Meet The Futurists

There are people who can see into the future, people whose visionary work will be shaping our culture for years to come. We meet three of them

THE PROPHET of doom and hope

FOR 20 YEARS, NAOMI KLEIN HAS BEEN ON A CRUSADE AGAINST SOCIETY’S ILLS. TODAY, THE STAKES ARE HIGHER: SHE’S TRYING TO SPARK A CHARGE AGAINST GLOBAL WARMING AS WE DRIVE TOWARDS THE CLIFF

BY MOLLY LANGMUIR

Naomi Klein makes her way through the crowd outside the Bloor Street United Church in Toronto. There are people chalking slogans on the pavement and a contingent wearing neon-pink “Justice For Foodora Couriers” T-shirts. All are there for an event titled A Green New Deal For All, at which the last speaker will be Klein, an author, an intellectual and environmental activist who is often deemed one of the leading progressive voices of our time.

Klein has been in the public eye since 2000 when her first book No Logo: Taking Aim At The Brand Bullies, an account of sweatshops, marketing and the rise of anti-corporate resistance, established her as a prodigiously capable systemic thinker and a writer of uncommon prescience. When she told people she was writing a book about anti-corporate activism, they would respond, “What anticorporate activism?” “These were the ’90s,” she says. “This was the boom years.” But the book, with its explicit critique of free trade, was at the printer when upwards of 40,000 activists convened on Seattle in November 1999 for raucous protests of that year’s World Trade Organisation conference. There are now more than a million copies in print.