That Agrilogistics Description

Remember this?

Well I realized I should have added that the program creates a hyperobject: the first one, really, that is made by humans.

When The Onion Agrees with You

...you know you're on to something. 

Look how it phrases things: 

“Even if every person decided to sit down at the exact same time, there would still be an adequate number of chairs to go around,” Clouse added. “As far as chairs go, we’re basically set.”

That's my line! Take a look at this. Marina Zurkow's new thing. I had to do the entry on plexiglass chairs! 

In case you haven't been following this, I'm a bit obsessed with chairs as they are a good way of thinking about how nonhuman nonsentient things have agency. A human is now a chair vector. After we go extinct there will be huge piles of chairs on whatever planets we have colonized. The first thing you design in Design 101 is...a chair. 

Making a chair comes from the age of agrilogistics. The conquering king sitting on his enemies etc. Then everyone had to have one: democracy! But they are no good for you. In effect they are literally a virus: an idea-virus and a chair-virus, and we seem hopelessly incapable to stop reproducing them. 

Review of Hyperobjects

Thanks Graham for pointing this out. It is in Reviews in Cultural Theory, two words that could usefully be expanded to include nonhumans.

Your Time Is Up

It's quite clear you don't belong in the twentieth century, let alone the twenty-first.

Today Programme 1:29

BBC, why will there “always be a suspicion” that the Ukrainians shot the plane down? And how do you know this about eighteen hours later?

And why on Earth have you no reporters on the ground at all, anymore? Let alone investigative ones?

Accelerationism Minus Earth

And this brings about the future how? It's straight out of 50s PR...It hasn't even heard of Rachel Carson.

"How do the Israelis see through walls they build? The same way accelerationists do: They read Deleuze."

I've been talking in a similar way recently.

Dark Ecology and Ecocriticism (MP3)

Part 2 of my seminar in Switzerland.

Noodle Paradise

The small humans and I have visited for the fifth time what Simon loves to call "Noodle Paradise," Soto's Houston Penetrable. Tactile colored space. Playful, immersive, disorienting. Highly recommended if you're anywhere near.

Let Me Get This Straight

The GOP demanded that the “employer mandate” part of Obamacare be delayed. And now you're suing the President because he conceded that.

Wrong, New Scientist

“Animals don't have a self-concept” my foot.

You should now change your name to New Scientism.

The Anthropocene: A Seminar (MP3)

Sometimes I can talk slowly : )

My Thoughts on The Ancient Mariner

Someone asks where they are. Well, there are several classes in "Classes" (Romanticism) about it. And several places in my writing:

The final part of Hyperobjects.
The Ecological Thought chapter 2.
“Coexistence without Coexistents” if you can find it.
Chapter 3 of The Poetics of Spice. 
Throughout Ecology without Nature.
“Of Matter and Meter” if you can find it.
Realist Magic. 
“The Dark Ecology of Elegy.”
“Queer Ecology.”
“Twinkle Twinkle Little Star as an Ambient Poem.”
And elsewhere...

Agrilogistics: Quick and Dirty

Someone wanted a brief-ish, simpl-ish explanation. The trouble with listening to explanations in talks is that it's hard to hold on to the concepts as they flit past. And in particular I tend to machine gun them out like some kind of mad scholar version of LTJ Bukem.

So:

An agricultural program so successful that it now dominates agricultural techniques planet-wide. It arose in the Fertile Crescent 12 000 years ago. Toxic from the beginning to humans and other lifeforms, and now responsible for a huge amount of global warming. It led to industry, the other huge global warming factor. Though toxic, it has been wildly successful, because the program is even more compelling than Candy Crush. It operates blindly, just like a computer program. It promises to eliminate anxiety and contradiction--social, physical and ontological--by establishing thin rigid boundaries between human and nonhuman worlds, and by reducing existence to sheer quantity. Agrilogistics is the smoking gun behind the (literally) smoking gun responsible for the Sixth Mass Extinction Event.

I'm sure I will explain it better in Dark Ecology : )

All You Environmentalists Who Use Climate Change

Stop. Exhibit A: 

“All this stems, this carbon capture, all this other stuff, it stems back to a scare, generated years ago about global warming,” the Fayette County lawmaker said on Thursday. “Finally it turned out there hasn’t been global warming in 15 or 20 years, then they changed the name to climate change.”  Kentucky State Representative Stan Lee