When Worlds Collide -- Popular Permaculture Against Superlative Technocentricity

Upgraded and adapted from the Moot.

Reader Mildred provoked a really interesting when worlds collide kinda sorta moment for me, when she commented on my permaculture post from day before yesterday. She was commenting especially on the last part of the post, in which I warned about mainstream developmental discourses that would promote geoengineering solutions to environmental problems. As I said, these seem to me, in general, to be much more about incumbent interests making money and maintaining control through terror-talk and war-talk and a re-packaging of the very elite-industrial model that is the culprit here than they are about actually solving the extractive-petrochemical climate crisis and energy descent problems.

But what made all this a when worlds collide moment was that Mildred commented on this in terms that make it clear she was reading that post through the lens of the sorts of things I talk about here when I am engaged in my critique of superlative and sub(cult)ural technology discourses (you know, robot cultists, techno-immortalists, nano-santa cornucopiasts, smiley-face eugenicists, boys-and-their-toys corporate-militarists, and so on), which isn't really what I had in mind so much at the time, but which do indeed connect up with what I was talking about at a broad level at least.

She wrote: I'm pretty sure they are going to write YOU off as an existential risk, since permaculture can be dismissed as "bioconservative" and utterly at odds with immortality. No?

Now, first things first, as it happens, reality is also utterly at odds with the notion of any medicalized human immortality, not just any time soon (which should go without saying, however hype-notized one might be by sci-fi or Big Pharma or both) but in fact ever at all, at least to the extent that anything legible as human life (embodied, vulnerable, partial, open) is presumably being "immortalized"... unless we are wandering into religious discourse here (and, honestly, let's not and say that we did).

Of course, all functional medicine is broadly "longevizing," I suppose, if one really wants to look at it that way, and I can imagine some particularly eeeeevil folks who might want to proclaim that the provision of clean water (after all, the single most important "miracle drug" we could make available to everybody on earth, here and now, and so save and extend and improve countless lives to the benefit of all) and universal healthcare on a planetary scale constitutes an "existential risk" to be avoided given, say, concerns of planetary carrying capacity and lack of infrastructure investment and so on.

Needless to say (surely?), I myself would advocate universal access to family planning and, wait for it, actually sound urban planning and development as the proper solutions to such concerns, solutions which, in my view should definitely be rethought in polycultural terms: sensible family planning education and agitation and organizing should be p2p, urban planning and regulation should emphasize sustainability concerns above all, all matters of activating local knowledges and organization, both appropriate and, crucially, appropriable technologies, and so on.

But all that is neither here nor there, since what is really interesting in what Mildred is saying I think is that she is mistaking the relevant "they" in my critique a bit here. My advocacy of Polyculture (conjoining popular permaculture, p2p, and consensual planetary multiculture) is only tangentially related to my ongoing critique of superlative technology discourses like the ones transhumanists and singularitarians and techno-immortalists indulge in.

The Robot Cultists are small fry (interestingly symptomatic or illustrative of some of the forces in play, sure, but given their numbers and resources senso strictu irrelevant).

What I'm actually speaking of here is the much larger battle of democracy against capitalism, which in ecological terms is very much a battle for survival for real.

Existential risk assessment by technocratic elites advocating geoengineering solutions to environmental catastrophe, generally speaking, constitute an elite-industrial response to a crisis created by abstract/extractive elite-industrial modes of production and exchange, often "neutrally" described as "global development" in the neoliberal/neoconservative consummation of the capitalist/industrial epoch. My point, by the way, needn't be to insist categorically or absolutely that existential risk assessment in all its versions or in all instances is wrongheaded, of course -- we're all grownups here -- since surely there are plenty of moments in which ideas and discussions describable in these terms have been useful enough as far as they go (the question indeed is how far do they go), but just to point to some vulnerabilities of this discursive mode in general, and to decry any foregrounding of this discourse as the proper or conventional institutional response to catastrophic climate change or resource descent in general.

Now, it's true that some "transhumanist" types are in on the game of existential risk assessment, championing geoengineered "solutions" for asteroid impacts, rising greenhouse waters, and so on. This is largely an effort in my view to "mainstream" their Robot Cultism, to treat their sf fantasies as serious "ideas" rather than, you know, just enjoyable sf blue-skying of a kind geeks in general are plenty good at already thank you very much without joining Robot Cults that confuse sci-fi scenarizing with proximate realities. In other words, they would have silly Robot God "waking up" online to wreak havoc scenarios given a "probability value" for wonks to assess on a continuum that also includes actual problems like tracking tsunamis near population centers, hence finessing all the pesky problems of incoherence and foolishness that otherwise plague the very idea of superintelligent entitative AI.

But, honestly, "transhumanists" (so-called) are hardly the ones you need to worry about when talk turns to deranging developmental discourses. The boardrooms and thinktanks and NGOs are filled with "serious" folks who are all too eager to direct sustainability discourse through the figures of terror and war back into elite-industrial developmental models. This is not because they are Robot Cultists (although their are interesting structural and conceptual continuities in play, as I have often pointed out), but simply because they want to keep those with money in the money and those with authority in charge, or because they lack the necessary (and I do mean necessary) intelligence and imagination to nudge themselves out of the confines of the usual selfish reductive elite-industrial grow-or-die assumptions that got us where we are in the first place.