Anthropocene Hubris

Stephanie Wakefield, “Infrastructures of Liberal Life: From Modernity and Progress to Resilience and Ruins,” Geography Compass 12, no. 7 (2018).

See Bruno Latour, Isabelle Stengers, Anna Tsing, and Nils Bubandt, “Anthropologists are Talking—About Capitalism, Ecology, and Apocalypse,” Ethnos 83, no. 3 (2018): 587–606; Stephanie Wakefield, Anthropocene Back Loop: Experimentation in unsafe operating space (London: Open Humanities Press, in press).

Timothy Morton, Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).

Anna Tsing, The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016), 8.

Bruno Latour, “Facing Gaia: Six Lectures on the Political Theology of Nature,” The Gifford Lectures on Natural Religion, Edinburgh, February 18–28, 2013.

David Chandler, Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene: An Introduction to Mapping, Sensing and Hacking (London: Routledge, 2018), xv.

See Andreas Malm, The Progress of This Storm: Nature and Society in a Warming World (London: Verso, 2018); Brad Evans and Julian Reid, Resilient Life: The Art of Living Dangerously (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2014).

Scholars have criticized the Anthropocene extensively for its invocation of a single figure of Man (or Human or Anthropos), its erasure of race and gender difference or its elision of the fact that the destruction now wrought by “humanity” is in fact caused by the actions of a very small percentage of wealthy people. See, for example, Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019); Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg, “A Geology of Mankind? A Critique of the Anthropocene Narrative,” The Anthropocene Review 1, no. 1 (2014): 62–59.

Venkatesh Rao (@vgr), “It's funny how people think a post-apocalyptic landscape will be relatively flat...” Twitter, October 5, 2019, ➝. While Rao holds a PhD in Aerospace Engineering and previously was a researcher at Xerox and Cornell, he currently works independently as a management consultant and writer, sharing analysis via his popular blog Ribbonfarm and Twitter. While not a well-known theorist like Latour, Rao is one of a growing number of critical thinkers exploring the present in interesting ways outside the limits of traditional institutions. In this vein, see New Models, ➝.

Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, The Information Age: Economy, Society and Culture Vol. I (Malden and Oxford: Blackwell, 2009).

Thomas Barnett, The Pentagon's New Map: War and Peace in the Twenty-First Century (New York: G.P. Putnam's Sons, 2004), 8.

Ibid., 8.

See Stephanie Wakefield, “Urban resilience as critique: Problematizing infrastructure in post-Sandy New York City,” Political Geography 79 (2020); Kate Driscoll Derickson, “Urban Geography III: Anthropocene Urbanism,” Progress in Human Geography 42, no. 3 (2018): 425–435; Ross Exo Adams, “Becoming-Infrastructural,” e-flux architecture, 2017, ➝.

See Carl Folke, “Resilience,” Ecology and Society 21, no. 4 (2016): 44; Kevin Grove, Resilience (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

Bruce Braun, “A New Urban Dispositif? Governing Life in an Age of Climate Change,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 32, no. 1 (2014): 49–64.

Nils Gilman, “The Twilight of Social Modernism,” in Plutocratic Insurgency Reader, eds. Robert Bunker and Pamela Ligouri Bunker (Bethesda: Small Wars Foundation, 2019), xix.

Mike Davis, City of Quartz: Excavating the Future in Los Angeles (London: Verso, 1990).

Nils Gilman, “Plutocratic Insurgency,” in Plutocratic Insurgency Reader, eds. Robert Bunker and Pamela Ligouri Bunker (Bethesda: Small Wars Foundation, 2019), 2.

Ibid., 2.

See Seasteading, “Seasteading! What Did the First Seastead Achieve?” YouTube, June 6, 2019, ➝; Jacob Hurwitz-Goodman and Daniel Keller, “The Seasteaders,” dis, 2018, ➝.

Rory Rowan, “Beyond Colonial Futurism: Portugal’s Atlantic Spaceport and the Neoliberalization of Outer Space,” e-flux lectures, April 18, 2018, ➝.

This orientation is found in Naomi Klein’s response to the popularity of Musk’s shooting a car into space in 2018; Naomi Klein (@naomiaklein), “About Elon’s big day…this is a car commercial in space. Everyone: pls stop participating,” Twitter, February 7, 2018, ➝.

Steven Erikson, Willful Child (New York: Tor, 2014).

“Going to Space to Benefit Earth (Full Event Replay),” Blue Origin, May 9, 2019, ➝.

Fred Scharmen, Space Settlement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019). See also Felicity D. Scott, “Securing Adjustable Climate,” in Climates: Architecture and the Planetary Imaginary, eds. James Graham, et al. (New York: Columbia Books on Architecture and the City, 2016): 90–105.

Marina Koren, “Jeff Bezos Has Plans to Extract the Moon’s Water,” The Atlantic, May 10, 2019, ➝.

Ibid.

Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin Arceneaux, “A ‘Need for Chaos’ and the Sharing of Hostile Political Rumors in Advanced Democracies,” PsyArXiv, September 1, 2018, ➝. The authors conducted four surveys in the United States (5,157 participants), and two in Denmark (1,336 participants). Media stories on the survey framed the affirmative responses as a window into the hearts and minds of right-wing Americans; however, according to one of the authors, affirmative responses “correlate positively with sympathy for Trump but also—although less strongly—with sympathy for Sanders. It correlates negatively with sympathy for Hillary Clinton.” See Thomas Edsall, “The Trump Voters Whose ‘Need for Chaos’ Obliterates Everything Else,” New York Times, September 4, 2019, ➝.

Chloe Watlington, “Who Owns Tomorrow?” Commune 5 (Winter 2020), ➝; see also Phil Neel, Hinterlands: America’s New Landscape of Class and Conflict (London: Reaktion Books, 2018).

Neel, Hinterlands, 131–146.

Alfredo Bonanno, From Riot to Insurrection: Analysis for an anarchist perspective against post-industrial capitalism (London: Elephant Editions, 1988).

Eva Haifa Giraud, What Comes After Entanglement? (Durham: Duke University Press, 2019).

Wakefield, in press.

Annalee Newitz, “How to be a smart Coronavirus prepper,” New York Times, February 29, 2020, ➝.

Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres I (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2011).

See Elizabeth Grosz, Chaos, Territory, Art: Deleuze and the Framing of the Earth (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 69; Kathryn Yusoff, et al., “Geopower: a panel on Elizabeth Grosz’s Chaos, territory, art: Deleuze and the framing of the earth,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 30 (2012): 971– 988; Philip Steinberg and Kimberley Peters, “Wet ontologies, fluid spaces: giving depth to volume through oceanic thinking,” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 33 (2015): 247–264; Stuart Elden, “Secure the volume: Vertical geopolitics and the depth of power,” Political Geography 34 (2013): 35–51.

See John Law, “What's wrong with a one world world?” Distinktion: Journal of Social Theory 16, no. 1 (2015): 126–139; Stephanie Wakefield, “Inhabiting the Anthropocene Back Loop,” Resilience: International Policies, Practices and Discourses 6, no. 1 (2018): 1–18.

See Clive Barnett, The Priority of Injustice: Locating Democracy in Critical Theory (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2017); Stephen Collier, “Topologies of power: Foucault's analysis of political government beyond ‘governmentality,’” Theory, Culture & Society 26, no. 6 (2009): 78–108.

Chandler, Ontopolitics in the Anthropocene, xvi.