“Miss Rachel Carson’s reference to the selfishness of insecticide manufacturers probably reflects her Communist sympathies, like a lot of our writers these days. We can live without birds and animals, but, as the current market slump shows, we cannot live without business. As for insects, isn’t it just like a woman to be scared to death of a few little bugs! As long as we have the H-bomb everything will be O.K.”

• December 02, 2014, 7:14pm

        6 notes

“What keeps me moti­vated is that I want to enjoy my life, and the clos­est I can get to full enjoy­ment is to attack my ene­mies.”

• August 16, 2014, 12:28pm

        1 note

“The image I have of the end of capitalism—an end that I believe is already under way—is one of a social system in chronic disrepair, for reasons of its own and regardless of the absence of a viable alternative. … What is most likely to happen as time passes is a continuous accumulation of small and not-so-small dysfunctions; none necessarily deadly as such, but most beyond repair, all the more so as they become too many for individual address. In the process, the parts of the whole will fit together less and less; frictions of all kinds will multiply; unanticipated consequences will spread, along ever more obscure lines of causation. Uncertainty will proliferate; crises of every sort—of legitimacy, productivity or both—will follow each other in quick succession while predictability and governability will decline further (as they have for decades now). Eventually, the myriad provisional fixes devised for short-term crisis management will collapse under the weight of the daily disasters produced by a social order in profound, anomic disarray. … As the decay progresses, it is bound to provoke political protests and manifold attempts at collective intervention. But for a long time, these are likely to remain of the Luddite sort: local, dispersed, uncoordinated, ‘primitive’—adding to the disorder while unable to create a new order, at best unintentionally helping it to come about. One might think that a long-lasting crisis of this sort would open up more than a few windows of opportunity for reformist or revolutionary agency. It seems, however, that disorganized capitalism is disorganizing not only itself but its opposition as well, depriving it of the capacity either to defeat capitalism or to rescue it. For capitalism to end, then, it must provide for its own destruction—which, I would argue, is exactly what we are witnessing today.”

• Tags:
  • götterdämmerung
  • perpetual crisis

• August 14, 2014, 7:50am

        17 notes

“If we can understand Rome as catechon, warding off a single catastrophe in space and time (Armageddon), resilience multiplies and diffuses this structure across the whole of the globe, posing itself as our only hope to avoid an infinite array of catastrophes located potentially anywhere in space and in time, feeding into one another and cascading across space and time: (storm surges that flood power substations causing equipment malfunctions leading to surge protection overrides leading to local grid network failures that feed into regional grids causing blackouts from Canada to Washington DC. causing riots in Brooklyn and Queens–this is resilience’s Armageddon). And, whereas the Christian catechon was tied both to catastrophe and to redemption, resilience does not even bother presenting itself in terms of progress or guidance toward salvation. Salvation has become unimaginable, unthinkable. Resilience presents itself, rather, as a project of survival; there is no paradise to come, only the endlessly emerging crises through which an eternal present must be sustained.”

• Tags:
  • anthropocene
  • resilience

• June 27, 2014, 8:51am

        2 notes

“Tenth of all. Fuck the propelling of sand from the bottom of the ocean floor in a high arc so as to construct new islands. Fuck that this is called rainbowing. Fuck any sort of dredge. Fuck how racehorses don’t get to fuck each other but instead the stallion is trained to mount a dummy mare made of plywood and fuck a heated plastic vagina. Fuck the prince of any country ever fuck Palm Jumeirah and Palm Jebel Ali and atrazine. Fuck everyone who has bought a big bag of ant poison because ants have a social stomach and you are one selfish motherfucker if you can’t let them have the very small amounts of food they want to share equally among them- selves. And fuck this list with its mixture of environmental destruction and popular culture smugness and fuck every one of you that laughed at that rock banjo joke and fuck us all for writing it. And fuck not just the Googlebus but the Googledoc this poem rode in on and fuck us for sitting here reading you a rock banjo joke while the New Mexico meadow jumping mouse went extinct. Fuck that this happened two days and twenty hours ago. And fuck that next up is the Sierra Nevada yellow legged frog because we’ve always liked frogs their vulnerable skin our vulnerable skin.”

• June 26, 2014, 4:48pm

        2 notes

“Disruptive innovation is competitive strategy for an age seized by terror … The eighteenth century embraced the idea of progress; the nineteenth century had evolution; the twentieth century had growth and then innovation. Our era has disruption, which, despite its futurism, is atavistic. It’s a theory of history founded on a profound anxiety about financial collapse, an apocalyptic fear of global devastation, and shaky evidence.”

• June 18, 2014, 8:05am

        2 notes

“Yes, everything is interconnected. And it sucks.”

• May 16, 2014, 1:52pm

        1 note