Politics of consumption

The term “neoliberalism” was sold, for decades, on the promise of growth, a sort of total political philosophy, extending a single, simple ideological tarpaulin so far and wide that it enclosed the earth like a rubbery blanket of greenhouse gas.

the forces that unleashed climate change — namely, “the unchecked wisdom of the market” — were nevertheless presented as the forces that would save the planet from its ravages. It is how “philanthrocapitalism”, which seeks profits alongside human benefits, has replaced the loss-leader model of moral philanthropy among the very rich; how the winners of our increasingly winner-take-all tournament economy use philanthropy to buttress their own status; how “effective altruism”, which measures even not-for-profit charity by metrics of return borrowed from finance, has transformed the culture of giving well beyond the billionaire class; and how the “moral economy”, a rhetorical wedge that once expressed a radical critique of capitalism, became the calling card of do-gooder capitalists like Bill Gates. It is also, on the other end of the pecking order, how struggling citizens are asked to be entrepreneurs, indeed to demonstrate their value as citizens with the hard work of entrepreneurship, in an exhausting social system defined above all else by relentless competition.

No future

Independent meditation, ayahuasca trips, hydroponic weed, crystals, microdosed LSD, prayers, the climate continues to careen toward visible degradation.

Feudalism

 

In the life of a brazilian, there is nothing but bullshit and god. All mixed together.

Politics of Consumption

The climate crisis demands political commitment weil beyond the easy engagement of rhetorical sympathies, comfortable partisan tribalism, and ehtical consumption.

Liberal environmentalist that they live hypocritically eat meat, flying, and voting liberal.

The structure of a political and economic order that not only permits the disparity but feeds and profits from it.

Screen addiction

A psychologically useful coping mechanism for living, still within the consumptive bourgeois tradition, in a dramatically degraded natural world.

Alienation

Staring into the screen so we don't have to see the planet die.

Global decarbonization

More than 10,000 people die each day, globally, from the small-particulate pollution produced by burning carbon. Globally, pollution kills as many as nine million each year.

Ethnocide

STF (rapporteur Flávio Dino) authorizes mining on Indigenous land: malaria cases will go off.

It would be more convenient to drop a plutonium bomb on the Indigenous people.

Global decarbonization

China recently poured more concrete in three years than the United States used in the entire twentieth century. Making concrete, production of which ranks today as the second most carbon-intensive industry in the world.

Planet of slum

The only alternative for Brazilians: live with potholes and service delays.

Slum

Brazilian wife reading trivial Twitter threads while your spouse is speaking, children scream and neighbor plays vulgar music.

Dirty infrastructure

The transition from dirty electricity to clean sources is not the whole challenge. It’s just the lowest-hanging fruit: smaller than the challenge of electrifying almost everything that uses power, by which he means anything that runs on much dirtier gas engines. That task, he continues, is smaller than the challenge of reducing energy demand, which is smaller than the challenge of reinventing how goods and services are provided — given that global supply chains are built with dirty infrastructure and labor markets everywhere are still powered by dirty energy. There is also the need to get to zero emissions from all other sources — deforestation, agriculture, livestock, landfills. And the need to protect all human systems from the coming onslaught of natural disasters and extreme weather. And the need to erect a system of global government, or at least international cooperation, to coordinate such a project. All of which is a smaller task, than the monumental cultural undertaking of imagining together a thriving, dynamic, sustainable future that feels not only possible, but worth fighting for.

Posthumanity

As delighted as you may by Netflix and Amazon and Instagram and Google Maps, rapid technology change transformed nearly every aspect of everyday life, and yet yielding little or tangible improvement in any conventional measures of economic well-being.

Posthumanity

We are, in other words, billions of dollars and thousands of dramatic breakthroughs later, precisely where we started when hippies were affixing solar panels to their geodesic domes. That is because the market has not responded to these developments by seamlessly retiring dirty energy sources and replacing them with clean ones. It has responded by simply adding the new capacity to the same system.

The cryptocurrency now produces as much CO2 each year as a million transatlantic flights.

Rio Grande do Sul:

Immoral behaviors

ghetto mentality.

Porto Alegre: the city of misery

The unemployed christian woman looks at the shit on the sidewalk and says:

- People say it's money.

Completely lost.

The writer and misery

Brazil's underdeveloped types, who have no respect for the life of the mind, are much closer to Hitler than to Stalin.

The underdeveloped worker cannot develop their consciousness. It goes against the rules of poverty.

The writer and communism

Under Stalin, the writer and the literary work played a vital role in Communist strategy. Literature was being honored.

Writers have always been aware of their special position in Communist ideology. They have taken Communism seriously because it has taken them seriously. Thus a history of the relations between Communism and modem literature is, in certain vital respects, a history of both.

There is hardly a major writer in 20th century who has not been touched at some stage in his life and art by Communism.

The alliance between literature and Communism remains both intimate. Literature is indeed the most dangerous of trades.

A withdrawal from Marxism leaving the imagination of the writer bruised.

In the lives of such writers as Camus, Steinbeck, or Silone, Marxism has played a liberating role.

The deep influence of Marxist ideas on Western aesthetics and literary theory. 'Whether explicitly or unconsciously, our whole contemporary view of art is penetrated with a Marxist awareness of social context and historical dynamism. Even the most Alexandrine of ''new critics" owes to the Marxist tradition some realization of the economic or social milieu that lies behind poetic style. Indeed, it may well be in aesthetics, rather than in actual literature, that Marxism has made its most solid contribution.

The Marxist or Communist element in the work of art is a code to express a personal radicalism.

Zei

Melancholic woman let’s move to Lisbon.

Now is the time for fearlessness!
There are a million reasons you can do it

Hey gothic girl, ragazza punk time flies by. 

We got the same intellect.

You have no money, fine!

I see people come and go, living low, in penury
It is time building a real home.

We're looking for a love that was never in our hearts.

Fill up the world with me.

The writer and communism

1984 is not a parable of the totalitarian rule of Stalin, Hitler, and Mao Tse-tung. The polemic of the fable is not unilinear. Orwell's critique bears simultaneously on the police state and on capitalist consumer society, with its illiteracy of values and its conformities. "Newspeak," the language of Orwell's nightmare, is the verbiage of commercial advertisement and massmedia. The tragic strength of 1984 derives precisely from Orwell's refusal to see things in black and white. Our own acquisitive society appalled him. He noted in it germs of inhumanity. Orwell came back from Catalonia with a kind of bleak, stoic faith in a humane socialism which neither East nor West is prepared to adopt on any but the most limited scale. To make of 1984 a pamphlet in the intellectual cold war is to misread and diminish the book.

The writer and communism

One of the striking differences between Fascism and Communism is this : Fascism has inspired no great work of art. Communism, on the contrary, has been a central force in much of the finest of modern literature; and personal encounter with Communism has marked the consciousness and career of many of the major writers of the age.

Why this difference? No doubt, Fascism is too vile and scurrilous an ideology to produce those charities of the imagination which are essential to literate art. Communism is a vision of human possibility rich in moral demand. Fascism is the ultimate code of the hoodlum. Fascism tyrannizes through contempt of man.

There is also a more specific difference. Hitler and Goebbels were cunning manipulators of language; but they had scant respect for the life of the mind. Communism, by contrast, is a creed penetrated from the very moment of its historical origin by a sense of the values of intellect and art. In Marx and Engels this sense is explicit. They were intellectuals to the core.

A city of illiterates

Porto Alegre: the province without a Marxist bookstore.

There's more to life than war and greed

Authoritarian globalist agenda: peddlers of destruction, financial suffocation, greed, fictitious enemies, you're living in a plutocracy.

Politics in Brazil: greed over everything else.

Poor women

Porto Alegre has turned into a slaughterhouse.

Is the monkey breathing

The argentine woman changed Buenos Aires for Porto Alegre. 

She must be crazy. Demented.

POA

The elderly woman behind the counter in a small town was a reactionary.

The false principle of our education

I keep saying, 170 years after Max Stirner:

— No, school is not life.

Feudalism

Universal education in Brazil is deteriorating.

The buffalo

But it was spring, and, tightening the fist in her coat pocket, she’d kill those monkeys levitating in their cage, monkeys happy as weeds, monkeys leaping about gently, the female monkey with her resigned, loving gaze, and the other female suckling her young. She’d kill them with fifteen dry bullets: the woman’s teeth clenched until her jaw ached. The nakedness of the monkeys. The world that saw no danger in being naked. She’d kill the nakedness of the monkeys. One monkey stared back at her as he gripped the bars, his emaciated arms outstretched in a crucifix, his bare chest exposed without pride. But she wouldn’t aim at his chest, she’d shoot the monkey between the eyes, she’d shoot between those eyes that were staring at her without blinking. Suddenly the woman averted her face: because the monkey’s pupils were covered with a gelatinous white veil, in his eyes the sweetness of sickness, he was an old monkey — the woman averted her face, trapping between her teeth a feeling she hadn’t come looking for, she quickened her step, even so, turned her head in alarm back toward the monkey with its arms outstretched: he kept staring straight ahead. “Oh no, not this,” she thought. And as she fled, she said: “God, teach me only how to hate.”

Clarice Lispector

1920 - 1977

Feudalism

SP almost a theocracy.

The perversity in power

Note: in Brazil, the State is not used to eliminate inequalities.

Misery

Brazil is a poor and disorganized country.

The perversity in power

The number of cyclist killings in Brazil is alarming.

Posthumanity

How to rearrange atoms to create water or oxygen?

Posthumanity

If the Earth goes, we’ll live in spaceships?
We’ll have 3D printers to print our food?

Posthumanity

Climate change does threaten the very basis of life on this planet, but a dramatically degraded environment here will still be much, much closer to livability than anything we might be able to hack out of the dry red soil of Mars. Even in summer, at the equator of that planet, nighttime temperatures are a hundred degrees Fahrenheit below zero; there is no water on its surface, and no plant life. Conceivably, given sufficient funding, a small enclosed colony could be built there, or on another planet; but the costs would be so much higher than for an equivalent artificial ecosystem on Earth, and therefore the scale so much more limited, that anyone proposing space travel as a solution to global warming must be suffering from their own climate delusion. To imagine such a colony could offer material prosperity as abundant as tech plutocrats enjoy in Atherton is to live even more deeply in the narcissism of that delusion—as though it were only as difficult to smuggle luxury to Mars as to Burning Man.

The faith takes a different form among the laity, unable to afford that ticket into space. But articles of faith are offered, considerately, at different price points: smartphones, streaming services, rideshares, and the internet itself, more or less free. And each glimmers with some promise of escape from the struggles and strife of a degraded world.

Existential threat

Human extinction scenarios are everywhere. The humans aren’t burdened with environmental wreckage and the problem of navigating it.

Crisis capitalism

We see the way that perspectives on climate change map neatly onto existing and familiar perspectives on capitalism — from burn-it-all-down leftists to naively optimistic and blinkered technocrats to rent-seeking, kleptocratic, growth-is-the-only-value conservatives — we tend to think of climate as somehow being contained within, or governed by, capitalism. In fact, the opposite: capitalism is endangered by climate.

The belief that the grandest task before technologists is not to engineer prosperity and well-being for humanity but to build a kind of portal through which we might pass into another, possibly eternal kind of existence, a technological rapture in which conceivably many — the billions lacking access to broadband, to begin with — would be left behind. It would be very hard, after all, to upload your brain to the cloud when you’re buying pay-as-you-go data by the SIM card.

The south is fascist

Xenophobia is a provincial characteristic of Porto Alegre.

Posthumanity

Sam Altman made a down payment on a brain-upload program that would extract his mind from this world.

Information

Who pursues their goals with monomaniacal focus, oblivious to the possibility of negative consequences? Who adopts a scorched-earth approach to increasing market share? This hypothetical strawberry-picking AI does what every tech startup wishes it could do — grows at an exponential rate and destroys its competitors until it’s achieved an absolute monopoly. The idea of superintelligence is such a poorly defined notion that one could envision it taking almost any form with equal justification: a benevolent genie that solves all the world’s problems, or a mathematician that spends all its time proving theorems so abstract that humans can’t even understand them. But when Silicon Valley tries to imagine superintelligence, what it comes up with is no-holdsbarred capitalism.

Badly programmed superintelligence

What will be more dangerous: runaway climate change or runaway artificial intelligence?

Feudalism

Brazilian irrationalism: a map of human mind as an awkward kluge, blindly self-regarding and selfdefeating, ineffective at some things and maddeningly incompetent when it comes to others; compromised to the illusion and misguided and tattered.

Feudalism

The brazilian cities are filthy, 

the underdeveloped minds intoxicated.

Climate change

Emissions are still growing, unabated.

Storm of climate change continue and just how little the world is doing to combat it.

Eremocine

There are literally billions who will shortly be terrified by the forces unleashed by the Anthropocene. In much of the world, they already are, in the form of lethal close-to-annual heat waves in the Middle East and South Asia, and in the ever-present threat of flood, like those that hit Kerala in 2018 and killed hundreds.

That we reengineered the natural world so sufficiently to close the book on an entire geological era — that is the major lesson of the Anthropocene. The scale of that transformation remains astonishing, even to those of us who were raised amidst it and took all of its imperious values for granted. Twenty-two percent of the earth’s landmass was altered by humans just between 1992 and 2015. Ninety-six percent of the world’s mammals, by weight, are now humans and their livestock; just four percent are wild. We have simply crowded — or bullied, or brutalized — every other species into retreat, near-extinction, or worse. E. O. Wilson thinks the era might be better called the Eremocine — the age of loneliness.

Storytelling

Climate change promises to transform everything we thought we knew aboute nature.

One message of climate change is: you do not live outside the scene but within it, subject to all the same horrors you can see aflicting the lives of animals.

Corporate greed

The natural villains are the oil companies.

Feudalism

In Brazil, it is impossible to get elected without verbalize faith, god and satan. They are magic words.

Storytelling

Climate catastrophe has billions authors, with responsibility distended over time and extended across much of the planet. This is not to say it is distributed evenly: though climate change will be given its ultimate dimensions by the course of industrialization in the developing world, at present the world’s wealthy possess the lion’s share of guilt — the richest 10 percent producing half of all emissions. This distribution tracks closely with global income inequality, which is one reason that many on the Left point to the all-encompassing system, saying that industrial capitalism is to blame. It is. But saying so does not name an antagonist; it names a toxic investment vehicle with most of the world as stakeholders, many of whom eagerly bought in. And who in fact quite enjoy their present way of life. That includes, almost certainly, you and me and everyone else buying escapism with our Netflix subscription.

Storytelling

How theoretically illustrate global warming: who would the heroes be? And what would they be doing? The narrative would be the result of collective action or the journey of an individual conscience? Or assuming we continue to proceed - zombie-like ourselves - down a path to ruin?

Storytelling

End-of-the-world nightmares will blossom, including in children’s bedrooms, where siblings once whispered worries over the fact of death. Among their parents, climate trauma will take its place in the pop-psychological vernacular, if often as a scapegoat for more personal frustrations and anxieties.

That environmental alarm was echoed in fiction of the Victorian era, including H. G. Wells’s The Time Machine, which depicted a distant future in which most humans were enslaved troglodytes, laboring underground for the benefit of a pampered and very small aboveground elite.

Why global warming and natural disaster haven’t yet become preoccupations of contemporary fiction?

Le diseguaglianze sono troppe

Il mondo è sempre più diseguale ed è ormai evidente che non solo esistono elevati livelli di disuguaglianza nella maggior parte dei paesi, ma che queste disparità sono in aumento. È anche chiaro che non esistono eguali opportunità per tutti: le prospettive di vita dei figli di genitori ricchi e istruiti sono molto migliori di quelle di chi ha genitori poveri e meno istruiti. Il reddito è solo una dimensione della disuguaglianza. Altre dimensioni sono molto importanti, come ad esempio l’accesso alla giustizia, che non è uguale per tutti, o la partecipazione alle decisioni politiche, che non è la stessa per tutti. Tali dimensioni, però, sono difficili da quantificare. Ci sono invece almeno altre due dimensioni che sono facili da misurare.

Una è la disuguaglianza nella salute, come risulta dalle differenze nell’aspettativa di vita. La natura stessa porta alcuni individui a vivere più a lungo di altri. Ma se alcuni individui non hanno accesso all’assistenza sanitaria o non riescono ad ottenere un’alimentazione adeguata, allora ci saranno ancora maggiori disparità nella salute. Di grande preoccupazione, ad esempio, è che una delle principali fonti di morbilità sono le “malattie sociali”, come l’alcolismo, la droga e il suicidio.

Joseph Stiglitz

No future

The planet will not survive in the hands of toxic men and women.

Mad Max: fury road

Global-warming,
a world made desert,
political crisis: oil shortage.

Pimped life

No party will eradicate prostitution. The Left is romanticizing the trafficking of women.

Feudalism

Theocracy is spreading like cancer across the periphery of capitalism.

Xenophobia in the political arena.

Systems

Heat produces violence and conflict between people, we know, and so it should probably not surprise us that it also generates a spike in violence against oneself. Each increase of a single degree Celsius in monthly temperature is associated with almost a percentage point rise of the suicide rate in the United States, and more than two percentage points in Mexico; an unmitigated emissions scenario could produce 40,000 additional suicides in these countries by 2050. One startling paper by Tamma Carleton has suggested that global warming is already responsible for 59,000 suicides, many of them farmers, in India — where one-fifth of all the world’s suicides now occur, and where suicide rates have doubled since just 1980.

Systems

In a world of suffering, the self-interested mind craves compartmentalization, and one of the most interesting frontiers of emerging climate science traces the imprint left on our psychological well-being by the force of global warming, which can overwhelm whatever methods we devise to cope — that is, the mental health effects of a world on fire. Perhaps the most predictable vector is trauma: between a quarter and a half of all those exposed to extreme weather events will experience them as an ongoing negative shock to their mental health.

Grist has called the phenomenon “climate depression,” Scientific American “environmental grief.” And while it may seem intuitive that those contemplating the end of the world find themselves despairing, especially when their calls of alarm have gone almost entirely unheeded, it is also a harrowing forecast of what is in store for the rest of the world, as the devastation of climate change slowly reveals itself. In the sense of psychological distress, which so many of them endure, climate scientists are the canaries in our coal mine. This may be why so many of them seem concerned with the risks of crying wolf about warming: they’ve learned enough about public apathy to worry themselves into knots about just when, and precisely how, to raise the alarm.

There are the more surprising mental health costs. Climate affects both the onset and the severity of depression, The Lancet has found. Rising temperature and humidity are married, in the data, to emergency-room visits for mental health issues. When it’s hotter out, psychiatric hospitals see spikes in proper inpatient admissions, as well. Schizophrenics, especially, are admitted at much higher rates when the temperatures are higher, and, inside those hospitals, ward temperature significantly increases symptom severity in schizophrenic patients. Heat waves bring waves of other things, too: mood disorders, anxiety disorders, dementia.

Systems

As conditions of environmental degradation become more universal, it may, perversely, require more imagination to consider their costs. When the deprived are no longer outlier communities but instead whole regions, whole countries, conditions that once may have seemed inhumane now appear, to a future generation who knows no better, simply “normal”.

Systems

Warming is not just a matter of sea level, and its horrors will not hit nations like the United States first. In fact, the impacts will be greatest in the world’s least developed, most impoverished, and therefore least resilient nations — almost literally a story of the world’s rich drowning the world’s poor with their waste.

Wealth will be a buffer for some countries, but not a safeguard, as Australia is learning already: by far the richest of all the countries staring down the most intense, most immediate warming barrages, it is an early test case of how the world’s affluent societies will bend, or buckle, or rebuild under the pressure of temperature changes likely to hit the rest of the well-off world only later this century.

The wheels of all communities are greased by abundance; baked by deprivation, they stall and crack. The paths are familiar ones, even to those who have only ever known affluence, their lives creamily frictionless but stimulated by entertainments tracing the arc of social decline: market breakdowns, price gouging, the hoarding of goods and services by the well-off and well-armed, the retreat of law enforcement into self-enrichment, and the disappearance of any expectation of justice making survival suddenly a matter of entrepreneurial skill.

More than 140 million people in just three regions of the world will be made climate migrants by 2050, the World Bank projected in a 2018 study, assuming current warming and emissions trends: 86 million in sub-Saharan Africa, 40 million in South Asia, and 17 million in Latin America. The most commonly cited estimate from the United Nations’ International Organization for Migration suggests numbers a bit higher — 200 million, total, by 2050. These figures are quite high — higher than most non-advocates credit. But according to the U.N. IOM, climate change may unleash as many as a billion migrants on the world by 2050. One billion — that is about as many people as live today in North and South America combined. Imagine the two continents suddenly drowned in the sea, the whole New World submerged, and everyone left bobbing at the surface now fighting for a foothold, somewhere, anywhere, and, if someone else is scrambling for the same dry spot, scrambling to get there first.