Category: Futurism

History and the Young

As long as the world spins around, I’ll take my time.

I finally got Covid. It’s been a miserable few days, though as I begin to recover, one saving grace is the annihilation of all other distractions; those few words ‘I’ve got Covid’ are enough to get one out of the most insistent commitment. And so after a hiatus of some months, I can read important things again! Two pieces yesterday caught my attention, Nathan Gardels’ The New Nomos of the Planet in Noema Magazine, and Stephen Buranyi’s Do We Need a New Theory of Evolution? in The Guardian. Summarizing Carl Schmitt’s later work The Nomos of the Earth (originally 1950), Gardels argues that of the available options, a multi-polar global geopolitics is emerging with multiple powers, who one the one hand are seeking to become internally self-sufficient, but on the other must collaborate in the face of planetary challenges – like climate change and pandemic (and, I would add, trade and migration).

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Beautiful Ideas Which Kill: Accelerationism, Futurism and Bewilderment

futurist soccer player
Umberto Boccioni’s Dynamism of a Soccer Player, 1913 (MOMA). Saw this on my visit in December 2017, it’s a provocative piece.

In trying to construct a progressive, positive view of the future, and design political structures that facilitate such outcomes, there are many ideas. These are the ideas of political philosophy, but they are also the ideas of sociology, economics, psychology, art and literature. When we think of writers like Karl Marx, Ayn Rand, Sigmund Freud, James Joyce – all of them could in some sense be considered to have made significant contributions in several of those fields. My own attempts to understand State Legitimacy, how the state’s claim to legitimacy can be established and maintained, is in truth a combination of those things as well. Ultimately, all of these pursuits fall back on critical theory: that field of study that attempts to understand who we are as peoples, as cultures. The Italian Futurists, from the first half of the twentieth century, and the (new) accelerationists, from the first fifteen or so years of the twenty-first century, each had a vision. And each was in some ways nasty.

Continue reading “Beautiful Ideas Which Kill: Accelerationism, Futurism and Bewilderment”