The future
long hours of this ‘project’ were spent watching sci-fi movies
in fact, I took it upon myself to do the maticulous work of isolating as many movies that do not make use of the easy alien civilization invasion excuse for a plot line, and concentrate on the human/machine/god relationship
This all became an obsession around 2001 when, disillusioned from the fact that Y2K didnt make not a dent in the machines back, I’ve become annoyed by the everpresent gap between the wild human imagination and the intense evasion of looking the present moment in the eye. There was no mission to jupiter. There was no mission to anywhere. The one mission to the moon, with it’s image of neil armstrong marking his plot of land on the moon was as faded and unrealistic as ever. If could have easily been special effected in the pixar studio. We were obviously regressing.
Not that anyone ever expected any of that to be true. Not at all. They always say that science fiction clears the way for science to come and pave the road, but nobody ever assumes that reality would follow fiction to the note. We might not have explored any other planets, but our cellphones do seem mildly reminiscent of StarTreck communication devices, and on that note, people do actually carry tazers on their person, and those can kill or shock another human being no problem. They havn’t started feeding us tofu made out of processed humans, instead they feed us cows that eat other cows… rings a bell? The gap was indeed closing.
What I was looking for in this experiment, as I do with this whole project, is to redirect the attention we give to fiction back into reality, which is to say, direct experience of the Present Moment. if I can dance back and forth along the line in the hope that the illusion would blur the seperation, even just for a minute, and if that drives me crazy, so be it, I am determined that the present can prove its superiority given a fair try.
At some point, of course, I got tired of the dance, of tracking the distance between the future and the past. I got distracted by the destruction of our natural habitat and studied more narratives of direct actions against that trend. In the end though, those go hand in hand with science fiction. As time goes by and things speed up, it seems there isnt much difference between hollywood and the hightech industry and oil corporations and the military industrial complex. They all suck the living juice out of the present moment with promises of using those in the future to fix a problem they created in the past… The idea of a deciding moment is as old as religion and and as extensive as science or the world economy, It can be contextualized in almost any system that uses time as a basic assumption. We project our ideology back into the past and use that to try to determine a course as far into the future as possible, but the whole thing is just a subversion to what is going on in the present. It is therefore all fiction, all a spectacle that is designed to capture our attention, and I do mean all of it.
Here is a slightly more poetic interpertation of our general environmental crises then the one unfolding in the news and triggering my response below.
I am reading about all the officials and accompanying activists that are meeting in copenhagen for a climate summit. The US rejects the idea of owing a debt for its share of the climate disaster, pointing out that we didnt know, nobody supposedly knew, that emissions were harmful. Thats to be expected. But then you read a lot of talk about numbers, scientist say 350 CO2 parts per million in the atmosphere equals 2c degrees increase, the US is offering to reduce 17% of 2005 CO2 emissions levels which equals 4% of 1990 CO2 emissions levels, which US Presideng Clinton did indeed sign a commitment to reduce by 20% by 2020 in Kioto, but, of course the US Senate refused to ratify into law.
Combine all this jumbled information: Having been informed, and let us remember that this did mean that at the end of long negotiations with scientist and politicians arguing about the facts and possible scenarios, an American president put their signature on the treaty that did not make it’s way into law. After that moment in history, the US spent the next 15 years between 1990 and 2005 basically ceasing the moment, gaining further ‘advantage’ over all other nations being bound by the treaty, doing almost the exact opposite: we have increased our emissions 5 fold. No one can deny that we did not know about the consequences during those 15 years. Doesnt matter how stupid the monkey sitting at the white house during that time was. Lets put a price tag on that crime.
If nothing else, the 2012 movie plot line can stand in here to represent the widespread world view of the upperclass of the developed world. This is a world where tickets can be bought to get out of the mess we created with the mere pricetag of a billion dollars, the rest of us will go through some genetic testing or the obstacle course of natural selection, that would allow everyone to rejoice in our inclusive human nature.
So whats missing from this whole cop15 scenario? maybe the realization that no nation state based system is going to solve this crisis. The US, as a state apparatus, is not willing to compromise because it would mean the end of it’s world market dominance, and it’s internal class system dominance, which will eventually lead to it’s dissolution. It would rather bet on some controlled demolition scenario that is a soft version of the 2012 movie plot. The negotiations here are not between equals. and I dont think looking at GDP differences is enough, neither is average income and emissions per capita. The missing factor is the internal class disparity multiplier that would tell you how close the heart of the person sitting at the negotiation table is to the suffering of climate refugees, both in the world at large, or in their country.
The US made it through Katrina with mild bruises. The upper class remained untouched, possibly even made off with some extra cash for overpriced reconstruction projects. The world that they are suggesting is one where nature steps in where terrorist and rouge states left off. Where the lower classes have to work to pay for the empire apparatus to provide basic protections from the climate to sustain their life. In their script, if we enter into this world slowly and with caution, there is a good chance they can maintain control. Basically, they want to save the planet, but only if they can still maintain their power and privilege. Good luck. I suspect mother nature has a different idea of how things will go down. Further, I suspect that the rest of humanity is in the process of writing another script. One where the earth crust shifts in a way that leaves everyone standing on the red carpet that leads to the luxury escape pods floating in mid air, desperately holding to a virtual reality recreating the now distant memory of the good old status quo.