Last month it was the Atlantic, where I pretended to know something about AI. This month it’s the MIT Reader, and the subject is The Imminent Collapse of Civilization. Honestly, I had no idea I was such an expert on so many things. This time, though, I’m not so much an expert as a foil. […]
Archive for In praise of biocide
22
Dec
2023
Bad COP
“We’ll go down in history as the first society that wouldn’t save itself because it wasn’t cost-effective.” — Donella H. Meadows (Or possibly Kurt Vonnegut) Well, what did you expect from a COP held in a fucking Petro State, a COP whose president explicitly denied that science justified a phase-out of fossil fuels, who in […]
15
Nov
2021
COP/out
“Governments should be afraid of their people”—Alan Moore It was our “last chance to act”, according to Sheldon Whitehouse of the Democratic Party. The “last best hope for the world”, according to John Kerry. Boris Johnson invoked James Bond doomsday machines, declared it “one minute to midnight”, and warned that “If we don’t act now […]
18
Jan
2021
The Viral Vasectomy: Covid’s Silver Lining.
“May we live long and die out.”—Motto of the Voluntary Extinction Movement We begin the new year with a glimmer of hope: Covid remains ascendant, and it might have ecological impacts far beyond what we first thought. I’m not talking about the obvious drop in carbon emissions. That was nothing, a mere blip: it didn’t […]
28
Apr
2020
Weird Al Yankovic and the Global Phase Shift
“We’re living by science and data, not our constitution.That’s wrong. We are not safe if we are not free.”—Darwin Award contender, protesting in Pennsylvania The target won’t stop moving. Not so long ago the WHO came out with a mortality rate of 3.4%; country specific rates span the range from almost 10% to virtually zero […]
11
Mar
2020
Revenge of the Pangolins
(Or, The Epidemiology of Understatement)
I’ll admit I didn’t really see it coming. I mean, sure: I’ve been harping on Dan Brooks’s epidemiological musings (and, as it turns out, those of the US DOD) for years now. I’ve written articles both magazine- and ‘crawl-based; ranted on panels from Sofia to Tel Aviv (and possibly Berlin, assuming international flights are still […]
22
Jan
2020
DeHumanize
Back before Christmas, Bakka-Phoenix hosted a launch for Sentient Tumor. In the course of that event—during the traditional Reading Of The Excerpts— I revisited a 2015 scenario in which gut flora reprogram the brain’s anger and image-recognition macros via the Vagus Nerve. People thus weaponized could be driven into a violent rage at the site […]
18
Jul
2018
Extinction and the Reset Button
I’ve just finished reading The Re-origin of Species, by Torill Kornfeldt (2016 in the original Swedish). The English translation is just barely out in Australia and the UK; here in North America it’s slated for a November release. (I scored an early copy from a publisher eager for blurbs.) Re-origin is about the burgeoning de-extinction— […]
27
Mar
2018
Riding the Tiger: or, Flirting with the Antivaxxers.
[PreProda: Yeah, after some really enlightening discussion in the Comments section, I’m walking back about 90% of this post. But I’m leaving it posted both because the comments are so interesting, and as a kind of historical artefact to remind me of what happens when I don’t take the time to think things through.] [Proda: […]
07
Dec
2017
Denying Dystopia: The Hope Police in Fact and Fiction
I recently read Terri Favro’s upcoming book on the history and future of robotics, sent to me by a publisher hungry for blurbs. It’s a fun read— I had no trouble obliging them— but I couldn’t avoid an almost oppressive sense of— well, of optimism hanging over the whole thing. Favro states outright, for example, […]
