The trajectory to counteract it is not just utopian but anti-anti-utopian. TINA-fueled nihilism is exactly what the regime depicted by McCarraher wants. We must resist doom-poisoning ourselves into spirals of despair. Our built environment is subdivided into grids of asphalt and concrete to facilitate vehicular machines that pump out toxic fumes which, in turn, facilitate sprawling cities which, in turn, produce mountains of poison-leeching trash which, in turn, combine in the air and water with industrial waste from the very same factories that produce the tools we need to support this unsustainable way of life and it’s all paid for by spending the vast majority of our days at jobs which contribute nothing meaningful to society-nothing but fake numbers for an elite few-and so we are left feeling, justly so, that our lives simply have no meaning. We live in antisocial communities designed for machines and commerce. Technological society has fallen massively short of its liberatory promise. What if I told you the real virus is civilization? Even as our newsfeeds fill up with natural disasters, human rights abominations, and state violence, there's something about this constant need for dystopia to be not yet here that feels pathological, symptomatic of a dark, subliminal malady infecting everything. It’s just been so hypernormalized that we don’t even realize it. But haven’t they heard? We already are living in dystopia. We’re shown cities in ruins and primal human bands balkanized into competing tribes. It is often depicted in the near future, as if its trajectory can still be aborted with technological ingenuity. Dystopian imagery surrounds us, rooted deep in anxieties of impending climate collapse and in the impotence of capitalist futurism. Our entire society has been restructured to facilitate mechanical efficiency and the upward flow of wealth and power.
We live in the fallout of a failed revolutionary century which saw the complete reconstitution of everything we know into a new pecuniary nightmare of resilient, hegemonic capital.
Eugene McCarraher, The Enchantments of Mammon, 2019 Every avenue of escape from accumulation and wage servitude must be closed, or better yet, rendered inconceivable any map of the world that includes utopia must be burned before it can be glanced at. Insistent, in Margaret Thatcher’s ominous ukase, that 'there is no alternative' to capitalism, our corporate plutocracy has been busy imposing its own beatific vision on the world: the empire of capital, with an imperial aristocracy enriched by the labor of a fearful, overburdened, and cheerfully servile population of human resources. Under the regime of neoliberalism, it has been the chief weapon in the arsenal of what David Graeber has characterized as 'a war on the imagination,' a relentless assault on our capacity to envision an end to the despotism of money. Artist Statement As the master science of desire in advanced capitalist nations, economics and its acolytes define the parameters of our moral and political imaginations, patrolling the boundaries of possibility and censoring any more generous conception of human affairs.
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