Nothing but the End to Come? Extinction Fragments.
By Ben Ware.
"We don’t need to act “as if” the catastrophe has happened or will happen, because—as the Covid-19 pandemic has made abundantly clear—the future of recurring disasters linked to climate change and ecological destruction has already arrived—indeed, they are all part of one and the same crisis. Our task is thus not to try to avert the worst by prophesying it, but rather to find ourselves within the current moment of crisis and catastrophe, to take the reality of extinction as our starting point"
"Anders argues that we have become “inverted Utopians”: while “ordinary Utopians are unable to actually produce what they are able to visualize, we are unable to visualize what we are actually producing.” This Promethean Gap—the distance between our capacity to produce and our power to imagine—defines the moral situation facing us today. Our society of machines and technological devices (the quintessence of science, and hence of “progress” and “morality”) has allowed the great dream of omnipotence to finally come true. This dream, however, turns out to be the very nightmare from which we cannot awake, precisely because “we are [now] in a position to inflict absolute destruction on each other.” With these new apocalyptic powers, we enter what Anders calls “The Last Age”: an age in which the old Socratic question “How should we live?” has been replaced with the altogether more terrifying “Will we live?”
"...the catastrophe is both necessary, fated to occur, and a contingent accident, one that need not happen. The way out of this paradox, based on a new understanding of the relation between future and past, requires us to act as if the catastrophe has already happened—or is fated to happen—in order to prevent it from becoming true. By acting as if the catastrophe has already taken place, we are able to project ourselves into the postapocalyptic situation and ask what we could and should have done otherwise. “Let me help you build an ark, so that it may become false.”
"It is now accepted that we are moving towards a new phase of world war: war by algorithm; and specifically the development of Lethal Autonomous Weapons Systems (LAWS)—systems that are, essentially, outside human control. In November 2019, US Defense Department Joint AI Center director Lieutenant General Jack Shanahan (in conversation with Google CEO Eric Schmidt) spoke frankly about a future of algorithmic warfare: “We are going to be shocked by the speed, the chaos, the bloodiness, and the friction of a future fight in which it will be playing out, maybe in microseconds at times. How do we envision that fight happening? It has to be algorithm against algorithm.” If the very idea of humanity rests, at least in part, on an ability to imagine the other’s suffering, then what is being signposted here is a movement towards humanity’s final negation."
"The problems with the universalizing, ecological “we” should now, of course, be fully clear: a faulty metaphysics which claims that all of “us” are equally responsible for the sixth mass extinction; that our destructive “lifestyles” are what are destroying the planet; that it is “civilization” itself—and specifically a civilization in thrall to “consumerism”—which is killing the human race (criticisms that are just as likely to emerge from the eco-alt-right as they are from the eco-soft-left). Following this logic, the only solution to our present problems appears to be a kind of eco-depressive hyper-moralism: an accelerated form of pseudo-authentic, “anti-consumerist,” “back to the land” “green living,” which turns out to be a parody of committed action and self-realization. Not only does such a position fail to register the true extent of the economic and political forces driving the climate and ecological emergency, it also seeks to instrumentalize this emergency: using it as the very means by which the “good subject” is able to save his or her own soul."