The second installment of our interview with synthetic zero‘s Arran James and Michael Pyska. This time around, we talk about post-nihilism as political therapeutics, Stoicism and what we would do on the eve of human extinction.
Download and Notes: Mindful Cyborgs: Post Nihilistic Whispers Part 2
You can find part one here.
Entertainment Weekly is running a three page preview of Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham’s forthcoming comic Nameless, which sounds a bit like a return to some of the themes explored in The Filth. Here’s Morrison’s description:
Nameless is my first collaboration with Chris Burnham since we wrapped up our run on Batman and it’s our first no-holds barred horror comic—a disturbing anti-human voyage to the hopeless outer limits of cosmic nihilism and cruelty, in the company of six doomed astronauts on a mission to save our planet from an approaching asteroid. Needless to say, they get far more than they bargained for.
In my superhero comics, I’ve tended to be a cheerleader for the human spirit, but Nameless gives me a rare opportunity to articulate a long-withheld sneering contempt for our miserable species, with its self-serving, sentimental, suicidal self-delusions and its greedy, willful ignorance.
Inspired by the dark side occultism of the Tunnels of Set, by pessimist philosophers like Thomas Ligotti and Ray Brassier, and by our culture’s unstoppable, almost erotic, obsession with its own destruction, Nameless is a light-hearted romp through the sunlit meadows of a baby unicorn’s daydreams!
Not.
Thomas Ligotti and Ray Brassier were, along with Morrison and Alan Moore, key influences on True Detective.
Full Story: Entertainment Weekly: First look: Grant Morrison and Chris Burnham’s human-hating horror comic ‘Nameless’
Here’s the first of the three pages:
EW also has a preview of Morrison and Frank Quitely’s take on the Charlton Comics (the inspiration for the Watchmen characters).
See also:
Everyone likes to live in a media bubble, but conservatives even more so. The media bubble that more and more people are choosing, however, is the one created by their favorite brands. That’s right, ‘“content marketing” is eating both journalism and paid advertising. (See also: Amway journalism)
BTW, if you love engaging with brands, then you’ll love Schwa.
Elsewhere, People are still talking about neoreaction. Meanwhile, #healthgoths and net art people are talking about accelerationism. (Thanks to Jay Owens for those last two. She follows this stuff pretty closely.)
My most interesting find of the week came today, though I doubt many others will be interested: East Portland Historical Overview & Historic Preservation Study.
Last week my computer told me that my cat doesn’t love me. Now it says that that my cat thinks I’m a giant unpredictable ape — which is true — but does indeed care about me. I’ll keep you updated, via your computer, what my computer tells me about my cats’ emotions.
The new Great Dismal book, The Peripheral.
Friday I started rewatching True Detective season one. Tried watching The Strain over the past couple weeks, but ran out of fucks to give it midway through. But Boardwalk Empire just finished its last season ever, so it’s time to watch that.
Joy Division, like a good miserablist.
Ever since Warren Ellis posted about the “extinction aesthetic” I’ve been seeing it everywhere. For example, the new game The Long Dark. From Wired‘s review:
As in Eric Kripke’s Revolution, The Long Dark imagines a world in which a “geomagnetic event” turns out the lights forever, ending humanity’s reign and repositioning nature for a comeback tour. But instead of the collapse happening while you’re traipsing through a balmy, subtropical clime replete with fruit trees, fishable waters and swinging hammocks, you’re somewhere in the vicinity of the Arctic Circle. And winter isn’t coming, it’s a bone-cracking fact.
The game wraps a biometric data cube around that nihilistic narrative, monitoring, in real-time, things like thirst, hunger, body temperature, fatigue, calories consumed, injuries (sprains, broken bones) and illness. It’s also keeping tabs on environmental metrics like ambient air temperature (inside or out) relative to variables like wind and weather, the time of day, and whether you’re in shadow or sunlight. If you find better clothes, you stay a little warmer. If you find water-purification tablets, you can render polluted water potable. If you find wood, matches and a sheaf of newspapers, you can build a fire.
That sounds an awful lot like a graphical version of A Dark Room, the strange game that Ellis called the “Extinction Aesthetic equiv of Minecraft.”
From the New Yorker‘s profile of the game:
The game’s ever-expanding scope and regular demands for micro-managing resources create an enthralling parallax effect that can keep devoted players dosed, for hours, on the pleasurable sense of immersion that the psychologist Mihály Csíkszentmihályi calls “flow.” The longer you play, the more complicated the game’s gathering and building tools become, with each incremental addition widening the game’s scope, while introducing unsettling hints about what it all could mean. Why do you sometimes find cloth caught in your traps? And why does the game suddenly start calling the few workers who’ve come to help you slaves?
Is this the beginning of a trend? Are there other examples I don’t know about?
Arran James follows up a previous post about extinction:
It is the palliative care of the human that we should really consider. We open with a discussion of the dying Earth because it is this dying that is killing us: a vicarious species-suicide? These are dark thoughts that imply a loathing so great in our species that we’d take out everything else just to slit our own throats once and for all. But we’re not that grand, we’re all too limited, all too human still. Like smokers in the 1950s we didn’t know what we were doing, then we did and did nothing about it, then everyone said it was too late. We’re not quite sure of the periodicity. We don’t know if it is too late. What we do know is that we’ve had a mass terminal diagnosis and there is no consensus on the prognosis. What are we dying of then, if not some anthropathology [3]?
Full Story: synthetic_zero: Beyond palliative care
See also:
Taking a week off work.
After posting about Warren Ellis’ extinction aesthetic thing on Monday, I figured I should look into the Dark Mountain Project a bit more. I figured the New York Times Magazine profile of Paul Kingsnorth would be as good a place to start as any.
Reading this led me to wonder what the current worst case scenarios for climate change, ocean acidification and peak soil are, which led me to a long piece from The Nation that, if I understand it correctly, reports that we could see a 3.5 Celsius increase in global temperatures as early as 2035. An increase of 3.5C would kill off the earth’s remaining plankton, which are already dying quickly thanks to ocean acidification, which would kick off a series of events leading to the death of most of our food sources.
In other words, we could be facing human extinction in just 21 years.
Actually, I imagine it would take at least a few more years after 2035 for the human species to actually go extinct. Maybe we’ll discover that some people can live on smaller amounts of food, or but it doesn’t sound like things will be pretty for the survivors.
And if we don’t hit those numbers by 2035, there’s a ticking time bomb of methane stored in arctic permafrosted soil, and that’s going to be thawing out sooner or later. And when that happens, temperatures are likely to go out of control fast.
Even if we make it to 2050, current projections estimate that our soil will only be able to produce about 30 percent of the amount of food we do today. That’s particularly bad news because new population projections predict that instead of peaking peaking at nine billion around 2050, we’re going to hit 11 billion by 2100 and keep growing (unless of course we all starve to death decades before we ever reach that point).
The good news is that these are just the worst case scenarios. Many scientists still think we can turn this around, at least somewhat. The bad news is that the worst case scenarios keep getting worse.
Other cheery subjects:
Good news: stop and frisk is all but gone in New York City and violent crime is still dropping. Bad news:
The police remain a visible presence in the borough’s Brownsville neighborhood, where the vast and violent expanse of public housing had made the neighborhood a proving ground for the department’s use of the tactics as a way to curb gun violence. As part of a new strategy called Omnipresence, the officers now stand on street corners like sentries, only rarely confronting young men and patting them down for weapons. But the residents of Brownsville, conditioned by the years of the stop-and-frisk tactics, still view these officers warily.
Elsewhere: Deb Chachra revisits Betsy Haibel’s article on the the tech industry’s consent problem and finds many more examples.
This week I watched Hardware, not realizing that human sterilization and population control were subplots. And finished watching the second season of Utopia (the British drama, not the U.S. reality show). I seem unable to escape the themes of human extinction and involuntary sterilization.
(You can read the first few issues free online)
Stray Bullets: Uber Alles Edition, which is the sort of thing that makes you think that humans deserve to go extinct.
Warren Ellis has identified and named something of a Ballardian inversion of the rather Gibsonian New Aesthetic: Extinction Aesthetic.
Extinction Symbol. Dark Extropianism. Apocalyptic Witchcraft. Dark Mountain. Uncivilisation. In The Dust Of This Planet. Health Goth. Accelerationism. After Nature/Dark Ecology/Ecognosis. Early signals: The New Nihilism, Speculative Realism, Neoreaction, Occulture. Cusp: Toxic Internet. Post-Westphalian.
Full Story: morning.computer: Extinction Aesthetic
See also:
Radiolab on In The Dust Of This Planet
Update: Ellis chimes in on Twitter: “Extinction Aesthetic equiv of Minecraft is A Dark Room, it suddenly & amusingly occurs to me.” (Presumably referring to this game).
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