The Manifesto of January 3, 2000
Page 2
Clearly if our efforts do not work for old people (a large and growing fraction of the G-7 populace) then they will not work at all. Old people tend to be generous, they sometimes have time on their hands. Electronically connected, garrulous oldsters might have a great deal to offer in the way of managing the copious unpaid scutwork of electronic civil society. We like the idea of being a radical art movement that specializes in recruiting the old.
Ignoring long-term consequences is something we all tend to do; but promulgating dangerous falsehoods for short-term economic gain is exceedingly wicked and stupid. If environmental catastrophe strikes because of CO2 emissions, then organizations like the anti-Green Global Climate Coalition will be guilty of negligent genocide. Nobody has ever been guilty of this novel crime before, but if it happens, it will certainly be a crime of very great magnitude. At this moment, the GCC and their political and economic allies are, at best, engaged in a risky gamble with the lives of billions. If the climate spins out of control, the 21st century may become a very evil place indeed.
The consequences should be faced directly. If several million people starve to death because, for instance, repeated El Nino events have disrupted major global harvests for years on end, then there will be a catastrophe. There will be enormous political and military pressures for justice and an accounting.
We surmise that the best solution in this scenario would be something like the Czech lustration and the South African truth commissions. The groundwork for this process should begin now. The alternatives are not promising: a Beirut scenario of endless ulcerous and semi-contained social breakdown; a Yugoslav scenario of climate-based ethnic cleansing and lebensraum; a Red Terror where violent panic-stricken masses seek bloody vengeance against industrialism. Most likely of all is a White Terror, where angry chaos in the climatically disrupted Third World is ruthlessly put down by remote control by the G7's cybernetic military. It is very likely under this last scenario that the West's gluttonous consumption habits will be studiously overlooked, and the blame laid entirely on the Third World's exploding populations. (The weather's savage vagaries will presumably be blamed on some handy Lysenkoist scapegoat such as Jews or unnatural homosexual activities.)
With the Czech lustration and the South African truth commissions, the late 20th century has given us a mechanism by which societies that have drifted into dysfunctional madness can be put right. We expect no less for future malefactors whose sly defense of an indefensible status quo may lead to the deaths of millions of people, who derived little benefit from their actions and were never given any voice in their decisions. We recommend that dossiers be compiled now, for the sake of future international courts of justice. We think this work should be done quite openly, in a spirit of civic duty. Those who are risking the lives of others should be made aware that this is one particular risk that will be focussed specifically and personally on them.
While it is politically helpful to have a polarized and personalized enemy class, there is nothing particularly new about this political tactic. Revanchist sentiment is all very well, but survival will require a much larger vision. This must become the work of many people in many fields of labor, ignoring traditional boundaries of discipline and ideology to unite in a single practical goal: climate.
A brief sketch may help establish some parameters.
Here I conclude with a set of general cultural changes that a Viridian movement would likely promulgate in specific sectors of society. For the sake of brevity, these suggestions come in three parts. (Today) is the situation as it exists now. (What We Want) is the situation as we would like to see it. (The Trend) the way the situation will probably develop if it follows contemporary trends without any intelligent intervention.
The Media
Today. Publishing and broadcasting cartels surrounded by a haze of poorly financed subcultural microchannels.
What We Want. More bandwidth for civil society, multicultural variety, and better-designed systems of popular many-to-many communication, in multiple languages through multiple channels.
The Trend. A spy-heavy, commercial Internet. A Yankee entertainment complex that entirely obliterates many non-Anglophone cultures.
The Military
Today. G-7 Hegemony backed by the American military.
What We Want. A wider and deeper majority hegemony with a military that can deter adventurism, but specializes in meeting the immediate crises through civil engineering, public health and disaster relief.
The Trend. Nuclear and biological proliferation among minor powers.
Business
Today. Currency traders rule banking system by fiat; extreme instability in markets; capital flight but no labor mobility; unsustainable energy base
What We Want: Nonmaterial industries; vastly increased leisure; vastly increased labor mobility; sustainable energy and resources
The Trend: commodity totalitarianism, crony capitalism, criminalized banking systems, sweatshops
Industrial Design
Today: very rapid model obsolescence, intense effort in packaging; CAD/CAM
What We Want: intensely glamourous environmentally sound products; entirely new objects of entirely new materials; replacing material substance with information; a new relationship between the cybernetic and the material
The Trend: two design worlds for rich and poor comsumers; a varnish on barbarism
Gender Issues
Today: more commercial work required of women; social problems exported into family life as invisible costs
What We Want: declining birth rates, declining birth defects, less work for anyone, lavish support for anyone willing to drop out of industry and consume less
The Trend: more women in prison; fundamentalist and ethnic-separatist ideologies that target women specifically
Entertainment
Today: large-scale American special-effects spectacle supported by huge casts and multi-million-dollar tie-in enterprises
What We Want: glamour and drama; avant-garde adventurism; a borderless culture industry bent on Green social engineering
The Trend: annihilation of serious culture except in a few non-Anglophone societies
International Justice
Today: dysfunctional but gamely persistent War Crimes tribunals
What We Want: Environmental Crime tribunals
The Trend: justice for sale; intensified drug war
Employment
Today: MacJobs, burn-out track, massive structural unemployment in Europe
What We Want: Less work with no stigma; radically expanded leisure; compulsory leisure for workaholics; guaranteed support for people consuming less resources; new forms of survival entirely outside the conventional economy
The Trend: increased class division; massive income disparity; surplus flesh and virtual class
Education
Today: failing public-supported schools
What We Want: intellectual freedom, instant cheap access to information, better taste, a more advanced aesthetic, autonomous research collectives, lifelong education, and dignity and pleasure for the very large segment of the human population who are and will forever be basically illiterate and innumerate
The trend: children are raw blobs of potential revenue-generating machinery; universities exist to supply middle-management
Public Health
Today: general success; worrying chronic trends in AIDS, tuberculosis, antibiotic resistance; massive mortality in nonindustrial world
What We Want: unprecedently healthy old people; plagues exterminated worldwide; sophisticated treatment of microbes; artificial food
The Trend: Massive dieback in Third World, septic poor quarantined from nervous rich in G-7 countries, return of 19th century sepsis, world's fattest and most substance-dependent populations
Science
Today: basic science sacrificed for immediate commercial gain; malaise in academe; bureaucratic overhead in government support
What We Wan
t: procedural rigor, intellectual honesty, reproducible results; peer review, block grants, massively increased research funding, massively reduced procedural overhead; genius grants; single-author papers; abandonment of passive construction and the third person plural; "Science" reformed so as to lose its Platonic and crypto-Christian elements as the "pure" pursuit of disembodied male minds; armistice in Science wars
The Trend: "Big Science" dwindles into short-term industrial research or military applications; "scientists" as a class forced to share imperilled, marginal condition of English professors and French deconstructionists.
I would like to conclude by suggesting some specific areas for immediate artistic work. I see these as crying public needs that should be met by bravura displays of raw ingenuity.
But there isn't time for that. Not just yet.
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