||||||| GUNK X ||||||| |||| Gunk (mereology) ...any whole whose parts all have further proper parts. That is, a gunky object is not made of indivisible atoms or simples. Because parthood is transitive, any part of gunk is itself gunk. 1 Nihilism is either necessarily true, or necessarily false. 2 Gunk is metaphysically possible. 3 If gunk is metaphysically possible, the nihilism is not necessarily true. 4 Therefore, nihilism is necessarily false. |||| | Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene; Justin McBrien Today’s debate about planetary crisis has yielded the concepts of the Anthropocene and the Capitalocene. Both recognize extinction but have yet to grasp its ontological significance—for humanity or for capitalism. What I wish to propose is that we recognize the Necrocene—or “New Death”—as a fundamental biogeological moment of our era: the Capitalocene. The Necrocene reframes the history of capitalism’s expansion through the process of becoming extinction. The accumulation of capital is the accumulation potential extinction—a potential increasingly activated in recent decades. This becoming extinction is not simply the biological process of species extinction. It is also the extinguishing of cultures and languages, either through force or assimilation; it is the extermination of peoples, either through labor or deliberate murder; it is the extinction of the earth in the depletion fossil fuels, rare earth minerals, even the chemical element helium; it is ocean acidification and eutrophication, deforestation and desertification, melting ice sheets and rising sea levels; the great Pacific garbage patch and nuclear waste entombment; McDonalds and Monsanto. The argument for the Necrocene flows from a view of capitalism as world-ecology, in which capital accumulation is understood as fundamentally embedded in, and shaped by, the web of life (see Moore 2015a; also Parenti and Hartley’s essays in this volume). The Necrocene highlights the relation between capital accumulation and negative-value. That latter encompasses those forms of nature that are directly hostile to capital accumulation, and which cannot be overcome through capital’s productivist logic. Questions of waste and toxicity loom large in Moore’s account, including of course the rising concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. But waste and toxification are only part of the reality suggested by the “rise of negative-value” (Moore 2015b). Extinction must be conceptualized in relation to the longue durée of capitalism. The “Anthropocene” displaces the origins of the contemporary crisis onto the human being as species rather than as capital. It reinforces what capital wants to believe of itself: that human “nature,” not capital, has precipitated today’s planetary instability. The Anthropocene says “humanity” put the earth under its power, that it could either save or destroy it—yet it also says the unintended consequences of this power only accelerate our powerlessness over earth’s inevitable revenge. We have mistaken who “we” are (as some kind of undifferentiated human mass) from what “we” perform through capital. We have mistaken a historical condition of our economic organization for an innate aspect of the human being. Planetary Catastrophism has become the ideology of capitalism, and in this catastrophism begets catastrophe. The more capital attempts the real subsumption of the earth, the more the earth subsumes it. In the Necrocene, capitalism’s farce runs concurrent with its tragedy | Accumulating Extinction: Planetary Catastrophism in the Necrocene; Justin McBrien | The Principle of Notworking: Concepts in Critical Internet Culture; Geert Lovink The culturalization of the Internet is at hand, and both the offline elite and techno geeks and media activists look at this slow but steady process with dismay. Culturalization, as Yudice indicates, is not an innocent process but comes with the ‘mobilization and management of populations.’9 This cannot merely be understood in terms of control. For Yudice democratic inclusion of ‘communities of difference’ is a necessary and desirable aim. What Yudice coins the ‘expediency of culture’ underpins performativity as the fundamental logic of social life today.10 Culturalization within the broader context of information technology (IT) can also be read as a moment of anticipation, a tactical sidetrack in response to the long-term decline of the engineering class in the West. The hegemonic role of computer scientists as inventors can easily be understood, but wasn’t going to last forever. Different fields of knowledge, from human computer interaction to usability and new media studies, have all in their own ways proclaimed the coming of the cultural turn. With the massive outsourcing of IT jobs to countries like India we may have finally reached this point. At last, there is an economic reason to pay more attention to the economic possibilities of techno culture. There is a growing urgency felt, at least in the educational sector, to start integrating ‘soft’ knowledge into the hardcore IT workforce. Until recently it seemed as if programmers and multi-media designers were from Mars and Venus. The genderized identity building imposed on male coders and female designers and communications staff still had an economic base in the division of labour within firms (IT versus marketing departments). With IT outsourcing happening at such a fast pace the dominance of the male geek coder is no longer a given and there is a chance of ‘cultural mingling’. ‘It takes a network to fight a network’, Hardt and Negri write.17 But networks might be an unsuitable form to win a fight. Hardt and Negri present the network as the logical follow-up of the guerrilla struggle. ‘Network struggle does not rely on discipline: creativity, communication and self-organized cooperation are its primary values.’18 Its focus is primarily on the inside, not on the enemy. Hardt and Negri rightly note that organization becomes less a means and more an end in itself. Networks are the best guarantee that no isolated cells emerge dreaming of armed struggle, suicide bombing, etc. Network struggles first and foremost question all present and contemporary forms of organization, from the political party and its Leninist model to the peoples army and, in my opinion, even the social movement and its residual form of the NGO. Networks undermine, but not entirely eliminate, authority and make decision-making next to impossible. They deconstruct power and representation, and cannot simply be used as a tool by self proclaimed avant-garde groups. In fact, networks prevent a lot of events from happening. This may not always be the right activist strategy but that’s where we are: preventing the repetition of tragic patterns in history. There are enough stories of lost struggles and organized idealism resulting in genocide. But then: networks do not only end histories, they also produce with their own set of politics. | The Principle of Notworking: Concepts in Critical Internet Culture; Geert Lovink | Fields of Potentiality: Part 3 – Patchwork and Institutional Oceanography We can see through 5th generation warfare and meta-perspectival lenses, the human as central actor may well be subsumed to alternative ontological frameworks that emphasise alternative users. As I’ve argued with regards to institutions attempting to map the conversational nexuses of modernity[1], the increasing levels of linguistic output and by extension linguistic heat create clinamenetic stirrings that go beyond modern institution’s boundaries, thereby increasing the informational complexity beyond their capability to manage. And in cohering new institutions, these may move beyond the human subject-user as its central focus, going into new technological and posthuman perspectival worlds that are below and beyond human comprehension. In mapping this, it would not be cartographic, mapping geography and landscape, but rather an oceanography of alternative codes and semiotics, where the new lifeworlds are below the surface of our view, deep in the inky black of posthuman nexuses. The speed now present in life, from logistics to technology bring forth whole new levels of optics that flatten and interface human lives. Perspectival lenses are shortened to recognise not a deep level of human-machine interconnectivity and addressability, but an interfacial regime of signs and screens that do the work of interpretation and narrativisation for you. Space and time have been warped by speed, delimiting the former as connectivity becomes instantaneous and distances between people and cultures are eliminated due to accessible knowledge and televisual/fibre optic linkages. Time has been limited, pushed away from the chronology of sequential events, as sequences translate into moments and singular anamnesis. Things blur and collide into moments of exposure, creating highlight reels and compilations. There is going authoritarian. “Authoritarianism controls the flow of information so that conspiracy theories never spread in the first place. Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube have tried to moderate content on their platforms, but this has proved to be an extremely thorny game of whack-a-mole and a textbook example of a wicked problem”[6]. There is going virtual, whereby moving one’s lifeworld from the organic to the computerised provides levels of control and certainty that are beyond the messiness of the real world. Of course with the increase in digital selves and botnets, the extent of this informational control may be limited as posthuman actors begin to inhabit and structure virtual worlds to their own ends. Finally there is the meta perspective, which attempts to analyse and map the various ideological and systemic lines that striate the modern world and its governance structures. Metamodern subjectivity, as well as ignoring the brutal consequences of systemic and meta-systemic change, also has the potential to devolve into transcendental nomadism with the aim of individual enlightenment. The postmodern nomad as such a subject is exemplified by Christopher McCandless[11], a Kerouacian hero whose death was caused by his philosophical hubris and naivety. As a metamodern persona, he recognised the futility of societal mass and looked to find light by flitting through the poles of the massed landscape. However, his postmodern reality came to bite as in his hubris he effectively killed himself. The poles he found himself between came to be the reality of his experience, and that in his attempts to escape he found these polarities to be multiplicitous rather than dichotomous. In other words, the stifling experience of civilisation turned out to be less harmful than the pure brutality of fissiparous nature. Being a tardo-frontiersman he wanted to separate the terra from the incognita, and in the process simply found that nature was as much a cruel bastard as society is. While McCandless was ensconced in a primitive romanticism, the lesson to be learnt is that full indulgence can lead to warped behaviours, either naivety leading to starvation or technological escapes that produce their own forms of brutal repression. The nomadism that both these polarities represent is an uncritical devolution into sedentary behaviours that attempt to recreate or create niches in society. A kitsch primitivism or a virtual realm of desire fulfilment. Both are uncritical in their perceptions toward actually existing technological and societal paradigms, and retreat into comfort zones of ludditic tribalism or computerised enrapturement, all the while reality explodes around them. | Fields of Potentiality: Part 3 – Patchwork and Institutional Oceanography | Joseph Tainter; The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) Collapse is a broad term that can cover many kinds of processes. It means different things to different people. Some see collapse as a thing that could happen only to societies organized at the most complex level. To them, the notion of tribal societies or village horticulturalists collapsing will seem odd. Others view collapse in terms of economic disintegration, of which the predicted end of industrial society is the ultimate expression. A society has collapsed when it displays a rapid, significant loss of an established level of sociopolitical complexity. The term ‘established level’ is important. To qualify as an instance of collapse a society must have been at, or developing toward, a level of complexity for more than one or two generations. The collapse, in turn, must be rapid – taking no more than a few decades – and must entail a substantial loss of sociopolitical structure. Losses that are less severe, or take longer to occur, are to be considered cases of weakness and decline. Collapse is manifest in such things as: a lower degree of stratification and social differentiation; less economic and occupational specialization, of individuals, groups, and terri­tories; less centralized control; that is, less regulation and integration of diverse econo­mic and political groups by elites; less behavioral control and regimentation; less investment in the epiphenomena of complexity, those elements that define the concept of ‘civilization’: monumental architecture, artistic and literary achievements, and the like; less flow of information between individuals, between political and economic groups, and between a center and its periphery; less sharing, trading, and redistribution of resources; less overall coordination and organization of individuals and groups; a smaller territory integrated within a single political unit. Collapse is a general process that is not restricted to any type of society or level of complexity. Complexity in human societies is not an all-or-nothing proposition. Societies vary in complexity along a continuous scale, and any society that increases or decreases in complexity does so along the progression of this scale. There is no point on such a scale at which complexity can be said to emerge. Hunting bands and tribal cultivators experience changes in complex­ity, either increases or decreases, just as surely as do large nations. Collapse, involving as it does a sudden, major loss of an established level of complexity, must be considered relative to the size of the society in which it occurs. Simple societies can lose an established level of complexity just as do great empires. Sedentary horticultur­alists may become mobile foragers, and lose the sociopolitical trappings of village life. A region organized under central chiefly administration may lose this hierarchical umbrella and revert to independent, feuding villages. A group of foragers may be so distressed by environmental deterioration that sharing and societal organization are’ largely abandoned. These are cases of collapse, no less so than the end of Rome, and no less significant for their respective populations. To the extent, moreover, that the collapses of simpler societies can be understood by general principles, they are no less illuminating than the fall of nations and empires. Any explanation of collapse that purports to have general potential should help us to understand the full spectrum of its manifestations, from the simplest to the most complex. This, indeed, is one of the central points and goals of the work. These points made, it should be cautioned that in fact defining collapse is no easy matter. The present discussion may serve to introduce the orientation, but the definition will have to be added to as the work progresses. | Joseph Tainter; The Collapse of Complex Societies (1988) | phys.org Techno-fix futures will only accelerate climate chaos—don't believe the hype Building a future in sync with the natural world will not be easy. Our collective imagination is bound to ideas that have delivered us to the cusp of environmental catastrophe. The ways we work, travel, eat, and even think are all locked into systems that perpetuate the use of fossil fuels, encroach on the natural world, and exploit wealth and resources from the Global South. Worringly, this understanding is sorely lacking in two of the most popular emerging visions of the future – ecomodernism and left accelerationism. In a nutshell, both envisage that technological progress will allow us to address climate and ecological breakdown while also dramatically increasing production and consumption. To navigate the high resource demands of their imagined futures, ecomodernist and left accelerationist visions rely on fairy tale technologies that do not exist. For example, the future vision of Fully Automated Luxury Communism (FALC) peddles promises of asteroid mining to address resource shortages on Earth. Where FALC attempts to provide for all using the notion of luxury, feminist and ecologically-oriented economists and design theorists look to alternative strategies to generate prosperity. We propose a redesign of future ways of living based on different values: the ethics of care, regenerating nature, and distributing its benefits fairly. Cooperatives, time-banks and community-owned renewable energy systems are already putting these values into practice. These organisational models create regenerative and distributive systems supporting prosperity for all, and addressing climate breakdown at the same time. Of course, these alternative futures will require us to fundamentally transform our culture as well as our economy. Clearly technofix futures are more attractive options for many of those who are not on the frontlines of climate chaos—and who might be able to continue living high-consumption lifestyles for a decade or two more. | phys.org Techno-fix futures will only accelerate climate chaos—don't believe the hype |||| The unplanned organism is a question asked by nature and answered by death. You are a different kind of question, with a different kind of answer. God was a dream of good government. I have no enemies, merely topographies of ignorance. A society that can augment itself at will, a human race capable of exceeding its physical limits through the application of technology. Can you imagine what kind of threat such a thing would be to those who want to control us? Welcome to the edge. It's not the end of the world, but you can see it from here. ||||