For $1 USD I will think about you for one minute. I will email you the time I start thinking, and the time I stop.

Parks, dog walking, landscaping, ponds. These are the pinpoints of our immediate experience with nature in cities, but far wider, deeper and messier urban ecologies form the skeleton of a sustainably habitable city. Human health is directly tied to those natural urban features and, in the age of the Anthropocene, it is crucial to foster urban ecosystems that are resilient to extreme climate events, slow environmental transformations and that can ultimately adapt to future climate in a stable way (Alberti 2013). The positive impact of nature on city dwellers is clear, from direct use to physical and mental health benefits to general ecosystem services (Wolf). Between air filtration, microclimate regulation, noise reduction, rainwater drainage, sewage treatment, and recreational and cultural uses (Bolund and Hanhammar 1999, Tratalos et al. 2007, Pataki et al. 2011…), nature is incontrovertibly beneficial for cities. However, inviting nature into the city opens political, economic and social debates on implementation, maintenance and basic interactions between nature and urban societies. Moving beyond parks as familiar expressions of urban nature, how might we achieve a truly vibrant urban biome?

The crux of the challenge is the difficulty of valuing ‘nature,’ – without a price tag, it cannot be sold or purchased. Natural elements are expensive to create and maintain and cities with deficits are wary of the vague benefits, particularly when a global agenda of “smartification” is driving global public investment. So-called smart city solutions can be quantified – Intel estimates that Internet of Things alone will see 3.5 trillion dollars-a-year in business, while McKinsey estimates smart urban systems at 400 billion dollars-a-year by 2020 – with impacts in employment, IP, urban services and more. ‘Adding up trees,’ on the other hand, relies on complicated methods like proxies, hedonic pricing, or willingness-to-accept. Valuation of ecosystem services opens a can of ethically debatable worms surrounding the relationship between man and nature – how do you assign a monetary value to the knowledge that there are penguins in Antarctica, or to the splendor of a Grand Canyon sunset (Chee 2004, Wallace 2007,Fisher et al.)? The (in)tangible value of ecosystem services provided by nature ultimately justifies funding eco-initiatives, but cannot be logged into a spreadsheet.

Without a robust cost-benefit analysis, green initiatives often settle for the lowest (justifiable) denominator: one-size-fits-all greenspace policies that sacrifice ecologies of diversity for economies of scale—concrete and cost-effective. From an implementation standpoint, this means a single kind of tree planted many times over, such as the ash trees planted on roadsides throughout the US. What was justified as “beautification” quickly became a regrettable lack of diversity that facilitated the propagation of the emerald ash-borer, an invasive insect that has since stripped streets bare in over 20 states and continues to spread (Herms and McCullough 2013) (see map below of EAB detection risk for 2014).

Current programs for urban nature involve plants (technically “nature”), but they cannot last; far from solving urban problems, ‘band-aid greenspace’ introduces unbalanced and fragile biomes, as in the case of America’s ash trees. While less economically efficient in the short run, greater planting diversity can promote adaptation and renders urban biomes more resilient (Raupp et al. 2012).

Far from manicured urban parks, diverse and resilient nature is messy, muddy and often unattractive. Architect and urbanist David Gissen has put forward a polemic reconception of ‘urban other’ or ‘subnatures’: the dust, insects, pigeons, mud, waste, and sewage that architecture has traditionally exteriorized. These material flows are actually some of the largest natural systems in the city, and may underpin viable ecologies. In this view, the common distinction between habitable space and environment becomes irrelevant, effectively neutralizing such ideas as ‘throwing away trash.’ Here and away are merged. Gissen “challenge[s] the instrumental value to which nature tends to be relegated in the contemporary city, from the docile greenways of landscape urbanism to the green-washed facades of eco- cities,” (Harrison). If our goal is a sustainably viable urban ecology we must discard the values we assign natural elements.

We cannot wait for the government to deliver nature, as if it were a metropolitan utility (see Trames Vertes et Bleues below). The current paradigm of top-down initiatives for expensive but ecologically impotent natural infrastructure must be inverted: to achieve high-value, low-cost and diverse solutions, infrastructure must be non-physical and realized in a distributed way.

Not physical infrastructure, but digital. Not nature delivered, but nurtured.

We propose a new model for urban ecologies. One that takes shape as a dynamic map of existing diversity, opportunities for enhancement – for example, the connectivity of green spaces – and is based on an overarching model for diversity: a projective urban ecology.

Ecologists have a knowledge of the possibilities for urban-nature function, based on diversity, while citizens themselves have the capacity and the willpower to get their hands dirty. Government is uniquely qualified to serve as a mediator between them, laying down the digital framework and setting the tempo of a diverse urban biome. A participatory digital platform breaks from the prescriptive model of ‘utility services’ with an atomized implementation model. In a strong joint venture, government-directed platforms will leverage the power of the crowd to take urban nature from the community garden to the digitally-enabled urban biome. The platform organizes, the citizenry activates.

The process is relevant to biologists and ecologists, but also landscape designers, politicians, architects, transportation officials, and others. The platform will bring together a wide spectrum of experts to set overarching guidelines (essentially, what is native and what works) that frame the participatory and self-sustaining nature-ifying process.

Linux proved the power of the crowd to create software; the next challenge for a globally active community will be to create greenware. In order to thrive, urban natures need diversity, active engagement, and flexibility – exactly the strength of the crowd. Natural ecology must go hand in hand with digital ecology. The seductive aspects of the digital experience – ‘curating’ your online presence – are grafted onto physical locations, hybridizing material and virtual activity. The digital mediates between individual experience and place, and facilitates meshing urban identity with ecology.

This proposed model goes beyond ecological resilience, toward a form of social resilience and sustainability, through a reexamined relationship between citizen and urban environment, building on the success of participative platforms like SeeClickFix and other 311-style apps. In much the same way, citizens reap the benefits directly – both tangible, such as food, and intangible, such as clean air. Furthermore, because the physical implementation is individualized, people feel a stronger personal connection to their environment and a sense of responsibility and ownership.

The projective ecological map can even become a platform for research: the model generates a new kind of ‘big data’: real-time monitoring of ecological diversity as indicator of resilience re-inputted into the map. Building on projects like the Senseable City Lab’s bacteria-based mapping of the city biome by deploying sensors in the sewer system, we might gauge health in the city as well as the status of the flore microbienne – after all, a healthy ecosystem is diverse from megafauna down to its bacteria. This kind of distributed sensing can happen through objective sensors (such as bacteria in sewers) and subjective response (community feedback regarding their individual quadrant of green space). As citizens participate, the platform shows how they value their physical surroundings (both natural and artificial), what natural elements will be most enjoyable, and most importantly, the nature of the interaction between the city and its natural ecology – something that is not yet completely understood.

This government-mediated/citizen-actuated model lays the foundation for future auto-suffisance of natural systems in the urban environment. It is conceivable that this model, as it increases in participation and complexity and effectively ‘learns-by-doing,’ might usher in an independently flourishing urban biome. Meaningful smart city solutions are less about cohesive ‘city-as-computer’ solutions, and more about hybrid platforms that span two axes: bottom-up / top-down and digital / physical. The map of projective ecology that we propose will span those dimensions in a meaningful, resilient and evolutive way. Most importantly, this model is completely feasible today – it asks for more silicon than concrete infrastructure, more investment of time and energy than money. As the process gains traction, citizens not only depend on the city, but the city depends on its citizens, sparking a new metropolitics of urban ecology.

ECOCORE: How and why did the Cornwall Alliance begin?

Cornwall Alliance: One of the points in the Cornwall Alliance Agenda was that the government is given too much authority. However, some of that authority should be used to empower the poor by allowing them more economic opportunities. As Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto has pointed out in his book The Mystery of Capital, one of the most important steps toward empowering the poor is recognizing, protecting, and legally documenting property rights, so that property can become capital available for entrepreneurial investment. Other important institutional factors empowering the poor are the rule of law, limited government, free trade, and minimizing the regulatory steps needed to start and operate a business. For further information about this, see that book and de Soto’s The Other Path: The Invisible Revolution in the Third World, or Deepak Lal’s Poverty and Progress: Realities and Myths about Global Poverty.

Ecocore: Would you identify as christian libertarian?

CA: A Christian, yes—an orthodox Protestant Reformed Evangelical Christian. A libertarian, no—rather, a Classical Liberal on economic policy.

Ecocore: How does a faith-based institution promote environmental stewardship globally?

CA: None can provide it globally. We must all act locally, recognizing our limitations. We can have wider influence, though, through educational efforts, such as the Cornwall Alliance’s and presence in social media such as Facebook and Twitter.

Ecocore: Why do you think climate change is a conspiracy orchestrated by “radical environmentalists”?

CA: I don’t think of it as a conspiracy, and radical environmentalists aren’t the only ones who embrace the idea of dangerous, manmade global warming—many others do, too. That some people who embrace it are motivated in that direction in part by their political desires is clear enough from the evidence, e.g., Dr. Mike Hulme, former Professor of Climate Change at the University of East Anglia and a founder of the Climatic Research Unit there, who has been extremely influential within the IPCC. He repeatedly expressed in his book Why We Disagree About Climate Change, that climate change provides a rationale for pursuing the replacement of capitalism with more socialistic structures for international and national economic order.

Ecocore: What do you think of other Christian organisations who identify as environmental activists?

CA: I’m grateful that they’re paying attention to the subject and would agree with them that we need to be good stewards of the earth, not abusing it but, as I would put it, enhancing its fruitfulness, beauty, and safety, for the glory of God and the benefit of our neighbors. On some specific issues we would differ in our understanding of the scientific evidence as to the presence and relative severities of problems and of the economic and political means of addressing them. Those need individual discussion.

A Climate Change dinner organized by the Cornwall Alliance.

CA: I don’t think consumerist culture helps the poor or the environment and generally find the term consumerism to be pejorative and prejudicial, not promoting civil and rational discourse. Economic progress—raising people out of severe poverty—does. A clean, healthful, beautiful environment is a costly good, and wealthy people afford more costly goods than poor people. When you’re worried about putting food on the table, clothes on your back, and a roof over your head, you can’t allocate much to preventing deforestation, smog, water pollution, and the like. When one is able to procure adequate food, clothing shelter, education, health care, transportation, etc., then one has the opportunity to allocate resources to restoring and protecting the natural environment.

Ecocore: Cornwall Alliance supports certain genetically modified organisms and the use of pesticides. How does this coincide with your religious views?

CA: There is no such thing as a risk-free activity: the odds of an American’s dying from a fall in the bathtub are higher than from a coal mining accident. We consider that the benefits derived from some GMOs and pesticides, prudently used, exceed the risks.

Ecocore: The Agenda states that investment in property ownership is a priority, could you explain why that is important?

CA: One has a natural incentive to take good care of what one owns; far less to take care of what one does not own (as many economists put it, nobody washes a rented car, and we find more graffiti on public bathroom walls than on the walls of our bathrooms at home.) Further, property ownership is critical to entrepreneurship, which is critical to overcoming poverty, which is critical to enhancing environmental quality.

A fundamental principle underlying our Agenda is “the encouragement of individuals to serve one another in ways that will unleash the power of the human spirit and contribute to reversing the results of past disobedience that started in the Garden of Eden (Genesis 3).”

Additionally, the Agenda attributes much environmental devastation to this disobedience. How does the conscious desire to “reverse the results” inform the Cornwall Alliances’ belief in economic development and human freedom? We recognize that human sin results in many different problems, from the breakdown of families to oppressive governments to wars and crimes, etc. Among those problems are various abuses of our natural surroundings. Correcting those problems is a costly endeavor, and both responsible human freedom (within the bounds of God’s moral law summarized in the Ten Commandments) and economic development (which rests in large part on human freedom) enable people to afford that cost.

Ecocore: The Cornwall Alliance supports local businesses and entrepreneurial initiatives within poorer communities. What role should wealthier communities play to support these communities in their efforts?

CA: Charitable giving is important and is most effective when it is privately conducted and non-patronizing (see Steve Corbett and Brian Fikkert’s When Helping Hurts: How to Alleviate Poverty Without Hurting the Poor … and Yourself) and avoids the corruption so common in developing-world governments (about which see, e.g., Dambisa Moyo’s Dead Aid: Why Aid Is Not Working and How There Is a Better Way for Africa). But for actually raising large numbers of people out of poverty, by far the most important elements are free trade—including the abolition of trade barriers that protect businesses in wealthy countries from competition by businesses in poorer countries—and capital investment in developing countries.

Ecocore: How does Cornwall Alliance envision the future?

CA: The Cornwall Alliance for the Stewardship of Creation aspires to a safe, abundant, beautiful world in which:

• human beings, reconciled to God by grace through faith in Jesus Christ, care wisely and humbly for all creatures, first and foremost for their fellow human beings, recognizing their proper place in the created order;
• objective moral principles—not personal prejudices—guide moral action;
• right reason (including sound theology and the careful use of scientific methods) guides the stewardship of human and ecological relationships;
• liberty as a condition of moral action is preferred over government-initiated management of the environment as a means to common goals;
• the relationships between stewardship and private property are fully appreciated, allowing people’s natural incentive to care for their own property to reduce the need for collective ownership and control of resources and enterprises, and in which collective action, when deemed necessary, takes place at the most local level possible;
• widespread economic freedom—which is integral to private, market economies—makes sound ecological stewardship available to ever greater numbers; and
• advances in agriculture, industry, and commerce not only minimize pollution and transform most waste products into efficiently used resources but also improve the material conditions of life for people everywhere.

We would like to challenge you to the 10 books that have become the most fundamental to the Cornwall Alliance. As always, some outstanding books were left out.

1. The Bible

2. E. Calvin Beisner, Where Garden Meets Wilderness: Evangelical Entry into the Environmental Debate

3. Paul Driessen, Eco-Imperialism: Green Power, Black Death

4. Indur M. Goklany, The Improving State of the World: Why We’re Living Longer, Healthier, More Comfortable Lives on a Cleaner Planet

5. Bjørn Lomborg, The Skeptical Environmentalist and (ed.) Solutions for the World’s Biggest Problems

6. Robert H. Nelson, The New Holy Wars: Economic Religion vs. Environmental Religion in Contemporary America

7. Nongovernmental International Panel on Climate Change, Climate Change Reconsidered II, volume 1, Physical Science, volume 2, Biological Impacts

8. Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton, The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy

9. Julian L. Simon, The Ultimate Resource 2 and (ed.) The State of Humanity

10. Bron Taylor, Dark Green Religion: Nature Spirituality and the Planetary Future

A Brief History of the Cornwall Alliance in Highlights

March, 2000: The Interfaith Council on Environmental Stewardship first published The Cornwall Declaration on Environmental Stewardship, which 1,500 religious leaders from around the world and many laymen quickly endorsed.

August, 2005: We began as The Interfaith Stewardship Alliance, adopting The CornwallDeclaration on Environmental Stewardship as our founding document.

November, 2005: We published our first major study, An Examination of the Scientific, Ethical, and Theological Implications of Climate Change Policy.

January, 2011: We published our first book, James Wanliss’s Resisting the Green Dragon: Dominion, Not Death.

July, 2012: To help evangelicals on many battlefronts to labor more strategically and effectively to reassert the sanctity of human life and sexuality, the beauty and centrality of marriage, the goodness of human multiplication, and the dignity of human work and godly dominion over the Earth, we launched our most ambitious initiative to date, In His Image, a multi-year effort to educate evangelicals about the integrally related threats, arising from the denial of the doctrines of Genesis 1:27–28.
Throughout this time, we have published articles in newspapers, magazines, and online sites, and been frequent guests on radio and television talk shows across the United States and around the world;provided helpful answers to individuals’ questions about the theology, ethics, science, and economics of environment and energy policy and economic development for the poor; done research to stay abreast of current developments.

The Vatican installs solar panels in an effort to be more green.

ECOCORE interviews Dr. Isabel Carter, Chair of Operation Noah with inputs from Bishop David Atkinson, theological team leader, and trustees Ruth Jarman and Nicky Bull.

ECOCORE: How and why did Operation Noah start?

Operation Noah: ON began in 2004 as an offshoot of the Christian Ecology Link. It was felt there was a real need for an ecumenical Christian organization to be able to focus on awareness-raising and campaigning around issues relating to climate change.

Ecocore: Can you tell us more about your many initiatives towards what you have called “low-carbon Christian living”, like Reclaim Christmas, Carbon Exodus and Oil Fast?

ON: Full details of all these are on our website, operationnoah.org ‘Reclaim Christmas’ seeks to help people cut through the consumer excess that surrounds Christmas and focus on what it is really about – a celebration of our Savior born into poverty as a refugee. ‘Carbon Exodus’ helps people to assess their carbon footprint and lifestyles to reduce their impact on this fragile earth. ‘Oil fast’ encouraged people to see if they can live for a day or more without carbon-based products. All our initiatives or campaigns provide our supporters with fresh ideas for awareness-raising and taking action within the churches. We back these up with bible studies for use in sermons or bible study discussion groups.

Ecocore: How do you see yourselves in contrast to the secular positions addressing climate change and environmental activism?

ON: Our focus is essentially to follow Jesus’ commandment to love our neighbors as ourselves – in that our neighbors are also global, and span future generations. Those whose lives will be impacted most by climate change are ‘the poor’; those least able to cope, to adapt and to recover from its impacts.
“Christians understand God’s relation to creation in three ways. ¬†All reality comes from God the Father; the flourishing of the earth and its future are foundational to the mission of God (and therefore to the Church’s mission). ¬†God embraces material reality in Jesus in whom all things hold together (Colossians 1:17).”

Ecocore: And what do you think about the many Christian organisations who deny climate change or do propaganda to cast a light of conspiracy upon environmental activism?

ON: Totally baffled – but we accept well-researched and peer reviewed scientific fact as just that – fact and don’t feel we have a choice about responding. Jesus wept over those who rejected his message and ignored the prophets. Climate scientists (many of them Christians) are among today’s prophets.

Ecocore: Do you think global warming is not part of God’s unfathomable plan?

ON: No definitely not – this kind of argument is a ‘cop out’. We have been given freewill – do we regard murder, genocide, cancer, and cyclones as part of God’s plan? We have God-given responsibilities towards the poor, towards our neighbors, and as stewards of God’s creation. All of these responsibilities come together in responding to the urgency of climate change.

Ecocore: It is very interesting that you pair your campaigning and activist work to a commitment to theological speculation around nature, environmentalism and ecology. What are the biggest theological challenges posed by climate change?

ON: Among the theological issues raised by climate change (N.B not just ‘global warming’) are the following (and all these are spiritual or theological questions):

• Our human relationship to the rest of creation: are we masters of nature, or at the mercy of nature, or are we, with all creation, dependent on God and interdependent with each other, and yet with a particular human responsibility under God to care for the earth which is the Lord’s?
• How much trust do we place in technology and the assumption of unlimited economic growth?
• What are the responsibilities of the present generation towards those who follow?
• What are our moral responsibilities to the poorest and most disadvantaged communities, who have done least to contribute to climate change and are least able to adapt?
• What responsibility do we have for husbanding earth’s scarce resources?
• Are we capable of the international cooperation that is needed, or are sin and selfishness too much part of the picture?
• How do we handle our fears and vulnerabilities?

Ecocore: In your “Declaration”, you state that despite the strong probability of very serious effects from global warming, despair is not an option for Christians. In what ways do you advise Christians to strengthen their hope in the face of this worsening crisis? Does this apply to non-christians?

ON: Hope is not blind optimism that everything will be OK. Hope is trust in the loving faithfulness of God that this is God’s world and God is working out his purposes of grace. That does not take away our responsibilities to work for the coming of God’s kingdom- rather it should motivate us towards transformative action.

Ecocore: Within the Climate Science Briefing for Christians, Operation Noah encourages Christian commitment to justice. This justice involves adaptation necessitated by climate change. What is the connection between social injustice and climate change for you?

ON: See 3 above. How can we love our neighbours if we ignore the impact on their livelihoods and future well-being that climate change brings (rising sea levels, drought, flooding, mudslides or the increasing severity of cyclones).

Ecocore: How does Operation Noah envision the future?

ON: Our trustees and staff believe that the ‘window’ for global action is passing – we are very close to reaching the point at which mitigation of climate change will be too late – and all we can do will be to adapt to climate change and the potential tipping points that may be triggered. Such urgency drives us on to do all we can while we can.

Ecocore: What are 10 fundamental books for Operation Noah?

ON: 1. Mark Lynas, The God Species (Fourth Estate, 2012)

2. Michael Northcott, A Moral Climate (Darton, Longman & Todd, 2007)

3. Michael Northcott, A Political Theology of Climate Change (SPCK, 2014)

4. Alastair McKintosh, Hell and High Water (Birlinn, 2008)

5. George Marshall, Carbon Detox (Octopus, 2007)

6. David Atkinson, Renewing the Face of the Earth (Canterbury Press, 2008)

7. Nicola L. Bull & Mark McAllister, Sustainable Faith: A green gospel for the age of climate change (Lulu, 2014)

8. Dave Bookless, Planetwise (IVP, 2008)

9. Ruth Valerio, ‘L’ is for Lifestyle (IVP, 2008)

10. Martin J. Hodson & Margot R. Hodson, Cherishing the Earth: How to care for God’s creation (Monarch, 2008)

A Brief History of Operation Noah in Highlights

2004: Operation Noah is founded
Since its launch in 2004, Operation Noah has worked in many ways to raise awareness of climate change and to equip Christians to take a stand on this vital issue. These are some of our past achievements.

Theology
For our annual lecture in 2009, the then Archbishop of Canterbury, Dr Rowan Williams, spoke on ‘The Climate Crisis: A Christian response’.

In 2012, our theology think-tank produced the Ash Wednesday Declaration, a theological basis for a Christian response to climate change.

Campaigns
From 2008 – 2009 Operation Noah’s ARK campaign events around the UK brought together churches and other faith groups, local schools, local authorities and campaigning organizations including WWF, Oxfam and Christian Aid. As a symbolic step towards low-carbon Christian living, we launched our Reclaim Christmas campaign in the autumn of 2008.

In 2010 a further project encouraging radical lifestyle changes was the Carbon Exodus and associated Oil Fast initiative. Operation Noah took part in a joint campaign in 2013 to lobby for reforms on the UK government’s Energy Bill.

Prayer
Operation Noah worked in partnership with other Christian agencies in organizing the very successful ecumenical Wave Service in December 2009. In subsequent years we joined forces with Christian Ecology Link to organize ecumenical climate services to support the Campaign against Climate Change national demonstrations.

Communication
In 2012 we commissioned Christian comedian Paul Kerensa to write a stand-up comedy routine about climate change. He performed his climate change set to a full tent at the Greenbelt festival that year.

Education and young people
Outreach work between 2006 and 2009 included visits to around 25 schools around the country, reaching 3,500 young people. We also wrote a play about climate change for young people to perform.

The Catholic church also speaks out about ecology: Pope Francis opposes fracking.

Some actually provided shipping and travel data (Artists Space and Grand Century), some found the topic interesting (New Museum, Serpentine Galleries) but were too busy unpacking crates, and others didn’t seem to care (David Zwirner, PACE).

Can artists and curators save the world?
If the art object is increasingly a commodity, does its value increase once it is carbon neutral? Do we need an ecological certification for art, from LEED (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Design) to LEEA (Leadership in Energy & Environmental Art)? Read the paintball gun reviews If art is an industry should it be held as accountable as the building and manufacturing industries are (at least in theory)? Should museums, galleries and other art institutions offset their carbon footprint?

Data from Artists Space, New York City:

Living with Pop. A Reproduction of Capitalist Realism

Five crates shipped from Dusseldorf, one from Berlin:
115 x 50 x 117 cm – 112 kg (Düsseldorf)
225 x 62 x 214 cm – 267 kg (Düsseldorf)
225 x 71 x 214 cm – 282 kg (Düsseldorf)
200 x 95 x 88 cm – 110 kg (Düsseldorf)
200 x 95 x 88 cm – 105 kg (Düsseldorf)
148 x 73 x 112 cm – 153 kg (Berlin)

Carbon Footprint = 0.0449 tonnes of CO2e

Carbon Footprint of a return flight New York – Dusseldorf = 0.96 tonnes of CO2e

Sam Pultizer, A Colony for “Them”

All shipping within NY:
Transportation of six “greeting card” works from fabricator (located in Brooklyn) to Artists Space by truck.
Delivery of various small antique materials from locations mainly in upstate New York, usually by UPS with some collected/ delivered by hand.

Carbon Footprint = 0.0008 tonnes of CO2e
Carbon Footprint of a truck trip to Brooklyn, NY = 0.0002 tonnes of CO2e

Data from Grand Century, New York City:

RRBGGGRWW (polysemes), curated by Franklin Melendez

All shipping within NY

Carbon Footprint = 0.0003 tonnes of CO2e
Carbon Footprint of a car trip to Brooklyn, NY = 0.0001 tonnes of CO2e

Santal 26 / 33, curated by Tara Downs

All shipping within NY, mostly delivered by hand within Chinatown, NYC

Carbon Footprint = 0.0001 tonnes of CO2e
Carbon Footprint of a walk within Chinatown, NY = 0.0000 tonnes of CO2e

Artist Kimmo Modig responds to the data on the left in an e-mail:

In a few performances of mine, I’ve told the audience that there’s no need for me to be here, the performance could be done by anyone here. And when i attended a group show at insitu gallery berlin, I wrote a text for them telling why I didn’t want to fly over to do my card-reading performance. This is also tied to this idea of not buying into the dream of the global art world, but doing your work more locally (local as in both online & irl). As a strategy, it’s as old as dematerialization.

Cutting our consumption down drastically is supposedly the best way to fight climate change. This is something I learned during a two-day symposium, titled “I, Consumer. Shopping, the Climate, and Us”, which was held last month in Riga, Latvia. “If you’re a cynic, what’s the point in staying alive”, someone told me during the closing dinner. Although the future is looking extremely grim, not even believing that we can create change seems to render life meaningless.

Change is not really something I think about as an artist. I’m curiously at ease with spending my day thinking such things as whether bringing up my stepfather’s gambling habit would spark up my upcoming performance lecture or not.

I have a deep belief in art that doesn’t want to be anything in particular. That’s why I find it increasingly hard to tell myself to get on that plane, to demand more, to buy that Canon 5D, and so on. Maybe it’s a lack of belief in my own work, depression, or white liberal guilt. Or maybe I’m fucking right about this one.

When Alessandro contacted me about art world’s CO2 emissions, I realized this topic touches something in the core of my rustic art philosophy. Since art’s value cannot be traced back to anything in particular, it would be bizarre to claim that art requires certain material conditions to happen. Say, I use cement and LED screens for my installation, or book a flight to Berlin to make it happen. Those are choices I make, and I choose whatever happens to please me.

The other side of this is that people get scared of artists and think they have to make all of their demands come true. It’s fear confused for respect. Nobody dares to say no to a famous artist demanding to have 40 dancers working for slave wages, because a “no” might break art’s magic, and your career. “Let’s just get them that what they fancy” is the scared producer’s mantra. This is consumerism as ritual sacrifice: better go and buy that coke.

If artists and curators want to diminish their professional carbon footprint, where would one begin? How to decide what’s important and what’s just a bad art habit? Is flying to an art fair more or less meaningful than flying to a residency?

Counting numbers doesn’t feel like the way forward. I was looking at the data provided kindly by Artists Space and Grand Century, and I simply can’t see them as a waste of anything, really.

On the other hand, you could figure out what the materials and their source of origins tell about an art work. I’m thinking about Julian Bryan-Wilson’s book “Art Workers” and this brilliant chapter about Carl Andre. Bryan-Wilson shows us how Andre’s chosen materials, such as aluminum plates, were very hard to come by at the time (far from “found objects”), and how the companies making said materials (such as Dow Chemicals) were facing violent protests during the Vietnam era.

The works themselves are a small part of art’s carbon footprint (unless you’re Christo). Mostly, it’s the audience and professionals traveling around to see the shows. More and more, art is seen as part of tourism. Ask Helsinki why they want the Guggenheim museum to branch out there.

Most of us might feel that, instead of individual carbon balancing, a more dramatic change is needed. If consumerism really is the biggest problem, as I mentioned in the beginning, should we get rid of art market, then? Just like me, 99% of my colleagues are not selling, and will never do, so why not, lol.

Apart from actually buying stuff, there are also the images we consume. I’ve noticed myself shifting away from dogged brand endorsement, in terms of art I get excited about. I’d love to see the connection, be it ironic or sincere, between coolness and consumerism getting broken.

All data provided with the help of:
Chris Jones
Research Associate, CoolClimate Network – RAEL at UC Berkeley
*Calculations are an estimate and should be considered as a means of example.

ECOCORE and Kimmo Modig would like to thank:

Richard Birkett and Stefan Kalmar @ Artists Space
Olivia Erlanger, Dora Budor and Alex Mackin Dolan @ Grand Century
Participants at the “I, Consumer” symposium @ New Theatre Institute of Latvia
Tea Mäkipää

More about calculating your carbon footprint:

calculator.carbonfootprint.com
footprint.wwf.org.uk

Matteo Pasquinelli will be speaking at the Ultimate Capital is the Sun Symposium on the 26th of October, 2014 in Berlin.

Wietske Maas is an artist based in Amsterdam. In 2007, she started developing with Matteo Pasquinelli a project called urbanibalism. Urbanibalism explores the city as a complex site of digestions between humans, other life forms and non-organic matter.

The Seasteading argument:

1. We need a better legal system in order to increase freedom and efficiency.

2. The best way to find a better system is through diverse experimentation and competition.

3. One needs a location to make an experimental society.

4. All land is claimed by governments who won’t give up their land, yet 70% of the earth is covered by oceans.

6. In order to make experimental societies we must build competing floating city-states on the ocean.

Daniel Keller: Seasteading is a portmanteau of Sea and homesteading. It is the concept of building semi-permanent cities at sea, usually in international waters and armed with novel socioeconomic and legal systems. It’s sold as the optimal libertarian solution to the lack of innovation in government. Yet its essentially a fantasy escape plan for a permanent minority to circumvent a representative democracy, which is inherently unsympathetic to their devotion to tax evasion and secession.

Libertarians argue that the Federal government should consider itself a ‘public option’ provider of “citizen experience” in the governance industry, and open the market to competing options. Obviously no national government is going to let this happen within their borders, so the idea is that they might, for some reason, just go ahead and tolerate it as long as it takes place in international waters. So a seastead is seen as the only way to lower the barriers of entry to the “governance industry” which are insurmountably high in any sovereign (land-based) nation. These platforms would ideally be built modularly so that citizens or groups could merge and split off to form new seasteads in the constant search for their optimum-blend society. (Islands having sex with other islands, then divorcing them).

ExitCon, Martti Kalliala

Alessandro Bava: Since the 15th century, understanding the legal and political status of the sea has been a struggle. Political philosophers like Hugo Grotius and Carl Schmitt have produced, in very different times, theories to define the immense and fluctuating body of water in terms of power relations. The renewed interest in seasteading seems to reignite that struggle by trying to inhabit the voids left by contemporary regulations on the sea, in times of global political instability. Do you think the seasteading option is a form of new colonialism, and in a way interprets current frustration with traditional governance models?

Martti Kalliala: I don’t think the colonial lens necessarily sets a meaningful frame in which to understand seasteading – even though you could say it’s rooted in a narrative sequence beginning with Manifest Destiny (then hitting the Pacific Wall, and reopening the idea of the frontier via a literal application of Blue Ocean Strategy).

But yes, frustration and anxiety for sure re: broken governance systems that have been experienced across the political spectrum. There’s a whole lot to be said about the current, and to a certain degree generational, disposition towards “exit over voice.” The tendency to favor opting-out over staying in, to create new structures rather than improve what already exists, to build a startup instead of a tracked career in existing organizations – or to start a new country. Exitcore might then be the aesthetic limit of utopia.

DK: I agree that the narrative basis of seasteading could be seen as a literal extension of Manifest Destiny off of the California coast and into the Pacific and beyond. But as opposed to classic forms of colonialism there aren’t any people out there being directly displaced or subjugated—seasteading has all the excitement and potential of a frontier without the humanitarian guilt. When I asked Peter Thiel about his interest in seasteading at the DLD conference a few years ago he framed it exclusively as fulfilling an emotional need for new exploitable frontiers as a catalyst for innovation and economic growth—first the oceans and then space.

DK: A lot has already been written about the emerging ‘scramble for the North’. The Nordic countries, Canada, Russia and the USA are all jockeying for resources and access trade routes in the soon-to-be ice-free Arctic Ocean. In fact a lot of potential geopolitical hotspots involve access to the sea, most notably Russia’s annexation of Crimea which was primarily about maintaining control of its only southern naval base and access to the Black Sea or the dispute over the resources around the Spratly Islands in the S. China Sea which threaten to escalate into a regional war.

Moreover, it’s a common belief that wars over access to freshwater will be the 21st century equivalent of wars over oil. So one way or another wars this century will be fought on or for water.

Simon Denny, TEDxVADUZ REDUX at T293 gallery / Courtesy T293, Rome

AB: Is it untimely that such interest in the sea is “territorial” even in times when the biggest industries are non-territorial (i.e finance)?

MK: But the body is still territorial. And the banality and awkwardness of needing to deposit one’s physical body somewhere to be “free” is really fascinating: one would choose this total unfreedom and hardship that comes with living on an isolated platform in a corrosive, at times hostile ocean environment in exchange for a set of abstract, mainly negative freedoms. Culturally it’s a bizarre combination of settler machismo – battling the challenges of the life aquatic – and an almost autistic disregard for one’s physical environment – like whatever as long as there is soylent, hi-speed internet and a lax tax code.

DK: I think it’s a misconception that we’ve moved beyond the territorial. I think its similar to fantasies of the internet as immaterial when in fact it is an enormous, lumbering stack of physical infrastructure. This is also why I think people were so shocked by Russia’s territorial expansion into Ukraine— fighting for territory felt so retro. But even finance is super-territorial (not non-territorial). Enormous profits are derived from exploiting the differing ‘energy states’ between jurisdictions, through tax avoidance schemes like “the double irish” or the “dutch sandwich”, sort of comparable to a steam engine generating energy from thermal gradients. If the world was really post-territorial, this would no longer be possible. A uniform and post-territorial world would be akin to a state of maximum entropy.

AB: Martti how do you think seasteading is relevant in architecture, or rather how is architecture relevant to seasteading?!

MK: It’s pretty obvious how existing and historical architectural typologies of living and working could be applied in more intelligent and interesting ways compared to these naval engineer / archi-hobbyist designs that now circulate online.

More interesting is the fact that designing a seastead would mean collapsing spatial concepts such as country, city, neighborhood, territory, site and building into basically one architectural gesture. Or, at the other end of the spectrum, in a design where secession is possible down to the scale of an individual building or cell – a seastead as a kind of plankton raft of floating mini-steads – these concepts become almost meaningless.

AB: Daniel how has your interest in seasteading translated into your art practice. In general what’s the relationship between your research and your art-making?

DK: It’s always a bit difficult for me to translate my interest in something into an exhibition format intended for art world audiences (without veering into didactic illustration on the one hand or obscurant poetics on the other). But of course on an allegoric and visual level seasteading is so incredibly rich with potential that I think it is worth trying. In my exhibition ‘Lazy Ocean Drift’ last year at New Galerie in Paris (which was my first solo show post aids-3d) I tried to introduce a constellation of ideas around seasteading, offshore finance, labor automation, and ecological disaster in the form of sculpture, sound, installation and video.

I am working on a proposal for a follow-up exhibition in an institution in Germany where I will transform the space into a sort of site-specific immersive seastead simulator. The centerpiece of the proposal is a 7 channel video projection onto the windows of the space, which will display a real-time rendered seascape generated in a video game engine.

AB: Theres something beautiful about imagining the sea horizon as the only view from your future window…is that just romantic? Or is it a generational phenomenon that arises from the implication of false ideas of limitlessness in technology, and the actual physical and phenomenological limitation we experience everyday?

MK: If it’s romantic, the ocean-as-image is also culturally (and apparently also biologically) imprinted with a host of associations that have been successfully appropriated by financial capitalism. Just think of concepts such as liquidity, offshore, Blue Ocean Strategy etc. and the imagery they are typically associated with. This is of course something that Daniel has been looking at a lot in his practice.

DK: Yes, I think the appeal of this imagery really boils down to an almost ‘lizardbrain’ attraction to blue and green landscapes. By employing that sort of imagery to illustrate entirely artificial concepts like liquidity, it lends them a sense of naturalistic inevitability. I imagine liquidity ‘looks’ more like cubes on a conveyer belt than a splash of refreshing aquamarine mouthwash.

AB: For me ultimately the idea of seasteading conflicts with the idea of world order, meaning: imagining the coexistence of many tiny floating utopias where you can choose your preferred form of life seems totally nuts. That’s what happened in colonial america…and then the USA happened…

MK: Or you could consider seasteading as being a completely predictable glitch of that very world order – inhabiting its voids as you said earlier. If nature abhors a vacuum then human nature abhors any vacuum of governance. So pretty much every opportunity for jailbreak from so-called Westphalian state space, which is the foundation of our current world order, has been ruthlessly exploited in the form of thousands of extra-state, extra-legal real and virtual spaces covering our globe – from special economic zones to offshore finance to Guantanamo. Seasteading is just a tiny sub-narrative of this rearranging and relayering of sovereign space. In itself I doubt it could pose an existential threat to this so-called world order, but it doesn’t claim to be one.

AD: How do you imagine your island?

MK: I think the neo-Victorian New Atlantis from Neal Stephenson’s Diamond Age mixed with Leon Krier’s Atlantis would offer an attractive USP.

DK: I imagine a real seastead to be an incredibly depressing unabomber style man cave. A barnacle-pocked corroding metal platform, littered with semen-encrusted socks, stockpiled food in filthy barrels and broken algae bioreactors; the water surrounded by floating plastic garbage.

Daniel Keller, Lazy Ocean Drift at New Galerie / Courtesy New Galerie, Paris

AB: In 2012 I did a project for a seasteding island off the shore of Naples, Italy. The idea was to create a free trade zone in the sea, operated by the Italian government, which would benefit from a new neighborhood. The project was published online on the most read left wing newspaper, La Repubblica, and generated tons of negative responses… Why do you think seasteading has so many enemies?

MK: I’d presume it’s as unattractive as most libertarian ideas in general to the vast majority of people. That’s also part of the libertarian argument for it: people with a natural disposition for libertarian ideas will always remain a minority, hence a libertarian government can never get into power through the democratic process, hence seasteading.

In any case, funny that you mention the hostility towards your project as I just last week had the opposite experience. In 2008 I produced a rather well researched but completely preposterous project to construct an artificial island – a kind of SEZ-meets-TAZ “social laboratory” – in the Baltic Sea between Helsinki and Tallinn by using the excavated rock material of a potential railway tunnel dug between the two cities. I just got mail from the mayor’s office in Helsinki requesting the drawings as they would like to bring the idea back into discussion. Now I’m not sure if this is a good idea…

Daniel Keller, Lazy Ocean Drift at New Galerie / Courtesy New Galerie, Paris

DK: Yeah there is a huge disconnect between the idea of seasteading as a platform for experimenting with various forms of governance and the reality that the vast majority of people interested in pursuing it are orthodox libertarians who see some kind of anarcho capitalist libertarianism as the inevitable winner in a ‘fair fight’ between political systems. I really think that a belief in libertarianism is linked to a distinctive and relatively rare neurological type, and therefore will never convince the vast majority of people who tend towards a more altruistic and collectivized morality.

Daniel Keller, Lazy Ocean Drift at New Galerie / Courtesy New Galerie, Paris

AB: Martti recently you have rewritten Rem Koolhaas’ text ‘City of the Captive Globe,’ readapting it for seasteading, could you explain that connection?

MK: So the original text was an early hypothesis of the ‘theory of Manhattan’ written before Koolhaas’s seminal book Delirious New York. In it he abstracts Manhattan into its essential parts: a gridded archipelago in which each “science and mania” has its own plot. On each plot you have a base (platform) on top of which each philosophy can construct its own edifice, suspend unwelcome laws, facilitate speculative activity, etc. Here 1920’s Manhattan works as an ideological laboratory and an incubator of the world itself (the actual office and condo-filled Manhattan obviously failed to deliver on this hypothesis). Today of course the incubator is a startup incubator and the grid is the smooth unobstructed space of the ocean. So suddenly the text becomes the subconscious theory of seasteading…

While I understand the relative pragmatism of the Seasteading Institute – looking into solving the fundamental hard problems of settling in an ocean environment – which I’m sure is necessary for them to gain any mainstream acceptance, the potential of the seasteading imaginary is to a degree wasted on trying too hard to ‘make sense’ of it. It will probably never ‘make sense,’ and it shouldn’t. For it to be truly attractive I believe it ought to be explicitly charged with libido, excess, and insanity – essentially the unfulfilled promise of ‘Manhattanism’ as a kind of boiling aquaculture. So instead of the lock-in of the grid, a liquid substrate on which islands can copulate and produce mutant offspring, collapse, burn and rise again. And, why not resurrect seapunk as some kind of aesthetic practice of every day life?

Daniel Keller, Lazy Ocean Drift at New Galerie / Courtesy New Galerie, Paris

On December 11, Martti Kalliala is organizing a symposium in NYC about Seasteading, including new work by Daniel Keller:

ExitCon – a Symposium on the Formal Imaginary of Tech-Secessionism

Van Alen Institute
30 W. 22nd St
New York, NY

Noah thought that he was the only man alive who knew about rain. He thought he knew about it because God told him. Living, as he did, in a world where the dominant form of communication was talking to people in his immediate vicinity, he existed in a state of more or less complete unawareness of the rest of the world. He couldn’t imagine, for example, that the people of Mawsynram, in India’s Khasi Hills, would learn to live with nearly 12 metres of annual rainfall, or that the people living around the Meekong River would learn to thrive on the variety of rainfall that it’s drastic, often fatal, seasonal swelling and shrinking brought. He didn’t know it was likely that, elsewhere in the world, groups of people had developed strategies of migration, innovation and co-operation to survive, en-mass, extreme changes in the weather. So, when he realized it was going to rain a lot where he lived, he saved his family and some animals and left what he believed to be the rest of humankind to drown. Being on a direct line to God, he didn’t share his skills or his space on his ark. Instead, he assumed that it was up to him to start again and re-father the entire species. He was the original environmentalist-who-would-be-king.

Still from ‘Noah,’ by Darren Aronofsky

Still from ‘Noah,’ by Darren Aronofsky

In 1979, Ted Kaczynski, a.k.a the Unabomber, tried to blow up an airliner using a bomb he had made himself (with, among other things, bits of wood and branch he had foraged). By this point in history, people who were interested – as he was – in shepherding humanity away from environmental ruin had, for the most part, given up on attributing their thoughts and impulses to the voice of God. Kaczynski didn’t believe his knowledge to be God-given like Noah did, but like Noah, he thought himself to have a privileged understanding of some occulted environmental information that he alone could understand and act on to save humankind.

Police sketch of Ted Kaczynski

While he did have a bunch of mathematical knowledge that pretty much only he understood (when he was studying a PhD in geometric function theory he came out with a thesis that a professor on his committee described as being so complex that it was understandable by only 10 or 12 other people in the country), his opinions on the environment weren’t that different from those of various other environmental groups that were active at the same time as he was. Even in the 70s the environmentalists message was, ‘Seriously, this might be way more fucked than you think!’ He was just really, really disconnected.

Kaczynski was a terrorist in the pre-21st century sense of the word. He was an eco-terrorist before eco-terrorism was a concept in the public imagination, and at a time before the attacks of September 11 ushered in a governmental redefining of the term. Unlike the operatives of the Earth Liberation Front – who were tried and convicted for crimes in the mid-2000s, and who’s interest was in causing property damage and economic sabotage but avoiding harm to people at all costs – his interest was in blowing people’s hands off and, when possible, killing them.

Secluded in a cabin he had set up for himself outside of Lincoln, Montana, Kaczynski spent almost a couple of decades, starting in 1978, setting bombs and sending them out to people he perceived as worthy targets in his struggle against environmental destruction and technological advancement. He targeted computer scientists, geneticists, and PR executives who worked with environmentally damaging companies. In 1995, he promised to stop on the condition that the New York Times and the Washington Post ran his essay ‘Industrial Society and its Future‘ in full. In it, he said that ‘the industrial revolution and its consequences have been a disaster for the human race’, and outlined in-depth criticisms of more or less everyone else that might have come somewhere near to agreeing with him – all leftist groups, all scientists. Some of his ideas were bordering on sound, and worthy of discussion at least. Yet in his rejection of anyone with even the slightest difference of opinion to his own, and his rejection of developments in technology that could unite and integrate different ideas and strategies for survival, he outed himself as the ultimate factional activist. He was in a faction of one. He called for a revolution following a very specific set of guidelines, set out by him. That is to say, he single handedly tried to re-configure the way the entire species interacts with the planet. He came as close to attempting to become the new father of humanity as a person with an awareness of our species’ breadth and scale can come.

Julie Ault, reconstruction of the unabomber cabin

By the time Kaczynski got his essay published, a widespread environmental and anti-capitalist movement, entirely incidental to him, was swelling. In Newbury, in the North Wessex Downs of the UK, for example, thousands of people were coming together to try and protect a significant area of forest from being turned into a bypass road. People lived in tree camps and stood in the way of bulldozers and tractors, and became a national cause célèbre. Meanwhile, around Oregon and Northern California, thousands more took to old growth forests to slow the progress of industrial logging. A mass environmental resistance movement was forming – more urgent, connected, and incorporated than any movement like it before. (A 1996 news sheet compiled by the activists at Newbury for example describes financial sector executives, who had formed a group called ‘Business Against the Bypass’, turning up to protests in their Jaguars). On both sides of the atlantic, attempts to quell the protests served to open up mainstream discussions about the legitimacy of police and government force. As the image currency of the internet was beginning to gain pace, various images brought the movement mainstream sympathy and support: activists being dragged from trees, or crying heartbroken as they were felled, and videos of charming, peaceful, singing hippies so dedicated to their cause that they continued their sit-ins even as police swabbed pepper spray directly onto their eyes, .

Unabomber cabin window

Meanwhile, in the major cities of Europe and the US, mass international protests were staged to intervene in global conferences of the world bank, the G8 and the WMF, and demand new solutions: the biggest international protests of their kind in recorded history. The rallying slogan of an international day of protest in 1999 was ‘Our Resistance is as Transnational as Capital’. For the first time, the radical shifts in communication technology that were taking place were being used to create an incorporated, co-ordinated move towards an environmental and economic alternative. While a huge range of tactics, opinions, and factions were invoked, the message at the aesthetic level – arguably the level most important for communicating to those not involved – was that these events were massive. A significant mass of people were considering the possibility of something other than a continuation of a system that was leading the world into a state of emergency.

When the aesthetic of resistance became aggressive – as of course it did, on account of the fact that images of a Starbucks having its window smashed in are inherently more attention grabbing than images of ordinary people holding placards – the result wasn’t alienating. Instead, the idea of mass economic sabotage began to edge onto the borders of mainstream discussion. The accompanying images of government response – police firing tear gas and water cannons in Seattle and Washington, the Carabinieri shooting a man in the head and running him over in Genoa – served, in the image battle, to legitimize the grievances of the protestors. These events – the protests in the forests and cities – where people staged disobediences and broke laws they believed needed to be broken, were open, massive, and public. They created a dialogue that anyone could partake in – even when groups had entirely opposed ways of operating. By participating in the same events, and contributing to the same spectacle, they were putting aside minor, or even major differences to work towards something else. An approach to changing things which is essentially the opposite of terrorism, which involves as many people as possible. It suggests a least a possibility of co-operation and innovation.

And then there were the ‘eco-terrorists’. In 2005, John Lewis, then the FBI’s counter-terrorism deputy-assistant-director announced that ‘The No. 1 domestic terrorism threat is the eco-terrorism, animal-rights movement’. In describing what he meant by terrorism in this case he said ‘Extremists have used arson, bombings, theft, animal releases, vandalism and office takeovers to achieve their goals’. This was four years after 9/11, after pre-2001 terrorism – the kind that kills people – had completely changed the landscape of discontents in America and Europe overnight. It was also several years into a widespread disintegration of the mass environmental movement.

The actions Lewis was talking about, attributed to the Earth Liberation Front, were arsons and vandalisms that had happened at ski lodges, lumber mills, wild horse corrals, meat packing plants and SUV lots. Arsons by people frustrated by the slow pace of change caused by public actions. At the end of 2005 and the start of 2006, 13 of the environmental activists Lewis was describing were arrested and convicted on terror charges as part of the FBI’s ‘Operation Backfire’. One of them killed himself in police custody, many of the others faced life without parole until they took plea deals and served sentences of up to eight years in prison, with ‘terrorism enhancements’ on their sentences, which meant they were held in special Communication Management Units – purpose built prisons-within-prisons that severely limit any outside communication.

In his 2011 film ‘If a Tree Falls‘, Marshall Curry looks in much greater depth at the implications of calling the people prosecuted in Backfire as terrorists and speaks to several of them about their motivations. ‘They [Superior Lumber, the target of an arson],’ says Daniel McGowan, an activist sentenced to eight years in a CMU, in Curry’s film, ‘were logging old growth, they were logging some pretty inaccessible areas. Sometimes when you see people destroying things you love you just want to destroy those things [that are destroying them].’ Chelsea Dawn Gerlach, one of the other activists sentenced has elsewhere described ‘a deep sense of despair and anger at the deteriorating state of the global environment,’ as her driving force.

Still from ‘If A Tree Falls,’ by Marshall Curry

Newbury Bypass. Acivists prevent trees from being felled by sitting in them

These people emerge not as murderous psychopaths, like Noah and Kaczynski, but as people who had come to the conclusion that it was down to them and them alone – not an incorporated movement – to save the planet. They acted as they did under the belief that their despair was more urgent, that the rest of the world was not looking, that, like Noah and Kaczynski, they were seeing something that no one else was. And on a small, immediate scale they might have been temporarily effective – burning down a lumber mill certainly means that, for a time that mill will be out of action, and there will be a brief respite in logging in that area. They’re actions that probably feel immediate and seductive to those doing them: the thing is on fire right in front of you. It’s fast and splashy. But on a larger scale, these isolated actions worked against empathy, against co-operation, against a solution that anyone else could be involved in. They created an image for the movement that was suddenly secretive and elitist; one that most people couldn’t feel a part of any more. They were private actions that did not contribute to finding ways for the species as a whole to survive. ‘This is too much […] This is futile,’ McGowan says eventually, in Curry’s film. ‘There’ve got to be better ways of addressing what is going on in the world than just burning things down.’

These actions coincided with the disintegration of the wider environmental movement. Regardless of whether or not they count as real terrorism, they created a public spectacle that was terrifying and alienating, in a culture where even the mention of terror or violence was automatically associated to the opposite of freedom. ‘I think people were self righteous,’ says Tim Lewis, an activist in Marshall’s film. ‘I think people thought they had the answer, weren’t willing to listen to other points of view, because they’re view was more radical. All of those things came into play to help narrow the amount of people that were connected within the movement, to the point that it just went “poof”, doesn’t exist any more.’

For a while, people collectively forgot about the environmental cause. It fell out of fashion. Now, as has been documented elsewhere in the disaster issue, a mass environmental movement is emerging again, at the moment focussed on reform, but also on co-operation and wide scale involvement. The situation we’re facing environmentally now is different to that faced by Kaczynski, and by the activists in Curry’s film. Now we know it’s way bleaker and more urgent, similarly to the one faced by Noah. We’re living with the reality of impending, widespread and unavoidable environmental change. The only way to survive is to act as the opposite of Noah, Kaczynski, and the ‘eco-terrorists.’ That is, to incorporate and co-operate, fully and completely share information, knowledge and skills, and to spread empathy. To use the means we have to connect, to teach and learn from each other, and to share information and means of adapting, integrating and surviving.

by Philippe Morel

Approximative Man by Tristan Tzara

It must be acknowledged that there is little to distinguish between architecture and political vulgarity. Indeed, how could it be otherwise, since architecture includes common psychology? Ignorance, lazy ideology and the sum of personal interests take precedence over truth. Thus it comes as no surprise that the psychology that should in all reason interest the theorists of resistance, the subjectivists, the neo-Spinozist scholars, be they Deleuzian or otherwise, and most of those for whom original Marxist or positivist objectivity has not given sufficient thought to the individual, should be studied the least. This is because to deduce individual attitudes from the masses, or indeed the multitude, would show that the abstract theories so enjoyed by Western television shows have failed. That enjoyment and interest is actually shared by the philosophers they invite on their shows, which thus expose the vast distance between themselves and their models.³

Rebirth of idealism

Of the subjectivist theories, those linked to Operaismo are strongly favoured by architecture. Operaismo, simply put and in terms of theory of the multitude, appears to embody the rebirth of idealism, for several reasons. First, because of a lack of subjectivist radicalism – shared subjectivity is theorised in abstracto- which refers neither to the true power of the Ego nor to Wittgenstein’s Solipsism, which “rigorously developed, coincides with pure realism” ⁴. Then, because it is not avant-garde enough, insofar as “being avant-garde is being in tune with reality” ⁵. The theory of the multitude seems to be yet another political ideal in the moralist tradition that our experience has shown to be an utter failure. Like every generalisation, it ignores, on behalf of the group or multitude of individuals, that “individuals are thus made that they show their lives. What they are, therefore, coincides with their production; just as much as it does with the way they produce it”⁶. This omission is a problem, because behind the social abstraction termed “the creative and productive practices of the multitude”⁷ lurks a huge number of productions of varying quality. One does not become an opponent merely by belonging to the cognitive multitudes, as it is shown by part-time advertising industry employees. The knowledge used or produced must be for another purpose than merely a reform of capitalism, where everyone claims his due in terms of money. The knowledge used or produced must be for another reason than just reforming a capitalist system in which everyone expects to be paid his due. As Wittgenstein perfectly expressed in “Tell me how you are searching and I will tell you what you are searching”, you must make the “how” to produce more important than the product itself, thus developing a true “critique of money” that goes much further than the criticism of commodity itself ⁸, by basing production on laws other than that of competition, while ensuring at the same time that there are indeed laws.

Tapes of Konstantinos Doxiadis’ Fortran IV lecture series, given in 1969 at the University of California, Berkeley. Doxiadis, especially thanks to the Delos symposia, is one rare example of architect who went really deep into the understanding of technology. His writings are still providing highly valuable insights.

The book Men Minutes Money, published in 1934, presents a series of statements by Thomas. J. Watson, IBM Founder. Their main characteristics lie in an amazing anticipation of the importance of computational power (and therefore speed) in modern capitalism. An importance that one can acknowledge every day in the NTIC economy but also in every other domain, including the most traditional ones like finance, whose rules are fully redefined by the spectacular mathematization and computerization leading to high frequency trading.

Although many claim lofty anti-capitalist moral imperatives, the reality is much more mundane. So much so that most left-wing “resistant” theorists resemble Dühring or Rodbertus, who both forgot (as Engels and Marx pointed out in Anti-Dühring and in the preface to the first German edition of The Poverty of Philosophy), that their Utopia either worked on capitalist laws or did not work at all. It is the same with the economic context in which the cognitive multitudes work, for it cannot escape the laws of capital gains or the value-enhancing process just through abstract work. It is also the same for the collective intelligence, about which the only thing we can say is that it externalises production and (re-)training costs, since it is constantly being swallowed up by the market itself. Although the most optimistic hypotheses on the development of production argue that it is its scientific and social nature that brings richness for all while work as such is merely the accompaniment of automated production, in reality the work accomplished by all the multitudes is remunerated in traditional fashion and assessed in terms of its function in the capitalist system.

Philippe Morel, Computationalism Diagram.
This diagram is part of the theory of Computationalism I started to establish in 2000 until today

The first (and biggest) full map of South America at the scale 1:1 Millionth, opened the path towards large scale geomatics. In such maps, people could literally enter the space as one can do today on Google Map. Another common points is that this map was produced by a private institution, showing the shift from States owned maps towards corporations owned ones.

The problem of the knowledge economy is not, therefore, that of the knowledge valorisation circuit, which would boil down simply to the opposition between good and bad capitalism, but the more classic one of how to use knowledge as a whole. This is a recurrent issue that has been widely explored, showing the boundary between revolutionary and reformist thought. The main line of exploration was to compare the respective roles of science, arts, the scientists and the intellectuals in society. This line can be traced from Alberti to Ray Kurzweil and includes Rousseau, Babbage, Russell, Oppenheimer and Wiener. Alberti’s early work On the Advantages and Disadvantages of Letters – a book which revealed that he was much closer to Nietzsche than to a wise humanist – noted that “as of then (1430) all the sciences, all the liberal arts which had been the consecrated training of the soul, collapsed and became servile”. Moreover, those whose job was animal husbandry and cleaning stables began to discuss human fate; those who were supposed to be lashing the backs of animals found themselves instead holding a sceptre and sitting among magistrates”⁹. Rousseau, although demanding in his most polemical early work “what would we think of scribblers who indiscreetly open the door to science and introduced an unworthy populace into its sanctuary?¹⁰, adding that «[…] Our souls have become corrupted while our arts and sciences have reached perfection” and “the same phenomenon has been observed at every time and in all places”¹¹, considered that the encyclopaedists and the actual democratisation of knowledge were what should be combated because they had both taken Man from his natural state of innocence. Indeed Rousseau, unlike the neo-primitives that will be dealt with later, always presented this state as an analytical tool, a state that “perhaps never existed, which probably never will exist, and yet one that we need to understand in order to judge our current state properly”¹². Babbage, who opposed Rousseau’s radicalism which petered out in England before merging into the Pre-Raphaelite reaction¹³, thought that it was not knowledge that threatened the social structure but in fact its absence. He criticised first the lack of scientific knowledge among the aristocrats of the House of Lords, who “[…] hold high rank in a manufacturing country” and who “can scarcely be excused if they are entirely ignorant of principles, whose development has produced its greatness”¹⁴, and secondly the economists themselves, for their poor understanding of the fundamental links between the economy and knowledge and between pure and applied sciences, understanding which should be based on new data such as the “division of intellectual work”. For Russell and Oppenheimer, it was not so much the structure of industrial production itself that mattered as the relationship between this industry strongly reliant on science (and therefore rationalised) and ever-increasingly irrational and warmongering policy that was no less ignorant than that described by Alberti and Babbage. It was partly the same for Wiener who went into the relationships between science, technology, the civil society and structure of production and work. Wiener’s advice to the American trade unions at the time, who were very involved in classical political contestation, passed unnoticed. Finally Ray Kurzweil decided that it was Singularity, based on a “law of accelerating returns” and described as “fundamentally an economic theory” ¹⁵, that enables analysis of economic structures, like that described by Babbage in The Economy of machines, but transposed to the age of computation.

Philippe Morel , A.D. Wissner-Gross Diagram. “Recent advances in high-frequency financial trading have made light propagation delays between geographically separated exchanges relevant. Here we (A.D. Wissner-Gross and C. E. Freer) show that there exist optimal locations from which to coordinate the statistical arbitrage of pairs of spacelike separated securities, and calculate a representative map of such locations on Earth. Furthermore, trading local securities along chains of such intermediate locations results in a novel econophysical effect, in which the relativistic propagation of tradable information is effectively slowed or stopped by arbitrage.)The map shows Optimal intermediate trading node locations (small circles) for all pairs of 52 major securities exchanges (large Circles)”.

       

Philippe Morel, The Last Earth. A speculation (2000-today) associated with my theory of Integral Capitalism and Computationalism, which acknowledge the end of the city. This might sound counter intuitive or counter factual as more and more people are living in cities, but in fact these cities are not cities anymore. They are floating and drifting post-urban magma, constantly moving according to the economics forces. This post-urban scenario refers to the last spatial organisation that our earth will see.

If I refer to these authors who, apart from Rousseau, are not just philosophers and theorists but also scientists of uncontested merit, and although great scientific achievements do not confer moral authority, as Rousseau rightly observed when qualifying as “ridiculous” the philosophy of mathematical genius Leibnitz, they do give an idea of how to understand science: above all, it is that any political theory calling itself a revolutionary theory of resistance must first be completely based on fully-understood economic mechanisms. This is the understanding Marx acquired from his vast research, either original or borrowed from Babbage, for instance¹⁶, into science and industrial production. The Neo-operaismo literature is far from being so well-informed. Marx said that such research would at the very least turn us from politics to political economy. Just as for Ruskin visiting the ruins of the Middle Ages and making their non-restoration his petit-bourgeois political combat, while Babbage was visiting A. von Humboldt, Gauss or Berzelius and European factories, it is the very absence of explanation that gives charm to current political literature. As Anselm Jappe and Robert Kurz noted in what is currently the most acerbic criticism of Neo-operaismo and its most famous representatives Antonio Negri and Michael Hardt, “the authors of Empire do not wish to bore their readers with criticism of political economy. There are much more exciting topics. The only thing that interests them is whether PCs has given birth to a new revolutionary subjectivity, and thus whether there will be a new successor to the old working class as a subject ontologically opposed to capital.”¹⁷

Philippe Morel , Konrad Zuse Diagram. Konrad Zuse, one of the fathers of programming languages and computing (including spatial computing) established a set of relationships between fundamental physics, mathematics and computation. At some point he really opened a new conceptual era in computer sciences, leading to the contemporary research in non standard computation, including quantum computing.

It is true that we are not bored by the critics of political economy, but on the other hand we are not convinced by the multitudes as a revolutionary subject or by the supposed separation of their production from capital, a fact that has still not been subjected to a theoretical demonstration. In fact, the problem with most of the current theories on political resistance is that on the basis of a partially accurate diagnosis – due for example to the highly integrated and computerized nature of the economy, the profoundly reactionary and repressive warmongering policy of the western powers and the extraterritorial nature of some of them – both the prognosis and the cure appear to stem from the utopian pre- or post-Marxist socialism that we thought had disappeared. It is widely viewed that the idealism of the great majority of Neo-operaismo is identical, a century and a half later, to that of the Pre-Raphaelite Hunt, who “like most young people […] overcome by the sense of freedom pervading the revolutionary events that were taking place at that time” was ready to “call down the heavens to fight the tyranny over poor defenceless people […]”. And precisely, what separates us from the heavens is that when it comes to new economic and social organization, in fact including this new violence which requires each of us to be a little more than “overcome” in return (today’s Greek anarchists rightly declare “we are not outraged, we are determined), it should not be a question of conviction nor of “belief, but of understanding.”¹⁸

Philippe Morel , Konrad Zuse Diagram

Abstract Criticism

Understanding the situation is not only a way to begin a theory of resistance or revolution. It is the sine qua non condition and the ultimate goal. “It is not enough that thought should seek reality, reality must seek thought”, such seeking being the way to avoid ideological and bureaucratic distortion and subjective and idealistic relapses. While idealism too often masks ignorance, and subjectivity, as in a love affair, is merely a vulgar reaction against technological means of action that have not been mastered properly, technological idolatry is not a solution either for understanding the mechanisms of contemporary civilisation. It must be admitted that these are increasingly complex, since each component depends on an infinite number of others around it, interacting with it. Cybernetic feedback has become the fundamental law of contemporary economy and knowledge, especially if it is amplified by the stock market. Faced with such intricacy it is not surprising that alternately, spontaneous reactions occur: 1) radical contestation of all technological civilisation, as in neo-primitivism; 2) more muted criticism of the movement and promotion of a sort of “amnesty on movement” or a return to various former positions, as if Windows Restore Point could be applied to civilisation; 3) taking refuge in an ideal imaginary world like John Ruskin; 4) a return to political and social progressivism. Although it must be admitted that all these positions alike are doomed to fail, the diagnoses and cures for each of them are far from being the same. The second and third positions are still, as commented in 1955, “[…] fighting on the same ground, with the same weapons, which are exactly those of petit-bourgeois idealism. They each proudly defend the rank and eternity of their standards”. They merely offer boring, erudite, or at best virtuoso variations on problems beyond their understanding, and make the mistake of treating history with a-historic methods at the very moment when, precisely because it is a historic mutation, the end of history requires a historic method. Conversely, despite the fact that its radicalism failed, anti-industrial anarchism (which we will come back to) at least had the merit of endowing today’s events with the importance they deserve. Theodore Kaczynski, far more than his neo-primitive follower John Zerzan, is thus logical in his analysis of technology. He is well aware that a temporary halt or a return to a previous stage of technological development will change nothing. Although complete integration of technology dates only from the second half of the twentieth century, which precisely leads us to believe that an earlier, less radical stage of technical development could be returned to, it is clear that the new mentality emerging from the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries will not be content with this. That would mean that humanity, after returning to the potential for technical evolution that it knew in the nineteenth and even eighteenth century, would busily try to reconstruct its lost world, at the same time blaming it! Spengler understood this: “ […] unlike generic techniques, it is one of the essential characteristics of man’s individual and modifiable technique that each discovery contains the potentiality and the NECESSITY to discover new things, that all satisfied wish wakes thousands of others […]”, and Kaczynski understood that too. He was not so naïve as to believe that if we abolish telescopes we will rediscover pre-Socratic mysticism in the stars, and that is why he theorises that the only solution is to destroy all technique and all the associated social and political structures. His understanding of the integrated nature of contemporary technology is lucid and that is why he should at least be read. Ray Kurzweil agreed, and so did Adorno when he drew attention to Spengler, who was also on the opposite side of the reader’s intellectual spectre. Understanding of this technological integration, the associated economy of which is by the way Integral capitalism and not Cognitive capitalism, is the only criterion for the radical branches of anarchist anti-industrialism – Neo-primitivist or not – and it is cruelly missing in the more modest forms of criticism described earlier. Even if, with all the historic significance of the term, a rationalistic Restoration or neo-Ruskinian idealism is encouraged, a historical and therefore evolutionist assessment of today’s developments cannot be arrived at: there is only confusion. By endowing the movement with an abstract character in the sequence of events and making it the sole cause of the progressive failure of western bourgeois democracy, we miss its “qualities”, pure quantity and speed being intrinsic ones. We refuse to see the nature of technology as the effect AND cause of an economic and social organisation, and the complex structure of knowledge which today is itself highly dependent on technology with the IT revolution. Thus, not only is it impossible to extract only what suits us from technology, but even more, it is impossible to separate the knowledge acquired by our civilisation, from its technology. This includes the anti-industrial literature published on the Internet! It seemed possible enough, with a bit of simplification, to operate such a separation until the IT revolution (except that there would not have been any Pasteur without powerful microscopes, no more than contemporary genetic science without computers). But today it is clearly impossible, both in theory and in practice. As we can see, the return to a pre-technological era of society is clearly impossible because of the very nature of the technique, which leads inevitably to a thirst for new techniques. Nor is it possible to return to an ideal moment of rationalism that is still sufficiently Universalist and distinct from capitalism and technology – a sort of “Hegelian” stage – nor to a pre-rationalistic moment – incarnated in the Renaissance and Baroque periods – either. There are several reasons for this: the first, important but rarely discussed, is that we do not see what moral argument there is for saying that the 80% of humanity that did not have the luxury of knowing about the Age of Enlightenment should suddenly decide that it is the ultimate goal of their civilisation, on the say-so of a few blasé intellectuals. The second reason is that we have already gone beyond Rationalism. The interdependence of knowledge and technology, which I also refer to as “Computationalism”, goes further than rationalism, while being based on the primacy of scientific knowledge that is inherent to rationalism itself. It is thus practically too late to take a step back, because the philosophical and cultural links between simple changes have been broken by jumping a ditch that is much too wide to cross back: the IT revolution. A revolution that has transformed the formal and political democratic process of the bourgeois revolution into an effective and social one. Thus what in time appears only a slight step backwards is, because of the true atomisation of contemporary society, a cultural gulf as difficult to cross as that separating us from the hunter-gatherers of the Neolithic age, which is where the Neo-primitives would like us to return. Indeed, if there are people tempted by Neo-primitivism, it is because the similarities between its hunter-gatherers and ourselves are just as seductive as the “absurd boundaries of race, nation and class” of the Golden Age of pre- and post-revolutionary rationalism, the very boundaries that rationalism never crossed because it refused to draw lessons from the French Revolution. Babeuf, to whom we will return when discussing his project of a “Perpetual Land Registry” and who, like the Jacobins, saw the revolution turn into just a formal reorganisation of civil society, already expressed doubts on this. Not only do “governments generally carry out revolutions just to govern”, but more specifically in law, he observed that “[…] the social laws have provided intrigue, trickery and dishonesty with the means of adroitly seizing common property”. The first step out of line signals the failure of any politician wishing to convince the people that it “can do nothing alone and will always need a government”. The second step out of line signals the failure of reason itself because, far from correcting the defects of natural laws, such as the randomness of births that justifies the Perpetual Land Registry, it helps to accentuate them. Falsely naïve, Babeuf addresses the bourgeois rationalists, asking “but if the social pact were really based on reason, should it not strive to abolish everything defective or unjust in the natural law”?

Rationalism and Psychologism

Despite the three hundred years of politics that have proved Babeuf’s scepticism, and have indeed fostered “intrigue, trickery and dishonesty”, and “the means by which adroitly to seize common property”, providing nothing to “limit the wealth that people are allowed to acquire”, it can be wondered what still drives some people still to believe in politics. Believing that politics as a means of applying reason can be anything but the superstructure it has never ceased to be since Marx described it thus, is a strange behaviour on the part of those claiming to have read this greatest theorist of the nineteenth century. That people who have refused the status of concept to scientific thought itself, in the name of free choice, should view the concept of politics as a “good” one is nothing more than making politics essential and above all declare, incautiously, that “from this just knowledge just acts must come”. “The greatest mistake”, given that, according to psychology, the contrary is “[…] reality in all its nudity, demonstrated every day and every hour since time immemorial!”³⁰ This is a philosopher’s, not a logician’s mistake and it differs little from that committed by the philosophies of desire that perceive it as merely positivity and never envisage other kind of desires such as those of the opponents of the great realist Alberti, seen earlier. Nor does it envisage the “desires of the lowest, most abject individuals” or those “of people who can only be distinguished from animals by the image and place they claim and not at all by their behaviour.”

Philippe Morel , Konrad Zuse Diagram

Today’s politicians, TV show presenters and plagiarists of every kind are no better. While the aforementioned Neo-Ruskinian or Neo-rationalist idealism, steeped in history, is incapable of understanding phenomena in the light of history, the subjectivism of today’s fashionable political renewal is steeped in psychologism yet bare of psychology. Thus what is presented as “renewal” is either 1) a reiteration of the refusal to “face up to the truth that all human form is in a continual state of transformation […]”; yet this refusal led to the “failure of the rationalists” who “failed to understand that the only way to avoid the anarchy of change is to become aware of the laws under which change takes place, and use them […],”³¹ or 2) an anti-rationalism that does try to “arrive at a dynamic conception of form.³² These renewals that are relying on politics miraculously impervious to economic trends or on old fashioned Vitalism end up merely to a new mysticism. That is precisely the subject of the recent criticism by Robert Kurz and Anselm Jappe against the Neo-operaismo representatives still believing in “primacy of ‘politics’ […], where ‘politics’ are considered per se as the contrary of the market”. Yet “despite their clear intention to implement a ‘completely different’ policy,” these representatives of today’s “left […] continue to slide back into ‘realism’ and ‘minor disorder,’ participate in elections, opine on referendums, discuss the possible evolution of the Socialist Party, and endeavour to make alliances and conclude a ‘historic compromise’ of some sort. For A. Jappe “confronted with this desire to ‘join in the game’ (and I would add, game including TV shows, in other words, all TV programmes) […] we should recall the movements and moments of radical opposition that actually played anti-politics […].”³³

Some of the greatest expressions of anti-politics were Dadaism – Duchamp even clamoured for a time when, according to Nietzsche, “the concept of politics will be absorbed into a war of minds”³⁴ – and Octave Mirbeau’s satirical pamphlet Electors on Strike (1902). Thus, the confidence in politics as a new fad was not the triumph of rationality in the world, but, in a civilisation that anyway had already gone beyond rationalism, yet another farce demonstrating the failure of reason, as noted already by Rousseau, Babeuf and the Jacobins. Indeed, in this farce on a giant stage, with “left wing” and “right wing” voters, it is not the left wing elector (who, according to A. Jappe, “has never […] obtained what he voted for”), who takes the rationalist role, but “the right wing elector. He is not so stupid. He gets the little he expects from his candidates […] for example tolerance of tax evasion and violations of labour law. His representatives do not betray him that much; and the elector who votes only for the candidate who will give his son a job or get a large subsidy for the farmers in his locality is in fact the most rational elector.³⁵

Proto-Computational Politics.
As traditional politics is failing, some researchers and theoreticians are trying to propose alternative models which would prevent the most obvious drawbacks of politics, for example massive corruption, thanks to stochastic models. As it is discussed in the present essay, no traditional political model, based on human representatives, can be saved. It should be replaced by computational substitutes, providing equal shares of the global wealth in a strictly socialist manner. Such a model, contrary to previous experiments in USSR, would still be based on the market, as market is not a problem in itself.

Computationalism as a social theory

In 1969, M. McLuhan already noted that “in our rapidly changing environment, new technologies appear practically every month,” and that “one of the effects of this huge acceleration of change in human organisation is very well expressed by the saying ‘if it works, it is out of fashion,’ or that “When electronically controlled devices are perfected, it will be almost as simple and cheap to obtain a million different objects as to make a million identical ones.”³⁶ He was observing empirical laws that have since been clarified and absorbed into common language under the names Moore law, Beta versions or non-standard production. McLuhan was not a precursor in this field – readings of My Discovery of America by Mayakovski³⁷ or Babbage, as mentioned earlier, will confirm this – but what is interesting is that he makes a number of hypotheses on the future solely for the purpose of describing the present more accurately. Not only does he avoid the trap of historical approximation common to the non-specialist trying to cover the entire past³⁸, his approach had the advantage of giving credit to all the avant-gardes of the twentieth century, starting with the biggest – Futurism.

STUDIES IN RECURSIVE LATTICES ©EZCT Architecture & Design Research, 2013

It has become commonplace in history and in theory in general, to consider the various avant-gardes as a linear succession and view the precious suffix as a seal of quality. Yet beyond the common suffix, not only are avant-gardes not equivalent, but some are even fundamentally reactionary such as the movements just after the war like Team X, which was never anything but a “social reformist” version of Lettrism and Situationist movements. What is there in Computationalism, beyond the term whose suffix might cause confusion, that could give us clues? Neither an artistic nor an intellectual movement, nor modernism or postmodernism. It is merely a term linked to what lies beyond computerised rationalism as a concept having now acquired complete autonomy from human thought as the privileged framework of application. It refers to the old algebraic turn as well as to the present day computational turn³⁹ of all the fields of knowledge, and to a new relationship between physics, mathematics and money. This relationship was noted by Marx, who said “logic is the money of the mind”⁴⁰ and by Sohn-Rethel⁴¹ – who, as noted by A. Jappe, tried to draw up the philosophical genealogy of the links between geometry, philosophy and money in Ancient Greece, based on the hypotheses of George Thomson. ⁴²

This relationship, which today concerns the parallel evolution of the infinite divisibility of electronic money and the ever more refined discretization power of computers – following the self-accelerating law described earlier –has developed so much that most of the earlier economic laws have become obsolete. It is this unprecedented transformation that is the main source of today’s crisis. Virtual money, which must not be confused with value,⁴³ is now regulated by knowledge and calculation power. Its growth is based on geometric progression laws while the growth of value is based on arithmetic progression ones. The gap is so great that it has become the San Andreas Fault of the economic and social world, an abyss in which economic and social theory got lost, due both to the intrinsic difficulty of the theoretical reconstruction and to out of date hypotheses and methods. The discrepancies between various social existences, life expectancies and many other parameters have reached cataclysmic proportions. When logic was “the money of the mind,” counting was still the ascetic part of human activity, forming “the religion of this generation, its hope and its salvation.”⁴⁴ The spirit of capitalism was the sum of the minds of the capitalists. In Integral Capitalism, on the other hand, computation – where the symbol includes the number – has replaced calculation and electronic money has replaced money: computation is the currency of the computer and since the computer becomes ALL it is the identity of money. Computation is the new universal equivalent of which machine time is merely the most concrete side, the “post-historic” equivalent of Marx’s work time. Computational finance and computational resources allocation platforms like Gridbus are constantly bringing new empirical proof. Computation that integrates physics, mathematics and money has replaced the Greek juxtaposition of geometry, philosophy and coinage. Physics, mathematics and money are a single thing, the new “(non)subject” of the “automated subject” the older of which was the folklore of finance. The traders in the old 6 stockmarkets, shown occasionally on television, have become the new “savages,” with their telephones cradled between ear and shoulder like so many feathered headdresses or belts decorated with bananas.

Confronted with this trend, which I named “Pangaea in the era of informed matter” ten years ago without realising its full extent except intuitively, politics has as much effect as a group of hauliers and the “political theorists” the clairvoyance of foremen… We understand too much and too little of computationalism, just like for rationalism three centuries ago. Too much not to see the dangerous pre-Marxist “explanation of religion by belief” in the ideological lies of the liberals. Too little to avoid seeing proliferation of illusionary replacement solutions labelled as “practical theories of resistance”, and to avoid “the end of all understanding of the facts” being “peddled as a ’liberating fantasy’, and perplexity being peddled as anti-dogmatic modesty”⁴⁵. Finally, computationalism as I understand it, this time not as a label for the present state of civilisation but as a theory, must be a social theory: a theory devoid of the technocratic nature of cybernetics, no less effective than the computer itself and no less concrete than Babeuf’s Perpetual Land Registry project. This project, one of the only distant descendants of which was Broadacre City, can be seen as the most fantastic political theory produced in the form of an “urban” theory. Of all the projects up to the Situationist movement, the Perpetual Land Registry is the one that best addressed the social lie of all social lies, that of the rarity of land and its string of consequences.

A cable robot developed at INRIA in France, whose model is now used in a joined research between the Ecole nationale superieure d’architecture Paris-Malaquais, INRIA and ENSAM. The aim of the project called DEMOCRITE is to develop large scale and heavy load robotics systems dedicated to 1:1 scale 3D printing in architecture.

This lie has disseminated a kind of rough Malthusian ideology decidedly much too visible for current taste and politically correct thinking. Instead of saying that there are too many people on earth, Liberals and blind ecologists are now saying that there are too many animals and too much pollution, as well as too little space, arable land, water or energy. The problem is that while in Marx’s time, and as he said, there was “only one individual too many on earth – Malthus himself,” it is today very difficult to identify a single creator of the most harmful ideology produced since the end of the Second World War. All the more as it is a “pacifist” ideology. However, its unknown creator is less important than the known messengers, some of whom are architects or urban planners (although, as the Situationists say, there is no urban planning and therefore no planners either), but only this “group of techniques for integrating people (techniques that effectively resolve conflicts but create others, currently less well known but more serious). These techniques are innocently used by imbeciles, or deliberately by the police. All the speeches on urban planning are lies, just as obviously as the space organised by urban planners is the space of social lies.”⁴⁶ As a land registry employee, trying to “recover or draw up the list of seigniorial rights over the land to benefit the landowning aristocracy,” ⁴⁷ Babeuf was able to “discover in the dusty seigniorial archives the “mysteries of the nobility’s usurpations.”⁴⁸ Noting the impossibility of a reformist approach of the “social institutions the universal principle [of which] was that, as long as a human being did not tear away by brute force the property his equal could possess, it was permissible, on the other hand, to use every ruse imaginable to take such property out of each others’ hands,” Babeuf projected a systematic re-distribution of lands to each generation, in accordance with strictly arithmetic laws, and obviously, independently of all previous ownership. Like Rousseau who preached that “fruits belong to all, and the earth belongs to no-one”⁴⁹. Babeuf saw private property as the only basic problem to be dealt with. Reformism was not enough to counter property, because it did not attack the “differential” root of the problem, that is to say the mechanism which, over the generations, impoverishes those who cannot “invest”, those, in fact, “who are superfluous and who were too poor to acquire” estates and who had “become poor without having lost anything, because everything had changed around them but they alone had not changed […].”

The radical solution proposed by Babeuf was to divide all the land up to ensure a share to everyone that would be “made inalienable so that each citizen’s property would always be guaranteed and un-losable”. Since by sharing out the French territory there would have been around eleven acres per family of four at that time, Babeuf asks with false innocence “what charming manor would each family have enjoyed? A question that Wright and more modestly Melnikov would ask a century and a half later and that today’s computational resources require us to ask again. In our profoundly algorithmic economy, where algorithms tame the turbulence of the markets, and the 700,000 billions’ worth of financial products in circulation – derivatives, shares etc., every square meter of culture and cubic meter of natural resource, and ultimately, a mass of global information that is vastly more than the human mind can conceptualise, what is delaying the production of a social theory based on the knowledge and the means of our era? Here, positivism, stripped of all theoretical and scientific basis”, “recycled in a new pragmatic realism and recognition of the market and the motor of profit, considered as the ultimate and indispensable,” there, an “academic left […] as threadbare as the ‘movementist’ Marxists that play at politics” and which, depending on the public, drops titbits of historicism and abstract criticism of movement. The sole purposes of this text are to insist on the idealism of the second option and to show its counter-productive theoretical nature.

First prototype of a space frame entirely made of UHPFC (here DUCTAL® Lafarge), whose thin sections are inspired by steel construction rather than by the traditional concrete constructive models. STUDIES IN RECURSIVE LATTICES ©EZCT Architecture & Design Research, 2013

STUDIES IN RECURSIVE LATTICES ©EZCT Architecture & Design Research, 2013

STUDIES IN RECURSIVE LATTICES ©EZCT Architecture & Design Research, 2013

Philippe Morel is the founder of EZCT Architecture & Design Research.

¹ Guy Debord, Considérations sur l’assassinat de Gérard Lebovici, Editions Gérard Lebovici, Paris. The complete quote is: “But, like the proletariat, I am not supposed to be in the world. Thus Gérard Lebovici is immediately suspected of having dangerous commerce with ghosts. The defeat of rational thought, so obvious and so deliberately sought in the spectacle, causes any practice outside the official magic organised by the State or the omnipresent mirror of the world where everything is presented the wrong way round, to be vilified as black magic, or collaboration with the obscure forces of the gurus, the Voodoo and so on. Saying that two and two make four is becoming a revolutionary act. Dare we, in France, think outside the frame? NO – terrorism! The outside is wrong, and the frame – built by the government – is right”.
² F. Nietzsche, Last Letters, Winter 1887-Winter 1889, Editions Manucius. The complete passage of the letter is: “Dear friend, forgive me for speaking again: this could be the last time. I have gradually eliminated all my human relationships, out of disgust for the fact that people take me for something other than who I am. Now, it is your turn. I have been sending you my books for years so that you will one day declare honestly and naïvely ‘I abhor every word’. And you would have the right to, for you are idealistic, and I treat idealism as insincerity that has become instinct, like non-wishing to see the truth at all costs: each sentence in my books contains contempt for idealism. No fatality is more harmful than this intellectual unhealthiness that has hung over humanity as it has existed hitherto; we have devalued all reality so as to invent dishonestly an ‘ideal world’…”
³ We should remember the refusals of Gilles Deleuze, Thomas Pynchon or Guy Debord to appear on TV, especially in political or cultural programmes.
⁴ “[...] Here we see that solipsism, rigorously developed, coincides with pure realism. The Ego of solipsism is reduced to a point without extension, and it remains the reality that coordinates with it”. L. Wittgenstein, quoted by Ralph Rumney, in. Le Consul.
⁵ Mustapha Khayati, De la misère en milieu étudiant considérée sous ses aspects économique, politique, psychologique, sexuel et notamment intellectuel et de quelques moyens pour y remédier, by Members of the Situationist International Congress and the students of Strasbourg, 1967. § “Create at last the situation that makes any return to the past impossible”.
⁶ Karl Marx, German Ideology.
⁷ In. Empire, quoted by A. Jappe and R. Kurz, Les habits neufs de l’Empire. Remarques sur Negri, Hardt et Rufin, Editions Léo Scheer, 2003.
⁸ In his preface to Alfred Sohn-Rethel : la pensée-marchandise, Editions du croquant, 2010, Anselm Jappe recalls that Sohn- Rethel, whose critical project paralleling that of Adorno was a “criticism of money”, confronted the taboo represented by this criticism. Thus he writes that Sohn-Rethel, refusing the abstraction of the categories of understanding out of their context “brings us back to the blind action of what has governed societies over the past two thousand five hundred years: money. And this criticism of money is still as taboo today as it was in the German universities in the time of Husserl and Heidegger”.
⁹The complete quote is: “from now on, all the sciences, all the liberal arts, the sacred training of minds, have collapsed because they have become servile: law, the religious sciences, knowledge of nature, moral principles and the other remarkable fields where the thought of free men is bartered. Ah, what a terrible crime! We see pathetic creatures flocking to sell off literature, and men, what am I saying?- innumerable beasts- made for servile tasks, emerging from the countryside and the woods, even from the mud and filth, leaving their holes and rushing like a pack of dogs to sell and profane literature. What a disaster for culture! People who should have dug and raked have the incredible impudence to touch letters and books! And those whose job it was to guard over the livestock and clean the stables peremptorily discuss human fortune; those who should have whipped the flanks of the animals are now holding the sceptre and sitting among the magistrates; and finally, for people that differ from animals only by appearance and the place they claim, not by their attitudes, a thin icing of culture is enough for them to advance in the world with the audacity, as the poet says, of a pack of wolves [...] is it thus that you, the nurse of letters, O philosophy, provide and submit to the desires of the lowest and most abject individuals?”. L. B. Alberti, Avantages et inconvénients des lettres, trad. fr. Christophe Carraud, Rebecca Lenoir, Editions Jérôme Millon, 2004.
¹⁰ In. Discours sur les sciences and les arts, 1750.
¹¹ Ibid.
¹² In. Préface au discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, 1755.
¹³ We know how much this movement influenced Arts & Crafts.
¹⁴ Charles Babbage, Preface to The Economy of Machinery and Manufactures, Charles Knight, 1832, p. V. “Those who possess rank in a manufacturing country, can scarcely be excused if they are entirely ignorant of principles, whose development has produced its greatness”.
¹⁵ “The law of accelerating returns is fundamentally an economic theory. Contemporary economic theory and policy are based on outdated models that emphasize energy costs, commodity prices, and capital investment in plant and equipment as key driving factors, while largely overlooking computational capacity, memory, bandwidth, the size of technology, intellectual property, knowledge, and other increasingly (and increasingly increasing) constituents that are driving the economy”, in. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity is Near, Viking, NY, 2005.
¹⁶ Marie-José Durand-Richard notes that “the chapters on ‘division of work and manufacture’ and ‘machinism and large scale industry’ in Capital are based on Babbage’s analysis” in. Marie-José Durand-Richard, « Le regard français de Charles Babbage (1791-1971) on the ‘Decline of Science in England’ », in Documents pour l’histoire et les techniques, n° 19 (2nd quarter 2010), Les techniques et la technologie entre la France et la Grande-Bretagne XVIIe-XIXe siècles.
¹⁷ Anselm Jappe and Robert Kurz, Les habits neufs de l’Empire. Remarques sur Negri, Hardt et Rufin, Editions Léo Scheer, 2003.
¹⁸ “Singularity is not about faith, it is about understanding”, Ray Kurzweil.
¹⁹ Mustapha khayati, De la misère en milieu étudiant, considérée sous ses aspects économiques, politique, psychologique, sexuel et notamment intellectuel et de quelque moyens d’y remédier, by Members of the Internationale Situationniste and students from Strasbourg, 1967. § “Finally create the situation that makes it impossible to return to the past”.
²⁰ Mohamed Dahou, Guy Ernest Debord, Potlatch n°21, 30 juin 1955.
²¹ O. Spengler, Man and Technique, 1933. French tr. by Editions Gallimard, Paris, 1958.
²² “The layman reading Spengler as he had done previously for Nietzsche and Schopenhauer, had become meanwhile a stranger to philosophy; the professional philosophers stuck to Heidegger, who gave a more successful, interesting expression to their depression. It ennobled the death decreed by Spengler with no consideration for the person, and promised to transform thought on death into a mystery that must be administered by the academic. Spengler was no longer a participant: his brochure on Man and Technique no longer competed with his day’s cleverly expressed anthropology. His relations with the National Socialists, his quarrel with Hitler and his death all went unnoticed [...]”.Theodor W. Adorno, in. Prismes, Payot, 1986. Here it should be noted that Adorno had enough intelligence to limit his own “cultural pessimism”, something that Heidegger’s philosophy preferred to forget. That defect is today a proudly exhibited certificate of authenticity brandished by all professional pessimists: “Cultural pessimism did not die with Fascism. On the contrary, it is only today that, in the form of ontologic fundamentalism and criticism of science and civilisation, that it has gained greater plausibility, given the undeniable importance of its old criticism of the destruction of life’s natural foundations. It has always transformed this criticism into ontology, on the ground that ‘a natural world order’ had to be preserved, with all the reactionary features typical of this thought”. Robert Kurz, in. L’honneur perdu du travail. Le socialisme des producteurs comme impossibilité logique.
²³ Cf. Philippe Morel, The Integral Capitalism (from the Master’s Thesis Living in the Ice Age, 2000-2002). English translation, with a new introduction, published by Haecceity, Quarterly Architecture Essay (QAE), Volume 2/Issue 2, Winter 2007. Available at www.haecceityinc.com. The concept of cognitive capitalism barely touches on the nature of today’s capitalism and its dependence upon computing power and the global technological infrastructure. Thus it ignores “robot trading” or algorithmic trading against which it is theoretically powerless, and many other phenomena.
²⁴ Many fashionable instances of this idealism may be found at http://thefunambulist.net/
²⁵ “A further reason why industrial society cannot be reformed [...] is that modern technology is a unified system in which all parts are dependent on one another. You can’t get rid of the ‘bad’ parts of technology and retain only the ‘good’ parts. Take modern medicine, for example. Progress in medical science depends on progress in chemistry, physics, biology, computer science and other fields”. Theodore Kaczynski, The Unabomber’s Manifesto, quoted by Ray Kurzweil.
²⁶ F. Nietzsche, Rough copy of a Letter to Georg Brandes, December 1888, in. Last Letters, Winter 1887-Winter 1889, Editions Manucius, p. 192.
²⁷ Gracchus Babeuf, Le tribun du peuple, n°40, février 1796, in. Babeuf, Textes choisis, Editions sociales.
²⁸ Gracchus Babeuf, Le cadastre perpétuel, 1789, in. Babeuf, Textes choisis, Editions sociales, p. 97.
²⁹ Ibid.
³⁰ “Socrates and Plato, great doubters and admirable innovators were nevertheless incredibly naive in regard to that fatal prejudice, that profound error which maintains that ‘the right knowledge must necessarily be followed by the right action’. In holding this principle they were still the heirs of the universal folly and presumption that knowledge exists concerning the essence of an action. “It would be dreadful if the comprehension of the essence of a right action were not followed by that right action itself” — this was the only outcome considered by these great men – the contrary seemed to them to be crazy and inconceivable – and yet the contrary position is in fact the naked reality which has been demonstrated daily and hourly from time immemorial.”
³¹ Asger Jorn, Image et Forme, extract published in Potlatch n°15, 22 December 1954. The full quote is “We must arrive at a dynamic conception of forms; we must face up to the truth that all human form is in a state of continual transformation. We must not, like the rationalists, avoid this transformation; the failure of the rationalists is in not understanding that the only way to avoid the anarchy of change is to become aware of the laws by which this transformation is operated, and use them [...].”
³² Ibid.
³³ Anselm Jappe, in. Politique sans politique.
³⁴ F. Nietzsche, Rough draft of “Letter To the Emperor William II”, December 1888. In. Last Letters, Winter 1887-Winter 1889, Editions Manucius.
³⁵ Anselm Jappe, Ibid.
³⁶ Marshall McLuhan, Mutations 1990, Tr. Fr. Editions Mame.
³⁷ Vladimir Mayakovski published this work in 1926. The passages on the telephone that transforms the whole world into a village in which each person can, as if in the main square, talk about the weather although they are thousands of kilometres away from each other, is a forerunner of McLuhan’s analyses.
³⁸ McLuhan fell into this trap, but most of his speculative hypotheses remain valid. Cf. Sidney Finkelstein, Sense and Nonsense of McLuhan, International Publishers Co., Inc., New York, 1968.
³⁹ Cf. Ph. Morel, L’Architecture au-delà des formes : le tournant computationnel (Architecture beyond Form: The Computational Turn), exhibition, Marseille, 2007.
⁴⁰ Karl Marx, Manuscripts from 1844, tr. Fr. Emile Bottigelli, Paris, Editions sociales, 1972, p. 130. Quoted by par Anselm Jappe, in Alfred Sohn-Rethel : la pensée-marchandise, Editions du croquant, 2010.
⁴¹ Alfred Sohn-Rethel : la pensée-marchandise, Editions du croquant, 2010. Preface by Anselm Jappe.
⁴² Cf. George Thomson, The First Philosophers, Lawrence & Wishart, London, 1955.
⁴³ Cf. the German school of “Criticism of Value” (Wertkritik) and Anselm Jappe, Les aventures de la marchandise. Pour une nouvelle critique de la valeur, Denoël, Paris, 2003.
⁴⁴ Gertrude Stein, “Counting is the religion of our generation, its hope and salvation”.
⁴⁵ Robert Kurz, L’honneur perdu du travail. Le socialisme des producteurs comme impossibilité logique.
⁴⁶ I. S. n°6, Août 1961, p. 11.
⁴⁷ Claude Mazauric, introduction to Babeuf, Textes choisis, Editions sociales.
⁴⁸ Gracchus Babeuf, quoted by Claude Mazauric, in. Babeuf, Textes choisis, Editions sociales.
⁴⁹ Rousseau, In. Discours sur l’origine et les fondements de l’inégalité parmi les hommes, Part II, 1755.