Residents of Venice were not pleased when Jeff Bezos announced his Venetian wedding in early 2025. The proposal involved leasing the entire municipality for three days, filling up the central canals and obstructing busy streets, all to fund roughly $50m in celebrations. It marked the beginning of a growing dispute between the city and its wealthy visitors.
The demonstrations came after Blue Origin, the rocket company run by Bezos’s wealth and anxiety about climate change. Bezos’, had recently sent a group of female influencers and celebrities into space for a publicity stunt. Among them was his fiancée Lauren Sánchez and pop singer Katy Perry, who flew to the suborbital edge of space. A 35-year-old high school teacher named Marta Sottoriva spoke to reporters about how a 10-minute space trip seemed pointless to her. She recalled her own reaction with these words: “The feeling that our city was being taken away from us in such an arrogant way,”.
Federica Toninello, another young activist, agreed. She described it as if both space and Venice were being “colonized.”
Bezos’s Plan for the Solar System
Blue Origin’s sales pitch is well-rehearsed. Bezos claims the company will secure humanity’s survival by allowing a trillion people to spread across the solar system. The threat he wants to save us from is what he calls a “civilization of stasis,” otherwise known as having to contend with real ecological limits and devise a way to share the planet’s finite resources.
Bezos instead pictures a world where “Earth will be zoned residential and light industrial” and held apart as a reserve, kept far from most of its people. Nearly all humanity will chase “exponential growth”, confined to Blue Origin spaceships. This suggests Bezos regards peaceable living and sustainability on Earth as an unworthy nightmare not worth considering.
The Venetian Response
Venetians objected to the plan. They feared economic decline from state divestiture, a shortage of employment and chance, and being compelled to leave the city and nation they hold dear. In recent years, over 1 million Italian citizens have relocated, with a third of them between the ages of 25 and 34. Many young Italians have no other option than to depart their homeland in search of work.
The Protest That Worked
Outrage over billionaires, climate breakdown and militarism fueled the “No Space for Bezos” campaign. Protesters printed posters and stickers with Bezos’s face on a rocket heading into space. A dummy of Bezos was built, grasping handfuls of fake cash while holding onto a huge buoyant Amazon package, which was then let loose to drift down the canals. Banners were unfurled from Venice’s well-known buildings and bridges and across its piazzas: “Tax the rich to give back to the planet.” The crowd chanted that the money for the wedding would be better spent rebuilding Gaza.
A host of well-known names made up the guest list, including Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, OpenAI’s Sam Altman, and a crowd of Kardashians. They spent days causing gleeful chaos and relentlessly poking fun at the groom and his star-studded guests.
A few days before the ceremony, authorities said the wedding was being held at a more remote spot because of the demonstrations. It was not clear who Bezos’s two yachts, Koru and Abeona, were denied permission to dock locally. Organizers declared victory and celebrated. The international press devoured the visual-rich showdown. The online right didn’ should cheer for: the Davos elites spraying each other with foam on a superyacht, or the leftist riffraff making agitprop.
“The feeling that our city was being taken away from us in such an arrogant way”
What the Protests Pointed To
The unrest in Venice highlighted a core issue with what the authors call the age of end times fascism, a subject they explore in their new book. That term describes a partnership pushing for an apocalyptic outcome in which only a select few survive unharmed.
The fight today is not merely between those struggling to survive amid worsening and costly conditions and a ruling class finding ever more extravagant ways to waste its fortune. It runs deeper than that, touching something closer to the very fabric of existence.
There are those among us with no exit strategy, no refuge above or below ground, who are bound to remain exactly where we are, on this earth, alongside one another. We recognize that we must undertake whatever action is required to make “here” – this planet along with all its ecologies and communities – a safer place for the many forms of life that depend upon them, fully conscious that this is our single and only dwelling.
There are also people with grand designs for protecting themselves against the end of the world.
The Wedding Moved
The demonstrations succeeded. As a result, the ceremony was shifted to a less prominent spot because of the protests. Both of Bezos’s yachts were prohibited from docking. The movement declared its effort a success.
The demonstrations proved that local discontent can grow into a national narrative. The foreign media documented the visually striking confrontation. The online right couldn’t decide which side to support. The Davos elites appeared absurd. The leftist riffraff appeared inventive.
See the video the story is built around at Theguardian.