Brian Holmes on Sun, 17 Jul 2022 07:49:27 +0200 (CEST)


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Re: <nettime> Strom vs Morozov: knockdown punch


Jean-Noel wrote:

"How can we imagine that the cybernetic system will continue to grow or even exist with more than a billion annual climate migrants within 30 years?"

I can't imagine it. I see multiple breakdowns ahead at an accelerating pace. The 'natural' reaction of highly developed capitalist societies blinkered by cybernetic mind-control is to create gated economic circuits reserved exclusively for the rich (everything from FRONTEX to key-codes for the water faucet) but that's not going to work because these imperial societies are already too big and diverse and therefore porous, any revolution outside the gates is immediately internalized (cf Syria crisis) and we will see this play out again as the famines caused by the current war begin in earnest. This does mean that some kinds of change are coming fast. In addition to shrinking cybernetic utopias of mindfuck-as-usual, we will get forms of pacifying socialism like those already introduced during the pandemic (free food, free money), along with forms of racist nationalism like those that already arose during the pandemic, along with forms of international war like what already started in Ukraine. The question for the next few years is how to break through the strategically induced idiocy of MAANA (that's Meta, Apple, etc) and gather forces for full-scale system change. It's urgent and it's barely happening. Fantasies of total and immediate apocalypse prevail over preparations for devastating but still gradual and incremental decline. The only part of your text where I might disagree, Jean-Noel, is that the future lies in scaling down toward simple agriculture. Scaling down, yes, that's a must, but it will still take effective forms of social organization and new, non-polluting energy sources to face all this without massive human die-offs. Plus some kind of religious renewal might help people accept a hard fate without murdering one another massively and right away.

pray for rain, Brian
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