Naturally, both Paul and I are of the ‘eco-fascist’ tendency; that’s to say, any devotee of Gaia who hasn’t bought into the GROWTH’n’PROGRESSforever!!! tripe.
What Paul is describing is the schism between those - alleged - environmentalist who have swallowed the startrekkytechietechie myths (like George Monbiot, incidentally) and those of us who, by contrast, intuit the remorseless unfolding of the Long Descent away from hitech industrial society, now already in hand (look around you; listen to the ‘news’; above all, look at the cavortings of the availability of energy, the master-resource that controls everything else that we do; see what we mean yet? In the immortal words of Dubbya Bush: “This mother is going DOWN!”)
I don’t imagine that the swallowers of the manasgod ‘growthforever’ myth have much longer to go before reality crashes their techietechie dreamworld. Meanwhile, we who are not hypnotised by the currently briefly fashionable, tripe-ish Schwabery have to continue imagining into existence the sort of - actually realworld possible - future that is in fact coming, beneath all the shallow, transient startrekkery: humankind as Mam Gaia’s respectful children, willy nilly. By the way, don’t you just love the way Paul repeatedly characterises the proposed new lab-grown ‘food’ as “sludge”? Love it!
Nice to see Monbiot getting a well-deserved kicking, albeit not as whole-hearted viciously violent as I would have preferred.
As far as AI and apps go, I’m about 40% through Dave Eggers’ The Every, a sort of sequel to The Circle (which I didn’t enjoy, this is much much better). The heroine, Delaney, is determined to destroy the eponymous global behemoth, a thinly disguised Google, and win humanity back it’s … well, humanity.
Whether she succeeds I don’t know, yet, but her attempts at dreaming up hopelessly crap apps with no discernible purpose have fallen flat because each and every one is a wild success. This is satire but really it’s just Reality Plus 5%.
“environmentalist who have swallowed the startrekkytechietechie myths (like George Monbiot, incidentally)” Aaah you mean neoliberals! There is no excuse, our evolution cannot be partial, compromised, subject to circumlocution…
This means the geewgaws and gaflah must go as must the false science base that underpins it all…think of the energy use of; WiFi, cryptocurrencies, nuclear power and particle beam research…not to mention the military applications of these, so-called, technologies…a paradigm shift is the evolutionary equivalent of “three-steps-forward”, abandon certainty all is impermanence…
