“Silicon Valley engineers long ago stopped programming computers and became instead programmers of human behaviour. From that moment when we decided to make social media the global interface of our relationship with reality, we put ourselves in their hands. And in the hands of everyone, from influencers to spin doctors, who’s interest is served by the overheating of the social climate.”

Pithy to power …. here’s Giuliano da Empoli, a Swiss Italian “political scientist” who was once a mandarin advisor to the then Italian PM Matteo Renzi (Italia Viva).

“– my experience with politics has allowed me to develop a certain amount of expertise when it comes to natural stupidity. And when we consider he future of artificial intelligence, we have to admit that it won’t only amplify human intelligence – it will also amplify human stupidity.”

This compact book of micro-dosed brusque musings on the contemporary monstrosity of “post $ump politics” & the disease of unelected plurto-oligarchic tech vandals spiralling misrule & hijacked-government administration facilitated crime sprees manages to be both frivolous & deeply cutting in roughly equal measures.

“Our ancestors lived in far more data-poor societies than ours, but they were able to make plans for themselves and their descendents. We have ever less understanding of the world in which we will wake up in tomorrow morning.”

It can sometimes be difficult to clearly determine “which side” Empoli exactly resides on or serves? as he microwaves randomised fallout from the prevailing political clusterfuck & anti-life authoritarian death economy. A smart opportunist with a scattergun & a book deal operating under couched cynicism? Or an unsparing acerbic making terse, morally motivated ambushes on the inner machinations of the ruination cult & it’s perpetually extending crisis saturation?

“Ten years ago, Cambridge Analytica paved the way by importing into Europe and the United States the information war techniques it had developed for the British army and intelligence services in Pakistan and Colombia. In a world were the digital condition has become the first truly global service, shared by the entire population of the world, the dynamics of the internet and social media can be exploited in more or less the same way everywhere. So Nigeria, for example, might become a perfect testing ground for a campaign in Norway.”

I appreciate sections & elements of The Hour of the Predator a lot, & there are some very useful observations, statements & revelations ascribed, but a shallowness & even showiness is at play, & there appears to be a certain flippancy & frivolity, which is at times highly reductive, generalising & prone to gross simplification.

“War is back in fashion”.

“All over the world war fever is catching, and liberal democracies are not immune to the contagion.”

but war is also detested & extremely unpopular, & despite some of the most absurdly draconian anti-protest legislation ever to insult “the democratic world”, tremendous public opposition & mass-mobilised contestations abound. War is “back in fashion” as Empoli describes it because of an increasingly desperate, unprecedentedly corrupt & compromised cadre of Western soft tyrants & political stooges who are doing the furtive bidding of their maniac billionaire special interest pilots & paymasters under ever-expanding criminal means & limitless egregious bent.

this is far from an intractable disposition & crisis, & the “no exit narrative” isn’t helpful or accurate for resolving this emergency.

“The new American president [$ump] is at the head of a motley procession of shameless autocrats, tech conquistadors, reactionaries and conspiracy theorists, all spoiling for a fight. An era of limitless violence lies ahead of us, and, as in Leonardo’s time, the defenders of freedom seem singularly unprepared for the battle ahead to come.”

Depth & the accuracy of “opinion” are a vulnerability for this book. It is simply too cursory, brisk & assumptive for its own good in places, which also makes some of the conclusions less substantive. I guess it has been designed & dispensed more like a collection of Twitter posts?

“The doomsday clock, updated every year by the successors of the physicist behind the Manhattan Project, is now set to eighty-nine seconds to midnight, the closest humanity has ever come to to extinction since the clock was created in 1947.”

Palantir, & the hellish, freakoid criminal terrorists running it, are never even mentioned once. For a far fuller & penetrating expose on “the autocrats and tech billionaires” onslaught, you would be immeasurably better off absorbing say, Jonathan Taplin’s The End of Reality, Gil Duran’s The Nerd Reich, or Nick Couldry & Ulises Mejia’s The Cost of Connection (among many others). But in addition the latter’s much greater & extensive examinations, Hour of the Predator is a worthy snack.

“The same goes for cutting government expenses with a chainsaw, eliminating entire departments in the American administration, which Trump ripped off wholesale from the Argentine president Javier Milei, before entrusting the execution of the plan to the world’s richest man, Elon Musk.”

Again, questions about fatalism & defeatism – which can double as a form of cunning complicity – are present, with Emilio sometimes exhibiting a trait of being a little too ready to shriek acquiescence to TINA (“there is no alternative”) foisted by tech tyranny & the new political criminal’s despotic outriding.

Debate & consideration needs to be had about whether this writing is ultimately resistance or a kind of surrender? & the oppositional errors of trivialising, nihilistic, & flashy, with spiel over substance & a potential facetiousness that could be at play, rolling this apocalyptic emergency into a kind of “entertainment” for cynical hipsters & amoral amorphism.

All said & done, & with caution, this is an interesting book with moments of excellence.

Giuliani da Empoli, 2025, Pushkin Press, 136-pages