An Amazon drone flying luxuries into gun nested fortresses, forever

September 2, 2020 10:54 AM

Although the threat of ecologically articulated right-wing politics is quite real...much of what might be better understood as right-wing climate realism need not be articulated as ecological at all. It can simply build from what the right has already formidably established and wishes to pursue further. This is not something we see only in the Pinkertons and other private security agencies investing in climate related protection for the wealthy, but something we can observe in tax policies that go far beyond neoliberal catechism, maximizing accumulation while disincentivizing investment of any kind. It’s not only a world in which what the [IMF] calls “phantom FDI”—foreign direct investment that goes toward no discernable investment but is rather just convenient avoidance of taxation and popular sovereignty restriction—has shot up to 31 percent of all FDI. It’s a world in which even that cannot fully explain the 40 percent of “missing profits” that are simply unaccounted for. It’s not only the U.S. military preparing for climate security scenarios and retrofits, it’s the [U.S.'] continued investment in the world’s largest existing migrant detention, surveillance, and expulsion network. It’s not only the development of what I call “detachable infrastructures”—luxury survival architecture built not only with internal power generation and the potential for stockpiles, but to receive aerial deliveries and withstand floods or riots. It’s Amazon’s infamous patented “airborne fulfillment center” which could connect far-flung supply chains with end-use consumption by drone delivery.... We're Not In This Together - Ajay Singh Chaudhary on "right-wing climate realism."
posted by Lonnrot (16 comments total)

I decided to post this today as a kind of rebuttal to a lot of arguments in the bunker thread which strike me as coming from people who are newer to these ideas. I've been tracking this stuff for a fair while; the idea that organized teams could simply pour concrete down some air vents, that the ruling classes will wake up one day powerless to the vengeful masses etc. are fantasies. In order to form workable strategies, it's important to understand what one's enemies actually think and plan, not just react to imaginary versions of them in our heads or daydream about impossible goals. Chaudhary lays this out pretty plainly here, but the longer version would be William Rees-Mogg's The Sovereign Individual, probably the least-read book I recommend. It's a difficult read. The content is grim and Rees-Mogg was a genuinely evil human being. It's hard to get over how repugnant he was. If you can, though, he's fairly clear about what a faction of the ruling classes want: to burn through this late-stage capitalism game as hard as possible for maximum gains and construct neofeudalist corporate-fascist fortress microstates in regions with long-term habitability to externalize the costs of climate change. We're more or less going down that road now. Peter Thiel might posture about his New Zealand fortress, but he isn't one of those who's actually using it for anything more than that. The bunkers are only part of this, and the easiest component to shrug or joke about. Jarvis Cocker, of course, put this all much more succinctly.
posted by Lonnrot at 10:58 AM on September 2, 2020 [19 favorites]

Of course the right-wing response to a pending catastrophe isn't "How can we prevent and mitigate this?" it's "How can I keep just what I care about safe?"
posted by Mr.Encyclopedia at 11:31 AM on September 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

I agree with the article as well as your general point Lonrot but I still find the concept of bunkers to be quite silly. The more likely thing to me would be for property developers to create secured enclaves for the truly rich that are self-contained surrounded by nice neighbourhoods for the managerial class to live in forming an additional layer of security for the enclaves.
posted by any portmanteau in a storm at 12:56 PM on September 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

But understood within a larger climate portrait, this is building or at least preparing for a world that is an extension of the extractive circuit that is capitalism in the twenty-first century, working for fewer and fewer. Or one of vigilant, restrictive, hyper-nationalisms. Or even structurally “neofeudal,” a rather different “post-capitalist” vision for if and when the extractive circuit breaks. Or a world of all three.

This is essentially the future posited in William Gibson's two most recent books. The world goes through what is termed "the Jackpot", which is all of the ecological, sociological, political, etc. issues of the world coming to a head in the mid-21st century, and the world that emerges from the wreckage in the 22nd is the one described above. Gibson also noted along with the article that "the Jacpot" isn't some looming future horror, we're already at least a century into it.
posted by star gentle uterus at 1:01 PM on September 2, 2020 [4 favorites]

I think the two articles are talking about different time periods.

One 2012 report tried the difficult task of synthesizing direct ecological and social systemic impacts and predicted, in terms of deaths alone, one hundred million climate deaths between the report’s publication and 2030. By then, six million people may die every year from climate change. This is a shocking number. But the same models note that the world currently experiences some 4.5 million climate deaths per year.

So it's not real clear if that model is talking 2012 projections for the year 20132 or2020 and 'climate deaths' is also pretty unclear and distributed (however unequally) across the nearly 7 billion people across the globe. In any case, the solutions here and by the Rex Position are really short term (interestingly, Rex's company Exxon was delisted last week) as in the next decade. I think the 1st article (bunkers, et al) are really more for like year 2100, when some number of US citizens are dying and the US government is either abandoning coastal waterways, publicly leaving cities and citizens behind, etc. I don't think we are there yet, and won't be in the next decade.
posted by The_Vegetables at 2:26 PM on September 2, 2020

Rex's company Exxon was delisted last week

Exxon wasn't delisted, it's just no longer one of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average. The Dow was changed to include more tech and biotech companies so that it more closely matches the overall economy.
posted by jedicus at 2:53 PM on September 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

realism used to mean national interests will tend to supercede international comity but the conservatives are morphing it into the "It is what it is / Live With It / Sucks to be you!" of intentional (reactionary??) inaction.
posted by Heywood Mogroot III at 2:55 PM on September 2, 2020

Eh, the high-tech Feudalism is as much of a fantasy as anything else. Technological civilization doesn't scale down well at all, and this article basically handwaves away the effects of a 5°c temperature increase in order to support its neo-cyberpunk fantasy. Realistically the wealthy may buy themselves a few extra years at most, but once enough of the planet becomes uninhabitable, the supply chains will collapse. And that's not even taking into account inevitable black swan events like a coronal mass ejection or megatsunamis.

But as we've seen time and time again, trying to predict the future is a game for idiots. The stuff I wrote above? It's as much bullshit as what the article writer predicts. Pesticide of the future have nothing to do with what will happen, abd everything to do with the fears and hopes of the person making the predictions.
posted by happyroach at 3:19 PM on September 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

Long-term, yeah, if we jump the 4°C barrier, it will be impossible to maintain this level of infrastructure; but realistically, that'll still take time and following the current trajectories we'll all go down with authoritarian states catabolizing themselves. The would-be architects of this future will be dead by the time that happens so literally none of them care. A larger point of the article is that right-wing climate realism is accelerationism - entrenching as much power while the lights are still on as possible, long-term consequences be damned.
posted by Lonnrot at 4:33 PM on September 2, 2020 [7 favorites]

Approximately 25 percent of the American workforce is already employed protecting wealth and surveilling other workers. Turning off location on your phone, isn't quite going to cover this.
posted by Oyéah at 5:18 PM on September 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

Exxon wasn't delisted, it's just no longer one of the 30 companies that make up the Dow Jones Industrial Average.

Yes, I didn't word that correctly, but it's indicative of this fall:
"One of the world's largest companies by revenue, ExxonMobil from 1996 to 2017 varied from the first to sixth largest publicly traded company by market capitalization."

So just 3 years ago (and for 20 previous) it was one of the largest companies by market cap, but now it's not even worthy of top 30, reprented by the DJIA. And is still the world's 2nd largest oil company, produces 3% of the words oil, and not worthy of being in the Dow. That's a sea-change.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:35 AM on September 3, 2020

Is that really a fall? Or is it just not being on the inside of the current tech bubble?
posted by notoriety public at 9:11 AM on September 3, 2020

The DJIA is a horrible way to measure the performance of the stock market as a whole. Since it is a price weighted average, they constantly have to tinker with membership of the DJIA so the average doesn't get out of wack. It continues to be reported on because it has a lot of history and public mindshare but really most people should ignore it and focus on broader indexes like the S&P 500.
posted by mmascolino at 9:22 AM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

Is that really a fall? Or is it just not being on the inside of the current tech bubble?

Yes, even if the DJIA doesn't accurately measure the stock market, it's still a measure of notoriety. Also, compare the 'market cap', the price * # of all the shares outstanding. Exxon used to be the most valuable stock. Now, its market cap is $165b, Google for example is $1.1trillion, and Exxon has fallen from it's high about -2X or from about $500billion to $165billion.
posted by The_Vegetables at 10:13 AM on September 3, 2020

A big chunk of that drop is the tremendous collapse in demand due to the pandemic. Some of it is certainly the loss of notoriety. But this is a big bubble. Huge. If people weren’t distracted by the million other raging trash fires, they’d be shocked by just how big it is. You might think it’s a long way down the road to the chemist’s, but that’s just peanuts to this bubble. It’s sucking all the air out of the room, and when all the air is gone it will continue sucking the water vapor out of the flesh of the dessicating freeze-dried corpse of the rest of the economy.
posted by notoriety public at 10:29 AM on September 3, 2020 [1 favorite]

For future breadcrumb purposes, here's a link to the referenced bunker thread.
posted by vibratory manner of working at 2:06 PM on September 5, 2020