Alan Sondheim on Mon, 26 Jan 2015 05:11:46 +0100 (CET) |
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<nettime> Broken World: Steerage and Steering Mechanisms |
Broken World: Steerage and Steering Mechanisms We are steerage. We do not arrive. */Properly, the space in the after part of a vessel, under the cabin, but used generally to indicate any part of a vessel having the poorest accommodations and occupied by passengers paying the lowest rate of fare. [1913 Webster]/* The ship is steered. The ship wanders. The world's broken. Don't misunderstand: nothing will save us; there is no land or: the land is damaged, or: the land is exhausted: blank, the land is blank: anguish. Anguish on our part. We're the ship. Our world. Or: We're all marooned. It is no longer a question of hope, of the human project, of plans or structures, of capital or capitalism, of late capitalism, of neo-liberalism, of inerrancy or the absolute. It is no longer a question of ideologies, of common language, of the commons: it's over. It's steered, and it's steered over, the steering's over. The mechanisms at work are simple and fundamental. They are abject; they grind the rest, whatever was tottering through modernism - they grind the rest down. The world's a world of dust and radiations. The world does not crack. Our project's broken. Some of them: The first intractable mechanism: Overpopulation. The planet is close to its carrying capacity, and there's no end to population increase. The demographics are skewed towards young reproducers; exponential growth lumbers on. The result is more mouths to feed, more strains on the environment, more slash and burn, more hillside slums, more bush-meat, more overcrowding, less jobs, more local war. The second intractable mechanism: Environmental degradation which has reached the point of no return. Consider the plasticization of the oceans, the post-tipping point of animal and plant extinctions, the increasing desertification world-wide, the loss of biological diversity. The anthropocene is not the usual planetary rise and fall; it's the greatest, the fastest, the most violent, extinction. The world is already destroyed; Gaia or its equivalent, is over. Something will remain, future adaptive radiations, but it won't be us: every species will be invasive, and the world, for the foreseeable future, will swarm. The third intractable mechanism: Global warming which is also global redistribution of currents and weather flow. This is also irreversible, past the tipping-point. The results are harrowing: record-setting droughts and floods, enormous hurricanes, tornado swarms, irreversible sea-level rises, and so forth. This is the classical catastrophe (Rene Thom): the fragility of the good descends to chaotic phenomena, and practical measures, theory, containment, is always after the fact. The fourth intractable mechanism: Increased violence and local/ global warfare: again, with limited resources, this will only grow worse. Territories split and compete; the lines are religious, ethnic, geographic, historic etc.; brutality increases as humans turn more and more to the rigidity of absolute/inerrant ideologies, and fortified binary oppositions - classical logics - gain strength as ideological instrumentality. This turn to the right, where the free press, women's rights, science and self-critique etc., are all viewed with suspicion; the left (if these binaries still exist at all) is an endangered species. The fifth intractable mechanism: The vast sea of weaponry and the nuclear arsenal available to all; it is only a matter of time before a dirty bomb or nuclear device is detonated, the equivalent of over-fishing, trawling, the sea bottom. Scorched earth returns to scorched earth; there are no longer resources for rebuilding as poverty and social chaos increase in the world. History, archaeological sites, villages, nations, records, are erased; history is no longer visible, readable; reading itself becomes suspect. The sixth intractable mechanism: Enclaving of the rich and income disparity exponentially increasing; the result is hoarding of resources and increased poverty as noted. This enclaving extends, crudely, to nations; the U.S. for example uses far more resources per capital than almost any other country; the U.S. prison system is itself a flux of pure capital, privatization, the largest in the world. Prisons are less efficient than pure disappearance; even so, population growth more than makes up for the violent loss of life around the planet. Think as well of local militias, including police forces that, first and foremost, look after their own, by any means possible. The seventh intractable mechanism: Antibiotics and spread of disease across varying species; as sludge and clutter increase world-wide, the opportunity for endemic disease increases. Disease vectors are driven by population vectors, by poor health practices, by hunger and poverty. Understand that overpopulation is behind all of this, a developing horizon, just like hacking and criminal gangs are a developing horizon of violence and seizure. There's no more living off the grid; off the grid is on the grid, within mechanisms and horizons. We're all in the ship, we're all marooned. The eighth intractable mechanism: Global communication networks granting power and encrypted communication among activist groups, including local militias and extremists. populations. These networks are temporary, because the Net and its cousins are subject to hacking on a inconceivable scale; security simply can't keep up without infringing on the rights of others - without replacing one ideology by another, far harsher. The Net and privacy are porous, and subject to the seven mechanisms above. With so much data and control in the cloud/s, with so much control and personal information in the hands of monopolistic corporations, gangs and governments, there's no doubt that we're seeing the tip of a cyberwar iceberg that will do violent damage far beyond the Sony fiasco - damage that will extend to (for example) power, health, military, and financial grids as well. We must begin to think of these mechanisms as both interlocked and environmental - i.e. constituents of a global and catastrophic horizon: much as the Club of Rome developed a model of interrelated flows in their relatively doomsday scenarios, we have to see this horizon as a holarchy of entangled mechanisms. The difference is that the mechanisms today are chaotic and unpredictable: there are events (primate extinctions, violent storms, the rise of violent fundamentalism, hacking of financial institutions, etc.) that are both destructive and fissured into any (ideological or instrumental) coherency that might have appeared as "explanatory" in the heady days of modernism which still inform us. What fascinates me is the global appearance of these mechanisms in the large: there's a kind of simplicity in their phenomenology that dissolves quickly upon closer inspection. But the simplicity isn't contradicted by the details; global warming, for example, doesn't reverse because the north-east United States is having record cold spells. The overall configuration of the world is based on strange attractors, which proceed, literally, in any case; we're steerage, not steering. (The technophilic ideology of progress, paradigm shifting, and cleverness does a disservice here, promising techno-utopias just around the corner - or already here - while in reality the beheadings and bush-meat continue to ravage.) (I think, at the least, of a curriculum focused on these mechanisms - but to what end? Past the tipping-point, things will continue to deteriorate until the anthropocene extinction does final damage. I can imagine the very rich escaping at some point, but to where, with what rockets, with what supplies? We are living in the ruin of a total institution called the global; we go down with the ship, in steerage. And steerage is now the corrosion of the dream of the West at the very least, as Plato's cave becomes the hold of a ship floundering on polluted waters.) # distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission # <nettime> is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, # collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets # more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l # archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org