Keystone
Shortly after the film adaptation of his latest novel “The Magician in the Kremlin” (2022), Swiss-Italian author Giuliano da Empoli is publishing “The Hour of the Predators”. It is a diary-like collection of essays that looks back on around 20 years of world politics.
It is not easy to write about politics these days, because what happened yesterday is usually completely outdated or no longer an issue today. The Swiss-Italian writer and political scientist Giuliano da Empoli attempts to understand this development in his essay collection “The Hour of the Predators”, which is being published in parallel in the original French and in the German translation. He also describes the resulting challenges of the present and the future.
He highlights moments from his own political career in the form of a diary – always with a date and place from Rome in October 1998 to Berlin in December 2024: da Empoli was an advisor to the Italian Minister of Culture from 2006 and deputy mayor in Florence from 2009 – under Mayor Matteo Renzi. The latter became Italian Prime Minister in 2014 and da Empoli was his political advisor.
Now he is fabulating about what happens when the most powerful people in the world are suddenly all in the same room. He writes about fashion issues at the UN General Assembly, power games between security officials from different countries and a dinner at the Obama Foundation.
These are observations and absurdities from a world that remains hidden from most of us. For example, da Empoli also knows that Trump called various foreign heads of state after his re-election in November 2024 to laughingly announce: “Ha ha ha, I’m back!”
Politics as a place of predators
Giuliano da Empoli distinguishes between an old and a new world. In the foreword, he writes that his “little book” attempts to “capture the breath of a world at the moment it plunges into the abyss – and the ice-cold seizure of power by another that takes its place.”
The predators of the new world are, on the one hand, the tech lords and, on the other, individual players of our time such as Argentinian President Javier Milei, US President Donald Trump, Saudi Arabian Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman and Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
Rumor has it that the latter only faked his trip to the UN General Assembly in 2024 in order to tempt Hezbollah to be less vigilant: “In the new world, the UN is just a decoy that you use to hit your enemies when they least expect it.” This is what da Empoli writes in the first diary entry, from New York in September 2024. These democratic institutions or human rights would no longer have the slightest value in the hour of the predators.
Chaos and artificial intelligence
As a writer, da Empoli sees his own role as that of the guy “who you don’t really know what he’s lost and who, according to all logic, shouldn’t actually be sitting at the table”. He observes, writes down and searches for meaning.
It becomes clear: In the last 20 years, the sphere of influence of politics has shifted considerably. Nowadays, election campaigns and propaganda take place primarily in the digital sphere, and artificial intelligence has been added to the mix in recent years. Empoli takes a critical view of the fact that Trump has entrusted entire parts of his government to Silicon Valley. He sees a “post-human future without the slightest security mechanisms” coming our way.
The author compares the average lack of orientation with regard to technology to Kafka’s “The Castle” or “The Trial”. Because in the end, nobody actually knows how artificial intelligence makes decisions; not even the developers know. Empoli is therefore gloomy about our future: “The window of opportunity in which a regulatory system could have been set up has now closed again.”
At the latest in the notes and the list of sources at the end, it becomes clear how much political, historical, technical or literary prior knowledge da Empoli assumes in these 100 or so pages. And this raises the question of who should actually read this little book. After all, it remains a description of the familiar, a hopeless plunge into the abyss that reads partly entertaining, partly overloaded with references.
*This text by Philine Erni, Keystone-SDA, was realized with the help of the Gottlieb and Hans Vogt Foundation.
