy of Netflix)

For Costa, this dynamic is at the heart of the film’s message. “It was this destruction of democracy, and that’s what the film is about,” she said. 

Throughout the documentary, the theme of the apocalypse serves as a narrative thread through which the film examines how literalist interpretations of the Book of Revelation, with its ultimate battle between good and evil, have shaped political imaginations and been absorbed into real-world political ideologies.

“It’s very hard to overstate the importance of the Book of Revelation and those symbols in our politics today,” Orofino told RNS. “Not only as a seminal book for dominion theology, but also as a force … that then has very concrete influence over geopolitical events around the world. So, it’s really illuminating for us.” 

AI Utopia, AI Apocalypse, and AI Reality

If we can’t build an equitable, sustainable society on our own, it’s pointless to hope that a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.


A conceptual background image of an Artificial Intelligence robot is shown.
(Photo: Getty Images)

Richard Heinberg
Jul 06, 2025Common Dreams

Recent articles and books about artificial intelligence offer images of the future that align like iron filings around two magnetic poles—utopia and apocalypse.

On one hand, AI is said to be leading us toward a perfect future of ease, health, and broadened understanding. We, aided by our machines and their large language models (LLMs), will know virtually everything and make all the right choices to usher in a permanent era of enlightenment and plenty. On the other hand, AI is poised to thrust us into a future of unemployment, environmental destruction, and delusion. Our machines will gobble scarce resources while churning out disinformation and making deadly weapons that AI agents will use to wipe us out once we’re of no further use to them.

Utopia and apocalypse have long exerted powerful pulls on human imagination and behavior. (My first book, published in 1989 and updated in 1995, was Memories and Visions of Paradise: Exploring the Universal Myth of a Lost Golden Age; it examined the history and meaning of the utopian archetype.) New technologies tend to energize these two polar attractors in our collective psyche because toolmaking and language are humanity’s two superpowers, which have enabled our species to take over the world, while also bringing us to a point of existential peril. New technologies increase some people’s power over nature and other people, producing benefits that, mentally extrapolated forward in time, encourage expectations of a grand future. But new technologies also come with costs (resource depletion, pollution, increased economic inequality, accidents, and misuse) that evoke fears of an ultimate reckoning. Language supercharges our toolmaking talent by enabling us to learn from others; it is also the vehicle for formulating and expressing our hopes and fears. AI, because it is both technological and linguistic, and because it is being adopted at a frantic pace and so disruptively, is especially prone to triggering the utopia-apocalypse reflex.

Messages about both the promise and the peril of AI are often crafted by powerful people seeking to consolidate their control over the AI industry.

We humans have been ambivalent about technology at least since our adoption of writing. Tools enable us to steal fire from the gods, like the mythical Prometheus, whom the gods punished with eternal torment; they are the wings of Icarus, who flies too close to the sun and falls to his death. AI promises to make technology autonomously intelligent, thus calling to mind still another cautionary tale, “The Sorcerer’s Apprentice.”

What could go right—or wrong? After summarizing both the utopian and apocalyptic visions for AI, I’ll explore two questions: first, how do these extreme visions help or mislead us in our attempts to understand AI? And second, whom do these visions serve? As we’ll see, there are some early hints of AI’s ultimate limits, which suggest a future that doesn’t align well with many of the highest hopes or deepest fears for the new technology.
AI Utopia

As a writer, I generally don’t deliberately use AI. Nevertheless, in researching this article, I couldn’t resist asking Google’s free AI Overview, “What is the utopian vision for AI?” This came back a fraction of a second later:
The utopian vision for AI envisions a future where AI seamlessly integrates into human life, boosting productivity, innovation, and overall well-being. It’s a world where AI solves complex problems like climate change and disease, and helps humanity achieve new heights.

Google Overview’s first sentence needs editing to remove verbal redundancy (vision, envisions), but AI does succeed in cobbling together a serviceable summary of its promoters’ dreams.

The same message is on display in longer form in the article “Visions of AI Utopia” by Future Sight Echo, who informs us that AI will soften the impacts of economic inequality by delivering resources more efficiently and “in a way that is dynamic and able to adapt instantly to new information and circumstances.” Increased efficiency will also reduce humanity’s impact on the environment by minimizing energy requirements and waste of all kinds.

But that’s only the start. Education, creativity, health and longevity, translation and cultural understanding, companionship and care, governance and legal representation—all will be revolutionized by AI.

There is abundant evidence that people with money share these hopes for AI. The hottest stocks on Wall Street (notably Nvidia) are AI-related, as are many of the corporations that contribute significantly to the NPR station I listen to in Northern California, thereby gaining naming rights at the top of the hour.

Capital is being shoveled in the general direction of AI so rapidly (roughly $300 billion just this year, in the U.S. alone) that, if its advertised potential is even half believable, we should all rest assured that most human problems will soon vanish.

Or will they?
AI Apocalypse

Strangely, when I initially asked Google’s AI, “What is the vision for AI apocalypse?”, its response was, “An AI Overview is not available for this search.” Maybe I didn’t word my question well. Or perhaps AI sensed my hostility. Full disclosure: I’ve gone on record calling for AI to be banned immediately. (Later, AI Overview was more cooperative, offering a lengthy summary of “common themes in the vision of an AI apocalypse.”) My reason for proposing an AI ban is that AI gives us humans more power, via language and technology, than we already have; and that, collectively, we already have way too much power vis-à-vis the rest of nature. We’re overwhelming ecosystems through resource extraction and waste dumping to such a degree that, if current trends continue, wild nature may disappear by the end of the century. Further, the most powerful humans are increasingly overwhelming everyone else, both economically and militarily. Exerting our power more intelligently probably won’t help, because we’re already too smart for our own good. The last thing we should be doing is to cut language off from biology so that it can exist entirely in a simulated techno-universe.

Let’s be specific. What, exactly, could go wrong because of AI? For starters, AI could make some already bad things worse—in both nature and society.

Just as there are limits to fossil-fueled utopia, nuclear utopia, and perpetual-growth capitalist utopia, there are limits to AI utopia. By the same token, limits may prevent AI from becoming an all-powerful grim reaper.

There are many ways in which humanity is already destabilizing planetary environmental systems; climate change is the way that’s most often discussed. Through its massive energy demand, AI could accelerate climate change by generating more carbon emissions. According to the International Energy Agency, “Driven by AI use, the U.S. economy is set to consume more electricity in 2030 for processing data than for manufacturing all energy-intensive goods combined, including aluminum, steel, cement, and chemicals.” The world also faces worsening water shortages; AI needs vast amounts. Nature is already reeling from humanity’s accelerating rates of resource extraction and depletion. AI requires millions of tons of copper, steel, cement, and other raw materials, and suppliers are targeting Indigenous lands for new mines.

We already have plenty of social problems, too, headlined by worsening economic inequality. AI could widen the divide between rich and poor by replacing lower-skilled workers with machines while greatly increasing the wealth of those who control the technology. Many people worry that corporations have gained too much political influence; AI could accelerate this trend by making the gathering and processing of massive amounts of data on literally everyone cheaper and easier, and by facilitating the consolidation of monopolies. Unemployment is always a problem in capitalist societies, but AI threatens quickly to throw millions of white-collar workers off payrolls: Anthropic’s CEO Dario Amodei predicts that AI could eliminate half of entry-level white-collar jobs within five years, while Bill Gates forecasts that only three job fields will survive AI—energy, biology, and AI system programming.

However, the most horrific visions for AI go beyond just making bad things worse. The title of a recent episode of The Bulwark Podcast, “Will Sam Altman and His AI Kill Us All?”, states the worst-case scenario bluntly. But how, exactly, could AI kill us all? One way is by automating military decisions while making weapons cheaper and more lethal (a recent Brookings commentary was titled, “How Unchecked AI Could Trigger a Nuclear War”). Veering toward dystopian sci-fi, some AI philosophers opine that the technology, once it’s significantly smarter than people, might come to view biological humans as pointless wasters of resources that machines could use more efficiently. At that point, AI could pursue multiple pathways to terminate humanity.
AI Reality

I don’t know the details of how AI will unfold in the months and years to come. But the same could be said for AI industry leaders. They certainly understand the technology better than I do, but their AI forecasts may miss a crucial factor. You see, I’ve trained myself over the years to look for limits in resources, energy, materials, and social systems. Most people who work in the fields of finance and technology tend to ignore limits, or even to believe that there are none. This leads them to absurdities, such as Elon Musk’s expectation of colonizing Mars. Earth is finite, humans will be confined to this planet forever, and therefore lots of things we can imagine doing just won’t happen. I would argue that discussions about AI’s promise and peril need a dose of limits awareness.

Arvind Narayanan and Sayash Kapoor, in an essay titled “AI Is Normal Technology,” offer some of that awareness. They argue that AI development will be constrained by the speed of human organizational and institutional change and by “hard limits to the speed of knowledge acquisition because of the social costs of experimentation.” However, the authors do not take the position that, because of these limits, AI will have only minor impacts on society; they see it as an amplifier of systemic risks.

In addition to the social limits Narayanan and Kapoor discuss, there will also (as mentioned above) be environmental limits to the energy, water, and materials that AI needs, a subject explored at a recent conference.

AI seems to present a spectacular new slate of opportunities and threats. But, in essence, much of what was true before AI remains so now.

Finally, there’s a crucial limit to AI development that’s inherent in the technology itself. Large language models need vast amounts of high-quality data. However, as more information workers are replaced by AI, or start using AI to help generate content (both trends are accelerating), more of the data available to AI will be AI-generated rather than being produced by experienced researchers who are constantly checking it against the real world. Which means AI could become trapped in a cycle of declining information quality. Tech insiders call this “AI model collapse,” and there’s no realistic plan to stop it. AI itself can’t help.

In his article “Some Signs of AI Model Collapse Begin to Reveal Themselves,” Steven J. Vaughan-Nichols argues that this is already happening. There have been widely reported instances of AI inadvertently generating fake scientific research documents. The Chicago Sun-Times recently published a “Best of Summer” feature that included forthcoming novels that don’t exist. And the Trump administration’s widely heralded “Make America Healthy Again” report included citations (evidently AI-generated) for non-existent studies. Most of us have come to expect that new technologies will have bugs that engineers will gradually remove or work around, resulting in improved performance. With AI, errors and hallucination problems may just get worse, in a cascading crescendo.

Just as there are limits to fossil-fueled utopia, nuclear utopia, and perpetual-growth capitalist utopia, there are limits to AI utopia. By the same token, limits may prevent AI from becoming an all-powerful grim reaper.

What will be the real future of AI? Here’s a broad-brush prediction (details are currently unavailable due to my failure to upgrade my crystal ball’s operating system). Over the next few years, corporations and governments will continue quickly to invest in AI, driven by its ability to cut labor costs. We will become systemically dependent on the technology. AI will reshape society—employment, daily life, knowledge production, education, and wealth distribution. Then, speeding up as it goes, AI will degenerate into a hallucinating, blithering cacophony of little voices spewing nonsense. Real companies, institutions, and households will suffer as a result. Then, we’ll either figure out how to live without AI, or confine it to relatively limited tasks and data sets. America got a small foretaste of this future recently, when Musk-led DOGE fired tens of thousands of federal workers with the expectation of replacing many of them with AI—without knowing whether AI could do their jobs (oops: Thousands are being rehired).

A messy neither-this-nor-that future is not what you’d expect if you spend time reading documents like “AI 2027,” five industry insiders’ detailed speculative narrative of the imminent AI future, which allows readers to choose the story’s ending. Option A, “slowdown,” leads to a future in which AI is merely an obedient, super-competent helper; while in option B, “race,” humanity is extinguished by an AI-deployed bioweapon because people take up land that could be better used for more data centers. Again, we see the persistent, binary utopia-or-apocalypse stereotype, here presented with impressive (though misleading) specificity.

At the start of this article, I attributed AI utopia-apocalypse discourse to a deep-seated tic in our collective human unconscious. But there’s probably more going on here. In her recent book Empire of AI, tech journalist Karen Hao traces polarized AI visions back to the founding of OpenAI by Sam Altman and Elon Musk. Both were, by turns, dreamers and doomers. Their consistent message: We (i.e., Altman, Musk, and their peers) are the only ones who can be trusted to shepherd the process of AI development, including its regulation, because we’re the only ones who understand the technology. Hao makes the point that messages about both the promise and the peril of AI are often crafted by powerful people seeking to consolidate their control over the AI industry.

Utopia and apocalypse feature prominently in the rhetoric of all cults. It’s no surprise, but still a bit of a revelation, therefore, to hear Hao conclude in a podcast interview that AI is a cult (if it walks, quacks, and swims like a cult... ). And we are all being swept up in it.

So, how should we think about AI in a non-cultish way? In his article, “We Need to Stop Pretending AI Is Intelligent,” Guillaume Thierry, a professor of cognitive neuroscience, writes, “We must stop giving AI human traits.” Machines, even apparently smart ones, are not humans—full stop. Treating them as if they are human will bring dehumanizing results for real, flesh-and-blood people.

The collapse of civilization won’t be AI generated. That’s because environmental-social decline was already happening without any help from LLMs. AI is merely adding a novel factor in humanity’s larger reckoning with limits. In the short run, the technology will further concentrate wealth. “Like empires of old,” writes Karen Hao, “the new empires of AI are amassing extraordinary riches across space and time at great expense to everyone else.” In the longer run, AI will deplete scarce resources faster.

If AI is unlikely to be the bringer of destruction, it’s just as unlikely to deliver heaven on Earth. Just last week I heard from a writer friend who used AI to improve her book proposal. The next day, I went to my doctor for a checkup, and he used AI to survey my vital signs and symptoms; I may experience better health maintenance as a result. That same day, I read a just-published Apple research paper that concludes LLMs cannot reason reliably. Clearly, AI can offer tangible benefits within some fields of human pursuit. But we are fooling ourselves if we assume that AI can do our thinking for us. If we can’t build an equitable, sustainable society on our own, it’s pointless to hope that a machine that can’t think straight will do it for us.

I’m not currently in the job market and therefore can afford to sit on the sidelines and cast judgment on AI. For many others, economic survival depends on adopting the new technology. Finding a personal modus vivendi with new tools that may have dangerous and destructive side effects on society is somewhat analogous to charting a sane and survivable daily path in a nation succumbing to authoritarian rule. We all want to avoid complicity in awful outcomes, while no one wants to be targeted or denied opportunity. Rhetorically connecting AI with dictatorial power makes sense: One of the most likely uses of the new technology will be for mass surveillance.

Maybe the best advice for people concerned about AI would be analogous to advice that democracy advocates are giving to people worried about the destruction of the social-governmental scaffolding that has long supported Americans’ freedoms and rights: Identify your circles of concern, influence, and control; scrutinize your sources of information and tangibly support those with the most accuracy and courage, and the least bias; and forge communitarian bonds with real people.

AI seems to present a spectacular new slate of opportunities and threats. But, in essence, much of what was true before AI remains so now. Human greed and desire for greater control over nature and other people may lead toward paths of short-term gain. But, if you want a good life when all’s said and done, learn to live well within limits. Live with honesty, modesty, and generosity. AI can’t help you with that.

Our work is licensed under Creative Commons (CC BY-NC-ND 3.0). Feel free to republish and share widely.


Richard Heinberg is a senior fellow at the Post Carbon Institute and the author of fourteen books, including his most recent: "Power: Limits and Prospects for Human Survival" (2021). Previous books include: "Our Renewable Future: Laying the Path for One Hundred Percent Clean Energy" (2016), "Afterburn: Society Beyond Fossil Fuels" (2015), and "Peak Everything: Waking Up to the Century of Declines" (2010).
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Eleanor Coppola, matriarch of a filmmaking family, dies aged 87

13 April 2024, 02:24

Obit Eleanor Coppola. Picture: PA

She documented the making of some of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s best-known films, including Apocalypse Now.

Eleanor Coppola, who documented the making of some of her husband Francis Ford Coppola’s best-known films and who raised a family of filmmakers, has died aged 87.

She died on Friday surrounded by family at home in Rutherford, California, her family announced in a statement. No cause of death was given.

Eleanor, who grew up in Orange County, California, met Francis while working as an assistant art director on his directorial debut, the Roger Corman-produced 1963 horror film Dementia 13, after had studied design at UCLA.

Within months of dating, Eleanor became pregnant and the couple were wed in Las Vegas in February 1963.

Francis and Eleanor Coppola in 1991 in Los Angeles (AP)

Their first-born, Gian-Carlo, quickly became a regular presence in his father’s films, as did their subsequent children, Roman (born in 1965) and Sofia (born in 1971). After acting in their father’s films and growing up on sets, all would go into the movies.

Gian-Carlo, who is seen in the background of many of his father’s films and had begun doing second-unit photography, died at the age of 22 in a 1986 boating accident. He was killed while riding in a boat piloted by Griffin O’Neal, son of Ryan O’Neal, who was found guilty of negligence.

Roman directed several movies of his own and regularly collaborates with Wes Anderson. He is president of his father’s San Francisco-based film company, American Zoetrope.

Sofia became one of the most acclaimed filmmakers of her generation as the writer-director of films including “Lost in Translation” and the 2023 release “Priscilla.” Sofia dedicated that film to her mother.

Beginning on 1979’s Apocalypse Now, Eleanor frequently documented the behind-the-scenes life of Francis’ films.

The Philippines-set shoot of Apocalypse Now lasted 238 days. A typhoon destroyed sets, lead actor Martin Sheen had a heart attack and a member of the construction crew died.

Eleanor documented much of the chaos in what would become one of the most famous making-of films about moviemaking, 1991’s Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.

“I was just trying to keep myself occupied with something to do because we were out there for so long,” she told CNN in 1991. “They wanted five minutes for a TV promotional or something and I thought sooner of later I could get five minutes of film and then it went on to 15 minutes.

She ended up shooting 60 hours worth of footage and published Notes: On the Making of Apocalypse Now where she wrote of being a “woman isolated from my friends, my affairs and my projects” during their year in Manilla. She also frankly discusses Francis having an extra-marital affair.

They remained together and Eleanor documented several more of her husband’s films, as well as Roman’s CQ and Sofia’s Marie Antoinette. She wrote a memoir in 2008, Notes on a Life.

In 2016, at the age of 80, Eleanor made her narrative debut in Paris Can Wait, a romantic comedy starring Diane Lane. She followed that up with Love Is Love Is Love in 2020.

Eleanor died just as Francis is preparing a long-planned, self-financed epic, “Metropolis,” which is to premiere next month at the Cannes Film Festival.

By Press Association