In a
brief but broad discussion in 2015, award-winning science fiction author and
literary legend Ursula K. Le Guin decried the absurdity of those who would turn
to the techno-fix to combat global climate change (The Nation, 2018). The expression is a common
one: technology got us into this mess, now we want to use it to get us out of
it?
The
trouble is, there simply isn’t any other way to deal with it. Either we face up
to our responsibility as the driving system for global climate or we abdicate
that role, pretending that our professed ignorance is the same as innocence and
being both surprised and resigned to miserable outcomes. It’s a shame about all
the displaced peoples in the Third World, we’ll say, but what can we do? And
how could we have known? And all that biodiversity rapidly disappearing, at
least we were able to preserve most of them as digital recreations inside of
simulated realities so future generations can experience them.
Science and Self-Imposed Limits
If science is, as
Zygmunt Bauman puts it, a language that excludes all teleological vocabulary (Bauman, 1989) -
a descriptive technique that avoids purpose or will - then it follows that
there are limitations to its reasoning that are built into its interpretive framework.
These limits manifest at the innermost and outermost scales - the
questions concerning the self and the nature of the universe.
Peak Postmodernity: Peak As in 'Peak Oil'?
The present moment is characterised by peak postmodernity. 'The
Death of God', what Nietzsche foresaw as an event that had occurred and
yet was still on the way (Roderick, 1991), has come seeping into the culture at large, so that
its engulfing damp has become unavoidable. What starts at the boundaries of the
organism comes to reside within it, before being incorporated, integrated, and
accepted into the body proper. The nihilism that Nietzsche feared as gripping a
culture that had begun to realise the 'Death of
God' and yet failed to put anything of worth in its place was in full
evidence on the Internet 4chan board /b/ and other marginal subcultures that
would soon give rise to the alt-right (Nagle, 2017). Within these subcultures nihilism had
come to reside as a sort of default, and the appeal of fascist totalitarian
solutions began to permeate the consciousnesses of those who feared the
spilling out of the attitudes of the Internet onto behaviour in the
"real-world".
Ancient Modernity
All
my life I've dwelt among the creaking frames of ancient modernity. The world of callous
institutional lighting along with the requisite always-flickering-but-never-to-be-replaced fluorescent tubes, paint-slathered
brickwork in heavy desperate coats – trying to cover it up… always covering
things up – drab brown-brick exteriors and the mediocre monotony of
seventh-generation xeroxes of so-called exemplary modern architecture, worn
thin by the necessary concessions to cost-consciousness; utopian ideals yoked
and made subservient to capital. A world that can only inculcate a vague
ambivalence, for feeling too is made hazy and indistinct by the replications of the cultural photoreceptors. A world that is
holographic, hollowed out, and made so oblivious by the lobotomization that it
cannot comprehend its own irrelevance. A world that can only pantomime to the
march of progress in a somnambulant stupor while feasting on the remains of its
own rotting flesh.
Don't worry folks, we can make things better, and that's exactly what
we are doing and what we're going to do! And don't fret about those ideas
floating around in the air, they never happened! We can have it all, we can be
modern and anti-modern all the same. No contradiction there, no siree!
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