This is a terrible response that completely misdiagnoses—or rather, refuses to diagnose—the problem. Academia has become an extremely precarious and underfunded productivist domain, further hit by rampant AI adoption. Arbitrary gatekeeping measures will not solve any of these structural issues.
Now that Artemis II is back and there’s some new images of Earth, we can all look forward to more critical commentary along the lines of "disembodied Promethean man uplifted by fossil fuels offers another God's-eye view abstraction from nowhere enabled by military technology.”
Sounds more like "Wealth *and* weapons" type of scenario than one or another.
Quotation from Thomas Nail's book "Marx in Motion" in which he defines zusammenhängen as mutual insufficiency and support in one another.
When the world is going to hell in a handbasket but your specific country is doing a bit better, it’s tempting to say, “I want everyone to be sovereign and independent from one another!” But historical dialectics is implacable, and the situation always reverses. We’re zusammenhängen or nothing.
The problem with this dream is the desired independence from Others. We will depend only on “ourselves”—people like us, that is, from the same country and the same culture, with the same passport? It’s an anti-international stance compatible with every reactionary fantasy of a world of closed units.
The issue with energy independence discourse is what are we becoming *independent from*? It is difficult not to see a conservative edge beneath this electric peace: a celebration of the nation state as a basic self-enclosed unit. It’s the Westphalian world with electrification. Is that the dream?
Summer school + conference:
PAScapes at Vilnius University convenes philosophers, environmental humanists, memory scholars, and interdisciplinary thinkers to re-envision coexistence through the ecosocial.
Keynotes: Cary Wolfe, Lambros Malafouris, Svitlana Matviyenko, and Luba Jurgenson.
I’d say 99% of sensible people agree about switching to renewable energy. What’s not so clear is the amount of expectations that can be loaded on this transition. Some folks think that arranging solar panels in butterfly shapes will change capital and ownership structures, and here I have my doubts.
You know what? Universities don’t have to be depressing hell holes with endless psychological services to help cope with the hyper-stress produced by the neoliberal factory model. We don’t need to defend this nonsense. Let AI burn the productivist university, and let’s have something better instead.
Many of us are implicitly colonised by the productivist university. Seeing it fail, we scramble to defend it. Instead, we should remember what higher education should be: an opportunity to learn *because you care* and not because you're forced to by future wage access based on grading discipline.
AI heralds the end of a *particular* humanities university—the neoliberal kind premised on gatekeeping, productivism, and competition. This model cannot survive AI, and it shouldn’t. Any excuse to dump it and fight for universities with actually universal values should be a welcome opportunity.
This entire discussion is missing a crucial part: the structure of university education. If access to higher education was universal, research not productivist, and classrooms not cutthroat competition via grading, the irruption of AI would be a minor nuisance and not the cataclysm it is right now.
There are still three more years left to the Trump administration, and already the damage is extreme. Even if a sensible candidate wins the following election—and we can only imagine the preceding electoral chaos—undoing the external *and* internal effects of American fascism will be... difficult.
If somebody had told me some years ago that Russia, Israel, and the US would together constitute an informal and intuitively coordinated cartel for the annihilation of international law and any semblance of a rules-based order, I wouldn’t have believed it.
Cheap point to make, I know, but the fact that there is an invasion of Ukraine, a genocide of Palestinians, and a razing of Iran happening all at once, and we are going about our business in isolated rage bubbles connected at most through Bluesky likes—it amazes and depresses to an equal degree.
Sánchez offered the most basic liberal discourse, which, nonetheless, today sounds like an act of radical courage. He may well be the only European head of state who has been capable of positioning himself correctly in the last three global conflicts—more so than many public intellectuals, too.
à propos affordability: take a look at what serious government investments in renewables can do to a country’s electricity prices. Go Spain.
ember-energy.org/data/europea...
There was an entire generation of Left intellectuals whose youthful political formation happened under these conditions: the sanctity of the enemies of Capital, whose actions from the private to the public were insulated from criticism. We see the consequences of this training now.
Exceptional text by Negarestani that deserves to be studied.
The dream of a new post-neoliberal consensus in which an updated technocracy reasserts itself without any attention to human rights, political freedom, and social protection. Business as usual, no lessons learned.
State terror is one of the most abject actions that a state can perform. It betrays a fundamental principle assuring citizens’ loyalty to the modern state: the legal and legitimate use of the state’s monopoly of violence. Once that monopoly is used for arbitrary persecution, the state is failing.
"Returning to calm." European leaders seem incapable of learning. They grasp at straws like drowning men, or like elites who dream of maintaining their privileges while the ship sinks. With this cohort running France, Germany, the UK, nothing radically good or even remotely decent will happen.
If a country ran a militarised and masked force with minimal oversight and accountability to harass, detain, and murder minorities and politically opposed citizens, that country would be internationally denounced, and sanctions would likely follow. So how come no state leader speaks out against ICE?
Trump's Greenland narrative is almost a 1:1 copy of Putin's Crimea narrative:
"It belonged to us in the past. Stupid leaders gave it away for no good reason. Now we want it back. We need it for our security. We need to protect it. It will be best for the people who live there."
I wrote about the irruption of ontological difference into the geological register by putting Heidegger and Deleuze together, running their differences through stratigraphy & Earth System Science, and asking what happens to difference when extinction removes the relationality we take for granted?
Instead of being a resource to be hoarded, sovereignty is the power to enter into relations: between persons and groups within a country, and with other states outside. This power is only as good as its deployment, it only works in motion, and it isn’t a fixed quantity but a dynamic force.
Yes! Nationalists misunderstand the nature of sovereignty. They treat it like a scarce resource to be hoarded, like gold for the mercantilists. After Brexit, the UK has hoarded all this sovereignty—to the detriment of GDP, influence, security, etc. It is swimming in sovereignty and losing in wealth.
International law died many deaths over the last 26 years: in Iraq, in Palestine, in Ukraine... Every time, people accepted it because the violations happened in “peripheral” places. And now, as it always does throughout history, the periphery has caught up with the center, and it looks grim.
If you say that Putin should get Crimea or Donbas, then you can't say that Trump shouldn't get Greenland. It's the same redrawing of borders by great powers at the expense of smaller neighbours. Normalizing the annexation of Crimea has paved the way for Trump's Greenland demands.
This is part of the problem: the EU is misrecognizing an ideology issue as a psychology question. Instead of working in a calculated manner to achieve a positive vision of itself in the world, the EU is always reacting to a chaos agent running a superpower. And thus, it is always behind and lagging.