by
Tom McCarthy
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9.2 Talks were limited to fifteen minutes each. The other speakers’ PowerPoint presentations moved with sub-second precision from one image to the next as they talked with evangelic zeal of neuroscience, genomics, bio-informatics and a dozen other concepts currently enjoying their moment in the sun. When my turn came, I didn’t have any slides or clips. I started by saying that The Contemporary was a suspect term. Better to speak, I proposed, of a moving ratio of modernity: as we straddle the dual territories of a present that, despite its directional drive, is slipping backwards into past, and a future that will always remain notional, we’re carried through a constantly mutating space in which modernity itself is no more than a credo in the process of becoming “dated,” or at least historical. The term epoch, I informed my listeners, originally meant “point of view,” as in the practice of astronomy; only later, I said, did it start being used to organize the world into fixed periods. This latter use, I argued, was misguided. Instead of making periodic claims which, since they can’t be empirically justified, only produce an infinite regress of detail and futile quibbling over boundaries and definitions, we should return to understanding epoch as a place from which one looks at things. From that perspective, I went on—the perspective of shifting perspectives—we can still pose the question of the difference introduced by one day, one year, one decade, in relation to another. To understand that question fully, though (I concluded), what we require is not contemporary anthropology but rather an anthropology of The Contemporary. Ba-boom: that was my “out.” My talk was met with silence, then, when my audience realized that I’d finished, a smattering of polite clapping. No one approached me to discuss it afterwards. Later that evening, in the “wet” or Turkish sauna, I recognized one of the other delegates. He recognized me too, but broke off eye-contact immediately before slipping away into the steam.
oh my god
[...] around this time, my attitude not only to the Great Report but also towards Koob-Sassen underwent a sea-change. I started seeing the Project as nefarious. Sinister. Dangerous. In fact, downright evil. Worming its way into each corner of the citizenry’s lives, re-setting (“re-configuring”) the systems lying behind and bearing on virtually their every action and experience, and doing this without their even knowing it … I started picturing it, picturing its very letters (the K a body-outline, the Ss folds of cloak, the hyphen a dagger hidden between these), slinking up staircases in the night while people slept, a silent assassin. That’s how I started seeing it. I couldn’t, at first, put my finger on a particular aspect or effect of it, nor on a specific instigator or beneficiary, that was itself inherently and unambiguously bad. But after a while I started telling myself that it was precisely this that made it evil: its very vagueness rendered it nefarious and sinister and dangerous. In not having a face, or even body, the Project garnered for itself enormous and far-reaching capabilities, while at the same time reducing its accountability—and vulnerability—to almost zero. What was to criticize, or to attack? There was no building, no Project Headquarters or Central Co-ordination Bureau. What person, then? The Minister with Shoes? She was no evil mastermind; she had no greater overview of the whole Project than I did. Her immediate boss, a man whose intellectual capacities (like all aristocrats, he was inbred) were held in almost open contempt by even his own cabinet members? The Project was supra-governmental, supra-national, supra-everything—and infra- too: that’s what made it so effective, and so deadly. I continued to ponder these things even as I laboured on, week-in, week-out, to help usher the Project into being, to help its first phase go live; and as I did, the more I pondered, ruminated, what you will, the more thoughts of this nature festered."
12.7 I visited Petr in hospital again. The worst thing about dying, he told me as I sat between his bed and the smudged windows, is that there’s no one to tell about it. What do you mean? I asked. Well, he said, throughout my life I’ve always lived significant events in terms of how I’ll tell people about them. What I mean is that even during these events I would be formulating, in my head, the way that I’d describe them later. Ah, I tried to tell him: that’s a buffering probl … but Petr wasn’t listening. The dying want to impart, not imbibe. When I was eighteen and I found myself in Berlin the day the Wall fell, he went on, as I watched the people streaming over, clambering up on it, hacking it down, I was rehearsing how to recount it all to friends after I got back home. I watched the people sitting on the wall, chipping at it with their chisels, and the guards standing around not knowing what to do … That’s what I was thinking, he said, what was running through my head, right in the moment that I watched them chiseling and chipping. Same as when I saw the shootout in Amsterdam. What shootout? I said. Didn’t I ever tell you about that? he asked. No, I answered. I found myself caught in the middle of a shootout between Russian gangsters as I came out of a restaurant, he explained. They were all firing from behind lamp-posts, dustbins, cars and so on, and I ducked into an alleyway and one of them was right there with me, holding this huge pistol, a gold one, which he balanced on the back of one hand as he shot it with the other. Wow, I said. Yes, Petr nodded—but the point is, that even as I cowered behind this gangster in this alleyway, I was practicing relating the episode when it was over. He had a huge pistol—a gold one, no less! And he balanced it like this … and it recoiled like that … Or: I was just ten feet away from him … I thought that he might turn his gun on me, but he ignored me … Trying out different ways of telling it, you see? Well, now, I’m about to undergo the mother, the big motherfucker, of all episodes—and I won’t be able to dine out on it! Even if there turns out to be a Heaven or whatever, which there won’t—but even if there does, I still won’t be able to, since everyone else there will have lived through the same episode, i.e., dying, and they’ll all go: So what? That’s boring. We know all that shit. So it’s lose-lose. Do you see my quandary? Yes, I said; I see that could be a problem.
12.9 One evening, I confided to Madison my dream of vandalizing everything, of using my insider status to wreak sabotage upon the Project. I knew a boy like you once, she said when I’d finished. Nobody had called me a boy in a long time. It was strange; I kind of liked it. But the thing is, she continued, turning from me in the bed, it won’t be you doing the wreaking and the vandalizing. Oh? I said. Who will it be then? She turned half-back again, sat up, lit a cigarette and said: It isn’t revolutionaries and terrorists who make nuclear power plants melt and blow their tops, or electricity grids crash, or automated trading systems go all higgledy-piggledy and write their billions down to pennies in ten minutes—they all do that on their own. You boys, she said, as once again I felt a double-pang of compliment and slight, are sweet. You all want to be the hero in the film who runs away in slo-mo from the villain’s factory that he’s just mined, throwing himself to the ground as it explodes. But the explosion’s taking place already—it’s always been taking place. You just didn’t notice …
12.10 I sat facing her in silence. I didn’t know what to reply. I tried to have sex with her again, but she wasn’t interested; she just finished off her cigarette, scrunching its small stub onto a saucer lying beside the bed, then went to sleep. I lay awake for a long time, though, thinking about what she’d said. Lévi-Strauss claims that, for the isolated tribe with whom an anthropologist makes first contact—the tribe who, after being studied, will be decimated by diseases to which they’ve no resistance, then (if they’ve survived) converted to Christianity and, eventually, conscripted into semi-bonded labour by mining and logging companies—for them, civilization represents no less than a cataclysm. This cataclysm, he says, is the true face of our culture—the one that’s turned away, from us at least. The order and harmony of the West, the laboratory in which structures of untold complexity are being cooked up, demand the emission of masses of noxious by-products. What the anthropologist encounters when he ventures beyond civilization’s perimeter-fence is no more than its effluvia, its toxic fallout. The first thing we see as we travel round the world is our own filth, thrown into mankind’s face.
[...] All we need to do to guarantee indefinite existence for ourselves is to keep our network contracts running, and make sure a missive goes out every now and then. We could have factories of Chinese workers do it; pre-pay five or ten years by bequest-subscription; give them a bunch of messages to send out in rotation or on shuffle; or default to generic and random ones; I don’t know. It would work, though. Key to immortality: text messaging.
damn this is so on the nose
[...] As the litany of falsehoods progressed, I thought about standing up, interrupting it and setting the record straight; the more it continued, the more these thoughts took on a violent hue. I imagined striding to the front, grabbing the minister by his frock, headbutting him to the floor, jumping between the coffin and the furnace and denouncing the entire procedure. Then we would all storm the dais, tie the priest up, urinate onto his font, break Petr’s body out for a huge party that would bring the rafters down, and so on and so forth. Needless to say, we—I—didn’t actually do any of these things. I just sat there, seething with quiet fury that this act of personal and cosmic fraudulence would never be requited.
quite simply hilarious
The Project’s first phase had gone live: it was up and running, rolled out, operational, whatever. Its implementation had been deemed a great success. By whom? I don’t know. Deemers. And the Company’s contribution had been praised, by praisers, as quite brilliant. And my own input into this had been held up and singled out, by Peyman himself, as particularly productive. All this was going to my head. I even glanced about the restaurant, to see if anybody recognized me. This was ridiculous, of course: the people there had probably never even heard about Koob-Sassen, let alone my role in it. And this, perhaps, was not a bad thing, after all: the thwarted saboteurs that I myself had mobilized then turned my back on, the hit squads of vengeful revolutionaries, wouldn’t know who to shoot when they came looking for the traitor.
14.10 I didn’t let myself be carried through the doors, though: at the last instant, I held back. This wasn’t easy: bodies were wedging me in on all sides. I had to push against them, turn myself around, then hoist and grab at passing arms and shoulders in order to move the other way. At some point, in that final stretch, I’d made my mind up not to take the ferry after all. To go to Staten Island—actually go there—would have been profoundly meaningless. What would it, in reality, have solved, or resolved? Nothing. What tangible nesting space would I have discovered there, and for what concrete purpose? None. Not to go there was, of course, profoundly meaningless as well. And so I found myself, as I waded back through the relentless stream of people, struggling just to stay in the same place, suspended between two types of meaninglessness. Did I choose the right one? I don’t know. I worked my way out to the side, and stood watching the crowd parading by. Their tight-packedness made them edge and shuffle rather than flow, a stop-start rhythm that was nonetheless placid rather than agitated, their stares fixed not on the back of the person right in front of them (although their eyes all pointed there) but rather on some abstract spot beyond this, or, perhaps, on nothing. The thought struck me that I should be filming this scene on my phone for Daniel, or, perhaps, myself—but I didn’t act on this thought. I just stood there, watching. The man on crutches shuffled by; and the one with the wig; and the ones in polyester suits; and the ones in plain, casual clothes. Many had small backpacks, most of which were loose-strung over single shoulders; one young man, though, had a larger one strapped tightly to his back, over both shoulders and around his waist, but hadn’t closed it: cloth-like fabric of a fleshy hue was trailing slightly from its unzipped opening. A woman with striped black and yellow shoes edged past me, and for a fleeting instant I thought it was the Minister. It was my jet-lag kicking in, colliding times and places in my head. I saw, amidst the mesh of limbs and torsos, a large bump on someone’s neck. I didn’t see their face—only their neck, and this just for a second. Helicopters thrummed again; I thought of humming-birds; again a radio crackled, and some children, possibly the ones with the candy-floss, or maybe other ones, processed by. The crowd thinned out; late arrivals scurried past me; then the doors closed; and, almost immediately, the gantries, like the drawbridge to some castle that I’d never enter, were hoisted back up.
We have been told two things about the relationship between technology and nature. The first is that technology has enabled humans to master nature. The second is that technology has caused humans to destroy nature.
At the intersection of these two stories lies the idea of the Anthropocene. The Anthropocene contains a paradox: the term recognizes the immense power humans wield over the rest of creation, such that nothing on the planet is immune. Yet this same power poses a serious threat to humans. We’ve shaped the earth so intensively to suit our needs that it can no longer support them. (Some of us. Some needs.)
In this issue, we try to tell a different story about the entanglements of nature and technology. No surprise that the end of the world looms large. Big Tech teams up with Big Oil to build systems for smarter drilling. The residents of a small town continue to fall ill long after the microchip plant shuts down.
But there are also reasons for optimism. There are movements demanding a more “correct relation with the non-human world,” to borrow one contributor’s phrase. This issue offers some materials for imagining what such a relation might look like.
so good
Technological mastery is a myth. Prometheus is not coming. In truth, everything is dirty, even the digital—especially the digital. Computers were supposed to be made of sunshine: “all light and clean because they are nothing but signals,” as another contributor to this issue famously wrote on her first computer, an HP-86, decades ago. As she already knew then, they are less pristine than promised. Their metaphors are ethereal but their footprints are filthy. They too are implicated in armageddon.
The renewable transition itself may involve new kinds of destruction.
But recognizing that nature is human-entangled and vice versa opens up more options than conservation. Recognizing that there was never any Eden to return to lets you look ahead. Indeed, the most hopeful futures may come from the darkest histories, where the lessons of resistance have been well learned. The world has ended before; there have been many armageddons. But this also means: We have to learn how to mourn. To mourn without despair; to mourn towards a future.