Jour Fixe: Alexander Etkind "Surviving the Anthropocene: The New Political Economy of Virtual Coloniality"

The Zukunftskolleg invited everyone to our jour fixe led by Alexander Etkind.

We invited you to our hybrid Jour fixe on Tuesday, 19 April.

Alexander Etkind (Senior Fellow / Dept. of History) reported about "Surviving the Anthropocene: The New Political Economy of Virtual Coloniality".

Abstract:

A virtual sequel to my Nature’s Evil. A Cultural History of Natural Resources, this talk addresses the new transformation of the European political economy in the age of the Anthropocene. Constructing its “barbell model” (juxtaposed to the popular “doughnut model” by Kate Raworth), I question the issue of online-offline interactions from a fresh perspective: Is cyberspace a “colony” that is producing growth for the stagnating “metropolis” of the physical world? And if so, what its decolonization would look like? Relying on this virtual-colonial metaphor, I will conceptualize “ghost emissions”, defined as the amounts of CO2 saved by digital interactions; “virtual growth”, which could (and already does) compensate for physical degrowth that is required by the climate action; and, finally, “digital prosumers” (virtual producers-consumers who “emigrate online”) as the settlers of the New Virtual World. My model proceeds from a hypothesis that decarbonisation works as a push factor for the economy that would survive the Anthropocene, and that digitalisation works as a pull factor. While the COVID-19 pandemic intensified this double action, the Russian aggression aims at resisting and reversing it. Despite these and other contingencies, the double action of decarbonization and digitalization will remain the strategic direction of further developments. From the perspective of post-pandemic and post-war Europe, the hope is that the Green (and Blue-Yellow?) Recovery will produce not the gloomy “1.5-meter society, 90% economy” predicted by pundits but instead a deep and progressive transformation that will make nature cleaner, people safer, and economies richer.

(Very) Selected Literature:

Beck, U. (2016). The Metamorphosis of the World: How Climate Change Is Transforming Our Concept of the World. Cambridge: Polity

Bonneuil, C., & Fressoz, J. B. (2016). The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History and Us. Verso

Etkind, A. Nature’s Evil. A Cultural History of Natural Resources. Cambridge: Polity 2022

Lovelock, James (2020). Novacene. The Coming Age of Hyperintelligence. Boston: MIT Press

Mitchell, T. (2011) Carbon Democracy. Political Power in the Age of Oil. London: Verso 2011.

Pomerantz, K. (2000). The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Princeton UP

Raworth, K. Doughnut Economics. Seven Ways to Think like a 21st Century Economist. London: Random House 2017.