Generative Empires. How Big Tech is Building the Future it Plans to Escape

In collaboration with Lighthouse Reports

A handful of billionaires have decided they should determine everyone's future. Musk wants cities on Mars; Bezos, industry in orbit; Altman, a superintelligence that ends scarcity, while warning that AI could wipe out humanity. In More Everything Forever, named a Best Book of the Year by Scientific American, Science News and The Conversation, science journalist and astrophysicist Adam Becker dismantles these visions and shows how the catastrophism pays: cast AI as a world-ending threat and its makers become the only ones fit to contain it, deflecting scrutiny and demanding to be trusted, unchecked, with the power they hold. These are not forecasts but an ideology, rooted in longtermism and currents that echo eugenic thinking, used by unelected men to claim the right to decide how the rest of us live. And it is no longer abstract: the same figures now sit at the center of power. Musk spent 2025 taking a chainsaw to the federal government inside the Trump administration in the US, while tech firms sell cloud, satellites, and AI to militaries and police and own the surveillance infrastructure of daily life. The real danger is not a rogue machine. It is the concentration of power, wealth, and data in a few hands, here and now, and what it does to democracy. This is an ideology fundamentally at odds with democracy: it asks us to surrender collective decisions about our common future to men and companies no one elected and no one can hold to account. The future these tech oligarchs describe is dressed in the language of technological and smart solutions, but in reality is no more than a vapid power fantasy based on science fiction and their own boundless greed.

Adam Becker also appears in the documentary Ghost in the Machine, screening at DIG Festival as an Extra film. Introduced by director Valerie Veatch and by Becker himself, the screening takes place on Saturday 26 September at 8 p.m. in the Sala Smeraldo of the Cinema Astra.