Re: <nettime> Biocultural Corridors

Jean-Noel, thank you for your words, thoughtful and intransigent as always. I just found them in my spam box... where they don't belong!

You are right, the global logistics system is not reformable, and as a USian (worst offenders) I feel the absolute need for self- and social transformation, down-scaling, rewilding, artisanship, renewed human-plant-animal relations. To work with rivers and the myriad creatures who inhabit them involves a wholly different kind of immensity, intricacy and flow than a just-in-time system... I gave up even criticizing such things because we all already know the essentials, more detail is just more delay.

In my view, a viable transformation does not exactly mean "going back to nature", although let's not quibble over words and phrases. Nature always changes, stability has always been dynamic, and consciousness always brings change. That's the only reason for talking about neo ecosystems. Every ecosystem is always new - all forests burn, painful as that is right now - and the question is what kind of newness, with what effects on who. The most profound thing I experience these days, and the reason for engaging with very different kinds of people (classes and races and regions and religions) is that what modernism saw as obsolete is now a series of possibly viable futures. The archaic becomes emergent. One can sense this in almost every revolt, and almost every retreat as well, except the fascistic ones that refuse any emergence whatsoever (admittedly they are legion). There is a growing understanding that our civilization went wrong at some point, and an urge to reach back in order to go, not forward, but elsewhere.

There is a definite value in looking into the future and creating things in that perspective, but frankly I want to live now and respond to the urgencies. It's potentially the same thing anyway. How to dissolve the deep orientation, or if you prefer, the cosmovision, of capitalist empire? It becomes a realistic question when that cosmovision starts threatening you, killing you. And at the same time, how to find a different way of living with and through machines, which cannot simply be extirpated from humanity, and therefore, from the ecosystems of which we are a part? Which neo-machines for which neo-ecosystems?

The questions go together, they're simultaneous, and I don't think one need await a future apocalypse to find their resolution. The apocalypse is now and the answers are emergent. But society is a very hard master, scale is a large and tough knot by definition, and the only viable way to evaluate a philosophy is by its effects. The jury is still out on these ideas, both yours and mine, that's for sure. But at certain times and in certain places, one can actually see empire crumbling. I gotta say I live for that kind of now-time.

Jean-Noel, I appreciate people like yourself, who are creating transformative effects. And I am always glad to find companions with whom to talk these things over.

Heartfully, Brian

On Sat, Aug 20, 2022, 12:43 Jean-Noël Montagné <jnm@autistici.org> wrote:

Le 19/08/2022 à 04:02, Brian Holmes a écrit :

Thank you for the action, the story, the software.

> The big question is this: Do the middle classes - including industrial
> workers attached to states and large corporations - go fascist under the
> pressure of rising threats to their old lifestyles and identities, or
> can we find shareable biocultural pathways toward reparative
> socio-ecological worlds, and through collaboration with other classes
> and cultures and races, create neo-ecosystems that can ramp down the
> causes and mitigate the effects of climate change?

It's not a matter of social class, culture or race, but of scale.

It is too late* to create sufficiently influential neo-ecosystems on a
global scale. The globalized capitalist system that extracts resources
on one side of the world, refines and assembles them elsewhere, and then
markets them everywhere is not reformable in its current structure.

The various eco-fascisms that will be the last manifestations of current
capitalism, as they have been predicted and discussed since the 1970s,
are temporary. They cannot survive in a meta scale, because of the
scarcity of "control" ressources, disorganisation of media,
communication and armed power.

But we can create neo-ecosystems at local scale, even during continental
or national eco-fascisms. As you can see in South America, as I can see
in Europe, this movement has started silently, worlwide, around
low-tech, open-source structures, planifyied ressource harvesting et
recycling, and small-scale real democracy. In rural areas, mostly.

The attraction of the middle classes for an eco-fascist management of
the collapse is temporary, as their dependence on globalisation and
high-tech makes their class fragile. But but their nuisance power is
great, they can be a trigger for armed unrest in US.

The potential for connection and exchange between small, resilient
communities will be rapid in terms of exchange of goods or services, but
will take longer to gain political traction on a more macroscopic scale.

JN

* Climate scientists have been warning for years that the next thirty or
more years of climate degradation are already written, because of the
long persistence of CO2 in the atmosphere. We are now suffering from 70
years of crazy fossil fuel use. What we are fighting for today is the
mitigation of the effects of climate collapse in the second half of the
22nd century, i.e. for our grandchildren and their descendants, during a
profound climate chaos.

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