PANUTOPIANISM

  • “SOME WILL DIE, SOME MAY SURVIVE, I INTEND TO BE AMONG THE LATTER.”

    HOW COLLAPSE PREPAREDNESS ON THE LEFT IS A MORAL AND STRUCTURAL FAILURE

    I sit in this small communal café. I am here for the first and probably last time. The topic to be discussed is the anxiety produced by the ever more obvious disfunctional reality of our systems steering us towards a societal cliff and what to do with that. As I look around the gathered people I feel no pity for them, I do not condemn them (neither individually nor collectively), I even understand where they are coming from; but I see is no future in this room. What I see is the next logical and evolutionary step for a global left that has failed to capture spiritual and worldly power and put it to use for the betterment of all. We have failed to envision and capture the future; so it seems the only option left was to prepare for no future at all. As our belief in systemic transformation weakens, collapse becomes a substitute horizon: change without the politics, disruption without the responsibility, meaning without victory.

    All I see here in this room is the diffuse body language of the timid and all I hear are the long pauses of the perplexed. A random assortment of those averse to hierarchy, power and violence, hoping to somehow survive the most violent possible event in human history by organizing locally and without too strong a structure; as to not scare away the already anxious and emotionally scarred.

    Let’s then state the most obvious thing first: a societal collapse is not a local or survivable event. 1 A societal collapse is a cascading failure of interdependent global systems that form the very basis of our survival; at least for those of us in the western world. You cannot be meaningfully prepared for this through small-scale interventions, basic hard skills or local autonomy projects without ignoring its truly global and historic scale. Preparing for societal collapse as if it were a survivable transitional event already implies a fantasy of collapse that is not a sophisticated representation of its reality with all its brutal implications and imperatives. It implies blindness – either deliberately or by lack of knowledge – to the nature of the event.

    Real societal collapse is the simultaneous failure of virtually all societal systems: energy, food, logistics, medicine, sanitation, governance, trust. Once these cascade out of control, you do not end up with locally organized pockets of functional autonomy and flat hierarchy; you get the remnant core of society stripped of all of its regulating and mediating instances – and all methodologies of known survival learned through modernity – dominated by unfiltered violence and power.     

    What would those fearful to speak too loudly or too forcefully as to not startle those gathered around them – those too timid to assert the smallest sliver of authority – know about such violence and such application of power; how could they possibly hope to be prepared for it?

    Let us then state another painfully obvious truth we find here among the gathered: collapse preparedness discourse is a uniquely westernized phenomenon. The imagined end of the world is decidedly that of the western world and its modernity. 2 We sit in our communally organized space musing about the dreaded absence of our habitual creature comforts while ignoring that large parts of the world already live with systemic instability and deprivation without framing it as a civilizational event. For large parts of the global south the insecurities we project onto collapse scenarios are not a hypothetical event but a lived reality that has to be managed now. Their realities are those of a living yet brutal world, not the fantasies of its end.

    Its decidedly a discourse made possible by experiencing historical safety, insulation, and privilege and fearing their dissapearance. You can only muse about, rehearse, or prepare for immediate collapse if collapse is not already your lived condition. 3 Modern western leftist traditions (the traditions now kept alive through and represented by a younger generation) developed largely under conditions where the state worked just well enough to absorb personal failure costs. We could reject hierarchy, power and authority because our hospitals still functioned, food still arrived, utilities were delivered to you at a financial cost and violence was externalized. Collapse now becomes a mirror in which the west finally sees itself as vulnerable, and instead of responding with responsibility, at the local level it fractures and retreats into survival fantasies that preserve its moral self-image in pockets of tribalism. The impending collapse now threatens to strip away these filters that allowed our ethical purity, horizontalism, and anti-authoritarian aesthetics to function without being tested by material scarcity and unfiltered power.

    For the western left the collapse preparedness discourse has become a surrogate for applied agency. When confronted with systemic failures too large to meaningfully influence – be it climate change, capitalism that wormed its way into every facet of daily and personal life, geopolitical inertia in the face of poverty, war, hunger and existential threats – people began to retreat into simulacra of control. Learning basic skills keeps them occupied, imagining small resilient communities and rehearsing post-collapse scenarios feels intellectually and emotionally stabilizing. They allow one to feel active and in control of what small things one can exert control over without confronting the horrifying truth that collapse, if it happens, is not something most people live through or that has a functioning “after” that one can organize towards.     

    They also act as a symbolic reconstitution. Personal education becoming irrelevant, symbolic capital evaporating, cosmopolitan identities losing their value, language skills and cultural fluency no longer expressing social power. For the western intellectual left, this is a terrifying existential threat. A fantasy of applying oneself with a new skillset after the collapse is a way to launder that fear into a functional and reaffirming narrative of a new equality in ruins – as if collapse would level the field rather than brutally re-stratify it. For collapse never equalizes. It concentrates power among those willing and able to wield force, seize and apply resources, and make brutal decisions.

    Many preparedness practices function to manage anxiety and restore a sense of agency, not however to realistically address what collapse would entail. They prepare for an idea of collapse, not its material reality. Collapse would abolish neither power nor hierarchy; it would strip away the norms and the institutions that constrain them and make them manageable. Rejecting structure and authority in advance or in principle guarantees their reemergence in informal, violent, and unaccountable forms. A lot of contemporary left spaces conflate all hierarchy with oppression, as if all structured authority were congenial. That works rhetorically under stable conditions. In a collapse scenario however this aversion might quite well become lethal. Scarcity forces prioritization, prioritization forces decision-making, decision-making forces authority. If this isn’t formalized, it reappears as informal power, as coercion, as charismatic manipulation, and as strategic violence applied onto us not as an ethically grounded application of an ordering principle by us.

    Within this movement towards a post-collapse agency we find the seeds of acceptance and desire. While individually tempting and dangerous they are particularly devastating for the collective left and its moral framework. Where there is no future to project identity onto – no shared undertaking that demands skills, resilience and the trust towards its realization – Identity shifts towards its unmaking and its absence. There then collapse and preparedness become a source of identity, community, and meaning and its nonappearance begins to threaten intellectual and material investments. This is doubly true in a present that seems to be devoid of reason and purpose for many in the western world; so organizing efforts towards collapse preparedness easily developed an irresistible allure. Here then collapse starts to subtly shift from feared outcome to awaited event. With time any investment in the absence of future will result in purpose and determination. Collapse then is not to be avoided but a functionally stabilizing inventory of one’s sense of self. This then shift the discourse from avoidance towards acceptance and even subtle realization. What good is it to prepare for the end of the world if it never comes? It’s the outsourcing of their agency and self to an apocalypse they increasingly need to happen.

    In its most extreme and most advanced stages this can result in almost fundamental beliefs – as the far right prepper scene (that is a few decades ahead of the left) has demonstrated 4 – and even have almost evangelical undertones; where the collapse then becomes a purifying event that separates the worthy from the unworthy and celebrates the collapse of society as a return to some form of divine nativeness; devoid of the illusions and artificiality of modern life. 5 Once we have reached this stage preventing collapse begins to look like the prolonging of a civilizational and social lie and its intrinsic suffering. Those opposed to it are labeled naive, complict or even cowardly and can become enemies of supposed or implied truth. And we all know what historically happens to those labeled enemies of truth.

    It is here where we as the global left have to confront this fatalistic, defeatist and nihilistic death cult that is coming to terms with end times scenarios. Both as an acknowledgement of our own failure to present viable alternatives, as well as a moral impossibility. Any politics that treats it as a plausible planning scenario rather than an absolute failure condition has already conceded its essential moral core. One cannot ethically adapt to the deaths of billions. There is no post-collapse utopia waiting on the other side; only a radically diminished, traumatized humanity governed by brutal constraints.

    We cannot allow for our brothers and sisters to fall prey to this ruining desperation. We cannot allow them to lose hope in better outcomes and a radically changed and living world that can produce a future. This particular discourse attracts those that can no longer imagine victories only endurance. While not inherently malicious it makes their politics conservative in the most fundamental sense: it’s their personal project of conservation of self under conditions where the world around them is allowed to decay into nothingness. A cruel and amoral bet with reality is made that states in no uncertain terms “Some will die, some may survive, I intend to be among the latter.” Explicitly this wager is one that accepts that many millions or even billions will die and so it wraps itself in talk of resilience, adaptability and realism. Collapse preparedness is the consent to mass death while preserving a self-image of care. It lays bare the fundamental difference between preparedness in a world that needs a project that is concerned with its future and rehearsing survival beyond its death. One is a reaffirmation of shared obligation towards life and society; the other is a selfish withdrawal that looks for accomplices.

    Lastly, collapse preparedness is also selective. Skills, ressources, social and material capital, physical abilities and psychological resilience are unevenly distributed among the world and within even local communities. The core tenent of preparedness is to deepen and reinforce those inequalities ahead of time as to increase one’s own chances of survival. Those without access, health, time, education, or capital are silently written out of the post collapse future. No applied forms of violence are needed, it can even be wrapped in the politics and language of care which makes this final injustice very easy to life with.

    Modern emancipatory politics (whatever its failures) however is grounded in the idea that lives are not expendable, that suffering is not acceptable simply because it is widespread, common or to “be expected” and that a shared future needs shared hope and investment. Collapse preparedness suspends this principle and in its stead practices abandonment. Here death on a global scale becomes an externality to realism rather than a moral failure to be prevented. Preparedness normalizes loss instead of resisting it.

    1. At least not for most. Many simply lack the grit, determination and unscrupulousness to survive the downfall of western society as we know it. They will starve, be predated on and murdered by those more amoral than them. ↩︎
    2. With many a religious and spiritual undertone of the rapture ↩︎
    3. I do not fail to see the irony in my own musings ↩︎
    4. Right wing preppers made this move earlier and more explicitly. For them, collapse promises vindication: proof that they were ultimately right about human nature, weakness, outsiders and the state. Their eagerness is overt. What’s different on the left is not the incentive structure but the justification. The left wraps the same anticipatory desire in ethics: mutual aid, horizontality, healing and rebirth instead of unfiltered domination. ↩︎
    5. Which is particularly enticing for parts of the anarchist left ↩︎

  • IT IS A GENOCIDE

    “Antisemitism!” – it rings through the room, a moment of stunned silence and the smug expression of unmerited righteousness on the accusers face (a smirk even), that always follows the magic spell. “Antisemitism!” a second chanting of the spell, as to make sure the dissenter is cast out. Sometimes I wonder if they expect the accused to vanish in billowing smoke; struck down by the powerful incantation.

    But no such occurence today, in this small community hall in eastern Germany. The accused is still there, bravely continuing their factual recital of what is and isn’t considered a genocide by legal definitions and how it applies here. Shaking, a little tremble in their voice maybe, but this is what bravery looks like these days. Even amongst the left we now have to justify what can be clearly seen, measured, quantified and of which thousands of first hand accounts exist: a livestreamed genocide and the starving of children by a people who should have known better but maybe have been fundamentally broken by the horror they had to endure at our hands.

    Even amongst us we now bend and stretch definitions as to find reasons why we do not have to move on, do not have to evolve and remain a living political organization and movement; but why instead it would be best to calcify around a select few core convictions not matter if they still hold true. Truth would be constructed after the fact if we would just agree to the project of self-petrification.

    I look around the room. A weird assemblage of furniture and decor, walls drenched in an orangy beige, two indoor Gazebos at one end of the room framing a low to the ground podium. Its the exact kind of communal space we find all over the eastern part of Germany, where people with little to no possession and wealth wanted and needed to create something they could call their own with what they had and could afford at the time. Renovations like this usually took place in the late 90s or early 2000s and since then this room has been unchanged. This room is a testament to the people that build it, people who under radically altered material conditions and societal rules never adapted or actualized a new inner life. This room is one of the past, but not just its own past, much more so the past of the people that built it. This room was already old the day it was freshly renovated for it contained nothing new.

    “That is because it’s antisemitism!” another person has come forth, a round of applause from the group of young and oddly self-assured accusers. 1 Now, an older woman – clearly encouraged by their full-throated attacks – speaks up as well about how the jewish diaspora has always been persecuted, how 2000 years ago they have been slaughtered by this or that group of people of muslim faith (ignoring of course the fact that there were no people of muslim faith 2000 years ago) and palestinian or arabic descent. 2 As if the murder and injustice from 2000 years ago would somehow justify the bombing and starvation of 2.2 million people, the carving apart of the West Bank and their continued displacement. As if her words would somehow move an entire room of people, thunderstruck by the sudden realization that we have been inhumane to each other for the better part of our history and that is why genocide is now acceptable, nay just even.

    It is here where I first realize that this isn’t a debate about the situation in Israel, Gaza, the West Bank or the wider region at all; not even a discussion about genocide, displacement or their personal justification to stand for or against the state of Israel in its current authoritarian, settler colonial form or its ultranationalist, far-right government. What I am witnessing is the tokeniziation of an entire conflict and all the people involved in it for purposes of debate. What I am witnessing is a debate amongst people who are almost exclusively white East Germans of the political left talking amongst themselves and specifically to themselves. They are expressly adressing each other and that is the debate they are having.

    In this room full of accusers there are no judges and no witnesses and the question of 80 years of conflict on Palestinian land is inanimate. It becomes painfully clear that this whole debate in itself has been colonized over the years and is now reduced to a mimicry. The sorrow of millions has become a strategic token to be used in conversation to demarcate the righteous from the wicked. The left squabbling amongst themselves, has made the correct application of language a tool to define its own inner hierarchies of virtousness. For the German leftist (and the entire West for that matter) the idea of an Israel has become much more important and interesting than its reality. For us Germans (leftist or not) this idea of the Israeli state was one of national healing by proxy. The Holocaust to this date remains irreal; the sheer scope of applied inhumanity arising from our midst unthinkable for most to this day. We hear the numbers, we learn about the conferences and the practical means that made it a reality but we rarely internalize it. We have truly made the act of murdering more than 6 million people a part of history, in that we confined it entirely to the past as an object to be studied – but not too closely as to make it actually real. History has become a vault to our greatest crime and most of us hoped it could stay this way.

    Israel on the other hand became a reassurance for the darker corners of the mind that had to be sedated. Its existence was as irreal to us as the Holocaust is. It was to exist as to absolve us of our sin just in case; and that is precisely why it could not become real (or more precisely have reality). For the reality of the state and the material and moral conditions it created for the Palestinians would bring into question the reality of the Holocaust, so we decided against dealing with both.

    For most of our lives the conflict on Palestinian land has been a clear cut affair for the left 3 and more broadly most people in the west. Allegiance to Israel and its goals was the default position that was never to be questioned and the only people who did were actual anitsemites, at times the far right 4 and the scholars that have been rightfully sounding the alarm against the established narratives for decades.

    It was this unquestionable allegiance that in itself already pointed at the underlying problems within the debate and its paradoxical nature. It pointed at the whole debate being insincere and a moral shortcut to righteousness. An intellectual complacency had taken hold of the entire western world and the left in particular. Within it the uttering of magical sentences and words conjured up the ghosts of past transgressions and horrors employed to make contemporary debate impossible and contemporary horror invisible. The atrocities of today had entered into a hierarchy in which they had to give way to one of the most brutal episodes in human history. The industrialized eradication of more than 6 million people of jewish descent reverberates through the psychological Gestalt subconscious of an entire species.

    It is a genocide however. By broad agreement amongst almost all relevant human rights bodies and scholars of genocide in particular, there is no open question here anymore. 5 The more important question now is: How come then that debate is still undesirable or contested; especially amongst the German populace and more importantly amongst the German left?

    “Never again!” was meant to shield us against humanities darkest impulses, no matter from where they would arise. For the left this has become a fight not only of actual and real decolonization in Palestine but more broadly one of the decolonization of our discourses and a return to honesty and authenticity. The current way we conduct ourselves is doubly unbecoming of parts of the global left by first not aknowledging the moral obligation to stand with the victims of ethnical cleansing and genocide and even more importantly by reducing their plight and suffering into a transactional conversational token and shortcut we throw around for clout in internal debates and fights of position.

    The mirage of an infallible, moral Israeli state – a state that never truly existed in its more than 80 years of occupation and ethnic cleansing (other than as an imagined expression of our own selfishness and comforts in the West) – is long dead. If the global left wants to survive it and its inevitable downfall, and be an actual force for good in this world this is a watershed moment for our movement to finally move on from institutionalized and weaponized righteousness and to return to an authentic empathy that is felt and shared and not just found in the abstractions of declarations and political necessities.

    Our fight now is to see that a people uniquely brutalized by history and us Germans (victims of one of the most barbaric episodes in history and of genocide and ethnic cleansing) themselves are capable of ethnic cleansing and genocide. For many decades “Never again!” was not so much a rallying cry but an implied certainty projected onto an idea – the Israeli state. The certainty that if we had learned at least one thing from the brutal 20th century it was that we as a species had evolved past genocide and the targeted eradication of cultures and peoples. We have been confronted with the realization, that even those most prominently and most directly affected by it did not learn that lesson at all and we are of course now confronted with the tragic irony (and reality) of the settler colonial nature of the state of Israel.

    For longer than most of us would want to admit Israel has been much more of an idea and projection surface than an actualized state with its own reality. More than a land inhabitat by people it was a strict necessity for the westen consciousness. Thousands of kilometers away from its historical oppressors and butchers an enclave was envisioned 6 to be a post World War II project of the entire human conscience. Israel was a cleansing of collective sin and apathy in that it should – by its mere existence – acquit those that have been perpetrating their industrialized murder, or did not intervene in time to save them. All of it would only cost us one last people that would need to perish for our salvation to become a reality; and if we wouldn’t look too closely maybe it would be over before we knew it and the people would remain abstractions, statistics and numbers. A very comfortable outlook of moral inaction by people who have for centuries colonized and murdered most of the world.

    The delusions and the self-deceit have become intolerable but they teach us one last lesson: the empathetic love for live must be real and internalized, it will not survive tokenization and wishful shortcuts to personal and collective deliverance. A people of the 21st century cannot look at the mounting evidence of the genocide and side with the perpetrators or sink into stupor; and the left will be a husk if it abides or even stands in support of it.

    It is a genocide and we have to deal with its implications and the fact that we have not learned the truly important lessons from the most brutal century in human history. We did not adapt a new way of thinking and acting towards a livable civilizational outlook and we cannot will it into being by remaining blind to the suffering of the Palestinians. We will have to stand in solidarity and learn in this 21st century what the last one apparently couldn’t teach us.

    Before we can move towards resolutions and the practical actions of decolonization and reparation it has now become imperative to decolonize our discussions and to be able to name that which couldn’t be named for decades. No viable solutions and no justice can be found without the possibility of truthful analysis and debate about the spiritual and material conditions in Palestine. Reality must be named without immediate social or institutional punishment. Before any actionable solutions can be formulated people must be able to describe what is.

    We must refuse to let the oppressors, the settlers and the colonizers set the epistemic rules for their own crimes. If a solution cannot be found in honest debate that leads to a broad consensus and collective action (for it is not allowed to take place), in its stead armed resistance will rise and the outcome will be more dead innocents. An outcome only favoured by the colonizer to justify more violence against the colonized.

    1. well organized too, as one person minutes every last word said here on their laptop ↩︎
    2. to no ones suprise she cannot name the specific group ↩︎
    3. who (after the actual antisemitism in its ranks in the 60s and 70s) had a vested interest in a normalization of the state of Israel and their relation to it ↩︎
    4. Who nowadays pivots between support and hatred of Israel depending on the issue at hand, their specific flavour of far right lunacy, their christian doomsday cults and their greater hatred for everything Muslim. Also many of them being in favour of white ethno-states in their own right are impressed by the ruthlessness and the agenda of the Israeli state. for many of them Israel’s efficient brutality has become a model to emulate. ↩︎
    5. Amnesty International, B’tselem, United Nations, International Organization of Genocide Scholars ↩︎
    6. allthough we know that the project of a state is much older ↩︎

  • AGENCY WITHOUT AWARENESS, IMPACT WITHOUT INTENTION

    A FORCE DRIVEN WORLD OF GHOSTS AND SPECTRES

    In our human lives, and within our perception, there is a hierarchy of awareness. There is the very personal – that is, the self. Within it lies a myriad of delicate and well-known nuances and issues that, in their interconnected totality, make up the self-image: the very concept upon which a world is built. It is the only thing most of us would call real – for it is directly accessible to us. More precisely its reality stems from it being the very substrate of our self. A self that is both at odds with the world it inhabits as well as deeply reliant on it.

    It is this direct access and its overwhelming reality that forces most of us into the strictly interpersonal, the tribal and the local. They are accessible extensions of what is real and they are therefore filled with meaning. For meaning is the web of interconnectedness of things, is the order that arises from contextualization – by giving things their place and their relation to each other (and most importantly: the self); a field that grows stronger with every added reference point. Our inner self is rife with meaning, everything within it is tightly connected, and has a history we can trace back to our own beginnings. This inner self is abuzz with an aura of authenticity and unique accessibility nothing else can rival in its totality.

    Within all of that the biological reality of our existence and millions of years of evolution that force themselves into every last aspect of our psyche. A complex biological machine guides our truths and realities which only knows one goal: “Bring order to my world to ensure survival.” A goal that is at odds with the abstractions of civilization and technology that do not directly relate to the nature of the biological machine that made them possible in the first place.

    This machine – and the psyche it creates, as both a result and a function of its biological complexity – fundamentally links its truths and realities (even the most abstract ones) back to the one persistent truth it has to operate on: its own inner actuality. An inner life that might very well live in stark contradiction to its physical origins in the material plane. Not of different substance but very much of overwhelmingly different quality. 1

    Unsurprisingly, such a mechanism will find it hard – perhaps even impossible – to incorporate the many abstractions of the ever-changing world into something with substantiveness or meaningful connection. Beyond the interpersonal and the tribal, there be dragons. The sub-global, the global, and the realm are distant and erratic – their reality rarely accessible, and even when uncovered and precisely defined, without the category of the real. All connections and all meaning is relational; centered around our inner truth.

    More and more distant connections had to be made, more and more abstractions to be incorporated, and the further we moved from that one singular kernel of accessible truth the further we ventured into the mist. For many these abstractions have become labyrinthine, hostile even; but most importantly very much irreal. So numerous and so complex have these abstractions become over time that we had to construct an inventory of them and allow them to live in the spaces between us: culture, society and history became their repository; the inconceivably abstract and complex needed something of similar type to accomodate it.

    Whilst these global systems of abstraction have become instrumental to our survival we do no longer know why or how – at least not in detail or in its entirety. We do not see them as entirely real, material or in a direct and measurable relation to us and our lives – they cannot be placed and integrated in our immediate and personal field of reference and meaning. With the existential horrors they contain, some choose to have no relation to them that brings them in palpable contact with their possible reality. We often times choose irreality for the abstract to shield ourselves from the reality of itself and the other that it contains. To shield us from the hunger, the war, the pain, the material onslaught of all the things contained within these grand abstractions.

    This is however not advocating for an expeditious retreat into the local and its incomplete, fragmented reality – nor a fervent call to abandon the complexities of civilization altogether; quite the opposite! For it is within this strict locality that a delusion of extreme – possibly fatal – severity is hatched. It is here where we assume total – even ultimate – control and therefore where we assume total reality. Yet the insular nature of locality, its property of direct access by the individual, makes it entirely virtual in nature. For as opposed to the great abstraction of the global and the grand narratives of Utopia (who become real and powerful precisely in the realms of holistic emergence and are therefore uniquely qualified to host actual pluralities that form a decidedly uniform actuality) the local is extrapolated from the individual self. Therefore every locality is not the sum of its constituent parts, not a neatly packaged slice of life, but a dissonance of individual realities competing with each other and denying each other in the process.

    Every locality is not a neatly demarcated wholeness of precise determination and finitude but the white noise of uncountable personal truths that only ever see themselves as the central measuring point for factuality. Factuality made real by being in direct relation to an inner self. In stark contrast to the commonly held believe that the local is the more defined space and the abstract is fundamentally inaccessible, it is this local space that misleads in its perceived ascertainability.

    Within that factuality every other individual encountered is subordinated to the personal reality. Every other person must exists in the realm of the local; a realm always centered on and related to the hyperindividualistic nature of the experience. Through this process every locality contains a multitude of people but only ever one of them is ascribed personhood and actual reality. Locality is a stage on which a life centered on the self is played out by actors that are only real in relation to themselves. The overpowering reality of the individual experience makes everything it touches an extension of itself. its reality (what is felt of it) is an colonizing force that demands the local for itself and everything in it exists as a matrix of purely referential circumstance. Every living being to an extent becomes in itself an object that is to be interacted with to achieve one’s own goals and to structure reality to one’s own needs.

    This colonized and seemingly controllable space of locality creates an excessive need. It must be ordered, understood and aligned to ones needs for it is an extension of the self – of its reality – and therefore must attend to it. 8 billion localities that move about the face of the earth, that are neither local nor finite. 8 billion truths that in their interconnectedness create hyper-localities that are structured in so far as they produce emergent realities that can be named and experienced but their order is not only temporary but very much not even present. They shift under the gaze of every individual embroiled in them, they are realigned with every conscious action, every need, every desire. Every reshaping of the locality is experienced as an intrusion and a violation and so the locality is not the stage for agency but of billions of injuries and the fragile and fragmented self that is confronted with its powerlessness within the most sacred of places that borders the self. The local is not the site of our realization and maturation, but in actuality a maelstrom of selfish, shortsighted and direct needs; where the actual reality of the sum of all needs of others always outweighs those of the individual self.

    But let us come back to our need for order, for it is here where we find the wellspring of our specters and forces. The same will to order that creates much of the scafolding of localities – aethereal as they may be – also expresses itself in a primal way: everything has to subject to it. In a world of abstractions, natural forces, a physical reality (whose ends we cannot spot) and within global societies this ordering impulse is confronted with more and more imperfections and gaps that prevent it from connecting our inner realities beyond the local and into a real web of meaning. It has to improvise, assume and manifest its realities if it wants to grow its web of meaningful connections beyond the immediate and its inner actuality.

    This meaning creating process of expanded inner realities is what brought us culture and the systemic structures of our society and civilization. As we already alluded to, these abstraction needed repositories and spatiotemporal representations to be able to accomodate living historical processes in their totality. It is here where we cross a threshold into a realm of cultural and societal forces. Forces that remain however endowed with “life” (irreal as it may be) so they can remain within the tightly knit web of meaning and the categories of the mind. It is here where we construct living abstraction to represent human and collective will. It is here were we project hopes and desires onto ideas, systems and the occasional extraordinary individual as a vessel. Within history, systems and great abstractions our biological imperative for order constructs from the maelstrom a coherent reality after the fact.

    A worldly mythology arises that orders the broader realm of our alienated global existence 2 according to standards extrapolated from individual experience and it is here were we create rules and laws to apply order to that which cannot be capture by simple extensions of the individual reality. It’s the attempt to order the interlocality, the sub-global, the global and the realm of existence by norms extracted from the local and tribal expression of individualistic representation. Its an attempted expansion of the colonization of the local into the world of abstractions and their subjugation under the rule of lived experiences that evolved independently of the social and civilizational realities and the realm of natural existence that stretched beyond the measurable. Its an act to safeguard us against the progress of time, of systems and our own worst collective impulses. Laws and rules are there to domesticate the roiling sea of uncertainty just enough so survival against the powers beyond what can be ruled by individual might or the tribal local is assured. The rules based order is to protect us against the raw energies of power politics 3 and to capture the irreality of abstractions in the directly accessible storage of language that evokes emotions and understanding.

    Systems, nations, corporations, organisations and history itself, (to a mind that needs order for survival) need personhood and with it intent; for it is those categories that move them from irreality into reality and into the meaningful tribal. They also need to become interpersonal or at least relate to its demands. The great abstractions need anima, a sliver of the living world 4 that is represented in them by extension, for them to become of the same matter or quality; for them to be not both alienated and alienating. Its then our arrogance that binds them and our unwillingness to evolve towards incorporating them that reduces their grandeur and their qualities down to the individual and tribal again.

    Within these anthropomorphized representations of abstractions we then find the narrative structures that make abstractions accessible and real to us. They now act according to our rules and realities – that is the guiding impulse that drives this pretense. Where meaning cannot be found through the instrumentarium of the mind it is ordained and immediately emancipated in the same instant. What have been purely mental recreations now – in their reality – becomes hyperreal. The abstractions that just a moment ago where inaccessible, alien and impossible to apprehend have changed their nature. Now they are constructions and extensions to the living world of humanity. Forces still and very much not explicitely corporeal they have now entered the realm of both natural elements and intent; have been transformed into something that adheres to the inner logic of the collective construction derived from individual experience that needs order and relation to create meaning.

    History now has meaning, within it we find actors and agents that are supposedly rational, that act with intent and that produce abstractions through meaningful interactions with their world. We find institutions, movements, nations and powerful elites that shape those abstractions, that create history and that give corporeal form to the forces; temporary as it may be. .

    But in actuality it remains that amongst the institutions, the nations, the elites and the systems we do not find order and natural law. Allthough we are in a desperate need for it even within these abstractions. The only truth we find here is a world in equilibrium, a world of inertia and one that remains controled by forces of which we see no points of origin. We find a world of algorithms, of interchangeability, of institutions whose identity persists through total replacement. We find corporations bound by national and international law, that break every last one of them and never face considerable repercussions. We find waring nations that murder millions and yet are allowed to persist. We find economic systems that solely work towards their own proliferation allthough every last action and initiation within them is done by humans. We see within these abstractions uncaring elites that are engaging in the most vulgar power politics. They create chaos and an equilibrium of power simply for the fact that chaos is easier to manage than an organized dystopian project of control and an equilibrium prevents dominance of other powers they are not a part of. This historical drift becomes both arbitrary in its derivation from abstractions that span millenia and in modern times shaped by the intention to reach control by denying others to get there first.

    We are quickly confronted with the harsh truth that these abstractions are not beholden to the local and the individual reality that refuses to evolve. Where we wish for a world of ordered meaningfullness, agency and intention by means of anthropomorphisation we only find one realization: the world is drifting through time and history. No one is at the helm and no powers control it in any meaningful way. All its abstractions remain fundamentally inaccessible to colonization by means of extendeding the inner realities of locality and indivdual experience.

    Our institutions have become self-referential, our political movements exist in relation to realities fabricated after the fact and systems without intention, and our society is an historic entity without self-awareness that does not care for its own intentional evolution. What we see realized in our world is what happens if a society evolves without intent and agency at its most basic levels and where social and mental evolution do not keep up with its emergent abstractions. What survives is the performance of intention, the simulation of command (in a world governed by emergent dynamics of uncertain and multiform origin) or the defeatist retreat into the practical realm of the local that forever captures the mind and the people. We are bound in civilizational drift towards nothing in particular. We are captured by undercurrents. No shadow governments, no deep states that are in control, no scheming elites that would bring us at least a dystopian stable order and no extraordinary people that illuminate a path through time towards utopia or cataclysm. The promise of civilization fully unrealized: to make meaning and to free us from nature’s indifference towards us. Replaced by the indifference of people towards themselves and by systems that involve them but do not cater to them. The true horror is not malevolence but absence.

    Politicial movements then, that speak of practical politics within the confines of such a world, must only ever find their own irreality. Movements that define themselves in relation to that which is fundamentally formless and directionless must in turn become formless and directionless themselves. A political movement speaking of coordinated practice in a world that is defined by an inheritance of accumulated accidents, stitched together myths, and the inertia of machines and systems with no memory, will find itself lost and chained to these illusions and in turn become part of them.

    To wrestle with ghosts is to become spectral. To act against a world without subject, authorship or intentions is to act against nothing. It’s a performative ritual played out in front of an absent witness.5 A politcal movement defined by its practical relation to this world will find itself in motion yet never move.

    1. We will discuss the mind-body problem in greater detail in the future. For now we remain within the empirical domain of our lived experience. ↩︎
    2. alienating not as an inherit property of the global but as a result of our inability to evolve past the local and tribal ↩︎
    3. And is failing spectacularly at doing so, as our present shows. For the rules based order is satirical in its nature. As with satire: those that understand it dont need it. The rules based order cannot shield us from our own worst impulses and the world where people live that are educated and socially evolved enough to understand the benefits of the rules based order is one where it instantly becomes redundant. ↩︎
    4. not necessarily in a Jungian sense, but in a more primordial sense of “force of life” ↩︎
    5. or against a singular witness – the person acting, which in turn makes the action selfish and hollow ↩︎

  • THE REVOLUTIONARY POTENTIAL OF RADICAL INNOCENCE

    The dead world of our present – the arrestation of historic forces, of trauma calcified into lifeless ideologies – is brought into being by a depraving, paralyzing way of thinking about ultimate potential and how we position ourselves towards the fundamental possibility for hope of better outcomes.

    “To expect is to suffer. To hope is to be fooled.” has become the rallying cry of entire generations, that watched every last bit of trust they have put in this world betrayed, warped or strategically used against them. A life that has no sacred places, no venerated foundations, and can only be endured through fragmentation, irony, retreat, and detachment.

    Systemic cruelty they cannot affect or address meaningfully – be it intellectually or emotionally. The erosion of the interpersonal realm into a transactional market of addicting dependency; where their intimacy is commodified and conditional, and sincerity exploited or ridiculed – seen as weakness worthy of shame in a dehumanizing act of self-abasement. The lifelong traumatized that have to build a web of interpersonal relationships with other traumatized.

    A futureless future of climate collapse, ultra-nationalism, fascism, militarism, automation of all creative processes in the name of profit, absolute alienation, intense cruelty and the brutalizing conflicts that grind body and soul into the dust, have made the acts of sanguine anticipation and expectant planning themselves foolish. Collapse and its acceleration have become the baseline of history. A submission to misery became the default emotional state. Hope the identifier of the gullible, the ignorant and the doomed. Cynicism, nihilism and blunted affect have become a twisted enlightened realism of spiritual abiosis.

    Here we have the world that dreams only of dystopias, that believes exclusively in decline and that reduced the processes of life to managed survival and explosive acts of violence as a spectacle and as an affirmation of their forsakenness. A world that is perceived as fundamentally controlled and owned by forces not by people. There is a distinct irreality to life and history. There is a comprehensive alienation to modern life and its many structures that even our most forward thinking intellectual and ideological ancestors could not have forseen.

    This world has become anti-life, a negation of the consecrated promise of society to elevate all of humanity above the cruel indifference of nature towards our plight.

    Radical Innocence is an existential optimism that refuses to be jaded by cynicism or paralyzed by realism. It is childlike in its nature. It is a radical reclaiming of elementary openness to all possibility; and most importantly of all: the possibility of the wondrous and unexpected that materializes only when one does not believe in one’s own limitations – when one is not bound to the charted realm of the strictly possible. It is a catalyst (an inital force) that disrupts the inertia of a totalitarian global system in motion towards its own annihilation.

    Radical innocence is not compliance with abusers or systems of exploitation and harm. It is not submission into yet another form of selfish escapism. It is defiance that refuses to become what it resists. it is an act of transrational trust that ruptures the expected logic of systems and forces of a dead world. It is the repeated act of springing into action in the face of great, overwhelming or even fatal uncertainty and systemic rigor mortis. It is a relentless drive towards grand narratives and utopian outcomes; simply because inaction brings death and action is hopeful. It is the creative force of the intellectually and spiritually unbreakable, that refuse to be swept away into the void without clamour.

    It is the fundamental unwillingness to accept inaction, even when reason and defeatist realism would suggest that nothing is left to strive towards. It is eternal hope as an obligation to the living world – a primordial remedy to indifference. A spell against the entropy of meaning and connection. It is defiant tenderness that believes in beginnings, even when endings seem most rational.

    In a world so fundamentally broken and cruel such as ours, this innocent belief in better outcomes and new beginnings becomes a bright beacon to epochal forces that want to shape history and society towards empathy, enlightenment and a panhumanist civilization of peace. It is the conscious effort to use all of ones vital force towards the construction of possibility, and the commitment to renew this solemn vow tirelessly.

    This innocence becomes a principled edge against the individual and collective shortcomings that breed distrust, turmoil, and schism within revolutionary movements of such aspirations – its simple promise and pledge being that there will always be a new beginning, a renewed effort to find common ground and understanding. It is an eternally outstretched hand to all forces, movements and people that choose to build a living world and a future for all.

    It is important to not confuse this act of willing trust with credulity or naiveté. It is not an oblivious invitation to exploitation, deception or overreach. Those that try will be confronted with an unwavering volition – a will set on destroying those that bring about the dead world and its suffering. The person that engages in radical innocence is not blind to the realities of the world and the conduct of others. Quite the opposite, they are acutely attuned to the world and the human condition. They have explored the barrenness of cynicism, of selfishness and of atrocity and recoiled in disgust. It is the reclaimed innocence of the returned, that know of the self-fulfilling nature of universalized distrust, the corrosive influence of cruelty and the futility of egoism.

    This radical innocence is a defiant call to build every day the world that is not; to choose love, to choose empathy and to endure the wound of existence until – through ones actions – the world can be healed. it is the deeply held belief of the possibility to interrupt the catastrophe with a gesture of redemption and a life in service to others. To keep moving forward in the face of almost certain defeat is the essence of radical innocence. To build anew every day, its expression.

    For the revolutionaries of this 21st century and for the movements and structures they need to construct, this radical innocence will for all time be the most essential basic impulse and call to action. In their lifelong fight for the survival of our species, of nature and a better world dedicated to others this recurring homecoming to the first moving force – that of hope built on defiant belief and love – will be an inexhaustible wellspring for their willingness to sacrifice and to suffer.

  • ONTOLOGICAL CAPITALISM

    A FINAL CAPITALISM AND THE MARKET AT THE END OF TIME

    Capitalism has proven that it does not break under its own contradictions, nor does it create forces within its borders strong or coherent enough that are willing to use said contradictions to break it apart in its stead. For as long as they intellectually operate within its totalitarian ruleset – for as long as they do not consider the real possibility of creating an outside to capitalism, strongly and authentically – they cannot succeed.

    For its own continued existence, it always needed to expand into new markets or find new things or interactions to commodify. From the moment capital became the driving force of market dynamics (the creation and proliferation of capital as its own product, simply investing money to make more of it), it had to be perpetuated. A fundamental shift had occured: something wasn’t valuable because it was useful – it was valuable because it could be sold for profit.

    To be absolutely clear here: capitalism, as we know it, has no intrinsic interest in fulfilling any needs. It does not produce food, medicine, housing, or other essential goods because it is just or right or needed, but solely because someone is willing to pay for it, and therefore a profit can be extracted from doing it. That same capitalism – if it could construct such conditions – would not hesitate to let billions starve and go unhoused if it could find other avenues of profit and revenue, thereby ensuring its own continuation. People living lives of intense abstraction and globalization also have no intrinsic interest in providing said goods, only in receiving payment for their work. 1 They assume someone will always produce food, medicine and housing and someone else will extract value from providing it to them. But there are no such assurances under capitalism.

    The profit imperative made it impossible not to be constantly incentivized to reinvest and extract more capital. Capitalism’s only motif became finding new avenues to keep capital moving and expanding. Work and goods as such (from the second this was realized) became just a means to an end. The capitalist economy is primarily not one that concerns itself with the organization of the production and distribution of goods and services to fullfill human needs, but one that exploits humans, production and services to organize itself and its central motif: the creation and proliferation of capital – and therefore capitalism – ad infinitum.

    To expand the markets that can create and absorb the central good of capitalism – capital – early capitalism expanded first through material markets until they were saturated (mercantilism, colonialism, and industrial production). What followed was a virtualization of markets (finance, crypto, digitalization, data, speculation, services, etc.). With it and the continuing globalization, the economy became increasingly abstract and removed from real material needs and production, and – most importantly – from the people working within it. It had become impossible for most to organize a life independent of capitalism and its needs.

    With the abstractions of said structure (and the capture of the commons – mainly land and the ressources buried under it or grown on it – in the 16th and 17th century, and later again through postcolonial capitalist economic coercion to this date) came the decomposition of interpersonal relationships and personal bonds that were rooted in community, locality and the land, and with that, the degradation of knowable reality itself. Life as such had become abstract – or more precisely: capitalism and its abstraction had become daily life – and the people in it were either strangers, or much more commonly: competitors.

    Strangers who had gone through intense generational trauma by becoming dispossessed, uprooted, and reduced to creators of surplus value through law-making and applied forms of violence. Uprooted not only in a physical sense, but in a spiritual one too. Their distrust in their own capabilities and in the interpersonal domain (which proved inadequate to reject and fend off the colonization of body and mind) became complete, alienating them not only from their work, but more importantly from each other and from themselves.

    Said abstractions, the impossibility of organizing a life without capitalism, and the degradation of the interpersonal and communal realm led to a central confusion with capitalism characterization: since there was no realm capitalism didn’t touch, nothing that was not within its shrouded and abstract inner workings (no life outside of it), and since its projection of power seemed to be absolute, it became an ordering principle of reality, a natural state and law. The confusion lies in attributing to this state stability, where it merely is permanence.

    Since the virtual markets will soon also be saturated, capitalism will have to break into new territories, and we are beginning to see this in the commodification of human attention, interactions, and engagement – as seen with social media and early human-AI interactions. Data and its application have become the central speculative tools that keep generating and moving capital around.

    We find in this a second central property of capitalism: it is a corrupting innovator that clings to all processes of life like tar. It will never accept an end to its selfish expansionist drive or twisted inner logic; it will always try to fold everything it touches into itself and force it to comply with its eternal act of ruthless self-preservation. Where it cannot find ways to coerce or colonize new realms it will subject them to violence, to forced transformation or threaten them with exile – which now is exile from life itself.

    Inherent to this Darwinian, self-preserving drive of continued expansion is also the impossibility of sustainability and balance. There is no logical end point or equilibrium that capitalism can strike. Grow or die becomes a mode of systemic coercion. Entangled in this economic feeding frenzy, all actors have to comply with the same rule. Those that do attempt the impossible – organizing life outside of capitalism with it still in place – eventually fail and are forced back into its realm, logic and hierarchies. 2 3

    Essential to the development of a theory of Ontological Capitalism will be what happens next – after its attempts to commodify human attention, interactions, and engagement have been completed. What will be left for capitalism to conquer, and what new absurdities will it subject onto those living in its dominion?

    Following its own monstrous inner logic, we can identify its distinct drive towards a final holistic totality, where we find the possibilities of: (1) complete spatial and temporal control reaching out beyond Earth, (2) with it, access to managed stability and citizenship in walled-off habitats and privilege through compliance, (3) the creation and management of post- and transhumanist realities, and finally (4) the total psychopolitical capture of the human experience.

    Even today, capitalism has already become a distinct hyperobject 4 or some sort of self generating entity. 5 It is a golem and an economy built on extraction and death, kept alive through reanimated debt and labor. It is animated by belief, strengthened by participation, but unable to distinguish creator from victim. A Homunculus of our own creation that stumbles forward through time with no one at the helm. While this system may feel alive, at times even scaled to human needs, its historical and global consequences are agency without awareness, impact without intention.

    (1) Repetition and reproduction are essential tools for a system that is hellbent on propagating itself infinitely. It’s no wonder that such a system will revisit tried methods as soon as opportunity arises. Now that the physical colonization of Earth is almost total, corporations and capitalists look towards the sky to find new spaces to exploit and conquer. Off-world colonies, the extraction of raw materials in our solar system and the construction of infrastructure in space will be lived realities by the end of this century. Terraforming and colonies will be used as a tool to sell a right to live on habitable worlds as Earth itself becomes increasingly unlivable. In the same vein these spaces will create a new feudal structure, where instead of just geographic wealth inequality, access to space-based habitats or digital realities could become the new stratification under total corporate and capitalistic control.

    (2) More than ever under this new regime, access to habitable space, rights, stability, and security themselves become commodities – bound to service and compliance – and are inaccessible or actively withheld from those deemed incapable or unworthy of fitting into this system. Corporate or subscription-based citizenships replace the state as yet another system gets fully folded into the capitalist metric – one that offered one last and increasingly waning avenue of influence to those who oppose capitalism and its realities. These highly controlled spaces, in a society in turmoil and active decline, are offerings of what little stability and security (which is actually permanence, as we pointed out) remains – and they won’t come cheap.

    (3) (4) Throughout the centuries the incredible perseverance of capitalism was rooted in its ability to quickly adapt even those tools and systems that could potentially be used for liberation and resistance.

    Counterculture’s aesthetic was captured: rebellion was made marketable—and therefore profitable. Radical language and cultural signifiers were appropriated and turned into branding. Labour movements have been intergrated into the inner workings of capitalism, bargaining within the system. The digital commons of the early internet, with its central idea of free-flowing information and a connected humanity, have been transformed into one of capitalism’s most effective tools for prediction, surveillance, and the monetization of human behavior at scale. Disinformation propagated through its many channels is fragmenting any potential for organized dissent and brainwashing entire generations. Liberation has been turned into sponsorships and awareness months exploited by global brands to signal allyship – reducing it to empty symbolism. Empowerment has been individualized, and collective action and systemic thinking have been reframed as issues of personal choice and access. Liberation became an issue of consumption, rather than freedom from it.

    Turning systemic issues into lifestyle choices led to an individualization of struggle. Commodification sold those struggles and their potential resolutions right back to us and in the process redefined success in capitalist terms.

    This also instilled a deeply ingrained sense of betrayal and caution – one that now causes many who seek liberation and authentic struggle to approach new technologies and cultural developments with suspicion and doubt long before cooptation even occurs. In anticipating their eventual capture, they begin to obey in advance and disarm themselves in the process, whilst doing capitalism’s dirty work for it – a preemptive surrender to its corrupting influence, seen as inevitable. We fear being naive, so we choose impotence over betrayal. We fear cooptation, so we abandon innovation.

    Now confronted with the possibility of seeing AI take over most processes of work and administration we reflexively fear AI instead of the corrupting influence of the markets, corporations and their billionaire ruling-class. Confronted with widespread adoption of automation we are consumed by the fear of being made obsolete and thrusted into precarity. We can clearly see the totality of all bio-engineering and medical research coopted to not only profit from humans but engineering new forms of laboring biological entities. We can envision AI entities not as sovereign minds, but as monetizable digital citizens with wages, debts, and consumer habits. Neural interfaces and biotech integration turn bodily functions and thoughts into commodities. Here, mental states, dreams, and subconscious processes could become data mines, where unconscious thought patterns are harvested and monetized. AI-generated influencers, artificial friendships, and even commodified emotional support (even empathy and intimacy become a service commodity) foster a personalized AI-driven existence, where every thought and behavior is predicted, shaped and controlled by monetized systems.

    And it is at this point, where we follow this line of thinking to its logical conclusions, 6 that we glimpse the dreadful possibility of a capitalism truly devoid of any and all meaning that can be measured against a human experience. A final state of capitalism terryfing in its simplicity and consequentiality. A form of capitalism that has gained control over identity, thought, and reality itself and in the process truly became ontological in nature. No longer a system people live under but the very condition of existence itself. A fully enclosed system, that has at its end gathered together all tools to manipulate, predict and commodify every relevant aspect of life and attempts to dissolve all vital energy into itself.

    There then is no remaining frontier – neither physical, spiritual nor conceptual – that has not been commodified or subsumed into the markets. Markets that no longer respond to human desires; they predict and shape them in advance through algorithmic control, AI modeling, and social engineering. Preemptive debt, predictive policing, and AI-managed behavioral economies ensure that subjects conform without the need for overt coercion. Dissent and revolutionary potential are not repressed but anticipated and commodified before they can take form.

    Capitalism no longer presents itself as a system among others – it redefines reality itself in economic terms. Meaning, truth, and existence are no longer outside economic logic – ethics and philosophy become market-driven constructs. Subjectivity is no longer autonomous but an extension of market processes.

    It is here were capitalism becomes Ontological Capitalism. The division between consumer and producer collapses; existence itself becomes a form of production and capitalism its sole possible configuration. The very idea of alternative futures is systematically erased – not just practically, but conceptually. Utopian thought is rendered unthinkable because every imagined alternative is absorbed into the market before it can take form. The final capture of capitalism is not just economic – it is imaginative: a world where people cannot even conceive of a world without it, for they have been rendered incapable of autonomy, the mental faculties to conceive and their lives are closely monitored effigies.

    And yet, somehow, within capitalism’s own logic, we can find a realm even more devoid, even more absurd – even more lifeless. For even this ontological capitalism has yet to integrate chance, cosmic events, its own absurdity and the very concept of crisis into itself. This form of capitalism has to deal with the distinct reality of cannibalizing itself. A capitalism that absorbed all meaning, might attempt to sell its own continued existence back to itself. It could attempt to sell versions of itself, competing against itself in layers of abstraction. 7 Such a Machiavellian system might in time find ways to even integrate widespread disaster and every crisis into its calculations. 8 Crises and their potential for profit(even possibly their deliberate creation) become well integrated normalities. Within these cold calculations the commodification of mass extinction and widescale destruction and eventually the obsolescence of life itself. 9 Capitalism could persist long after human life has become irrelevant to it. A capitalism trading, transacting, investing in a world that no longer exists except in digital abstractions.

    And once that form of capitalism truly dissolves the very concept of meaning we are left with a system that continues transacting long after all of its external purpose has disappeared, purely for the sake of its own motion. A market that doesn’t need people or goods, only inputs and outputs – economic activity itself has become a cosmic principle. A creeping infestation of existence itself that propagates itself along until the last stars burn out and until entropy becomes final. A fully commodified reality, autonomous and indifferent to meaning. A cosmic machinery, running not for anyone or anything, but just because it can. A market at the end of time where there will be no light.

    1. This is the very nature of alienation from work, from self and from others. ↩︎
    2. A quick interjection, though: although it is our purpose to lay bare capitalism’s central contradictions and imperatives, it is not our goal to perpetuate a fatalistic sense of apathy and subjection. When we talk about there being no outside of capitalism, we do this with the express purpose of showing that with the capitalist logic in place, there can be no outside of it. We, however, specifically advocate for its [the outside] construction precisely because of that. This is the task of any revolutionary movement and utopian thought. ↩︎
    3. It also has to be pointed out that this life in the cracks and blind spots of capitalism is not a life of freedom or independence from capitalism’s logic. It exists in defiance of it and is therefore defined by the existence of capitalism. Yet again, there is no outside of capitalism if its centrality is not questioned. Life that attempts to go outside of it is defined through being outside of capitalism, not as a thing in itself. ↩︎
    4. cf. Timothy Morton ↩︎
    5. cf. Autopoiesis, Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela  ↩︎
    6. logical by the rules, standards and imperatives of capitalism ↩︎
    7. We already see this to some extend in hyperfinancialized markets (with derivatives, financial instruments, speculation on speculation) but an ontological capitalism would turn even its own operating systems and framework into a commodity ↩︎
    8. we see glimpses of it today where climate collapse is sold back to us as Green Capitalism (carbon credits, eco-luxury goods, gated eco communities, electro mobility). We see it in media traffic and engagement created by disasters. We see it in financial markets speculating with instability or even collapse (short selling, hedging, prepping industry). The idea to turn crises and disasters into yet another commodity and revenue stream is alive today. ↩︎
    9. for it might be easier for this capitalism to calculate its inner workings and goals without life and consciousness ↩︎