The War Against Humanity
A war has been raging for decades. It is a war affecting or involving nearly anyone. As such, it could very well be the first real โworldโ war, not in the least because this war also decides the future of this world and everything that lives on it. There are relatively few โsoldiersโ fighting this war, however, and certainly on our side. Almost all of the violence โ and certainly all of the structural violence โ is inflicted upon us by the enemy. That enemy is waging a war against humanity. The enemy goes by many different names: the โsuper-richโ,...
On Human Overpopulation
A recurring theme among a number of widely divergent political and environmental movements is that of human overpopulation. Often, the claim that there are too many humans has conspicuous racist overtones and is associated with ecofascism, but claims of overpopulation are also made by people with very different political ideas. Much of the popular overpopulation discourse appears to be quite ignorant about what โoverpopulationโ even means, however, and about what it might imply, so I thought it might be useful to write a few words about this. What even is โoverpopulationโ? โOverpopulationโ is a relative term โ it means that...
Enemies of Our Children
(This is part 4 in the No Time for Utopia series.) In the previous two episodes in this series I argued that there are two possible futures for mankind and our planet. One is global societal collapse, which may take place within a matter of decades. The other is the โLesser Dystopiaโ, a set of policies and adaptations intended to avoid societal collapse and the massive suffering it would cause. The Lesser-Dystopian path is a rather narrow path, however, and significant deviation will inevitably result into a slide towards the Greater Dystopia of global societal collapse. To some extent, both...
You Are a Zombie
For reasons that are somewhat mysterious to me, zombie movies remain fairly popular. There has been a notable change in the genre, however. A few decades ago, zombie movies were probably best classified as a sub-genre of horror, while nowadays they seem to be a variety of disaster movie โ particularly, a variety of end-of-the-world disaster movie. Picking up on this subtle, but telling genre shift, Brad Evans and Henry Giroux write in Disposable Futures, a book on the role of (depictions of) violence in contemporary society, that the zombie figure โspeaks to a future in which survival fully colonizes...