What’s with Europe’s ultra-wealthy high-spending fossil fossil-burning elite, beyond the Arab sheikhs and crazy nouveau-rich Asians?
This DW (Deutsche Welle) documentary in English is one of several documentaries and reports being commissioned by very mainstream German media channels (ZDF, DW, ARD etc). Since a few years, the discussion about growing inequality in Germany (or what is termed “inequality studies” in Picketty’s famous update). We enter a world of unwanted and expensive gifts given by the German ultra-rich to their communities or small towns were they live a life of anonymity and how refusing such gifts is becoming harder and harder.
This is also the murky world of “taxation designing”, of Steuern Gestalten basically a German term or euphemism for the high payed fiscal professionals and legal eagles who sometimes work for the government (finance ministry) AND also give advice to the super-rich oligarchs on how to legally avoid taxation in their own respective countries (if they didn’t already leave for the fiscal paradise of Switzerland). As always the best analysis of how the rich keep getting richer in Germany (and elsewhere) – in one of Adam Tooze’s last substack posts (highly recommended!).
While we are all aware and fulminate about the outrageous antics of Russian, Ukrainian (or say Romanian) or US billionaire for that matter – plutocrats, the German super-rich are a shifty lot. They actually stay out of the limelight and are much more elusive – even paying (or suing) to be taken off the lists of the global super-rich. Several of the richest family fortunes (do not get any illusions it is all a family business) owning chains such as Kaufland, Lidl or container shipping liners such as Hapag-Llyod in Germany do not appear listed in the annual who’s who of largest profits and incomes. When education or state services seem less and less reliable – charity capitalism is stepping in, but there are many tie-ins. Not to mention the silence and implications of such foundations with their nazi past (check out Nazi Billionaires 2022 book).
What we still have to learn today is that we cannot trust or employ the super-rich to save the planet (it is more the other way around, saving the planet from them and their private jets), what is less clear is that the Social Market Economy (Ordoliberalism) has been consistently enriching them during the last years, while the vast majority of Germans scrapes by a living from day to day, and the number of homeless people in Germany has doubled the last year.
What better counterpart to a decade where the rich won (2020s) and quantitative easting (short QE) seems to rule them all than to watch a documentary on how it all began. And also to understand what bugged free market libertarians like Milton Friedman’s than to watch the documentary that ‘triggered’ his response. Today we speak of ‘triggering’ in terms of what right wing is good at (Fox News etc) – and how easy it is to push their critics into ridiculous postures and very predictable behaviors, basically in what became a Pavlovian show. Who is going to make his opponent react in a knee-jerk way? And even better, who will make the other adopt one’s own tactics and meme first?
Well, before all that, we can place these two documentary series. Both very personal, with two key players. Big influencers supr in terms of statal policies and ideas. Do not get me wrong, these documentaries are about one of the most hated subjects around: economics (prove eme wrong!). Who does not hate the history of economics or the principal ideas deriving from that? A majority seems to suffer and endure under economicsl hardships even if money amd investment or financial system seem tok haunt us. What os a recession, what causes it, what are the class politics behind austerity measures? Who gets tok pay for inflation?
Maybe this will also answer some of the curiosities and questions regarding the 1970s when the great Golden Age of Capitalism in the West came to an end after a series of shocks. Several counter-measures culminating with the switch from liberal democracies where Big Government Keynesianism (both left or later on right-wing brands of Keysianism) finally gave way to the Austro-libertarian school of Economics represented by Friedman and the Chicago boys. While some may feel emboldened to say that today in the midst of the polycrisis we have a Keynesian moment coming around and neoliberalism is on the wane, I would rather say (with Quinn Slobodian and others in mind) that neoliberalism has mutated itself in the time of decoupling, de-risking and ethnopolitics. Maybe it is capitalism as usual – an upside down world that cannot get the right side up and will only get more lopsided.
John Kenneth Galbraith (1908-2006) was perhaps one of the most interesting characters and appreciated social scientists of his time. There are echoes of Galbraith everywhere today, even in his admonishment of militaristic Keynesianism where the military-industrial-entertainment complex simplex in Washington begins to use all the levers of power to transform its Big Tech into a national asset amd industrial policy. Frmerly free-trade radicals feeding on nationalism start to recast themselves as anti-Chinese US stalwarts. All this is put into stark contrast by a new generation of Keynesian economists (Gabriela Gabor and Isabella Weber come to mind). Forgotten lessons seems valid again. To prevent inflation after WWII JK Galbraith was recommending strategic price controls (anathema to the free market radicals!)
As John Kenneth Galbraith explained “the role of price controls” would be “strategic.” “No more than the economist ever supposed will it stop inflation” … “But it both establishes the base and gains the time for the measures that do.” 4/
John Kenneth Galbraith is a representative of classical liberalism that also enjoyed tremendous influence & honed his skills & experience being active at the center of the US establishment. He was active in Democratic Party politics, serving in the administrations of Franklin D. Roosevelt, Harry S. Truman, John F. Kennedy, and Lyndon B. Johnson. He also had relations to the Global South – being an ambassador to India (the biggest democracy on Earth) during the JFK administration. At the same time, he was red-baited by his opponents and considered by conservative think tanks the man who “made socialism mainstream“. So when he is saying that the powerful US Farmer lobby is still hailing back to the physiocrat thinkers in France, he knows what he is saying from direct experience. He pokes fun at everybody, especially at the privileged members of the ‘leisure class’. He does not miss an opportunity to constantly question the very thinkers he mentions according to their own principles or tax them when they employ theories or easy justifications in their own favor.
Yeah it looks oldskool and peak boomer in a way, at the same time all episode 1 The Prophets and Promise of Classical Capitalism is a tremendous effort to stage the history or economic ideas, the larger background, or the assumptionsof behind it all, including all the major thinkers. The stage is set by unsettling the stage – in a Brechtian manner, all the illusionist art, all the stagecraft, and the scaffolding of history is shown to be a BBC studio. He quotes John Maynard Keynes(Galbraith himself is regarded as a post-Keynesian) at the very beginning:
“The ideas of economists and political philosophers, both when they are right and when they are wrong are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed, the world is ruled by little else. Practical men, who believe themselves to be quite exempt from any intellectual influences, are usually slaves of some defunct economist.”
What can be blander than pretending to be free of any influence or any previous antecedent thinker or just acting according to practical reason, bootstrapping yourself? Then we risk like Kant’s dove to think that we can fly faster and more frictionless if we would prefer a vacuum instead. Yet this vacuum strikes back. Many intellectuals prefer to ignore schools of thought that have spawned the economics and politics that they prefer to think is the result of practical decisions & spontaneity. On the other end, you have professional economists being absolutely adamant that you have to stick with what works. They are eminently disinterested and ignorant of the history of their trade. Well, then maybe that is why we need historians of the economy.
Other than most Galbraith recovers those very fragments from the texts cherished economists that are not usually quoted or followed. This makes us see how fragmentary and prejudiced our reading of them is. The ideas and abstractions he visits are constantly pulled from their pedestal – with historical examples that seem to show the way they were misused. If he gets us to visit Adam Smith and the writing of the Wealth of Nations, at the same time notices that Smith in his self-interest and critique of tenured academics have also chosen private tutoring as a more profitable income over his university career. Eps 1 is a journey through the Scottish Enlightenment and Smith’s friendship with philosopher David Hume who woke Kant fromhis dogmatic slumber! Galbraith stops at French markets to talk about the theories of the French physiocrats or observe that not even Smith’s disdain could make us dismiss the Tableau économique of Quesnay sonde the input-output analysis later developed by Russian economist Wassily Leontieff (1905-1999) or the planned economy of the Soviet Union is a direct descendent of that very table. Principles such as laissez-faire and free trade are paraded, while the importance of the division of laborgets exemplified with the help of a pin-making process.
David Ricardo (1772 – 1823) advanced a Labor Theory of Value that was also going to have a long history ahead. In this climate of the British Empire, you had the first stirrings of the Industrial Revolution and the experiments in social responsibility atNew Lanark cotton mills in Scotland established by industrialist David Dale. Capitalist charity (which was not charity at all), since children and women became the first recruits and disciplined workers of the new era, worked just 1h less than in the other mills. Socialist Utopian experiments in collective living such as New Harmony, Indiana established by Robert Owen also get mentioned – an episode that rests in my heart because of Marguerite Young’s magnificent literary rendition of that in An Angel in the Forest: A Fairy Tale of Two Utopias (1945).
Early eviction and land-grabbing in the name of ‘agricultural improvement’ also get staged under the Highlander Clearances, where Scottish tenants were pushed out of homes to make room for more profitable (and aesthetically pleasing) sheep. The Irish Famine – and its Malthusian instrumentalization by the British State, as well as the migratory working class trails across the Atlantic, are important references. For Galbraith, it is also an example of how easy it is to abstract from the misery of others and decide to ignore their plight when one life and calculates remotely at a safe distance from their troubles. Or ordering bombs to drop on unknown others from above. The Irish had to pay with their lives and with their wheat to the landlords while the Corn Laws blocked the import of cheap corn. The Hamlet of Marie Antoinette that somehow modeled pastoral life of the education of princely offspring also gets mentioned.
Eps 2 Manner and Morals of High Capitalism – makes pretty obvious how Social Darwinism became the secular religion of the rich industrialists and robber barons (today’s oligarchs and Big Tech billionaires) of the Gilded Age. Put simply Social Darwinists embraced both racism and laissez-faire capitalism. The survival of the fittest dogma fitted their own socially privileged positions and even if they were not biologists, they used a biological language and twisted Darwin’s idea of natural selection to position themselves as the finest and most adaptable representatives of the species. The popularity of Herbert Spencer in the US is proportionate with the amount of capital accumulation and ruthlessness of the American ruling class. Carnegie and Rockefeller become thus prime representatives of this ideological thinking. Galbraith presents a bizarre series of such US apostles of Darwinism that were sometimes even predecessors of the pro-capitalist Prosperity Gospel. One of them is laissez-faire advocate and clergyman William Graham Sumner. Galbraith also illustrates the thin line separating the capitalist from the criminal, the hoodlum and rascal in the 19th century by recounting in detail the Eerie War – a bloody conflict between US financiers to control the Eerie Railway Company in an effort to corner the market. This is not very far from the current crypto kings. Galbraith also remarks something interesting – that the poor have always been a preferred subject of sociological research, with investigators going to the slums to study their existence, mores and sexual life, while the rich have not attracted this selfsame attention at the time. That was to be the task of Thorstein Veblen -that did exactly some reverse safari on them, depicting the rich as no more than Big Man, and explaining their luxurious living and excess in terms that are still familiar to us today: conspicuous consumption (think Trump, think Berlusconi, space billionaires and basically every other fat cat). There’s one of the most sympathetic views of Marx and that chapter also makes it even more clear than the internecine wars of western liberalism would make neoliberalism or even current secessionist anarcho-capitalists completly at odds with what went on for much of the post war period in the western world. There’s a lot to be desired in the series perhaps none more than the chapter on colonialism – and the anti colonial, transatlantic slavery trade, and all the current struggles and long shadow of colonialism that still ontinues to this day.
spacetime coordinates: few hundred years after the apocapyse
Here are some possible reasons to watch SILO series (as usual no spoilers!):
Enjoy safely from home curvaceous neo-brutalist architectures that reminded me of a lot of gaming architectures (somehow related to subway or metro designs). And ask yourselves if SILO is Apple+ streaming reply to new Cold War fears? Ok, maybe you are too young to remember when Outer Limits and Twilight Zone series went into the details of “average” families and societies that either prepared for the apocalypse (or the “Red scare”) by closing in on themselves and their (commie?) neighbors. Yes, that was a time drenched with a heightened sense of paranoia when you could unwittngly marry a commie ( I Married a Communist 1949) or battle monsters brithed by radioactive fallouts (Them! 1954). That was also a time for underground living and atomic scares. Well for what it’s worth, the atomic fears are back with Russia’s aggression war on Ukraine getting close to the largest atomic powerplant in Europe and people raiding the apothecary for iodine pills. SILO is basically a subterranean arcology right out of 1950s scenarios, at the height of the Cold War or the Cuban Crisis. Private home ownership has been a flagship of the free world yet this private ownership had its under side: the bunker. With the 2008 economic crisis and the housing/real estate crash, the growth of bunker offers has been relentless. How did Western post-WWII democracies imagine the future home? From early on, future homes where showcases of industry and Western capitalist values in the face of Soviet or Socialist modernist ideals. Thus, the House of the Future was an outcome of these Red Scare fears and an eventual bulwark against possible atomic catastrophes, financial troubles, and worsening outside conditions as well as ideological encroachment. If house ownership seemed to drive housing booms, there was also an underside. The American Dream managed to exclude and evict certain portions of the population on economic and racial grounds. The “house of the future” was conceived as a perfect self-sustaining (and sustainable) dream if only it could keep the undesirables on the outside. It was a self-contained bubble that could hold at bay both toxicity, freak weather as well as human misery or discontent.
The SILO is almost a rehearsal for the colonization of other planets, which is why the outside is non-existent, mediated and akin to the deserted exoplanet. It is almost like living on a Mars colony or a spaceship. Take the Alison and Peter Smithson House of the Future designed in 1956 for the Ideal Home Exhibition in London – and we can see overlaps with plans and blueprints for ideal bunkers and spaceship habitats. What strikes a chord now is that this is a sort of pre-Big Brother setting, a staged and open habitat. It does not have a ceiling or a roof, it is transparent from above. This house was not a house to be lived in, it was more of a stage. It was meant as an exhibition platform – a showcase where the spectacle of futurity (and Western modernity) did its rounds and where visitors could peer from above as if looking into a laboratory maze of experimental mice. SILO takes this in another direction, since it is a multi-racial society, yet with a class-system and pro-natalist eugenist politics. Eugenics is back and tech entrepreneurs do not shy away to express support for such views that have a terrible and brutal history behind. So in contrast with the old 1950s House of the Future, the SILO was meant to be collective if layered and divided living quarters. The usual SF trope with a long an UP/DOWN axis makes it a vertical Snowpiercer of sorts. There is a race to the top but once born in a certain level or section you cannot go up. Yet there is some downward mobility with the main character (like Engels) choosing to the bottom. All utopian plans concerning collectivity in the Anglo-American SF do not have a good track recrod. Usually, collective living is reserved for ideological enemies. This I think is where SILO series deviates from the usual familial unit. It is a whole block – a community of a little more than 10.000 humans (though there are many secrets concerning its origin and the possibility of outside humans with their own societies). Generally speaking, it is a quite diverse lot (till the recent episodes) and even if restricted by The Pact (you shall not magnify or shall not mechanize bottom-to-top transport), social mobility stifled by nepotism, by regulations and rules, I would say it is a much more egalitarian than the capitalist world we actually live in today. There do not seem to be homeless or people starving. Even if it somehow superficially reminds us of real existing Socialist (or Eastern Marxist) historical examples with its repressive surveillance systems and Judicial arm, the economic differences btw the inhabitants are not at all as extreme as in our societies.
SILO Apple+ series comes at a moment when overall fragmentation and fragilization (not to say militarization) is rampant. We live in a moment when extreme forms of anarcho- and libertarian capitalist ideas keep on popping up, no matter what. Advocating for so-called “free ports” and “free zones” or smart cities (free of taxes, free of regulations and basically free of any oversight or responsibility) is not new. This model has been ballooning on and off all over the world with the most notorious examples ranging from the US and the UK to places as unexpected as ex-US army basis in Afghanistan now under the Taliban. The question of TRUTH which seems all-important in this series is also too close to the “Truthers” claim, but it can also be a play on all these revelations and “talking truth to power” – and a feeling that this, under the current capitalist system will lead nowhere. The same as all the SILO ceremonials and sports events – they are just reverted or degenerated forms of historical events (this is again something that Tea Part and Truthers hold in common). The Freedom Festival celebrates the victory over the separatist escapist fraction, yet the sovereign individual is today at the center of conservative thought. Freedom and anti-cancel culture campaigns have become a constant part of the deregulatory push of tech entrepreneurs (and outcome of TW takeover by Musk). SILO announces today’s race for the insular. No, globalization and free trade are not disappearing. Within certain renegade sections of the Austro-libertarian neoliberal family – there was an attempt to eliminate democracy and fuse economy with trade within smaller, tight-knit (and like-minded) communities. What is SILO if not the result of the touted failure of nation-states, or the flight from the grasp of federal governments? According to such views, geopolitical blocks and democracies failed to avert catastrophe, stick to climate agreements and placate the military-entertainment complex. The surprise is that this SILO micro-state is rather drab, ignorant of its past, slightly totalitarian, and at the whim of its agencies (as the US with its Alphabeth NSA/CIA/FBi agencies?!). Another (not unimportant aspect) is the fact that a kind of runners or gig economy workers are all the time running down the stairs doing all sorts of errands. Is it the result of The Pact interdiction? Probably, but it is also a reminder of our world where food delivery services with the poorest of pay and under the most polluted conditions are a click away! If it is a “zone” closed off from the seemingly polluted deathly surface, it somehow reverted to the ideals of the old West with its Sheriffs and Mayors. Apart from the brown-grey and visible worn-out look of surfaces and its forced recycling ideals and hack labs (very far from today’s Big Tech control), this could be a real existing socialist world. You can also start watching this way. At the same time – it also seems strangely lifeless. Following the lives of citizens feels like living in Hobbiton: THE SHIRE haunts SILO. This is the most displeasing feature (plus long repetitive dialogues) – a sort of Tolkeinesque like villager life, closer to Amish or Pioneer town role-playing. So no Moebius/Jodorowsky Incal 1980s vertical (shaft) city. No color and no excess.
Depending on your point of view (or ideological flavor or science fantasy feel), Silo may be a missed opportunity or a chance to tackle an apocalyptic imagination of billionaires and tech entrepreneurs hiring military security to survive a societal collapse. A collapse, that they are constantly obsessing about but actively contributing to. While SILO is not confronting the way luxury bunkers it is a fictional extension of the lifestyles explored in Notes from an Apocalypse by Mark O’Connell. Such silos are the model for SILO and they are real not fictional. There is no need of fictioning in this sense. Companies such as Survival Condo have transformed ex missile silos into prime real estate. Cold War as a business model. Prepperism is so deeply entrenched in the US that there must be no surprise that every other tech AI entrepreneur has a bunker in his head (thinking here of ChatGPT’s Sam Altman).
Here is my favorite point. Watch SILO if you must as an answer to recent Chinese SF blockbusters such as Wandering Earth. I am referring here to the main character in the 2nd eps “Machines” – the proletarian figure of the engineer Juliette Nichols (played by Rebecca Ferguson of Dune fame). Watch her and her crew at the task of switching off the main generator for repairs. For me, this scene could be a perfect counterpart to the Liu Qi scene in Wandering Earth 1 installing the Lighter Core at the Sulawesi Earth Engine. That Wandering Earth fragment brought some of the most amazing scenes in recent cinema since it deployed intentionally some extant realist-socialist imagery by showing how humans (NO super-heroes), in a group effort and under great odds, manage to fix a very difficult issue. And VERY IMPORTANTLY this is an issue not dealing with chips or semiconductors, but with some huge engines. These mega devices are closer to giant mecha than high-precision equipment. Such engines appeared long since gone in cinema (and only part of the industrial age or Stalinist arsenal) or as said mecha designs. Here you have a gigantic rotating engine that keeps the entire SILO running by using some (what I suspect) geothermal energy source that can only be interrupted for short periods of time before catastrophic pressure build-up. Everything is against the clock. All the action in this episode was built around this engineering feat and “repair” moment. Where do we see such a repair scene? In my books, they are usually part of the Soviet Union or Romanian brochures about industrial achievements or stories my dead grandpa (a wielder) used to tell. This is very ironic, especially thinking that Apple is a company that has made repairs nearly impossible. Apple is particularly notorious for its closed hardware policy and for making eventual maintenance as difficult as possible for its utilizers.
Here is a series of tweet about that episode and more:
Eps 3 Machines was a surprise. I see here an influence of the Chinese #WanderingEarth movies. SF action based on a collective effort to repair a(geothermal energy) generator. Mechanic Juliette Nichols reminds me of Liu Qi installing the Lighter Core in the Sulawesi Earth Engine. https://t.co/v9VB4bNxlu
— sentient gloomberg @TironStefan@mastodon.social (@TironStefan) May 16, 2023
Photograph of the interior bedroom inhabited by two couples in the roles as inhabitants. House of the Future 1956, London.
House of the Future 1956 floor plan.
Drawing of a mat cluster of Houses of the Future 1956.
Phil Tippett (born September 27, 1951) is an American movie director and Oscar and Emmy Award-winning visual effects supervisor and producer, who specializes in creature design, stop-motion and computerized character animation.Over his career, he has assisted ILM and DreamWorks, and in 1984 formed his own company, Tippett Studio.
1. Do you think that imagining the future could be the first step to contribute in manifesting it?
First, let’s not limit the power of imagination, this “capacity” to imagine to just our common use of it as only pertaining to humans, a unique human faculty or a particular ability. Just a capacity of the capacious. A fantabulous happy extension of an evolved cognition, the marked and significant difference of lionized primates, such as humans used to feel as their branch diverged from other related species.
Let’s imagine that imagination is certainly more widely found and more basic than expected – a precondition to all the other “higher” faculties regarded by many as superior or distinctive.
For me and for others it feels more and more important to be able to accept and speak for example about bacteria or non-sapient blue-green algae in these nearly frivolous, imaginative terms. There is a comics from 1979 based on ideas by Dr Timothy Leary, a Neurocomics that treats the primordial soup as an irreverent cocktail of excitable ingredients, utterly promiscuous, and imaginatively spilling over (pls check the digital version here https://timespacewarps.wordpress.com/2021/01/27/1760/ ).
Let us see how we can question our own favorite evolutionary just-so stories, stories that get constantly remade. What about a story that shows how our particular transformation was achieved historically from distantly related, non-neuronal, brainless beginnings? Let us understand, with our current brains the way of being in the world of organisms that enjoy their lives without a central nervous system.
What do you do with this “imagination” that presupposes a complete lack of imagination around itself?
It would be worthwhile investigating how we can recognize or include the manifestation of an imagination that is clearly phylogenetically and epigenetically overflowing, one that complicates the arbitrary borderlines of a standard neuro- intelligence model. A more gradual and universal one. One that would put to shame our supposed neurotypical preferences. And even as this model gets more and more untenable, it tends to slide, captivated and kidnapped, lured by the supposedly lower ‘concrescent’ reality of the world.
With this background of unequal distribution hovering around us – a (preposterous) scarcity of imagination in the history of biological life that became the main tale told by the life sciences, we have arrived at a moment of crossroads. I considered my contact with STS (Science and Technology Studies) and history of science important because it made me question the very restricted and canonical histories told by the life sciences about themselves or as transmitted by generations and generations of biology manuals.
Otherwise, we keep risking remaining conceptually blocked in our physio-chemical understanding, blindfolded by the dominance of one domain, resisting all those ideas arising out of various domains of the evolving life sciences, losing our chance to keep up with all the new discoveries being made all the time.
Some call it a “Crisis of the Imagination”. I do not know if it is a crisis or not, but it would be a mistake to attribute it by default to the human, or Germaine to the fine arts, therefore entirely and exclusively human or humanistic. A crisis is only one if it keeps mired in just coffee talk about quantum physics and string theory while forgetting about various levels of symbiosis levels, of the role played by extremophile Archeobacterial lifeforms living in impossible (for us) conditions, or about the iconic role played by Tardigrades, seen everywhere online and offline, seemingly the perfect pre-adapted for life in outer space and pop SF series such as Star Trek.
It is important to see how we get socially constrained and so strict when and if we imagine a future, a common future imagined not just by some bipedal apes. Imagination is somewhere else then, especially if it does not help us imagine another world. Imagination is an agential and tangentially unpredictable mode, actively and reactively involved in emanating, speculating, fabulating, emitting “other kinds” of worlds.
If we refer strictly to the patriarchal and systemically racist capitalism we currently participate in, one that has subjugated and exploited billions and billions of species on this planet crushing this world in its grasp, it feels more impossible or unachievable than ever to exercise our imagination. It becomes very easy to imagine why we live materially in our very own flesh and bodies the closing in of a creaking opportunity window without being able to do something about it.
Our current worldview, where other worlds have been condemned to stand on the losing side of the equation, prefers the word “unfit” – a term that puts all in the same box as maladaptive, improbable, wasteful or impossible. This strictly Adaptationist worldview is more and more maladaptive itself, and I mean here that is presupposes this fitting in as essential and unavoidable. To fit is to have to practically accept all injustices. This view justifies and rationalizes all economic and energophage inequalities, and is more and more evident and obscene by the day.
What do stromatolites dream of? What do stromatolites imagine while belching gases, not as individual cells, but as planet-wide biomass, on a grand scale collectively, contributing to a world of tomorrow under oxygenation/oxidation just a few billions of years away?
Can you identify in these bubbles of inklings of an imagination floating during a period almost impossible to imagine in human cortical terms, that made possible our ‘humaness’ that is still narrowly defined as western and whose understanding limits itself to a rusty technoscientific imaginary.
A lack of imagination that can barely communicate the vastness and scaling necessary to assess the cumulative effects of millions of exhausts pipes and changes that do not take place during millions but decades (our own lifetimes)?
Technoscience stimulated by imagination for profit is making itself responsible for the unfair mass extermination of countless species. On the other hand, it is a science that has offered as an unprecedented and vertiginous look into “deep time” and has tried to familiarize us with the hidden contribution of unknown ones. Of course, there is countless other non-modern of pre-modern examples from non-Eurocentric societies from all around the world that cherished and acknowledged this overwhelming contribution by other creatures, beings, entities, spirits.
Science is only now finally recognizing the collective work of inhuman, non- more than human (more than fungus, more than plant etc) ones, a work that produced this outer protective layer calle atmosphere. A layer where we started walking and became conscientious of late, without therefore asking ourselves who made this protecting shield that has protected us and other creatures from most of the cosmic rays or UV radiation during millions of years.
This atmospheric or climatic imagination implies the apparition of a future where free-floating cells dividing continuously got stuck to each other, never alone anymore and only sporadically and dangerously autonomous inside their larger organismic units (see for ex our current understanding of the evolution of cancer cells).
These cells, meanwhile, started showing behaviors of a vaguely coordinated organized kind, a quorum-sensing that took life to another level than mere individualities, making waving coordination into a “ciliary collective walk”.
The very first levels of organization that enabled early movements appear as a disequilibrium of hundreds of microscopic ciliated cells in a gradient field – as the movements made today by multicelullar model organism Trichoplax adhaerens, considered one of the most basal metazoans.
Our extremely complicated brains are now unable to grasp why there is no need for brains to obtain the first cellular coordination of millions of cells, yet today we definitely struggle to obtain large scale coordination in a Ministry for the Future (as per Kim Stanley Robinson), so that we can preempt a nearly inevitable situation: the climate crisis. Difficult to perceive, to conceive and start imagine this very basic advancement of tissues or differentiated cellular lines as they search their spatial-temporal momentum…
2. Does a critical-analytical perspective of the past have a constructive role in modeling the future in your view?
I am agreeing with those that say we should try to circumscribe the finitude of such a total future – a totalizing future such as the one promoted by a series like Star Trek let’s say (even if I continue watching and enjoying it!). The series was bold enough to include gigantic tardigrade-like extraterrestrial beings navigating a mycelial network that holds the galaxies together, or a character called Stamets based on actual mycologist and mushroom enthusiast Paul Stamets. On the other hand, one should embrace the possibility that one is always partial, in the sense of being part and partial whenever exploring such present possibilities and future impossibilities.
Let us keep a big warning about a future that imposes one single unchanging version of the future upon all other species and the rest of humanity.
Let say a unique future based on just such a “warp drive” invention, i.e. the impact of one invention that pushes inevitably everything into the Faster Than Light era. Yes, it is an imaginary invention, but one that directs exclusively towards a total future. This is something if not entirely problematic, then full of lacunae that are not immediately noticeable, especially when that totalization is made around a technologically privileged group or one single invention.
Maybe a philosopher would say that such an analytic or critical perspective is a direct follow-up to the post-Kantian heritage that has divided western philosophy into suburbia of the mind with separated continental traditions and analytical ones.
I am not a philosopher so I will not go into detail. I will ask those interested to ask themselves in what why does any type of future depend on something more humble than what we have taken into account, even given our lofty evolutionary position, a minor something that does not even get mentioned in those version of a totalizing future.
Here is this simple observation by Charles Mudede, writing on the Seatle Slog, about the absence of green plants on the spaceships of the United Federation of Planets (the main supranational stellar union mentioned in the ST universe). Plants, as the primary providers of energy on the planet, or at least on this planet, are completely circumvented, ignored, overlooked, etc.
One of the most symptomatic under-currents of SF was cyberpunk sub genre that gets crystallized in the 1980s during the ballistic missile race btw the East and West blocks and during the first massive wave of neoliberal restructuring. As a genre it appears at a precise place – the city of Vancouver, Canada. It is a future placed in a city where the past is not perceived as surpassed, unreachable, deleted and where layers of time coexist, where you have to make use and make do with what has existed or will exist, old or new, low tech or high tech (here taking my cues from C. Mudede).
At the same time we are now in a better position to see why the Silicon Valley Californian future is not at all somber and opaque, oppressively corporate-like in the classical cyberpunk narratives, but more like a transparently corporate habitat, inexhaustible exhausting wellness and profoundly libertarian and anti-syndicalist mood more akin to The Circle movie from 2017.
Nevertheless, the cyberpunk inheritance makes it clear why we are not just neighbors to our actual neighbors or our actual flights of imagination, but neighbors to all the crazy rich and all the business park dreams on the whole planet.
It is important to understand that this cyberpunk, initially Canadian, does not repudiate temporal layering and temporal intermingling. It does permit the persistence of a constantly perishing present, temporal complicity towards futuralism, especially when PKD’s obsolescent androids and exclusive premium robotic sheep coexist.
3 How do you see the role of contemporary culture in relation with the future?
I think I partially answered this above.
Contemporary culture is too much “culture” and this search for the eco-critical dimensions that includes laboratory cultures (as in tissue cultures or yogurt cultures) comes with very meager offerings and maybe overly defined by Danone possibilities and lack of funds for blue-sky research, with a preponderance of big tech lobbies.
From Raymond Williams we have learned how difficult it is to define culture, risking to leave out somebody, abusing and emptying this word while at the same time diminishing conflicts or inherent transformations.
It is important to see how – the future is totally decoupled from the new or the truly new, in total divergence from that future promised in genre movies, in the sense that every new thing ‘is more of the same’. This monetized future is already portioned, auctioned, packaged and sold using cryptocurrencies and complex financial instruments (the so-called fintech), some of which are actually called futures. Crypto currencies belie their underlying materiality and so manage to escape our attention because we tend to forget that they run on physical infrastructure, on computers that are sometimes fueled by leftover fossil fuel somewhere at the Polar or Arctic North like in one Canadian advert trying to attract new investments.
Even if we feel placed at the bottom end of financialization, we can take this recent campaign by the BRD bank “You are the Future” and see in what way the pressures of contemporary culture (represented by financial institutions) amplify the surrounding climatic and ecological pressures on individuals, on personal payment plans, etc. and especially on this recurrent YOU – as unitary, ethnopolitical, indebted or having to pay rate till forever.
Everything is still sadly transposed in terms of you or him, or her.
It remains to be seen how much is this going against a situation that is in no way easy to isolate, locally or individually, or how slow and after how much struggle some populations and expressions, ecologies, bodies, genders, multiplicities etc. will carve themselves a space in contemporary consciousness and attention.
I think that SF in the sense of speculating and fabulating, or as speculative fiction, fantastic or scientific speculation has this role of culturally translating for both interlocutors, exactly like a device from the SF movies that can deliver meanings almost involuntarily from one extraterrestrial language into another. No unadulterated transmission, but a transmission with twists and modifications – creatively and imperfectly translating realities that necessarily surpass the individual level, the human limits of perception, especially if dealing with social, scientific and technical transformations that are impossible to calibrate.
4. Do you think that the study of the future will have a constructive impact if it would get included in the educational curriculum?
I would definitely prefer to alternate this impeding hype, the pressing and oppressing futurological drive with other things.
Maybe it is high time to include in the school curriculum something about speculative fiction instead, going back to your first question.
Embracing futurology has to be nuanced, especially if one refers to a type of future forecasting typical of the banking sector, or the start-up kind. We should have the utmost care and reservations here, taking into account the fact that everything that has to do with prognosis and forecasting from is completely engaged in ensuring the impossibility of a common future.
Futurology as packaged by tech pundits and tech gurus is easy to find, because the world seems to be full of quite myopic visionaries, even dangerous ones, in the sense that uncertainties are nowadays packaged as manageable risks and externalized on others. We do not need more singularity salesmen, or agents of a more or less conscious optimization that touches upon everything but does not change anything fundamentally.
We should always be wary and vigilant about this futurology frustrated by the borders of this world and in search of tax evasions, off-shore futurology of neglect that has become a sort of scourge, an exercise in externalizing risks on the backs of others, offering cheap predictions on demand (*or expensive one if one takes into account the habitats and lives lost in exchange): a simple business deal dressed up as a very rudimentary SF.
First, education itself is left without a future.
All those with a degree end up without a viable future, jobless, without any pension plans and ready to fall trough the gaps of a system that prepares highly qualified people for bullshit jobs. I refer directly to those jobs discussed by the late David Graeber in his book and familiar to most of us today. Even if I don’t have such a job at the moment, the clock is ticking, and I will sure join in, because there is nothing else for me.
You do not have a future, because this is the future of work, of the learned skills turned worthless in today’s terms, of careers based on educational systems have become all a subject of speculative investments and divestment. Today at the stock exchange one can bet on the lack of future of certain careers and what one is learning and hoping to graduate in. All the unprofitable lessons, the obsolete school manuals they are based on, the slowness of re-qualification or costliness of retraining get correlated by algorithms to academic disciplines and careers with loosing odds.
At the same time, the educational systems have dealt only very late with the neurodivergent, the non-neurotypical, with minds that do not obey or coincide with what was considered standard everywhere in the past. Also, very, very late we are finally starting to see jobs that take into account the autism spectrum disorders or an educational curriculum that is more inclusive in this sense.
The way our studies are being sponsored and financed always in regard to a certain future income, of either being coupled with future “liquidity” or not, gets everyone reduced to constant payment status or the incapacity to be such a source of regular payments. It gets tied down to the incapacity to reimburse in time the debt accrued during your education years.
Not only is risk calculated so that investors or shareholders would be repaid – only then you are ‘worth it’, or incentivized, only then you become part of the “meritocratic” scheme, only and only if your future career can be monetized so that you can enjoy today a scholarship or be worth all those tuition borrowings.
Betting is not just the usual corner shop betting joint, that one is just a small picturesque neighborhood get-together. We have a much more insidious betting on the potential lack of future of a large majority of school students or of students whose education was devalued from the start, or that becomes just a reason for upping the bets.
It is easier and easier to bet on the certainty of educational failure, on the loosership of certain disciplines or the obsolescence of pedagogic systems that have spent money and time to train us humans in the past and the present. Let’s just think about such classical domains as the natural sciences, or the dwindling number of field scientists, the disenfranchised humanist or liberal arts, as well as all the vocational schools of the socialist times.
We also have today this creative sector – already the main betting horse of the new economy, on one side completely fragilized and highly dependent on applications and all manner of extra financial supplements and on the other – the poster independent sector of new, so-called smart cities. All these shrinking and polluted cities that need to reinvent themselves constantly in order to attract investors and clean their image (what happens in Timisoara “and soon in the whole country!” to rhyme in with the Revolution 1989 slogan).
Sometimes the students who can afford the costs of high theory of highly-rated teachers and interesting courses – are already from the privileged classes, those that come from rich milieus from the very start (I am saying this because of acquaintances that do this kind of teaching in Germany, so it is not just an Eastern European thing).
On the other hand, there is so much educational material online, so many videos, tutorials, fabulous YT channels – be it philosophy, transgender studies, dialectics, history of science, technology, political economy etc cultural studies, biohacking etc.
Yet it is true that one gets to them when already exhausted, bored and disillusioned.
If you do not represent an investment, a vested interest, you are suffering all sorts of consequences, mental and bodily ones.
On the other side the paradox is that nobody dictates your curriculum any longer, you can choose what and how to built up your ‘looser’ educative kit, for the very fact that such courses do not represent an investment, no winning bet, and you can maybe use this false freedom to combine the most unwieldy materials and contradictory things. For example let us imagine a course based on SF speculations about education from the future and immediate examples about educational betting or critical theory and afro pessimist thinkers.
I can tell you I am working on something that I hope will never end.
Because you specifically called it project – I will pick up on this complete mess of a word, on the fact that we already describe this way our work or this type of structure where we find ourselves no matter what.
When you say ‘project based’ you are employing the neoliberal newspeak – trying to dissimulate this type of nomadism from project to project for what it is – a complete disaster, a way to embellish and make it sound cool, while it is actually a common disease and a currently incurable one.
And I want to include here that blind tech-nomadism, of carrying your workspace, working from a distant beach, no matter if you work for NATO, for humanitarian purposes, or for the election campaign in another country, using your skills no matter what the requirements, exactly the way Cambridge Analytica did it (just one infamous case among many I guess).
Why are these things valued in this way on the job market? Why are such beach remote working positions made possible etc promoted in adverts with the promise of a fat paycheck that helps you jump planes like a DJ from country to country? Well, this is sure one of the most toxic and polluting things existing on the planet today.
I am also migrating from Bucharest to Berlin and back and have tried to keep this come n go at a minimum. Very few can afford a fixed place. Very few are employable in anything but on a project base, where and when the project season is on. These projects are a euphemism for free-lancing, a reality that hides a cynical mercenary lifestyle without illusions and without much future talk. You are good for everything and good for nothing.
This sez a lot about the type of obsolescence that these projects imposed because whenever finished or evaluated, they get sent away and behind there is not much left. Eventually, just online crumbs that you can barely match or explain or replicate.
It is a research literature that is cherishing a variety of ideas and authors, a SF that has become truly global (what did we know about Indian, Arab, Korean, pan-African SF 50 odd years ago, or even about a wider understanding of Easter European SF?).
Partly vaccinated in this way we can dive into deeper waters, catch hold of mutations, frog leaps and qualitative jumps and acknowledge their relevance for now as well as for the future.
In its short version, I spontaneously caught it on TV, during one of the Minderiads (mineriade in RO) from Bucharest in the 1990s. From the streets we received our daily screen portions of televised audio-visual TV realism. On one of those Mineriads that remain in the collective memory as brutal and violent, from a group of miners brought from the Vale Jiului coal mining towns, one turns around towards the camera and is asked by the TV crew what are his demands.
I kid you not! I want to take this minor anecdote and make into something quite serious and fundamental. In my regard – this TV fragment does not just reflect the cheesy, dunk humor and naivete of those years.
For me this quite provocative response from a young miner arriving in the Romanian capital city from the mining towns that would soon be ruined and shut down, give us a first tectonic sign that something is massively changing behind the scenes – that behind these televised events there is the transition from one industry to the next.
How does a miner from Valea Jiului, from the core fossil fuel extractive industries, from the soon to be dis-empowered miner syndicates – become a fan?
How does the fan get born from the settled soot of the working class? A fan, let us not forget, that is engrossed by a US-Canadian series about biodroids, immortalist bosses, digitization, experiments gone rogue, abandoned cities, lots of rusty iron, intelligent machines and the first decent 3D effects meant to give body to a vision of dystopic dimensions of a specific nature. A no-future, post-industrial landscape for people that had to deal not only with the post-human but also with a world of post-work. Where does the factory move, how does one consume, relax and gets fascinated by the history of one’s own disintegration, of “restructuring” and its own crumbling representation?
More importantly maybe, what does it mean to loose a world? What does it mean to live trough the disappearance of your world, and what does it mean to not find a place any longer in it?
From a working-class hero he becomes on TV a villain while watching it live on premium hour. We notice this shift, from a representative of those fundamental means of production, from a worker from a glorified industrialism branded almost overnight as polluting and unwanted but which gave him a collective bargaining power when confronting the dehumanizing mechanisms and pressures of capital, a shift that places him not in the back seat – but in front seat of an unwanted future.
How does this fan almost instantly become jobless, media literate and tele-visually integrated at the same time entangled in a cinematic or computational mode of production (to use the Jonathan Beller’s terms). He transforms and is transformed in his own main opponent, in the class enemy of the newly green-washed electronic industries that evangelize their zero emission goals.
At the same time, he is becoming a prosumer fan with a Netflix subscription plan, a fanatic of online streamed series. He is ready to binge-watch, netflix & chill and eager to influence the production of his favorite series and shape his favorite titles, ready to feel entitled, even ready to start planning and organizing the next Comicon together with Kaufland in Bucharest. This puzzle I feel I am involved in since a few years, if not from the moment I have seen this fragment on TV during the 90s immediately after the Revolution, a fragment one should revisit and think with even now.
6. How do you see your profession/your projects in the future?
I think we can regroup all these together with the above question.
As mentioned I suffer from a constant de-professionalization, I forget what I use to do or am supposed to do, and have gotten to the situation where it is very hard to explain or to justify myself in front of those that ask me what are you working on actually, how much is your salary, where do you get your income? What did you work on? What do you want to do now, or want to do in the future?
I get the feeling that I refused or allowed myself to refuse too many jobs whenever I was offered them during the heyday of easy offerings, refusing this enviable possibility to settle in a particular institution. This has eloped me, so I cannot pretend I have an overview on my own doings and goings.
Most of the people I know already have their .com or .ro or have built more or less assiduously a career, a trajectory, a fixed base, more or less engaged in the management of the self-image. What I see with me is a cemetery of projects, shipwrecked blogs etc.
One important thing is when your friends drag on you, and I start to appreciate this more and more, even as you did it now with this interview. I think this has been one of your favorite methodologies all along, even if not systematically pursued. I appreciate it when somebody tries to involve, question me without a particular end-result, because I’ve become more and more skeptical about all these self-evaluations. I am talking about the flighty untimely moment when somebody comes and tells you to come and join in, let’s meet, let’s think about it together. Even when ghostwriting, mind you, or pretending to be an AI!
This while each is streamlining and bulldozing his yellow brick road towards solitude. If everyone tries to actualize – in the current default talk, you completely start feeling incapable of ever doing something together with others, and I also include myself in this bizarre situation.
I had the luck and joy to collaborate interuptedly with you, with Sebastian Big, with Declan Clarke, with Bogdan Otaku Gorganeanu, Alexandra Croitoru, Vasile Leac, Milos Jovanovic, the early trio Nanca/Cosm/Gontz as I knew them once, Mimi Salajean, Mihai Lukasz, Sara Lehn, Nita Mocanu, Candidatura la Presedentie, Lucas Cantori, Ovek Finn, Dyslex, Philou from Come N Go (or this is his core band for me), Mabento Makunouchi, Claudiu Cobilanschi, Anca Benera, Biroul Melodramatic, Valentina Desideri, Bezna, Kavdanska & Dilmana, Manuel & Brynjar, Mircea Nicolae & Victor Plastic (as I met them), Nicu Ilfoveanu, with Alt Art, Protocol Cluj, Tamtam, ODD, Mes 56, with Mort “braindead” la Creier, Ion Dumitrescu, Alienocen Outernational, Würtembergischer Kunstverein Stuttgart, Nae Timotei Drob, Nicolae Comanescu, Clubul Convivialis, Cristian Darstar, Utopiana, Szilard Miklos, Florentin Tudor from Rusu & Flore, Fundatia Tranzit Sibiu si Bucuresti, Colectia Energii Regenerabile de la Fractalia and much more in what reads like some bizarre automatic writing… many more that should have probably get mentioned here.
With many more I did not collaborate directly but had the pleasure to meet, contact and enjoy their company. I cherish the rare moments I tried to curate something in the past.
I enjoyed when Mihaela Dragan invited me to talk about the Romacene and SF. I was glad that the Arhiva de Sunet came over in Drumul Taberei hood to talk about sounds from Timisoara. I enjoyed talking with students about indie horror movies, starting from the Bodrog the movie experience. I regret not organizing a cozzzmonautica at the Cuca Festival (which I still hope I will). I truly enjoyed writing about the composer Octavian Nemescu for muzica imaginara, just before he departed this world.
I felt very good being invited by Gabi P.N.E.A. to contribute to his blog Timespacewarps as a place of churning and collating and trying out ideas, sounds, perceptual trajectories & apperceptual notions, all these un-hoped for splashes in growing data pools.
More and more difficult as this conviviality becomes – this communal labor is quite improbable, as an occasion to socialize outside the social platforms towards a common task as per Feodorov dwindle down. I really enjoy this co-opting, and try not to count them or to do any rankings – always glad to return the favor, whenever I get the nerve to involve others in return.
7. What is your relation with Artificial Intelligence, or with robots?
I think I just wrote something towards this end on the blog I am contributing to with Gabi. It is a discussion starting from the recent movie by the French video clip director Seth Ickerman, a sort of age-restricted musical video clip, mostly a retro SF biopunk full of sex magick and synthwave sounds by Carpenter Brut https://timespacewarps.wordpress.com/2021/08/24/1930-blood-machines-mini-series-2019
I even have a few quite amateurish recordings uploaded on a soundclound account, a sort of plunderphonics using some linux audio software from years back https://soundcloud.com/earth-evacuation-plan/data-recovery-foundation-tapes-i-choam-corporationplanet-kaitain I think that you can hear there how my relation with what we call today AIs or robots or entities has developed, since it takes into account not only the cinematic or gaming industry examples but all the imaginary spillover all around us.
We have somehow these retrograde AIs, stuck in their virtual asistant roles that hear you, peeping on you whenever you least expect it, although under surveillance capitalism you should expect it all the time. We worry about who or what is influencing us, but we never seem to worry how we influence AIs instead, in regard of the fact that they carry a lot more agency and decisive power nowadays, deciding over the chances of many other humans, because they integrate human cultural biases almost without regulation or filtering etc. although things started changing.
For those interested, I urge them to listen these recordings on earphones and try to imagine them as part of a memory implant, residual coaching of future employees from various fictional inter-planetary corporations. More than 6 years have passed since I made this sound collage with the track name – CHOAM Combine Honnete Ober Advancer Mercantiles – exactly the corporation from Frank Herbert’s Dune that takes care of mining the spice.
So you see I am interested more about these secondary aspects, those that fall off the main equation, the way in which the very attention and buzz around “Intelligence Explosion” or the “Super Intelligence X-Risk” tends to monopolize informal meetings at the Davos conferences from Switzerland (a few years ago). I am interested in the way a paradox or mere speculation about AIs feeds into the fears of certain high-ranking, ultra rational communities characterized by efficiency and singularity search. How curious that their attention is being disturbed, grabbed or invaded by a future AI hyperstition like Rocco the Basilisk?!
You said how do you relate – I am interested in the relational at in its most fragile and remote, this delicate relationality, easy to break, the way these feeble connections are sometimes the most important ones, not the stronger and stable ones.
In the theory of networks – these wispy links would be the most important ones, NOT the verified and tested ones, those links for example that bind members of a conspirative group, members of clan, a family, of a mafia, of a political class, of a clique etc but those that can literally hang almost on one single strand of hair.
Another weak strong inter-relation that suddenly came to the foreground is the non-intelligent nature, a non-intelligence, a non- smartness that is very basic and gets upcycled by capitalism and especially by this growing traveling jet set.
I refer to the simple fact that COVID virus reached out so much of the planet using previous cheap flight networks, touristic routes, carried and pulled in this race that is extremely lopsided and with differing speeds of vaccination and mutation that gave rise to resistant strains that you could never call intelligent.
8. How do you see the relation between technology and nature in the future?
I think I got a problem with this relation that gets chocked by a tunnel vision of one single technology – let say lets say the choke-hold on our imagination that some historical technologies have got on our explanatory power.
The way our descriptions have helped in mistreating or exploiting the various sub-divisions of life, or the way such technologies have been used as misguided metaphors or as outdated models that got reified and retained with quite damaging material results.
There is this insidious feeling that I can let myself being carried along by a certain easiness or frivolity following in the steps of the ex-mathematician A N Whitehead and the many that have taken his hints in various directions – such as Isabelle Stengers or Steven Shaviro among others – maybe I can even call my friend Ion Dumitrescu one of those. Of Whitehead’s lack of contempt towards the role of feelings and generosity towards the new, inherent in his thinking. I am not carried by his very elaborate “scheme”, but taken on board by his very encouraging tone that tries to think against the grain, or in spite of all the dead weight of all those philosophical orthodoxies.
There is a new appetite, towards a certain new kind of realism – a realism that is measured and balanced by debates about the world in all its aspects. It is a new courage of being part of a tangible reality not completely dissociated from the absolutely intangible and bizarre universe described by the physical sciences.
Maybe this is one of the few available ways of avoiding the strictures of replication or testability typical for scientific positivism as well as a way to get ahead of the game that has chained theoretical physics to biases and aesthetic presuppositions (like those highlighted by Sabine Hossenfelder in her provocative Lost in Math: How Beautry Leads Phyisics Astray 2018).
As an example SF should not be regarded just as a metaphor, or just exclusively a literary genre, but something direct, inevitably shared all around us, with utmost concreteness. At the same time SF offers a insistent yet vague affective palette, a literal sensor or a tool kit that can help us learn and unlearn to live with technologies, in order to multiply the experiences of another cosmotechnology.
An example would be Jeff Vandermeer (Southern Reach trilogy, or the Borne cycle). Vandermeer, just to take this well-knowns example, a relative fresh one at that – that somehow mediates and stimulates the need for an environmental posthumanism, one that has not nostalgia towards anthropocentrism, free of the residues of human exceptionalism. And this, importantly, without being misanthropic or an adorer of Gaia theory that risks falling prey to green-brown eco-fascisms as many do indeed.
His proposal – if I can call it that is to be completely immersed, co-dependent and transformational, but not in the sense of current workplace flexploitation, and at the opposite pole of domineering suprematist transhumanism that is somehow ultra-humanist and exclusivist.
I see in Vandermeer’s offer a certain critical posthumanism, pessimist and mature at the same time, but also with a lot of trust in utopian promiscuity, enriched by ambiental transhumanism and multi-species perspectives that once theorized feel more sterile and sparse than what he and others manage in their books.
Borne is for example a living weapon – biotechnology that went rogue, a feral experiment conceived as a very complex weapon that starts growing and blooming, and that seems to have a very imprecise teleology or final purpose.
Nobody knows how it got here, or nobody can trace all the necessary gene manipulations that made it possible or those pathways that stimulated its evo-development. Even its metabolism is unclear. All that does not matter because you can never take back things, at a moment when you have to learn to share the world with so many orphaned creatures, so many orphaned biotechnologies, so many banished organisms. Banished by their supposed creators or patent owners, that have long since expired and disappeared or become extinct and unrecognizable.
We have to welcome and learn to accept new refugee ecologies – that have been weaned from the measurements and quantification of the human or their initial laboratory tests (even if there they had their petri dish cradle phase), because the lab itself does not exist any longer or has fused with the entire world.
The world of Jeff Vandermeer from Borne is a world full of beings that have sprung out of the Linnean taxonomy or have left the Natural History museum behind. They are unclassified beasts of an unnatural world, exuberantly dangerous, killing you softly, tearing you to pieces gently, forlorn artificial entities. They are in search for a den wherever they can. Borne is such a found bud, one that is incredibly and attractively full of hidden fangs, a budding poisonous something that is morphing and shapeshifting when you do not look at it.
It is important to understand that it can be incredibly dangerous and at the same time very friendly and cuddly in a terrible, very unfriendly world. Arriving with tendencies and desires in tow that cannot be confused with those of the people around it, no matter how much they wish to see themselves as adoptive parents.
It is an unrecognizable world, where we cannot impose our old pastoral values of forest brotherhood as in the Romanian saying and untouched wilderness sold as România Neîmblânzită (title of a recent Romanian documentary about the supposed wilderness of Romania). Borne is the exact opposite, a preparation for an overly domesticated world that is unbound and that is transforming us almost as quick as we transform it.
We have to let go of the Greek myth that tells us about the damaging things that escaped from Pandora’s Box, because it is senseless to let ourselves be oriented by recurrent mythopoetics and vintage cosmotechnics. We should maybe follow in the lead of what Yuk Hui mentioned in his extended essay, because it is high time to cultivate and learn new things, even from the Chinese technological accounts that seem strange and unusual to many.
We have to understand what to do with such inherited myths of Western progress. What is going on with all these escaped things, with all these unfruitful things, the denied, the disavowed ones, those that left us and got dispersed around the world.
Here I refer to inventions that were never fully ours or technologies invented by others, things that where never owned even by their inventors, brought far from their point of origin, inventions that became so universal and generalized that they entered some vast general intelligence or public domain of unknown and innumerable applications. Like the Chinese magnetic compass, this magnetism is at the core of magnetic resonance visualization technologies or part of the maglev (magnetic levitation) trains such as the Shanghai Transrapid, currently the oldest such commercial maglev tech still in operation.
9. What project are you dreaming about?
Common let us try and avoid the “project” dream – because of them we cannot dream any longer, they do drag on us. Let us rather search for new modes of conviviality – new ways of living co-dependently and not dependent, traveling around ourselves with our attention ecology widening, one gracious step to be able to parse time and space together, with modes of thinking and feeling, shared passions and also a shared disappearance.
Do not overshare – but try to join with unknown friends (or well-known ones) an unknown dusk, not a well-known rising of the sun. I am reading for a few years Dhalgren by Samuel R Delaney. It is a fabulous way to get lost in the thickets of that book, providing dense vertigo, stylistically flawless, written in 1975 one year before I was born. A shelter of a book for difficult and demanding times, an amorphous bloom that is nearly impossible to keep hold on to and that nevertheless offers numerous stepping stones towards a misaligned friendship and a living in between the cracks of this world.
TimeSpace Warps 
