Intersecting Epochalities: The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and COVID-19 (It’s the End of the World, and I feel fine)
Tucked away in a lecture room inside AUT, Professor Wayne Hope gave his latest lecture series focusing on global capitalism and climate change.
Wayne is a blogger here at TDB, I’ve known him 30 years and he is my neighbour.
I consider him one of the most brilliant and important public academics around.
His latest research into the impact of Covid on Global Capitalism and its intersection with the climate crisis is probably the most important work of his entire career.
The picture he paints through the insight of meta oversight is grim.
He looks at how Climate Change, Covid 19 and Global Capitalism are combining to create a unique existential threat to our species.
Intersecting Epochalities: The Anthropocene, Global Capitalism and COVID-19.
Put simply, epochs are demarcated eras or historical periods. One often hears claims that certain contemporary epochs are radically discontinuous from the past. Over the last three decades, such formulations have included the emergence of globalisation, the digital age, the social media or platform age, the Anthropocene, and, since 2019, the global pandemic era. Of course, no epoch is exclusively experienced. Several of those mentioned may prevail simultaneously. Yet, there is confusion about what epochs we inhabit and their relative salience.
To clarify matters, this presentation considers three major demarcations: the Anthropocene, global capitalism, and the COVID-19 pandemic. The net result, on my analysis, is a three-level crisis complex incorporating global capitalism, the anthropocenic Earth system and the future of humankind. These substantive crisis clusters can also be construed as a crisis of epochal time.
Two epochs we have entered is the Anthropocene where human pollution via carbon is now transforming the very planet we live on and Global Capitalism which is facilitating that global warming.
No one asked for oil corporations to send the planet on a path towards meltdown! The smartest marketers used mind tricks and every possible emotional manipulation via media to convince you that you had to have the shit they sold you.
Consumerism, loneliness, disconnection, poverty and alienation from the real and the genuine has created a spiritual, economic, cultural and political crisis.
Google starting an oil and gas division to maximise energy to power their network seems ridiculously dangerous. The devices we use to fight each other and cancel each other and threaten each other require enormous electricity needs, needs the online world intend to protect, so not only do they warp our political debate with hate algorithms, they also direct the economy for its interests.
And then as global capitalism and climate change expand, Covid came.
The hyper dense urban crush and exploitation of the natural biosphere alongside cheek to jowl living with farmers forced to farm exotic species because large agribusiness have pushed them off land and cornered monocultural crops and herds is a symptom of the overcrowding that is a byproduct of global capitalism.
Just-in-case supply chains will import inflation back to the West, and corporations will attempt to reduce that cost by eliminating people from the last mile strategy altogether with drones and autonomous delivery robots.
This matters because in 2010, 388 individuals owned more wealth than half of the entire human population on Earth
By 2015, this number was reduced to only 62 individuals
In 2018, it was 42
In 2019, it was down to only 26 individuals who own more wealth than 3.8 billion people.
And now in 2021, 20 people own more than 50% of the entire planet.
This isn’t democracy, this is a feudal plutocracy on a burning Earth
The Big Tech Tzars have manipulated our collective fear, ego, anger and insecurities through social media in a way that has led to the largest psychological civil war ever launched against one another.
We are but meat bags secreting hormones addicted to dopamine rewards for fat, sugar, salt and sex in a cultural landscape of individualism uber alles where we sing sweet secret lies to ourselves to make sense of a world around us that is frightening and in constant entropy.
Meanwhile, the planet burns and every aspect of our existence is monetarised for big data to sell us more stuff we can’t afford. We are alienated and anesthetized by a consumer culture that keeps us neurotic and disconnected. Our work, our existence, every move we make are all built to suck money to a minority class that sits above us while under neoliberalism, globalization, financialization, and automation, our existence as individuals has only become more disposable.
Here’s Tom with the weather.
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Someone’s going to be controlling the economy.
Better that it not be soulless alien plutocrats like Larry Paige or Elon Musk.
Yea. We know. Great to lay it all out – but maybe we should do something?
Some energy sanity in this post, really good to see. As a long term energy watcher from way before the “peak oil” movement it is possible to say that we are blinded by incorrectly ascribing values to economies. In particular we say GDP in $s or similar. Every transaction gets measured that way. But stop, consider that there is energy use implicit in every transaction. We could measure that too in $s but we need to consider that transactions can take place without $s, but not without energy. In short you can have a bank printing $s, you cannot print energy. Conclusion is that our understanding of economics is totally at odds with reality, we need to base all economic policy upon energy availability and use.
Thanks Nick, and if you want to go faster than a galloping horse you need fossil energy.
“Richest global 1% have a carbon footprint 175 times the poorest 1% [oxfam]”
1970,s I was in an Indian village one night and knocked over the hurricane lamp [kerosene powered]. Plunged the whole village into darkness!! A huge lesson for me in wealth/energy disparity.
“The richest global 1% have a carbon footprint 175 time the poorest 1%. [oxfam]”
1970,s I spent a night in an Indian village. Knocked over the kerosene hurricane lamp and plunged the whole village into darkness. A huge lesson for me of energy/wealth disparity !!