There is a veritable mania, now, concerning testing. And yet even the NY Times admits the tests are virtually meaningless. But no matter. We must test more! Magical thinking permeates the climate discourse, as well. Never in history, or never since the Enlightenment, have so many people pretended to know so much. For the educated thirty percent (white and reasonably affluent) it is the era of the TED talk. Nothing dare last longer or be more demanding than a quick (and entertaining) ten minutes. The fires in California have come primarily from downed power lines (badly out of date and rarely serviced), but exacerbated by homeless encampments (rarely mentioned) and fireworks — and of course the drought that has extended backward a decade.
California has always burnt. It was part of the ecosystem to rid the hills and forests of dead of dead shrub and trees. Climate is clearly a part — snowpack is down, and summer heat has dried out shrubbery. But much of what is dried out is shrub not native to California (stuff like cheatgrass, a native of Asia and parts of Africa, and notoriously invasive) whose forests are overstocked anyway.
Infrastructure in America is rotting, and per California, the wild areas have been neglected for almost a hundred years. But that is not a part of the narrative. The narrative must be about the rebellion of Earth itself and population. And population matters only in terms of who can afford to over consume. The problem is that the most obvious pollution issues (militarism and the packaging industry) are never addressed.
US imperialism is the cause of most of the suffering in the world. Most of the instability. But the infantile anthropomorphizing of much green discourse is just more baby talk. I often hear “we are waging war against ourselves”. This is a dangerous bit of mystification. [note that this riff goes all the way back to the Pogo comic strip in the 1960s].
Its more simplistic sloganeering and like most such chestnuts, class analysis is absent. I have written a good deal on the psychological appeal of certain hi-tech fantasies, the seductive aspect of AI, and yet the world is more proletarianized than ever.
Yes people, in a very general sense, can be seen as self-destructive. It’s one of the most troubling byproducts of the habituation to screens, the loss of literacy and numeracy and the loss, really, of an ability to think critically. But this cultic hysteria is driven by the increasing precarity and desperation in contemporary life.
The loss of unions plays a part, the absence of a real left party, a radical Marxist party. For all the terrific work activist groups do (Prison abolishment groups, criminal justice reform, and stuff like the Innocence Project) there remains a vacuum in terms of electoral politics. Perhaps that is just going to be the way this goes. Maybe the entire electoral apparatus is dead. And maybe that is a good thing. There is a quality of suffocating sameness and emptiness that permeates daily life. People don’t look at each other on the street, they look at their phones. One is walking, all the time, among the pod people.
America’s mental health is in a dire state. The U.S. and really this is increasingly true in Europe, too, but not nearly to the same extent, is an excruciatingly lonely country. People have lost the ability to make, and more, to sustain friendships. And how the role of social media plays into that is an open question. Or media in general. So while yes, the marketing of technology serves to manufacture an appeal, on one level there are troubling numbers of people who seem, all by themselves, to *want*, to desire, ravishment by our robot overlords. Android sex is a thing, and its growing.
And it’s not just men who want “pleasure model” androids (ok, for now they have to settle for dolls), but many want to not just fuck androids – but to get fucked *by* androids.
The engine is capitalism.
A number of world leaders have contracted Covid. Much as many get the flu. There is something curiously similar in nearly everyone of these cases. Boris Johnson, Bolsanaro, the fascist interim President of post-coup Bolivia Jeanine Anez, Mikhail Mishustin of Russia, French finance minister Bruno Le Maire, and India’s Amit Shah (the #2 strongman behind Modi), and also in India, Pranab Mukherjee, former President, who subsequently died (age 84) from the virus (no, actually he died from a blood clot on his brain).
