#tech-critical

[cl0ck-killer]

The internet complex has become inseparable from the immense, incalculable scope of 24/7 capitalism and its frenzy of accumulation, extraction, circulation, production, transport and construction, on a global scale. Behaviors that are inimical to the possibility of a livable and just world are incited in almost every feature of online operations. Fueled by artificially manufactured appetites, the speed and ubiquity of digital networks maximize the incontestable priority of getting, having, coveting, resenting, envying... all of which furthers the deterioration of the world - a world operating without pause, without the possibility of renewal or recovery, choking on its heat and waste. The techno-modernist dream of the planet as a colossal worksite of innovation, invention and material progress continues to attract defenders and apologists. Most of the many projects and industries of "renewable" energy are designed for perpetuating business as usual, for maintaining devastating patterns of consumption, competition and heightened inequality. Market-driven schemes such as the Green New Deal are absurdly pointless, because they do nothing to switch off the expansion of senseless economic activity, the needless use of electrical power, or the global industries of resource extraction incited by 24/7 capitalism.

Scorched Earth (by Jonathan Crary)

[cl0ck-killer]

Many of those who understand the urgency of transitioning to some form of ecosocialism or no-growth postcapitalism carelessly presume that the Internet and its current applications and services will somehow persist and function as usual in the future, alongside efforts for a habitable planet and for more egalitarian social arrangements. There is an anachronistic misconception that the Internet could simply "change hands," as if it were a mid-2oth century telecommunications utility (like Western Union or radio and TV stations) which would be put to different uses in a transformed political and economic situation. But the notion that the Internet could function independently of the catastrophic operations of global capitalism is one of the stupefying delusions of this moment. They are structurally interwoven, and the dissolution of capitalism, when it happens, will be the end of a market-driven world shaped by the networked technologies of the present. Of course there will be means of communication in a post-capitalist world (as there have always been in every society), but they will bear little resemblance to the financialized and militarized networks in which we are entangled today. The many digital devices and services we use now are made possible through unending exacerbation of economic inequality and the accelerated disfiguring of the Earth's biosphere by resource extraction and needless energy consumption.

Scorched Earth (by Jonathan Crary)