Heat Death and the Vampire Horizon
(Author’s note: I’m sorry for more glitch art cover images. It’s a good way to make visually distinct cover images from public domain art.)
My semester ended last week, and I’m taking until New Years to actually relax. I had intended to marinate my brain in Christmas media because that seemed like an interesting thing to do (just to see what it’s all about for other people. I seem to be neurologically incapable of experiencing Holidays as anything but a day off now). However, I didn’t do that. I’ve just been playing video games (trying to fix the Spanish Civil War or create a Syndicalist United States in Hearts of Iron IV, or playing through the excellent Paradise Killer – expect a review of that latter on at some point) and working through some audio books from the library, because I’m trying to meet the dumb goal I set on Good Reads this year.
I’ve been playing the hell out of the Kaiserreich mod, largely for the Second American Civil War, which largely bypasses the problems of the base game by not encouraging you to play a fascist state.
Most of the time, the library’s selection of nonfiction is disappointing, but I’ve found some good stuff there, recently: Tribe: On Homecoming and Belonging, A People’s History of the United States, The Uninhabitable Earth, White Trash, and The Fire Next Time are all going to appear on my next slate of book reviews, as well as – if it’s freed up in time – Between the World and Me. All of these are fascinating to me, but (most of them) have the downside of being poison to my mental health.
My thoughts turn back to the piece I wrote about Capitalism, defining it and trying to explain it. I think one area that requires further exploration is what I’ve come to think of as the “Horizon of Extraction.”
For much of American History, the “horizon” that resources came from was the western one. This is why Manifest destiny was the idea that it was: to the west was unspoiled lands that were being wasted on the original inhabitants, who were to be replaced, violently, and then represented with the watered-down pagan imagery of our civic religion (just go whole hog, you cowards).
As I wrote in that piece, I tend to think of Capitalism not as a particular relationship of production, but as a relationship of extraction, where things outside of it are processed into the commodities that are the primary tool for the capture of value. Ore is extracted from the earth and smelted into metal, which is then forged into a knife blade or a piece of jewelry or something. The Marxist interpretation is that value is produced by the worker at each step: ore to metal to final product, each is more valuable. Each has had something added to it by the worker at each step.
You could also see the workers and the earth as sharing a burden here: the metal is extracted from the Earth and the labor is extracted from the workers. In an ancient slave economy, the means would have even been identical: remarkably similar tools would be used to extract both the ore and the labor of the enslaved.
So clearly, this isn’t a purely capitalist issue, because capitalism didn’t exist at the time of the most primitive slave societies. I even acknowledge this in the prior piece, stating that apparatuses of extraction operated by workers are only slightly preferable to apparatuses of extraction operated by bloodthirsty capitalists. Capitalism did, however, bring in a certain degree of innovation, though, by seeing that the apparatus of extraction could be moved.
A portrayal of one of the more famous myths about the Midgard Serpent Jörmungandr, as painted by Johann Heinrich Füssli. In this myth, Thor (possibly the most peasant-friendly of the Norse gods) fishes the serpent up from the ocean and tries to kill it with a hammer.
These different sites where the apparatus can be located are what I think of as “Horizons of Extraction”. They are places where value exists that can be extracted. I refer to them as “horizons” because they mark the outer limit of the capitalist system. As I noted in that piece, Capitalism always needs an outside. As soon as it appears, Jörmungandr-like, to encircle the world, it begins to collapse and die because, all things being equal, no consistent profit can be extracted. This is presaged by a decline in the rate of profit(1): there is less to be extracted, the more work is required to extract it, and the more investment is required to get the work done. When everything is commodified and financialized and reduced to numbers on a spreadsheet, the Capitalist system will suffer a Heat-Death, because it seems fairly obvious from the fact that people are trying to make subscription services for running shoes made out of beans (Cyclon) and convince programmers to live in vans that they have to pay $1,000 a month or more for (Kibbo).
This is what drives the supposed innovation of the capitalist system: the need to always move to a different horizon of extraction, to find untapped sources of value that can stave off this heat-death for just a little longer. Sometimes the state intervenes and slaps them away from one horizon of extraction (see: child labor laws,) but this only rarely happens.
The system almost hit this limit, I believe, in the 1970s. It was thought that the generalized crisis of that decade might lead to some form of mass unrest and revolution, but it failed to materialize. The common explanation for this is something along the lines of the neoliberal project, which was the counter-revolution of the capitalist classes against the rising tide of social democracy (itself, I would argue, a milquetoast compromise system, but one that was considered unbearable by the wealthiest of society), and in the ruins of which we now live, where nothing is possible and the President is your dad (it’s a stupid world that we’ve been given). Things that were formerly infrastructure were offered up as horizons of extraction: air travel in the US, council housing in the UK. Then came the digital revolution, and now we live in a world where our social relations are considered a form of information which can be commodified and sold (this is what social media is: the horizon of extraction moved to the field of social interaction). This is part of why I argue that our world is cyberpunk – an incredibly dumb form of cyberpunk, but cyberpunk nonetheless – because something that is internal to our being is colonized by the forces of capital seeking to extract value from us.
If something like market capitalism were to be preserved then it would be ethically required to preserve certain things from extraction(2) – there is already a legal framework for this in much of the world in the form of utilities and national parks and the like. But much like Graeber noted in his discussion of natural rights – a criticism taken up by me in my piece on the general concept of self-ownership – this is principally a negotiation to try to establish when these protections can be suspended.
This meme’s been going around and it shows the same general relationship:.
Capitalism, likewise, doesn’t even afford any protections for anything inside of it. Many wage laborers rent homes: the fact that they need a home is used as grounds to extract what meager resources they possess. They rent from landlords, who extract this value, but the landlord – in turn – often acquires the property they rent by mortgaging a home and using a large portion of this rent to pay the mortgage, meaning that their ownership of the property is contingent on their ability to pay the mortgage. The property thus belongs to the bank, but the landlord manages it and accepts liability for it. They cannot be said to actually own it, because they are not free to dispose of it how they wish: it would always be necessary to work things out with the bank in question. So what happens if you’re laid off in the middle of a pandemic and can’t pay rent? Take a wild guess. But of course, no one is actually responsible.
Likewise, these wage laborers work for a business or other organization that likely only really exists to pay off a loan. They enter into contractual subservience to a manager, who is likewise contractually subservient to an owner, who is beholden to a slate of shareholders and/or a bank (or, in the case of franchisees, to the actual owner of the business, who is likewise beholden).
It’s a vast bureaucratic apparatus for the extraction of value from people, who pull it from these various horizons of extraction: sociability, in the form of retail workers and social media services; continued existence, in the form of guard workers and security services; et cetera.
Personally, I consider this a more valuable conception than simply focusing on producing power because it can explain the same phenomenon as the labor theory of value, but is not dependent, solely, on productive labor. Production is another form of extraction, but the workers are also victims of extraction. I also consider this valuable, because it can be used as a foundation for an alliance between labor causes and environmental causes, two fronts in leftism that are often put at odds with one another.
The basic idea is that our society is arranged hierarchically, but the primary mechanism for this hierarchy is to extract from the bottom and centralize resources under the control of those at the top, usually by driving a wedge between people at slightly different levels of the hierarchy. It’s important to understand this because the hierarchy, not the extraction, is the point. As Graeber, again, wrote in Bullshit Jobs, a great deal of waste is generated through what he called “managerial feudalism” – the creation of flunky positions to support the egos of those higher up the hierarchy (see: the proliferation of administrative positions in Universities and non-profits). I’ve taken to thinking of this as something like the waste heat produced by an inefficient machine, and it is a primary driver, I would say, in the hypothetical “heat-death of capitalism” I mentioned previously: the proliferation of non-productive, non-extractive positions further up the hierarchy, acting as a drag on the whole system. This is one problem that the system has recognized and developed tools to deal with (see the movie Office Space for an explanation for how this works). People who fill these meaningless positions are cut loose and become part of the pool of free labor.
Look for the scenes that feature Dr. Cox from Scrubs.
But this also explains why homelessness is not solved: it would be cheaper – indeed, profitable – to just give homes to the homeless. It wouldn’t even fill up all of the available homes in the United States. But it would be one fewer tool usable to motivate workers at the bottom of the hierarchy: there would no longer be the fear of reduction to indigence to motivate them. Likewise, this is why we don’t offer free food or medical care: because the hierarchy as a whole benefits from the threat of deprivation. A loss of efficiency is acceptable if it means that the machine as a whole continues to run.
Of course, it seems fairly obvious to me that this is all simply deferring the heat-death of capitalism. Innovation can only increase efficiency so far, can only discover more horizons of extraction. Eventually the horizon of the system and the horizon of the world will become coterminous (fantasies of space capitalism are just that: fantasies, and poisonous ones at that). The idea of infinite growth on a finite planet is ludicrous, and anyone who says otherwise is shambling, zombie-like, to their own destruction. The issue here is that as the horizons of Capital push outward, the horizons of the world are crumpling inward: catastrophic climate change has begun. The Sixth Great Extinction has begun.
This means that we need to figure out a new mindset right quick.
I’m an English teacher, though. I can only sketch things on the back of an envelope or build a castle in the air. Maybe the little models I come up with can be stripped for parts by someone with the power to actually do something about it.
As an aside: the honeyguide is a fascinating bird. It is not domesticated — as far as I can tell, it refuses to be — but will willingly enter into a cooperative relationship with human beings. The Audobon society has an excellent article here.
The first thing that we need to do is – as I mentioned in the immediately previous piece I wrote – abolish the conceptual division between natural and artificial. This would open us up to a mutually beneficial relationship with the natural world – such as that which exists between humans and the honeyguide (a bird which has developed calls and behaviors to communicate to humans the presence of bee hives, so that the human can harvest honey from the hive and the bird can feast on the wax and grubs inside) or between humans and cereal crops (which could be argued to have domesticated human beings, not the other way around). Beyond this, by viewing the whole world as something to be cooperated with and – to an extent – lightly managed, instead of as simply raw materials for our extraction and use, we could maintain an artificial and stable equilibrium with our environment that would allow for the continued flourishing of the human species.
This is not a new – or particularly interesting – stance, I feel. However, the flourishing of the human species would be improved through a radical rethinking of hierarchy. I do not feel that hierarchy is inherently bad, personally: I feel that permanent, inflexible hierarchy is. There is always a tendency of hierarchy to maintain itself and establish a bureaucracy for the deflection of blame, but the reason that Cincinnatus was idolized in the revolutionary period – despite my misgivings about America as a nation-state – was that he abandoned power when he was no longer needed, and I feel that this ideal should be promulgated: power is to be used when necessary and set aside immediately when it is not.
Another ideal that needs to be pursued is one that is actually imperfectly realized by one of the ridiculous startups mentioned above: Cyclon, the bean-shoe-subscription-service (I still feel like I’m having a stroke when I describe it) puts forward as their ideal a kind of circular economy – their shoes are made from a plastic derived from pressed castor beans, which can be re-pressed when they wear out or fall out of date. Of course, this is not a truly circular economy – the subscribers still have to pay in monthly for the service, and are thus the horizon of extraction for the company – but the concept of a circular economy, one that makes its waste product into raw materials for the goods that it needs to produce, is a good idea. At the moment, man-made goods outweigh all natural life. Clearly we have reached the point where we no longer need to extract more from the Earth, we simply need to make good on the promises of recycling.
I would like to introduce you to a case in point: The so-called “Playstation War” of Africa, brought to my attention first by the third episode of Adam Curtis’s All Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace. This conflict was driven – at least in part – by electronics companies’ need for tantalum, which is processed out of Coltan, 80% of which in the world is located in the Democratic Republic of Congo. Or the recent Elon-Musk-cheerled coup attempt in Bolivia, which was largely over the lithium necessary for modern electronic devices.
I was trying to find a good image to go along with this, but when looking at image searches relating to Bolivian elections, most of it was just people at a ballot box. The Economist decided to include a picture of these three young skateboarding women in traditional Bolivian garb, and while I couldn’t read this article due to a paywall, the aura was a powerful one, and I wished to share it. Of course, the Economist article has nothing to do with skateboarding, so maybe check out the AP article the picture came from originally, there are more photographs from journalist Juan Karita there. I’m getting distracted. Back to my essay.
What I want to know is: how much tantalum and lithium is currently sitting in the landfills of the first world? How much will sit, unused, there in five or ten years? Apparently, we have decided that these materials are unsuitable for consideration because they’ve already been used, and that it’s much better to cause death and suffering in the global south to get more. We have already extracted this material: putting it back would be useless and wasteful. If we turn inward for what we need, it is no longer necessary to extract from the natural world, and – moreover – would constitute dutiful and effective management of the environment to use it.
Interesting fact, this asshole hasn’t invented anything, despite what CNBC says. He bought the title of Founder of Tesla, and that really tells you everything you need to know about him. His brand of technocratic ecomodernism will doom us all.
My argument here is that respecting the environment doesn’t need to follow the path of flagellant neo-primitivism or self-deluded (and weirdly macho) ecomodernism. It doesn’t require abandoning all of the comforts of contemporary life, and would – in fact – be improved by the continued use of informational technology for the management of ecological and economic concerns. What is required is a change in material culture, yes, but that can be begun with a change in ethos.
Let’s consider, first, one of the major areas from which pollution is produced to see if we can solve this on the back of an envelope. It’s widely acknowledged that we need to divest ourselves of fossil fuels, so this should be a fairly easy sell.
There are three general levels of transportation that need to be dealt with. Let’s call these Local, National, and Trans-National.
Image of a Cargo trike in London, uploaded to Wikimedia commons by its owner, who uses the handle ArtlessWilbury, and shared under a CC BY-SA 3.0 license.
At the Local level, we already have the principal technology that I would suggest: bicycles. For most of the year, bicycles would be a suitable replacement for personal transportation, and there are designs that can allow a certain level of freight-hauling, limited by the capabilities of human muscle power and electric assistance.
For larger applications, it would be possible to replace fossil fuel vehicles with electric motor vehicles – lithium, however, would be the limit on the application. To this end, replacing lithium-ion batteries with aluminum-ion batteries would be preferable. While they are not as well-developed as LI batteries, Aluminum batteries have much more readily available raw materials, including in landfills and dumps. They also have the added benefit of charging much more rapidly than lithium batteries.
For National-level transport, while Aluminum-battery Electric vehicles would be viable, I personally think that rail transit would be less harmful overall, especially if coupled with solar charging. There is, as a result of this, less flexibility, but a greater volume can be shipped, and if this can be coupled with regional distribution, then the problems seem to me to be minimal. The impact on the natural world could be further reduced by using wildlife overpasses.
Also, more green space is always good, in my opinion. Image taken from Atlas Obscura.
The Trans-National-level is a bit harder: each passenger on a transatlantic flight costs the arctic several square meters of ice. This could perhaps be reduced by starting a second age of sail or making use of thermal airships. The connections between the different regions of the planet would move more slowly, but it would be a trade of rapidity for greater long-term viability.
These solutions do require a certain material base, but much of the material would be available by improving recycling techniques, and all of the technologies I’m mentioning are extant, they are simply not widely distributed.
I’m going with a photo of Gramsci here, because I’m still trying to figure out what the deal is with his hair. Also, because I don’t like looking at Andrew Breitbart.
My phrasing there is a deliberate call back to William Gibson’s famous adage that “the future is here, it’s just not evenly distributed yet” – there is, however, a corollary to this, namely that many futures are already here, and engaged in a sort of pseudo-darwinian competition to become more real. This is really the conflict of politics: what sort of world do you want to live in? And for this, we need to look at Andrew Breitbart’s reworking of the ideas of Antonio Gramsci: “Politics is downstream of culture.”
That’s really what I’m doing: trying to figure out what kind of future to describe. My ideal is a society arranged not as a hierarchy of extraction, but as a latticework of cooperating and mutually supporting groups. To that end, I think that the best thing to pursue, here, would be a kind of optimistic, polycentric green syndicalism, where the human project is acknowledged to be asymptotically improving: always growing closer to a state of perfection that we will never reach. This is an important realization, because it’s not in the arrival that the journey gains its meaning, but in the vector.
We can do better, if we simply try.
We just have to move past give-and-take.
1 - A problem often commented upon in Marxist economics, but also noted by decidedly non-Marxist Political Economists as diverse as Adam Smith, John Stuart Mill, David Ricardo, and Stanley Jevons – at least according to Wikipedia.
2 - I’ll be honest, I think that the division of certain fields from one another is stupid, and largely at the root of the current mess we’re in: ethics is politics; economics is ecology; politics and economics cannot be meaningfully separated.
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