The computer you’re reading this article on right now runs on a binary — strings of zeros and ones. Without zero, modern electronics wouldn’t exist. Without zero, there’s no calculus, which means no modern engineering or automation. Without zero, much of our modern world literally falls apart.
LINK: https://www.vox.com/science-and-health/2018/7/5/17500782/zero-number-math-explained
(Fingers crossed?)
If humans continue to pump greenhouse gases at our current rate, “we have no reason to think it wouldn’t cause a similar type of extinction,” said Curtis Deutsch, a UW professor and author of the research.
It’s possible to think of the director as a troll first and serious director second – this is understandable, but regrettable
Last Wednesday, a hundred-plus American theatres hosted a new Lars von Trier film, in its ‘director’s cut,’ for one night only. It’s impossible to imagine any of Von Trier’s still-working contemporaries from, say, the 1996 Cannes Film Festival (where his international breakthrough Breaking the Waves premiered) having their latest films released this way: no such fate awaits Hou Hsiao-hsien or Mike Leigh.
The House That Jack Built (2018) arrived, carnival-barker style, as a viewer-testing orgy of extreme thrills, but it’s actually a very late-period-auteur movie which continues Von Trier’s longtime formal gambit (a widescreen, performance-foregrounding and conspicuously handheld camera style, courting utilitarian ugliness, interpolated with bits reminding you he can go hyper-formal at will) while self-reflexively reorganizing his general preoccupations. A few grody but brief insert shots aside, The House That Jack Built is no serial killer slasher but two and a half hours of uneasy black comedy carried by Matt Dillon’s unreadable (hence unpredictable, hence funny) murderer, leavened with plenty of discussion about church architecture, art and morality.
On this edition of Parallax Views, Dr. Harold Schechter, one of America’s most prolific and voluminous true crime authors, joins the show for a wide-ranging conversation on history’s real-life monsters from Ed Gein to H.H Holmes that attempts elucidate why society is fascinated by serial killers, violent art, murder, and mayhem.
It’s widely known that Marilyn Manson came up with his stage name by combining the monikers of actress Marilyn Monroe and infamous convicted mass murderer Charles Manson. The two names were chosen by Marilyn Manson because he felt that the pair were the two biggest icons of the 1960s. Apparently, the shock rock icon is pretty infamous himself in the mind of Charles Manson, as a postcard from the prisoner to the rock star has been leaked online.
LINK: http://loudwire.com/charles-manson-writes-open-letter-to-marilyn-manson-from-prison/
When I went public with revelations that Cambridge Analytica had harvested 87 million profiles using an app that Facebook had authorized, Facebook’s first reaction was to immediately ban me — not only from Facebook but also from all the other companies that Facebook owns. That means I couldn’t even go on Instagram. All the apps that used Facebook authentication just showed errors — so my Tinder, Uber and countless other apps stopped working.
Within a day of coming out as “the first Millennial whistleblower,” I was deleted from the Internet.
LINK: http://www.papermag.com/christopher-wylie-break-the-internet-2621783738.html
As the UN sits down for its annual climate conference this week, many experts believe we have passed the point of no return
LINK: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/dec/02/world-verge-climate-catastophe
A piece by Julian Langer, whose blog can be found at https://ecorevoltblog.wordpress.com
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“Three minutes. This is it – ground zero. Would you like to say a few words to mark the occasion?” Tyler Durden
As Tyler stood overlooking the heart of civilization he knew he saw a failing empire on the brink of destruction. So Tyler abandons the consumer nesting instinct, in favour of neo-luddite primal anarchy.
Whether or not time and this magical land called the future exists is something for another discussion – I’ll just say that I’m not convinced. But for the purposes of this discussion it seems fair to say that we are three minutes from ground zero. The important thing to remember though is that we are not awaiting the arrival of a nuclear bomb, though Trump, Putin and North Korea appear to be directing us towards that situation. No, we are the embodiment of a thermonuclear cataclysm, a world-ruining piece of machinery, three minutes away from ground zero. So I’ll say a few words to mark the occasion.
Tyler was wrong when he said that our fathers were our models for God; our fathers were merely meant to teach us how to navigate the body of God – the body of the metropolis, the state, the market, civilisation, the Leviathan. But Tyler was correct when he said that God hates us.
After all, what has God, civilisation, the state, the Leviathan, the stranglehold of capitalism brought us? The planet is in ecological ruins. We are plagued by droughts, hurricanes, wildfires intensified by arid conditions and desertification, brought on by agriculture and the deforestation it requires, oil spills, dehabitation, specicde, air unfit to breath and mass extinction. Television feeds us the daily horror of militarism, bombs and politics, along side (m)advertising, supposed reality shows and force-fed comedy spooned down our throats, as we sink deeper into the psychosis of this hyper-real Spectacle – the word of God, the great domesticator.
But in the words of Tyler Durden, “fuck damnation, man, fuck redemption! If we are God’s unwanted children, then so be it!”
If this culture wants us to live lives of death, I propose we rebel, by seeking (near-)Life experiences; that we lose every-Thing to be free to do anything.
How do we do this?
Well if this culture is hell bent on trying to domesticate us all, bringing some wildness to this culture seems the best routeless direction to go down.
With all their attempts to make living in this culture better, most activist projects have served only to make the planetary work machine more bearable for those closest to “radicals”. The revolutionary project is now largely a t-shirt or film. Social anarchists fill potholes and keep this culture going – acts of service to God.
On the other hand, subversive art-focused and psychology-focused milieus, such as Situationists, Discordians, guerrilla ontologists and others which can generally be considered applicable to a post-anarchist practice, have succeeded in creating spaces to release the repressed flow of the wild, within the body of civilisation. This type of practice is that which Hakim Bey (Peter Lamborn Wilson) calls poetic terrorism, and appears to be a means of eco-radicals waging primal war against this world-ruining culture.
Situationists are focused on challenging the psycho-geography of this culture’s everyday normal life, through mediums such as the situationist-prank, which involved turning aspects of capitalism’s everyday-narratives against itself. Discordians and guerrilla ontologists, inspired by the philosophy of Robert Anton Wilson, have often embraced the campaign of Operation Mindfuck, which has focused on art based approaches like performance and guerrilla art, as well as vandalism, practical jokes, reality hacking and hoaxes.
Drawing from these both, in mapping out a loose route for our poetic terrorism, a campaign seems available to us, as agents against this culture, as a means of wild-attack.
What does this look like?
Here are some games –
Modelling glue in the locks of shops, banks and vehicles of world-ruiners. Going into computer shops with fishtank cleaner magnets and destroying the hard drives. Standing on streets with a free hugs sign and giving each person who hugs you a home-made pamphlet on the ecological crisis. Gluing folded up pieces of paper into the coin slots of parking machines and into the card slots of ATMs. Searching for unlocked cars and turning on their lights to drain the battery. Mixing whipped cream, corn flakes, grapes, maple syrup, dish washer fluid and warm water in large quantities in black bags and pouring home-made vomit along streets, in high-traffic pedestrian areas. Standing on the edge and peeing into swimming pools. Leaving kitchen knives in public places covered in fake blood. Graffiti apocalypse poems or surrealist slogans, like “I don’t want to be a wall anymore” on walls, in chalk in public spaces, in sight of on-lookers. Putting itching powder on the toilet paper in public toilets and rolling it back up. Gluing public toilet seats down and putting glue on them. Wearing sandwich boards emblazoned with “the end was yesterday”. Filling wet paper towels with flour, wrapping it up, tying up with a rubber band and throwing flour bombs. Reviving the Existential Negation Campaign. Destroying badger traps or committing other acts of ecotage/monkey-wrenching and turning them into works of art.
These are some of the directions for this project of wild mayhem. With every work of creative-destruction performed a communiqué should be left, as words to mark the occasion.
With this, eco-radical practice escapes the revolutionary model, which is tied to History (the narrative of this culture and its “progress”), without falling into renunciation and becomes an iconoclastic endeavour, full of wild potential. Eco-radicals can challenge believers in this culture’s faith in its ability to maintain everyday normality in ways that are direct and signify a defiant rebellion, without appealing to ideologies and systems, which end up being incorporated and part of that which we hate.
As this operation is intentionally outside of History, there is no start or end date to it. This can be picked up by anyone and dropped as soon as they decide to stop. It has no governing body or even decentralised organisation behind it. It is a wild endeavour, anarchic, free.
So this is it – ground zero. Our operation will be one of wild mayhem. What is to come we cannot know for sure, but the present course only leads to ruin. Disrupting that course, disrupting its ruin of the world and encouraging God’s ruin, through wild poetic terrorism as primal war, seems like a pathway to go down with potential. If you want a future, I will turn again to Mr Durden – “In the world I see – you are stalking elk through the damp canyon forests around the ruins of Rockefeller Center. You’ll wear leather clothes that will last you the rest of your life. You’ll climb the wrist-thick kudzu vines that wrap the Sears Tower. And when you look down, you’ll see tiny figures pounding corn, laying strips of venison on the empty car pool lane of some abandoned superhighway.”
Paul Kingsnorth, a former green activist, thinks the environmental movement has gone wrong. He argues for ‘uncivilisation’
The future for humanity and many other life forms is grim. The crisis gathers force. Melting ice caps, rising seas, vanishing topsoil, felled rainforests, dwindling animal and plant species, a human population forever growing and gobbling and using everything up. What’s to be done? Paul Kingsnorth thinks nothing very much. We have to suck it up. He writes in a typical sentence: “This is bigger than anything there has ever been for as long as humans have existed, and we have done it, and now we are going to have to live through it, if we can.”
Hope finds very little room in this enjoyable, sometimes annoying and mystical collection of essays. Kingsnorth despises the word’s false promise; it comforts us with a lie, when the truth is that we have created an “all-consuming global industrial system” which is “effectively unstoppable; it will run on until it runs out”. To imagine otherwise – to believe that our actions can make the future less dire, even ever so slightly – means that we probably belong to the group of “highly politicised people, whose values and self-image are predicated on being activists”.
According to Kingsnorth, such people find it hard to be honest with themselves. He was once one of them.
We might tell ourselves that The People are ignorant of The Facts and that if we enlighten them they will Act. We might believe that the right treaty has yet to be signed, or the right technology yet to be found, or that the problem is not too much growth and science and progress but too little of it. Or we might choose to believe that a Movement is needed to expose the lies being told to The People by the Bad Men in Power who are preventing The People from doing the rising up they will all want to do when they learn The Truth.
He says this is where “the greens are today”. Environmentalism has become “a consolation prize for a gaggle of washed-up Trots”.
As a characterisation of the green movement, this outbreak of adolescent satire seems unfair. To suggest that its followers become activists only because their “values and self-image” depend on it implies that there is no terror in their hearts, no love of the natural world, nothing real other than their need for a hobby. My experience of green politics is minuscule and secondhand compared with the author’s; all I can say is that the environmentalists I know often share his doubts and yet manage to stick with the cause, believing that their actions may not be totally ineffectual, that something is better than nothing. Most of us would tip our hat to that idea, but Kingsnorth is a passionate apostate with an almost Calvinist certainty that most of the human race, if not all of it, is heading for the fire.
These pieces trace some of his personal and political history. He had a middle-class childhood in the outer London suburbs, with a father who was a “compulsive long-distance walker” – he took his son on marches across the English and Welsh hills. In 1992, aged 19, Kingsnorth joined the protests on Twyford Down against the hill’s destruction by the M3. Aged 21, he was in the rainforests of Indonesia. Like many others, he became an environmentalist “because of a strong emotional reaction to wild places, and the world beyond the human” – like them, he wanted “to save nature from people”. But he also wanted to be different and famous. When he first took it up, green activism “seemed rebellious and excitingly outsiderish”; later, he writes with disappointment, it became “almost de rigueur among the British bourgeoisie”.
Disenchantment arrived when he was in his 30s. In a piece published in 2011, after he has written two or three books as well as columns “for the smart newspapers and the clever magazines”, he decides that his new role model is “not Hemingway but Salinger”. He has done the “big book stuff” – the tours, the extracts run big across the centre pages of mass-market papers. There will be no more Newsnight interviews, no more sitting on the sofa with Richard and Judy (“Jerry Springer was sitting next to me. It was … strange”). All he wants is an acre or two, a house, some bean rows, a pasture, a view of the river. In lists of this kind, renunciation can be hard to distinguish from bragging, and self-sufficiency comes packaged with literary romance.
At the root of this disillusion and retreat – he lives now in a dry-lavatory bungalow in Galway – lay what he calls the “single-minded obsession with climate change” that began to grip environmentalism early in the century. “The fear of carbon has trumped all other issues,” he writes. “Everything else has been stripped away.” Some would see this as saving the planet. Kingsnorth thinks the opposite, that we are destroying the wildest parts of it in the name of sustainability, “a curious, plastic word” that means “sustaining human civilisation at the comfort level that the world’s rich people – us – feel is their right, without destroying the ‘natural capital’ or the ‘resource base’ that is needed to do so”. In more concrete terms, it means wind farms, solar panels and undersea turbines, the renewables that will allow us to carry on business as usual.
Kingsnorth notes that environmentalism is now respectable enough to be embraced by the presidents both of the US (pre-Trump) and Anglo-Dutch Shell, and that a lot of awkward questions have been pushed aside by the drive to reduce carbon. The number of humans, for example, when sustaining a global population of 10 billion, suddenly isn’t a problem, and anyone who suggests otherwise is “giving succour to fascism or racism or gender discrimination”. Instead we make the hills, the deserts and the seas suffer – we’re “industrialising [the] wild places in the name of human desire”.
He writes insightfully about England – presciently, too. “Large-scale immigration is not, as some of its more foaming opponents believe, a conspiracy by metropolitan liberals to destroy English identity,” he says in an essay first published by the Guardian in 2015. “It is a simple commercial calculation. It may cause overcrowding and cultural tension … it is undoubtedly good for growth … if you don’t want the population movement, you don’t get the cheap, easy consumer lifestyle it facilitates. Which will you choose?”
This is Kingsnorth at his plainest and most provocative, but another Kingsnorth is never far away, as romantic in his nationalism as any Victorian storybook when he writes in the same essay: “England is the still pool under the willows where nobody will find you all day, and the only sound is the fish jumping in the dappled light.” This Kingsnorth believes that the human race will eventually die of civilisation, and he wants to create what he calls “Uncivilisation” that will show us a new way to look at human history and endeavour. Stories, he says, are the key.
The book ends with a manifesto: The Eight Principles of Uncivilisation, designed to undermine the myths of progress and human centrality. “Principle 7: we will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.” And so, rather than electric cars and oil in the ground, we are left with a smaller idea of salvation: a little literary movement of the kind that might have gathered around a hand press in a Sussex village c1925, facing the real uncivilisation that has still to come.
• Confessions of a Recovering Environmentalist is published by Faber. To order a copy for £11.24 (RRP £14.99) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only.
