Any political doctrine relying on a liberal understanding of freedom runs into significant trouble, for as Dipesh Chakrabarthy states, “most of our freedoms so far have been energy-intensive”.[26] The thesis about the Anthropocene states that “the geological agency of humans” becomes in fact “the price we pay for the pursuit of freedom”.[27] Fantasies of exiting the metabolic multitude—mirroring the fantasies of the supremacy of transparent subjects of modernity—bring us to a point where we are in fact enmeshed in the planetary assemblage deeper than ever. The intimation is that we have always been less autonomous than we imagined ourselves to be, and that while we commonsensically accept some very unjust constraints, we are biased against those that make us actually well aware of our position as agents in the metabolic multitude. The age of climate emergency demands a thorough perspectival rotation in this respect, a new economy and geometry of freedom; a sort of redistribution of competences, gerrymandering the territories of limits and liberties.

via ŠUM

CONCUSSION PROTOCOLS

ALIENIST MANIFESTO

Dear Comrades
Not a fortune-teller, soothsayer, charmer, diviner or caster of spells — nor one who consults ghosts and spirits or seeks oracles from the dead — I have nonetheless been wondering about the possibility of confusion and how we might be extinguished. I recently had to ask Thirty-Seven to remind me who Forty-Six was. I have been replying to everyone and then deleting them from the face of the earth. (In the end I got my own lightbulb.) I have been replacing the subject. We might need a new classification — this kind of interaction is completely new to me, I have no idea what the rules of engagement are. I have no idea what is to be shared and what is not to be shared; for instance, during the eighteenth century the difference between history or pornography or fiction wasn’t always obvious. Notwithstanding, I shall set down whatever…

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Sketches on Mutant Design (or, Situationism at the after party)

synthetic zerø

1. (worldmap: command and control)

Beyond the Judgement of God. Meltdown: planetary china-syndrome, dissolution of the biosphere into the technosphere, terminal speculative bubble crisis, ultravirus, and revolution stripped of all christian-socialist eschatology (down to its burn-core of crashed security). It is poised to eat your TV, infect your bank account, and hack xenodata from your mitochondria.[1]

Specters of crisis and scrambles for revolutionary agency emerge from the updating forms of privatizations that occur concurrent with capitalism’s continually updating of the modes of production through powerful social and machinic technics. The demise of feudalism saw the partitioning of land in the form of private property; the faster paces of the industrialization – particularly under its Fordist-Keynesian mode – proceeded with the unleashing of cycles where seemingly everything under the sun could be transmuted into commodity form. The transition towards post-Fordist production, made possible by the advent of computational technology, has engendered…

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Morbid Interregnum

synthetic zerø

In his Prison Notebooks (1930), Antonio Gramsci wrote:

“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.”

The world is once again living an interregnum.

Of course, Gramsci was writing about an era of economic depression, rising fascism, and incipient world war. For many, the contemporary world looks oh so similar. The global North is poised between inward-looking old powers and reluctant emergent ones. We have been bequeathed an exhausted civilization determined to accelerate through neoliberalism directly into hothouse eaarth.

This is just another way of saying that the world’s current interregnum is fucking mess. We, indeed, are a fucking mess. Ours is a planet now defined by insane habits of extraction, haphazard technology, janky social networks, and pathological individualism; all forces that lie outside conventional notions of geostrategic power.

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Historic Midwest Blizzard Has Farmers “Expecting Massive Crop Losses – As Devastating As We’ve Ever Seen”

via Historic Midwest Blizzard Has Farmers “Expecting Massive Crop Losses – As Devastating As We’ve Ever Seen”

Charting the Cosmic Hero’s Journey

Journal of a Cosmic Anthropologist

These days you’d have to strap me to a bed to make me watch all the Marvel movies. Five years ago, that was a different story. Bed-ridden, recovering from major surgery, I wasn’t going anywhere and needed some serious escapism – watching every single Marvel movie plus the short films, doped to the gills did the job. It wasn’t watching the heroes level up to become Supers and defeat the Villains that stuck with me – it was the sacrifices they made to get there. Forever etched into my brain by that adventure into the MCU was the death imagery of the ordeals that Steve Rogers, Tony Stark and Thor endured in their origin stories to then become a better version of themselves. Something that would be repeated for each of these core characters in successive tales, for higher stakes, each requiring greater sacrifices before their ultimate acts of heroism…

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Nietzsche’s Eternal Return

via Nietzsche’s Eternal Return | The New Yorker