Category: The Future

Crisitunity

Lisa: Did you know that the Chinese use the same word for “crisis” as they do for “opportunity”?

Homer: Yes! “Cristitunity!”

crisitunity

It’s hard to fight your allies.

I’m largely sympathetic to Obama, but I don’t really support the permanent war, or torture, or extrajudicial execution by drone, or the clampdown on whistleblowing or… well, you get the idea. So, in my desperate effort to process the new reality I’ve decided to think of this as a crisitunity. Yes, it is a crisis. But, it is also an opportunity. An opportunity to fight against permanent war, for starters. As well as an opportunity to fight for global human rights.

Let the crisitunity begin!

*Note: Chinese may not actually use the same word for crisis and opportunity.

Global Weirding

The pivot to right-wing nationalism is a global issue, a so-called ‘patriotic spring’.

How to counteract this? Especially if I’m not too keen on neliberal globalization? I’m sympathetic to indigenous movements, but frankly they haven’t gained a lot of traction in the last few hundred years. So, the solution I’m toying with is —

Global Weirding.

I’m not sure exactly what this might mean, but I’m going to run with it for a month or two.

Currently global weirding is a neologism to address strange weather.

“Describes how the rise in average global temperature leads to all sorts of crazy things — from hotter heat spells to colder cold spells, more drought and intense flooding, as well as slow-onset changes such as ocean acidification and sea level rise. Also includes oddball things such as jellyfish clogging up the pipes of nuclear power plants, forcing them to shut down.”

I think it can be more.

Perhaps this future issue of Paradoxa will help shed some light on the future of global weirding.

“The editors of this special issue of Paradoxa on “Global Weirding” invite contributions that explore the aesthetic, political, ethical, and existential potentials that arise when weird ecological patterns or events converge with weird speculative literature. Jeff Vandermeer’s acclaimed 2014 Southern Reach Trilogy (Annihilation, Authority, Acceptance) cracked open the space for thinking the weird and the ecological together—for experimenting with radical new ways of representing massive and mind-bending things like global warming, geological time, the Anthropocene, the life and afterlife of infrastructures, and so on. This issue invites further analyses of this eco-literary link we’re calling “Global Weirding—mirroring the term proposed by some climate scientists to register that global warming does not simply mean higher temperatures but a global planetary ecology transformed in radical and sometimes highly unexpected ways.” Read the rest here.