Time To Stop Cuddling with The Technosphere Cannibalism !?
Biosphere vs. Technosphere - Part 1 of ?
We’ve been to way too many technology conferences and events over the years ( more than a couple decades ) that harbour some kind of untenable affection for our unsavory versions of “modernity“ and “progress” in the hyper-industrialized global cesspools. Come to think of it, almost all of them !
And even when it’s expressly meant to be a critical and activist convergence, there is an incredible amount of naive and/or heavily-invested faith that our high-tech industrialism is really ingenious and evolutionary, even as it’s poised to devour us !
And the new critical theories emerged that it’s just the social + economic + colonial orders, and/or all the greedy corporation-owning bastards, that have made it such a muddy and bloody mess. And as the increasingly co-dependent thinking goes, all we need are alternative tools and better communal + sustainable infrastructures to live in our shiny, blinking, ever-expanding and non-negotiable Technosphere1 ! We just need to make it green !
But given all the latest insanity of Technocratic regimes and the predatory Big Tech entities, increasingly entangled with competing nation-state objectives and systems of control and exploitation and war machines, this gigantic green-transformation fig leaf has become a preposterous ruse.
“We all know Major-Cyborg Tom is a big-time MIC junky!”2
Military Industrial Consumer !
Check Ignition ! Check your privilege ! Check your levels of incorporation ! Engines On ! Countdown commencing !
Of course, we don’t “all know”. And we cannot say for sure how exactly to react, once one begins to grasp the dark horizon. But after reading this analysis below, do you now consent to being a pawn, a node, a user in this cold war / hot war race to the bottom !?
Do you now commit to engage in deeper investigations into how we can protect and nurture our only inhabitable planet and all the humans, all the minorities, and all the species that co-exist us ?! There is currently no Planet B, as much as the tech industries would like you to believe. And some specific psychopaths are pushing hard those fantasies, rather than grappling with the actual situations.
Foto at the top: The Gécamines district in or near Kolwesi, the capital city of Lualaba Province in the south of the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Gécamines is the name of an originally Belgian holding/mining company which sits on the world's greatest deposit of cobalt and has some of the world's largest deposits of copper. We aren’t going to sort out the bloody transnational details here, but there’s a variety of parasite corporations in the region. Note: There’s much more gruesome pics and stories and details of child labor, and environmental pollution that is causing suffering, illness, death. But we decided to be a bit aesthetic here, to lure you in to the full dilemma.
It has been known for quite a long time already, that the consumer market explosion of personal mobile devices is built on horrible labor conditions for so many and creating new resource wars. The prime engine of this IT economy - Surveillance Capitalism - remains one the root causes of an entirely exploitative and unsustainable tech architecture / environment. And now the corporate AI agendas/gameplan/expansion threaten to lock us all in even deeper to these entirely inefficient + unethical systems. But we’ll try to come back to that in a possible strategies section.
_______________________________________ _____________________________________
Pitch for your support : This article is a very quickly assembled sketch, a summary of some our experiences and perspectives, and an emergency call for new paradigms and narratives and more fierce resistance to the escalation of blood-soaked + dead-end futures. This will take some time to refine the arguments, and perhaps it will require a series of articles. Perhaps a whole XLterrestrial book-sized rant. We’ve been in negotiations with a few publishers. But these days, there’s little or no advancement / fees to embark on such a journey. And we’re too busy just keeping our spaceship afloat.
If you would like to be a patron of our work, at whatever scale, please contact us. We prefer not to use paywalls here on a corporate platform. This is just our sketched notes, realtime reports and reflections, and a way to steer community activism in better directions without ( publishing ) delays. And it’s our own search for sharpening community-based strategies and a way to get immediate feedback on our experimental perceptual gambits.
______________________________________ _________________________________
Biosphere and Technosphere and all the Anthropocene Narratives Bullshit
The “technosphere” term was first coined in 1968 by the Vancouver-based control engineer John Milsum.3
But it first came to our attention through the various Anthropocene-themed studies and events that were popping up all over the big cities and in the academic circuits, around 2012. Something about it seemed very fishy and/or very inadequate from the very start.
We remember well the slick video called “Welcome to the Anthropocene” which caught our attention at the time from an NGO-ish? conference event “Planet Under Pressure” in 2012 in London. Disclaimer: we didn’t attend. But one could say that it was setting an “Anthropocene agenda” in parallel with all the climate concerns + activism that was sprouting at that time. The org behind it is apparently well-funded entity called ISEE ( International Society For Ecological Economics ) w/ more than a dozen regional chapters around the world and fellowship positions ( needs more research ). Not a small operation. No doubt some people involved are doing so with good intentions, but nevertheless important to investigate and critique the abundance of delusions and/or omissions that came with these (institutional) frames.
We used the video in a number of our CiTiZEN KiNO episodes, an artistic and tactical media platform which analysed various socio-political + ecological + humanity topics from an experimental sci-fi-ish alien-anthropological lens.
This short clip was an excellent media specimen for 2 reasons. 1. To introduce the new Anthropocene frames. 2. But also to question and expose the frequently overly-positive take on industrialization + globalization factors, which for us were back then - and are still now - obvious error-ridden trajectories for any real and viable planetary wellbeing and any kind of social + environmental justice.
C-KINO poster from about 2015 ( we’re not sure, we’ll have to sort out the chronology ). We often tried to be funny about this, you know, to not scare the shit out of people. And to camouflage the hard pill, that we were up against a very Techno-fascist system. We were “early adopters” of being fierce tech industry skeptics and calling it out.
…
Let’s grab a bit of backround from a very politically sharpened 2022 article in The Ecologist. Keep in mind, this framing of all the urgent + dire issues at stake are now almost entirely occluded by the new tsunami of tech industry branding…
Our Great Saviour IS Coming - Artificial Intelligence ! … brought to you by the same parasitic assholes who were devouring our futures and stealing all our data ( and all cognitive + cultural labor ) since the 90s.
Remember that sparkling disco data ball, on the scale of a 2nd simulacrum sun, that provided a spectacle-spewing + technotopian + dramatic fog-producing machine of cheap-screen + bite-size wonders. From one angle, it was all like A Big Data Kiss of Death, transforming nearly everything of value into a pipeline of bits. Into a form that Silicon-Titan colonialists could swallow up global markets, and conveniently shovel into their transnational-scaled pockets ! … Bill Gates, Andreesen, Zuckerberg, Bezos, The Paypal Mafia bros, The Goo Duo + Eric Schmidt, etc. ( note, we are just illuminating the western version of this for now )…
On top of installing themselves as overlords of the new domain, they also snatched the (equivalent of) keys and passwords to our brains and inner lives and our communities ( and realworld social networks ) ! Pay up pal mafias indeed !
Pic: From the latest 147. Netzpolitischer Abend on Digital Colonialism at C-base ( more on that later )
From The Ecologist’s Herbert Girardet:
THE BIOSPHERE
All life, including human life, ultimately depends on the wellbeing of our host planet as a vast, interconnected, synergistic system…. It was the famed Austrian geologist Eduard Suess who named the space on Earth that contains life, including human life, the biosphere…
This concept was revisited in 1926 by Russian/ Ukrainian biochemist Vladimir Vernadsky when he published his book The Biosphere, focused on the interaction between planetary biology, chemistry and geology. He says: “The biosphere is the only region of the Earth’s crust where life is to be found... Without life, the face of the Earth would become as motionless and inert as the face of the moon.”
The term ‘biosphere’ is now familiar as the place where photosynthesis, powered by the sun’s energy, reigns supreme… a profoundly dynamic place, with a vast variety of living organisms interacting with one another.
THE TECHNOSPHERE
By contrast, the technosphere, a product of the Industrial Revolution, is primarily powered by fossil energy sources, or stored ancient sunshine, with ‘progress’ enabled by relentless advances in technology and innovative production systems.
It comprises all the structures and processes that modern humans have imposed on the planet, such as factory production, building technology, transport and communication systems, mechanised farming, cities and megacities.
The technosphere, of course, has enabled a life of abundance for a minority of the world’s population, whilst a majority is still waiting to benefit. But there is another profoundly systemic problem: today the vastly expanded human economy is essentially linear: materials are extracted and turned into consumer products, and wastes are discharged into Nature as pollutants. In our accountancy systems, these environmental externalities are largely unaccounted for, with dire consequences for future life.
The technosphere may be an offshoot of the biosphere, but by contrast it is inanimate and profoundly lifeless. As a linear system, it operates according to its own entropy-driven dynamics. Its products do not grow in some organic process, but rather are assembled on conveyor belts. It has no sense of ‘future’.
Crucially, our industrial economies are subject to the second law of thermodynamics: their use of fossil energy, their key characteristic, is an irreversible process, with materials degraded and usable energy irretrievably turned into unusable, dispersed waste. Recycling is often avoided because of costs that both producers and consumers are unwilling to pay.
This is just an extract, please read the full essay, to get a good grasp of the challenges ahead !
___________________________________________ _________________________________
The XLterrestrials have been working on projects for a number of years that deconstructed the concepts of the "Technosphere" which became a key framework for the majority of the anthropocene narratives and/or agendas ... which permitted - inadvertently or intentionally - a kind of absolution of the tech ( and energy ) industries. i.e. Letting them off the hook !
This Unesco article - The Unbearable Burden of Technosphere ( 27 March 2018, Last update: 6 Nov. 2024 ) - is a bit ‘old hat’ ( in regards to all the new threats emerging ), but a pretty good and very complex summary, and it represents the standard Anthropocene conclusions that the XLT will ultimately contest ! Because it holds none of the culprits accountable for the major fuck-ups of hyper-industrialism plus corporate-krapitalism ( i..e fossil fuels CEOs and the new technocrat oligarchs ) ... Nor does it create sufficient strategies for liberation from the long and/or very short tail of techno-fascist systems, implementations and expansionism !
The industry narratives are changing fast… b/c as our existential crises and horror shows become increasingly visible to those who still have their eyes open, the systemic stupidity is getting more desperate to conceal all the societal, environmental and economic-system damage being done. And the narratives are even wilder and stupider than before. Do they even believe their own stories any more? or is it a ruse? or an endgame ? as they install evermore means to control the world’s diverse populations ( in a kind of monotheistic fervor), to harvest our labor, and to accelerate the plundering of natural resources, which essentially translates to the disruption/ demolition of all our habitats and livelihoods.
Poster : From CiTiZEN KiNO #84/85: Asymmetric Media and the Simulacrumbs (for the 20th Anniversary of Indymedia) (for the 20th Anniversary of Indymedia) presented at Transmediale 2020 at the Volksbuhne.
to be cont.
Borrowing from the high-art of Bowie … interesting to think about his lyrics from Space Oddity ( 1969 ) and Ashes to Ashes ( 1980 ). Interesting to note that the latter was like a lyrical requiem to his formal self in the 70s. An unsustainable character /persona that needed to be relinquished in order to survive… creatively, mentally, and physically ?! … and probably some addictions that needed kicking. Well, a couple interpretations among many.
https://theecologist.org/2022/nov/28/biosphere-and-technosphere
… ( footnotes need a little work ;)