by Kim Crawley
This Word document version of this article may be easier for you to read: https://drive.proton.me/urls/435KD3KKZC#du9FgRXQnqxw
Since the Covid pandemic started in 2019-2020 (it’s currently ongoing, by the way), “doomer” is a word I’ve seen used on the internet a lot more frequently.
People have strong disagreements about what the word means.
Some people believe it means a nihilist who has given up on absolutely everything and is eager to watch the world burn.
Those who take that definition think we enjoy mass suffering and everything being shit.
Some people believe the word means someone who is generally pessimistic about the state of the world, but said pessimism is justified and we aren’t the most negative of nihilists who want to watch the world burn. At most, maybe a “doomer” is just like Eeyore. Is gloomy and negative by default, but can be persuaded to see the good in some things. And our pessimism is realism, because the world really is shit now, even worse than it was even a few years ago.
Whenever new words enter the lexicon, Urban Dictionary generally records it before Merriam Webster does. Let’s see if anyone on Urban Dictionary has definitions…
One user, dom-trussardi, wrote:
“A person who sees doom coming for humanity as a whole for either rational science-based reasons (AGW, nuclear war, doomsday clock, etc) or irrational reasons (zombie apocalypse, god’s punishment, etc). Sometimes used as a slur against schizoid or loner types who have negative worldviews for mental health reasons.
This guy reading The Sixth Extinction is becoming more and more of a doomer as he turns the pages.”
May 2020. I believe dates may be relevant.
Jaymax wrote:
“Someone who expects the worst possible outcome from a global occurrence, especially the peak in global oil production.
Antonyms are cornucopian, humanist, realist.
Doomers hold a faith based belief that humanity is incapable of resolving human-society created global issues, e.g. by replacing oil with other energy sources.
Refer apocophilia
peakoil.com is packed full of doomers practicing group-think like it was a survival skill.
I used to be a doomer, but then I remembered how to add.”
That’s from September 2005! So “doomer” isn’t that new, it’s just become more frequently used. It must be nice to be unaware of what happened to the world beyond 2005. I think we have some worse things on our plate right now than speculating about peak oil production.
Sierra Sam wrote in 2012:
“Someone who that revels in the thought of destruction of the planet or humanity due to global warming.
Antonym: denier.
Doomers hold an unshakable faith that the planet is inevitably doomed because of anthropogenic global warming and that nothing can reverse earth’s ultimate destruction. In particular, doomers seem to take joy in discussing and contemplating a global doomsday.
The doomer took great joy in debunking a report that suggested that global warming doomsday predictions were exaggerated.”
There again, the strange connotation of people enjoying the doom. That’s not a connotation that I like at all.
In 2025, I Kim Crawley get accused of being a “doomer” because I’m immensely aware of how much shit we’re in. I can summarize it like this:
- Late stage capitalism has collapsed into fascism. Karl Marx didn’t use the phrase “late stage capitalism” in any of his writings, nor the most direct German equivalent in his original texts. But spätkapitalismus or “late stage capitalism” was terminology introduced by Werner Sombart in 1925. Sombart was a follower of Marx and Friedrich Engels, and Sombart and Engels did communicate with each other through letters. The idea is that when capitalism’s many contradictions (something Karl Marx did write about) makes the system start to collapse, it collapses into fascism. Capitalism and fascism definitely co-exists. Fascism is basically the state or other forces under control of the capitalists using violent force to maintain their power. Marxists after Werner, all around the world, have generally agreed that fascism is capitalism in crisis. This phenomenon is currently the most intense in the United States. But it’s also ramping up in America’s “allies,” especially those in the G7. Canada, the UK, Australia, much of Western Europe, and definitely in America’s vassal “state” of “Israel.” If you want to escape fascism as much as possible, you have to move a country like Vietnam, China, Bhutan, or Cuba. Bhutan isn’t communist, but has been an unusually egalitarian Monarchy far from American control. The other three examples are countries that have enjoyed communism in different ways.
- Capitalism has controlled most of the world for about 200 years. Karl Marx only lived for the beginning of it. We are dealing with the damage caused from the cumulative effect of two centuries of industrialization under capitalism. Most notably, global climate disaster. Now each year, there are much more frequent and much more intense natual disasters all over the place. From floods in Malta (the tiny far southern European island nation my mom’s side of the family came from, that prior to 2020 got very, very little precipitation each year) to the opposite, droughts in parts of the world that normally get a lot more precipitation, to 30 Celsius, 80 Farenheit in April in Toronto, Canada (where I am, hi!), to hurricanes reaching parts of the world that didn’t normally have them. One of the major problems is buildings and civic infrastructure in parts of the world were designed for climates they had for most of the 20th century. Malta wasn’t built for more than an half an inch of rain a few times between November and February. Even modern British homes weren’t built for very hot summer days, which requires insulation and air conditioning. Floridians have homes built for hurricanes, but not people in the middle of Idaho. Toronto has a massive fleet of snow removal vehicles, and Texan cities don’t. And so on, and so forth. Climate disaster also greatly harms agricultural food production, so people starve. A lot of cities on ocean shore lines may be underwater soon. Any parts of North America south of Toronto or any parts of Africa north of… South Africa, may soon get extremely, unbearably hot year round. Scientists saw climate change and climate disaster coming as early as the late 19th century, just a few decades into industrialization. They warned that we would have to restrict how much coal is burned, and then how many cars are driven, and so on. But measures to reduce carbon emissions and fossil fuel consumption hurts capitalism! So for lots of decades, capitalists have colluded with the media and the government to pretend that manmade “global warming”, climate change, climate disaster was a myth. As recently as the early 1990s, my late father said to me, “Kimberly, global warming is a myth! The climate naturally has warming and cooling cycles without humanity!” That’s one of a multitude of myths that my parents and adults in my life taught me, and I believed them. Fuck you, dad. Yeah, feel free to torment me with your ghost.
- The kind of economists “the Chicago School” have produced from the early 20th century to today adore Adam Smith’s “magic hand” of the market, and assure the world that capitalists act in rational self interest. But now capitalism has collapsed to the extent that a lot of those at the very top are being absolutely batshit. It’s understood by people who are in touch with reality that a capitalist doesn’t mind harming proletariat for the sake of profit. But now they are being psycho in ways that don’t even make sense from the perspective of benefiting themselves. For example, OpenAI is dumping literal billions of dollars down the drain each month. In the middle of the 20th century, a massive corporation might spend $2 billion to get $5 billion in return. OpenAI is getting maybe a million dollars for every billion they spend. For several years, Amazon deliberately lost money to become a virtual monopoly in a lot of online retail segments and computer networking infrastructure for corporations. But they have been in the black for several years now. Not OpenAI. Corporations like Microsoft have generally been immensely profitable, but their Gen AI segments are deeply in the red. Our group member RazedHunter goes into detail in The Skeptic’s Bible podcast he makes for us. It’s definitely worth your listen, and he has tons of citations.
- Gen AI is the product of capitalism really running haywire. And it’s accelerating climate disaster, and making millions upon millions of us unemployed and poor. It doesn’t matter that Gen AI cannot do our thinking and creative labour anywhere close to competently. Our overlords will keep pushing it anyway. See citations on our homepage. According to this recent article from Gareth Watkins at New Socialist and this piece from Forbes, capitalists have spent at least a collective $3.44 trillion on Gen AI. Not billion. Trillion. I think the collective American GDP has been $10 trillion in a good year? It’s an unfathomable amount of money. NASA could probably send custom built probes to the moon thousands of times for $3.44 trillion. And space missions are extremely expensive. $3.44 trillion is a lot more money than most entire nations have. Are capitalists seeing a return of even a fraction of that? No fucking way.
- The large majority of workers in capitalist countries becoming much poorer, and many of us will die due to poverty, is part of the contradictions of capitalism Marx did write about. The capitalists need us to spend money on goods and services, but their money hoarding means we cannot spend money on goods and services. If you give a poor person $200, they will go out and spend it immediately because it would be really nice to buy groceries instead of hoping the food bank has something remotely edible. That money goes right back into the economy and becomes “useful.” Meanwhile, if you give a billionaire a million dollars, it’ll just get thrown into a metaphorical vault. It will stagnate.
- Most of us on social media see frequent images of how Israel, with vast amounts of American funding nonstop, is completely genociding every single Palestinian in Gaza. We see emaciated babies with their heads blown off. I can stomach the photos and videos of bombed buildings, and I share Palestinian crowdfunds and donate when I can. I cannot stomach the videos that get shared of Palestinian children with their intestines literally oozing out of their torsos. I have to actually block the accounts that share those particular videos, because I will vomit with my phone in my hand, and I will have nightmares that keep me up for consecutive nights. It’s tough for Palestinians to find the sweet spot for a glimpse of their reality that emotionally compels a westerner to give them survival money, and a glimpse of their reality that makes Saw look like Barney & Friends. The political leaders in the west are responsible for this. The United States, Canada, the UK, and so on are “the baddies.” Any westerner who is proud to be American or Canadian or British is absolutely fucking vile. The United States isn’t “neglecting” the genocide. The United States and its allies are directly causing the genocide. South Sudan also has a pretty nasty genocide going on, so I hear. But we see a lot less of that. During the Holocaust, most ordinary people didn’t see what was going on, nonstop on their phones.
- I see ICE being totally fucking Nazi. Now even Americans with birthright citizenship are being thrown into concentration camps. ICE will invade a courtroom, a kindergarten, a medical clinic. Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and everyone around them are now very openly Nazi, salutes and everything. Liberals are generally “see no evil, speak no evil, hear no evil.” Our new Prime Minister Mark Carney here in Canada was apparently elected because he appeared to many Canadians to be a lot less cooperative with Trump than his opponent Pierre Poulivere. But guess what? Canada currently has no travel advisory against going to the United States, and it turns our that Carney, Bay Street darling (our Wall Street) has closer business ties with Trump and says “how high?” when Trump says “jump!” Liberals are so fucking dense that while we see that all mainstream politicians in the west enable fascism, they think different supposed teams of fascism enablers are wildly different if they’re red or blue.
- On top of that, all of this shit impacts me personally. I have no fucking idea how I’m going to pay my rent past August. And I have no family to move in with. By the way, I’m still a college professor! I may soon be a college professor who is current faculty, but literally sleeping on the street. I am one of the millions of people Gen AI has recently made poor, that my organization was founded to support.
So, call me a “doomer.” For me personally, that means I will fight as hard as I can until the day I die (Will I see 45? I’m 41 now.) But if hypothetically, someone gave me a pill and said, “this pill will kill you relatively painlessly within two minutes of ingestion,” I would put it in a very safe place and thank them for giving me an emergency escape route so I don’t have to “experience homelessness” again, like I did often in my twenties. I don’t have surviving that in me anymore. I want to stay alive as long as at least the bottom tiers of Maslow’s hierarchy are met. But I won’t go on for long if I don’t have reliable shelter and food.
But founding Stop Gen AI has given me a bit of hope. Alas, there is one issue I’m dealing with lately that I hadn’t anticipated a month ago. Back in May-ish when I founded this org, I did anticipate that we would need to keep liberals away from our organization. I’ve seen liberals co-opt way too many leftist movements over the course of my lifetime. For instance, Occupy Wall Street became “Occupy Democrats.” Nancy Pelosi kneeling with the Kenta cloth in 2020 was part of the Democrats’ efforts to co-opt and neutralize Black Lives Matter. Barack Obama telling Black NBA players to not go on strike was another part of their efforts. And even before I was born, for decades there’s been tons of times that liberals have deliberately co-opted movements that anticapitalists/communists/Marxists had built to fight for marginalized people, in order to neutralize them.
A very recent example is “Hands Off” “No Kings!” “50501” pretending to be a protest movement against the more obvious fascism Trump is doing now. Fools who don’t know any better let themselves be convinced that nonviolent protest stops Trump if a million people march in an orderly, cop approved fashion in various American cities. Don’t be violent, and make sure to vote, vote, vote! Don’t do something the fascists don’t like. Don’t smash shit up like Minneapolis in the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. Be civil!
Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have recently held multiple “Rally Against Oligarchy!”events where attendees get arrested for chanting Free Palestine. What Bernie and AOC really want you to do is wait until the next election and then vote blue, really, really hard. VOTE HARDERRRRRR! As Bernie said around July 2024, “vote for Biden!”
So yeah. I knew to keep liberals from joining Stop Gen AI. All rightwingers, liberals included, are terrible at pretending to be “leftists.” You have to empathize with us in order to effectively talk like us. And if one empathized with us, one wouldn’t be liberal or any other kind of rightwinger, would they?
I once spotted a lib who pretended to be a “radical leftist” on Bluesky like this…
They were replying to posts opposing Israel’s genocide of Palestine. (I know that alone makes it obvious they aren’t one of us.) They wrote, “I am also very bigoted against Five Eyes people! But Hamas is also bad!”
Anticapitalists/antifascists/real socialists/Marxists/communists/anarchocommunists have a wide range of vocabularies, and both personal and international perspectives. But no actual leftist would ever call people living in colonialist states “Five Eyes people.” And we certainly wouldn’t call ourselves bigoted. (The “Five Eyes” is the military intelligence sharing alliance between the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, Australia, and New Zealand. That much is public knowledge. Was this man or bot a spook?)
My confidence in generally being able to spot liberals and other rightwingers has been generally well founded. I’ve said “anticapitalism” to some people curious in joining our group, and they didn’t like it. Buh bye!
But I had a blind spot I didn’t realize. Some people don’t flinch at anticapitalism. They may even act relaxed and friendly when you say you’re a communist. But they still think appealing to (western) politicians is a worthwhile tactic. Two such fools were group newbies in a recent meeting.
“You’re going to beg evil politicians who are in bed with our evil capitalist overlords to pass legislation?” I said.
“Kim, it’s just one of a multitude of tactics!”
One n00b went even further in his irrationality. “So Kim, you’re going to appeal to tech executives then? Yeah, that’ll go over well!”
Those are the options! If you hate and distrust all politicians, you must think appealing to Sam Altman and Satya Nadella is key! (I hope you can feel my sarcasm.)
Wow, liberals really live on a different planet. Up is down, down is up, we were always at war with Eurasia. Tech billionaires aren’t shoving buckets of cash down the pants of politicians in all “mainstream” parties. No, they’re separate entities, and you got to brown nose one or the other! /sarcasm
Last week, someone else on Bluesky was very proud to show me their Change.org petition to get Microsoft to stop doing Gen AI shit. These motherfuckers have THREE POINT FOUR FOUR TRILLION in the Gen AI bucket. That petition could get ten million signatures, and Mr. Nadella, if he ever saw it, would laugh at you.
I founded this org partly because I did approach a few unions that represent tech workers and creative workers. And they said “proposing legislation” is the only “offensive” they condone. And they have no fund for people Gen AI is making poor, right now.
If the planet wasn’t on fire, and if I wasn’t concerned that most of us won’t live to see 2030, I would only be annoyed by the liberals who cling to their voting and “proposing legislation,” and yadayadayada.
But… the planet is on fire.
And begging evil people to be less evil, instead of strapping them into a guillotine and dropping the blade, is a waste of energy and stalling that’s literally dooming us all!
WE HAVE TO FUCKING FIGHT. WE HAVE TO FUCK SHIT UP.
Lots of Marxists have written about how foolish it is to beg capitalists and their politicians to be less evil. Go here and explore: https://www.marxists.org/english.htm
Also my friend “Living in a neoliberal dystopian hellscape” @breakify.bsky.social wrote today about how foolish it is to appeal to politicians. They described it very well in a number of posts.
https://bsky.app/profile/breakify.bsky.social/post/3ltk75fzabk2n
“Apparently the proper response to the state declaring war on its own citizens, murdering them in cold blood and throwing them into concentration camps, is to passively lay down, while our ‘betters’ work within the system for redress. Professional class technocrats are going to get us all killed.
Let’s be real, every ‘work within the system’ reformist has utterly fucking failed. This is the same murderous system that sanctions qualified immunity, mandatory minimums, and mass incarceration. Things are getting worse, not better. This is a deeply fascist machine that can’t be fixed.
Also, isn’t it weird how so many of them happen to be affluent white men and aren’t personally affected by the policies that they claim to want to address? Like, of course you’re urging patience and passivity. It’s not your fucking life on the line!”
https://bsky.app/profile/breakify.bsky.social/post/3ltkci3qy5k2k (alt text through link)
https://bsky.app/profile/breakify.bsky.social/post/3ltkd64osqc2v (alt text through link)
Forget about “voting” under capitalism.
If Marxist writings aren’t credible to you, ivy league Princeton University did extensive research several years ago and found that “voting” does fuck all if you aren’t super wealthy. And if you’re wealthy, you “vote” by shoving vast sums of money down politicians’ pants. (And they won’t pass your proposed legislation to stop, or even temper Gen AI. Their donors don’t want that.)
https://ivn.us/2015/05/07/voice-really-doesnt-matter-princeton-study-confirms
or
I say the real “doomers” aren’t those of us who recognize the doom. The real “doomers” are those who are dooming us to protest “nonviolently,” to VOTE HARDERRRRR, and to “propose legislation.” Instead of actually fighting effectively!
They are dooming us to doom.
Stay the fuck away from Stop Gen AI, legislation proposers.