INKTOBER DAY 23: CELESTIAL
23. Oktober 2023 • 2 Minuten
Billionaires talk boldly about colonising Mars to distract from the fact that they have nothing to offer to solve today’s problems. Useless in challenges that requires teamwork above all else, they begin to plan their escape to their gilded bunkers - or off Earth altogether.
Elon Musk mochte über die Kolonialisierung des Mars sprechen, Peter Thiel über den Umkehrungsprozess des Alterns, Sam Altman und Ray Kurzweil mochten planen, ihren Verstand auf Superrechnern zu speichern. Aber diese fünf bereiteten sich auf eine digitale Zukunft vor, die sehr viel weniger damit zu tun hatte, die Welt zu einem besseren Ort zu machen, als mit der Überwindung der conditio humana schlechthin: Sie wollten die real drängende Gefahr des Klimawandels hinter sich lassen, den steigenden Meeresspiegel, die massenhafte Migration, die globalen Pandemien und die Erschöpfung der Ressourcen. Tatsächlich bedeutete die Zukunft der Technologie für diese Herren nur eines: Flucht.
[…]
Menschlichkeit handelt nicht von individuellem Überleben oder von Flucht. Es ist ein Mannschaftssport. Was auch immer zukünftige Menschen haben werden, sie werden es gemeinsam haben.
— Douglas Rushkoff, Tages Anzeiger Magazin
As Bruno Latour writes in Où atterir? (2017), or Down to Earth (2018):
[T]he elites have been so thoroughly convinced that there would be no future life for everyone that they have decided to get rid of all the burdens of solidarity as fast as possible – hence deregulation; they have decided that a sort of gilded fortress would have to be built for those (a small percentage) who would be able to make it through – hence the explosion of inequalities; and they have decided that, to conceal the crass selfishness of such a flight out of the shared world, they would have to reject … climate change [italics in original].
Unlike some other recent thinkers such as Jason Stanley, Latour argues that these movements are only superficially like early 20th-century fascism. Rather, they represent a novel political order that is based on climate-change denial, where wealthy elites aim to create gated communities and escape routes by deregulation and disenfranchisement. All the while, they try (in vain) to realise themselves in things that seem ultimately unfulfilling and empty: superyachts, short trips into space or into the deep sea, and buying up entire islands.
— Helen De Cruz, aeon magazine
The Matrjoshka idea is adapted from Christian Bobst’ ad campaign 2010 for the Tages-Anzeiger-Sonntagszeitung .
(→ Inktober drawing challenge 2023)