The Post-Partisan Emporium

  Beneath the Artificial Earth Electricity generation, economic doctrine, and the ever-growing power demands of AI Chris Bateman “You never change things by fighting the existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” - R. Buckminster Fuller In one of the merely possible futures within reach of our imagination, our planet possesses unimaginable computational power harnessed by Artificial Intelligence. These colossal computational contraptions can calculate protein folds so effectively, that they can predict the side effects of new drugs with only moderate inaccuracy, while mediocre television shows are so cheap to generate that even the most undiscerning viewer is bored of them. To power these computational achievements, the landscape is cloaked in vast continental sheets of light farms, ringed by endless rows of windmills, and peppered with catalytic carbon dioxide stations to compensate for the scarcity of trees. This is the Artif...

  The 'Green' Movement: Endemic Sorrow and Permanent Fear And btw, the smoke you are inhaling? Those fires were set. ELIZABETH NICKSON Whatever happened to saving the whales? Twenty years from now we are going to look back at the early years of green energy seeing it as the apex predator in the Madness of Crowds sweepstakes. The wealth transfer from the poor to the rich, as taxpayers  subsidize  green energy projects in every country, is shocking. That money winds its way into hedge funds that promote new green energy projects accompanied by yet more taxpayer subsidy. At the same time, the money that could be used to lift up an increasingly miserable lower 50 percent is accompanied by a shutting down of fossil fuel supply, thus raising energy costs for the working poor and middle class, which then skyrockets the price of food. It is a pincer movement, a classic play by the rich to milk the poor, a driving of tens of millions into poverty and serfdom. I can read the face o...

  Hidden Costs: Ecological Realism & The ‘Green’ Revolution Polymetallic Nodules, Sand Mafias and E-Waste Hazards Stone Age Herbalist From the position of the archaeologist, technology is a neutral term. From flint hand axes to sickles, antler harpoons to fish traps, the earliest forms of technology leverage efficiency and capability at the interface between the human and the rest of the world. There is nothing unnatural about this - crows, otters, monkeys, even crocodiles make use of manipulated objects to exploit their dietary niche. Where there are concerns about how modern technology functions, they shouldn’t be framed as a dichotomy between ‘good’ and ‘bad’, but rather at the specific problems created. Too often what counts for academia today will position any discussion of technology in a framework of ‘neoliberalism’ and ‘systems thinking’. Some will talk of the Anthropocene, barely suppressing their glee at the control such definitions bring. What I want to do here is ou...