'Three times the size of' is the new black — like the GPGP, the
cryptic-alliteratively acronymed Great Pacific Garbage Patch that, it
was recently reported, is three times the size of France and is growing
at an 'exponential' rate. Of course, if a scientist claimed that
*France* is growing at that rate, s/he would be drummed out of the
corps(e). Externalities can grow at such a rate but what we could
retronymically call 'internalities' can't. That predicament lies at the
heart of most discourses that are, or are inspired by, environmentalism
— which is to say, most discourses at this point.
I ranted about this in a non-threaded thread on twitter, in response to
another thread that Morlock pointed out here, François Chollet's take
on algorithms:
https://twitter.com/tbfld/status/976850523562356741
In response to:
https://twitter.com/fchollet/status/976564511858597888
Morlock's message:
https://nettime.org/Lists-Archives/nettime-l-1803/msg00106.html
The crux of my argument was that the new dominant historical trope is
the crisis, which relies on a template consisting of two 'key
performance indicators': one that's linear, usually 'flat' in some
sense, and one that's running away (geometric, exponential, asymptotic,
approaching 1, approaching 0, whatever, it's all the same, rhetorically
speaking). Its logic is damned-if-we-do, damned-if-we-don't: we're
always fucked — fucked if the two KPIs are converging or we're fucked
if the two KPIs are diverging. Maybe someone else has pointed out some
variation on this already (Theweleit did a bit in _Buch der König_),
but either way I think a good name for this is 'the crux': we define our
position in relation to the point at which lines ~intersect. So, in a
sense, the crux is a secular addition to a list of sacred geometries
that, similarly, were efforts to define our place in the world.
The crux has some obvious mirrors: in theories of subjective
'intersectionality,' on the one hand, and in the relentless babble about
people 'who work at the intersection' of X, Y, and (increasingly, as
everything is these day) often a Z. Those theories differ in part in
which geometric elements they take as primary: points, boundaries,
areas.
It should be obvious that all of this rhetoric is, on a basic level, at
least tacitly visual: it's partly a vestige of techniques of teaching
mathematics. The trick, as with a lot of 'technology'-related discourses
now, is that what it describes is both imaginary and real: imaginary in
the sense that we insist on evaluating them qualitatively, and real in
the sense that that same growing mathematical literacy is a precondition
of — and driver or — rapid technological advance. The result is a
sort of a feedback loop in which secular data and sacred ideas amplify
each other: Google drives around producing views of the 'street,' Uber
drives around producing a God's-eye-views, and the oscillation between
these two frames of reference drives people insane. In the absence of a
clear ground, we run around manufacturing them to explain who were are,
what we do, what things are, and most of all where we're going
individually and collectively.
But back to your point about China:
The main difference here lies in how deliberate the activity is. The
premise of the theory of the anthropocene is that, for decades or
centuries or even millennia, depending on who you talk to, we know not
we do — but face the externalities of the fact that we did it. But
China's actions are different, because they're planned — they know
exactly what they're doing in the myopic engineering sense:
internality-wise. But the just-add-water ecological catastrophes that
have happened elsewhere in China strongly suggest that, when it comes to
the externalities, they either don't know or don't care. Or, worse,
both: they don't know *and* they don't care. That places them squarely
in line with the centuries-long behavior of previously developed
countries (PDCs?) — a historical continuity, as opposed to the
discontinuity that lies at the heart of the historical trope of the
crisis, which is a form of rupture.
So where is the rupture here, actually? Is it in the scale of the
activity? Or in the fact that a nation-state is pursuing it? Again,
there are precedents — Stalin's White Sea–Baltic Canal, the US Amy
Corps of Engineers efforts to change the course(s) of the Mississippi
River, even the ways the Dutch have played with their coastlines, even
military strategies to despoil entire landscapes — that suggest
continuity.
Pointing out continuities is often a crypto-strategy for dismissing a
question: same old, same shit, etc. That's not my point at all. There's
no question that our ability to operate 'at scale' can reach a point
that threatens the viability of the planet. The question is whether we
*have already done so* — and it's mainly a question because a suspect
set of actors benefit from a feedback loop in which they pay out some of
their profits to promote 'questions' about the effects of their revenues
sources — a FAKE question, basically.
But, even so, I think we need to step away from all this talk about
*topias: utopia, dystopia, etc. Better to focus on the 'topes'
themselves than the evaluative prefixes. It's also helpful because doing
so gives us a more solid ground to think about what's going on. But it's
also tricky because it tends to disaggregate these activities and imply
that some of them might be necessary or even beneficial.
Cheers
Ted
On 26 Mar 2018, at 9:59, Felix Stalder wrote:
The drive towards geo-engineering is gather pace. It's hard to see
this
as anything but dystopic. A kind of autonomous vehicle problem wright
large. And this problem goes like this: If the system detects two bads
(e.g. driving over an pedestrian or steering the car into a wall)
which
one does it take? Now, if we change the weather patterns, whose
weather
should improve? OK, it's not a zero-sum game like in the car accident
situation, but I doubt that this is an unambiguous win-win either.
Felix
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