The mirror of terraforming is “xenoforming” — think here of the “red weed” mentioned in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, making the Earth alien-like, or of the strangeness from the Southern Reach Trilogy. Gentrification is like xenoforming. It isn’t some extraterrestrial force though, no little green men are showing up to pry off the old house numbers and put up the addresses rendered in metal Neutraface, the official font of gentrification.
Read MoreThe Great Recession ended, supposedly, sometime in the Summer of 2009. You wouldn’t know that if you talked to anyone actually working a real job. You would think that it had never ended, because for many of us it never did.
Read MoreThe tendency of profits to decline is 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.
Read MoreIn 1969, three men rode a sky-scraper sized explosive device to the moon using less computing power to do the math than I currently have sitting in my pocket, and made it back alive. Three years later, in 1972, the most progressive major party candidate lost a stolen election by a landslide, and America turned its back on the future.
Read MoreThe people currently in power see this as an opportunity to give a blank check to people who think you deserve nothing. For them, a crisis is nothing but a way to make the system function worse for the average person. It’s the disordered thinking of an addict. The worst thing you can do in the depths of an addiction is feed that addiction. Feeding that addiction is also the easiest decision to make when in that state. So what happens if we go cold turkey on capitalism? Chain ourselves to a metaphorical radiator and try to sweat it out?
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