[D66] Anthropocene Hubris

[R.O.]

  Anthropocene Hubris

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    Precarious Entanglement

In the Anthropocene—the current terminal period of neoliberal capitalism 
marked by climate change, environmental degradation, and 
social-political unraveling—calls to rethink human life abound. In 
response, a powerful subframe of Anthropocene theory—what we might name 
“precarious entanglement” or “dwelling in the ruins” thinking—forwards 
one way of doing so. For proponents of this perspective, the 
infrastructures, promises, and aspirations of modernity are seen as 
ruins themselves.1 To think otherwise would be to miss the lessons the 
Anthropocene holds for us: modern humanism and attendant ideas of 
progress, hubris, and freedom were an error, and now drive current 
devastation. Humanity must, this narrative insists powerfully, be humble.

“No more agents of history. We all agree on that,” argues sociologist 
Bruno Latour, whose work perhaps most fully fleshes out this narrative.2 
Reversing the modern story of human freedom as a matter of rising above, 
separating from, or hubristically trying to transform the world, this 
line of Anthropocene thinking argues its inverse: that subjection to 
volatile earth forces and entanglement amidst ruins are the real nature 
of human existence. This entanglement in social-ecological-technological 
relations, once elided by modern thinking, is not to be escaped but to 
be embraced, argues philosopher Timothy Morton; such loops, he 
maintains, are our “fate” and “destiny.”3 Seeing ourselves within 
complex systems to which we are bound reveals that rather than makers of 
worlds, we are defined by precarity. Instead of holding on to hope or 
dreams of a “happy ending,” we must now learn to survive, to use 
anthropologist Anna Tsing’s terminology, “in capitalist ruins.”4 The 
perfect image of our new earthbound existence, Latour says, is the 
brutal ending to Béla Tarr’s film /The Turin Horse/:

    In the final tempest of the last days of Earth, father and daughter
    decide to flee their miserable shack isolated in the middle of a
    desperately parched landscape. With a sigh of relief, the spectator
    sees them finally going away, expecting that they have at least a
    chance of escaping their diet of one potato a day. But then, through
    a reversal that is the most damning sign of our time, a reversal
    that I don’t think any other film has dared show, instead of moving
    /forward/ to another land, one of opportunity, full of great
    expectations, full of hopes (remember /America America/), we see
    with horror that they come back, exhausted, despondent, bound to
    their shack, resuming their old even more miserable life until
    eventually darkness envelops them in its shroud.5

Ending scene from Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse, used by Bruno Latour to 
illustrate being earthbound. © Másképp Alapítvány/Cirko Film/The Cinema 
Guild. Ending scene from Béla Tarr’s The Turin Horse, used by Bruno 
Latour to illustrate being earthbound. © Másképp Alapítvány/Cirko 
Film/The Cinema Guild.

    It’s funny how people think a post-apocalyptic landscape will be
    relatively flat socioeconomically. At most they think there will be
    small-scale warlords or Dunbar-scale anarchist communes. No. There
    will be deathstar billionaires with private armies and narrow-deep
    tech stacks.9

Constraining human being to the /is—/precarious survival amidst 
entangled ruins—rather than the possible contributes, intentionally or 
not, to the already-omnipresent sense that what is, is all that is 
possible, and renounces hubris and audacity at a moment when poor and 
working-class people seriously need these qualities.


    Disentanglement and Delinking

Ultimately, this particular version of Anthropocene thinking fails to 
capture many of the characteristics and possibilities of the present. By 
this I do not mean that the current moment is not marked by 
entanglement. On the contrary, defining and administering life 
cybernetically in terms of information, feedback, and non-equilibrium 
interconnection—dismantling the modern subject—has been central to 
western neoliberal governance for decades.10 Post-September 11, securing 
interconnected critical networks came to be seen as especially 
paramount, with American military analysts like Thomas Barnett dividing 
the world into a “functioning core” and a “non-integrating gap,” the 
latter defined as “disconnected from the global economy and the rule 
sets that define its stability.”11 “Eradicating disconnectedness,” 
argued Barnett in his much-discussed /The Pentagon’s New Map/, 
“therefore becomes the defining security task of our age’’12 with 
failure or refusal to integrate into the global economy and its rule 
sets enforceable by military action.

 From Lagos to New York, urban planners and governments have more 
recently emphasized connectedness as key to building resilience to 
climate change and its effects.13 Originating in cybernetics and ecology 
in the 1970s, resilience is both an ontology and design practice based 
in systems thinking, which emphasizes the interconnectedness of the 
social, ecological, and technological.14 Whereas modern forms of 
administration were based in city/nature binaries and sought to 
eliminate volatility and risk, resilience is a governance paradigm that 
welcomes entanglements, understands instability as inevitable, and views 
cities as coupled social-ecological-technical infrastructural systems 
that must develop their capacity for absorbing turbulence.15 In 
resilience approaches, entanglement is thus viewed not only as 
politically mandatory (as for early 2000s geopolitics) but also 
ontologically natural: a corrective to erroneous modern ways of thinking.

However, while entanglement is increasingly celebrated, we are also 
witness to some of its opposite. In the United States, one might observe 
that there seems to be growing tendency toward “delinking” or 
“islandization” in response to Anthropocene conditions and events. For 
example, politicians promote ever-more securitized borders and walls as 
a manipulative solution to the suffering of working-class people. The 
very wealthy detach their stacks and supply chains, shore up urban 
networks against climate change, or disconnect from the same social 
media they own, while also preparing infrastructure for bigger moves in 
the future to secure themselves and their forms of life. This may be 
seen as the Anthropocenization of what historian Nils Gilman calls the 
plutocratic insurgency that has been underway for decades; a revolt by 
capitalist elites against the confines of modern postwar territorial 
power configurations.16 In this insurgency, the rich seek to detach 
themselves legally and infrastructurally from what Gilman terms “social 
modernism”: an ideological and institutional formation centered around 
the nation state as a provider of welfare and economic growth.

Along with off-shore tax havens, Fourth Industrial Revolution modes of 
labor management, and gutting the West’s working-class and welfarist 
structures, a key component of the plutocratic insurgency is the 
creation of enclaves like those documented by Mike Davis.17 “These 
islands of elitism,” explains Gilman, “are designed to be largely 
self-sufficient in their ability to deliver health care, food, security, 
education, entertainment, etc. to their residents, even as they sit amid 
seas of social misery…From the point of view of the denizens of such 
communities, the primary function of the wider society is to serve as a 
source of cheap, servile labor, and as a well of resources to be 
looted.”18 But gated communities, Gilman further argues, “are merely an 
example of a broader pattern, in which economic, social, or political 
enclaves are carved out of a national state and enabled to play by a 
fundamentally different set of rules from the surrounding territory.”19 
Taking this forward, Kanye West recently floated “building a fireproof 
community” after he and Kim Kardashian hired private firefighters to 
save their $60 million California mansion during the 2018 California 
wildfires. Meanwhile, the Seasteading Institute, founded by Milton 
Friedman’s grandson and originally funded by Peter Thiel, is exploring 
how to set off a “Cambrian explosion” of autonomous artificial floating 
cities starting in the Pacific Ocean. In the Institute’s eyes, seasteads 
are a solution to sea rise as well as what they see as the domineering 
overreach (read: taxation) of existing governments—a way to “liberate 
humanity from politicians.”20

As imagined by the Seasteading Institute and its startup company Blue 
Frontiers, autonomous floating cities will run on solar and wind power, 
grow food via aquaculture, and use desalination as well as their own 
cryptocurrency. Artist Concept: Artisanopolis—Sustainable Domes and 
Power-grids. Credit: The Seasteading Institute and Gabriel Scheare, Luke 
& Lourdes Crowley, and Patrick White As imagined by the Seasteading 
Institute and its startup company Blue Frontiers, autonomous floating 
cities will run on solar and wind power, grow food via aquaculture, and 
use desalination as well as their own cryptocurrency. Artist Concept: 
Artisanopolis—Sustainable Domes and Power-grids. Credit: The Seasteading 
Institute and Gabriel Scheare, Luke & Lourdes Crowley, and Patrick White

These earth governance efforts exist alongside private space 
colonization projects couched as an escape hatch from an increasingly 
degraded earth.21 Elon Musk has built and successfully tested rockets on 
which SpaceX intends to send humans to Mars by the mid-2020s (NASA plans 
to land astronauts there by 2033) and predicts beginning colonization as 
early as 2025. Most Left commentators cynically scorn such space 
ventures.22 However, it is understandable how others might see in them a 
worthy human venture, one that current and future generations might find 
actually desirable, not least because it might offer escape from the 
social carnage of neoliberalism’s cataclysmic continuation on earth. 
There is nothing necessarily wrong with imagining oneself in the shoes 
of the first humans to see Mars’s surface with their own eyes, 
descending from a rocket doorway to touch the planet’s rocky red crust 
with their own feet. Just like the writings of science fiction author 
Steven Erikson, commercial space ventures contain their own poetics: the 
desire to go where no human has gone before; find other life; or sink 
into the stars at warp speed.23

SpaceX visualization of Interplanetary Transport System and the first 
humans to see Mars. © Official SpaceX Photos. SpaceX visualization of 
Interplanetary Transport System and the first humans to see Mars. © 
Official SpaceX Photos.

In the more pragmatic vision of the world’s on-and-off wealthiest person 
and /Star Trek/ fanatic Jeff Bezos, the only way for poor and 
working-class people to get to space will probably be as free labor in 
one form or another. As Bezos recently described, with resources on 
Earth running out, “space is the only way to go.” Rather than colonizing 
Mars, though, Bezos plans to build artificial worlds—O’Neill cylinders 
rotating to create artificial gravity—orbiting Earth and able to support 
one million people each.24 Some of the cylinders will be agricultural 
areas irrigated by drones, while some will be cities and others more 
recreational.

“What does architecture even look like when it no longer has its primary 
purpose of shelter?” asks Fred Scharmen.25 Like “Maui on its best day, 
all year long. No rain, no storms, no earthquakes,” Bezos responds. 
Earth, he envisions, will be rezoned as a residential and light 
industrial zone.26 “We send things up into space but they are all made 
on Earth. Eventually it will be much cheaper and simpler to make really 
complicated things, like microprocessors and everything, in space and 
then send those highly complex manufactured objects back down to Earth, 
so that we don’t have the big factories and pollution generating 
industries that make those things now on Earth.” And as to the question 
of “who is going to do this work?” Bezos concluded: “not me,” and 
gestured to a group of school children in the audience wearing shirts 
from the children’s club of his space company, Blue Origin. “You guys 
are going to do this, and your children are going to do this.”27


    Human Agency: A slender air-bridge to the possible

It is increasingly important to refute assertions—both those of 
governments and some critical theory narratives—that nothing else is 
possible. Both literally and figuratively, “this” world is actually not 
the only world there is. Much is actually possible. The first grunt 
labor force sent to Mars could blow up the return Starship™—gone 
Croatan, albeit on the red planet. Still, beyond contributing to the 
present shredding of the social fabric or desperately flinging oneself 
against it in vain, it can be extremely difficult to imagine what 
liberation in the Anthropocene might look like, especially for the poor 
and working-class. To say anyone knows the answers to the unbelievably 
complex problem of contemporary neoliberal capitalist society would be 
disingenuous. To say that a preidentified system would provide a better 
world seems even more off, especially considering the outcomes of such 
projects throughout the twentieth century. We cannot imagine what we 
cannot imagine. If the emergence of the Anthropocene tells us anything 
it is that we need a break with existing structures and institutions and 
ways of thinking, perhaps including ones that have risen so recently to 
hegemony in the epoch’s name.

This need for a break is felt widely. Eco-cybernetic entanglement, 
precarity, and lack of agency are circumstances in which much of the 
population lives and not by choice. Rather than celebrating Anthropocene 
conditions, it is worth considering seriously that an equally 
descriptive image of the present is that of the current order’s 
structures on fire. This zeitgeist was well-summarized in political 
scientists Michael Bang Petersen, Mathias Osmundsen, and Kevin 
Arceneaux’s recent survey, covered by the /New York Times/ with alarm, 
which reported highly affirmative responses to statements such as: “When 
I think about our political and social institutions, I cannot help 
thinking ‘just let them all burn’” (40% agreed); “We cannot fix the 
problems in our social institutions, we need to tear them down and start 
over” (40% agreed).28

This sentiment is part of the attraction many Americans have to 
apocalyptic movies and TV: the end promises an escape from the present 
order. Take, for example, the once extremely popular TV series /The 
Walking Dead/, which during its golden age—season 4 (2014)—was the most 
popular show for Americans aged 18–49 (15.7 million people watched the 
season finale). Episode “Still” opens with a survival skills montage of 
characters Daryl Dixon (grizzled crossbow-toting fan favorite whose face 
is featured on “Don’t Mess with Daryl Dixon” t-shirts sold at Walmart) 
and Beth Greene (blonde, Christian, suburban) collecting tools, trapping 
animals, and roasting snake. Devastated by the recent murder of Beth’s 
father and loss of their band of companions, the pair wander a 
zombie-ravaged landscape. Inside an abandoned country club where they 
search for bottles of liquor, Daryl discovers piles of money. Falling to 
his knees, he shovels the bills into a duffel bag, frantically acting on 
old impulses. Later, they hole up in an abandoned rural house. Car parts 
and old tires litter the yard. Inside, cigarette butts overflow plates 
atop a junk store kitchen table. On the porch they drink their found 
moonshine and share stories from their pasts (while Beth’s sheltered 
upbringing is known, Daryl’s “before” story has until this episode 
remained unknown).

“Home sweet home,” says Daryl, reminiscing to Beth how he grew up in a 
house just like this. He recounts how his abusive racist father would 
place jumbo, plastic, bra-shaped ashtrays on the TV and use them for 
target practice, sitting in his underwear drinking in a dumpstered 
camouflage La-Z-Boy. “You want to know what I was before?” he asks Beth. 
“I was nobody. Nothing. Some redneck asshole.” “I'm just used to it, 
things being ugly. Growing up in a place like this.” “We should burn it 
down,” Beth suggests. Beth too has experienced great pain and loss and 
is ready to leave the past behind in her own ways. They gather the money 
they’d hoarded—valueless now as money anyway—and the alcohol with which 
they’d tried to drown their pain and use them as tinder and fuel to burn 
the house down. In an extraordinarily beautiful scene—which reverses 
Latour’s /Turin Horse/-inspired vision—Beth and Daryl, their faces lit 
up by flames, point their middle fingers at the ruined house, turn their 
backs and walk into the night.

It’s not that a better world awaits ahead, and the scene is not 
triumphant. But to paraphrase Beth, at least you’re not living how you 
used to, not anymore. This version of the apocalyptic is powerful and 
popular because it offers a way out of the crushing hopelessness and the 
impossibility of becoming something or someone else that many poor and 
working-class people in America feel. Or at bare minimum, a proper 
response to the structures that create these conditions.

Daryl’s past—represented by the dilapidated manufactured home—offers an 
image of the rural poverty across the American hinterlands, where 
unemployment and debt are extraordinarily high and “deaths of despair” 
(suicide, drug overdose, alcoholism) common.29 Far from the spaces of 
academic theorizing, such “ruined” places represent the much broader 
death of the so-called American dream, the sum of the post-1970s decades 
of revanchism and counterrevolution waged via deindustrialization, wage 
cuts, urban crackdowns, hyperincarceration; all strategies flanked by a 
massively increased wealth gap and soaring profits for the very wealthy, 
now augmented by ecosystemic collapse. Daryl and Beth embody a fictional 
response to a certain experience of this. But such imaginaries only echo 
larger scale, real world responses to other, differently situated 
experiences which have been launched in recent years from America’s 
impoverished cities and suburbs—such as Ferguson, Missouri—by humans 
sick of being dehumanized by the never-ending police shootings of 
African Americans, ghettoization, and economic precarity.30

In spite of theoretical prescriptions to the contrary, we need ways to 
pry open the walls closing in around us (walls around the imagination, 
walls between the now and the future, between peoples). Toward this end, 
Alfredo Bonanno once described insurrection as an air-bridge to the 
unknown, a non-rational breaking through the structures of the 
present—wage work, for instance—to a space of the possible in which we 
might see in new ways. “A slender air-bridge between the tools of the 
past and the dimensions of the future.”31 Rather than celebrating the 
ruins or qualities of entanglement and precarity imposed by governments 
and companies, perhaps building these air-bridges might have something 
to do with delinking. This can mean detaching, as theorist Eva Haifa 
Giraud suggests, from structures and situations which strangle us, to 
reweave others, according to other priorities.32 Perhaps delinking as a 
liberatory—not resentful or conservative—political matter will also 
involve both reconsidering what building power today means and working 
towards freedom as a serious and urgent goal, even (and especially) as 
the old orders shred themselves apart.

Here we might note, in America at least, the growing normalization of 
once-outlier activities amongst growing numbers of working-class 
individuals and families. Examples of this include learning survival 
skills, building local infrastructures (wireless mesh networks, food 
production, whether farming or engineering protein bars, etc.), and 
taking up physical fitness regimes.33 Such activities are representative 
of an increasingly widespread desire to decrease dependency and take 
back some degree of power over one’s life and abilities—to reappropriate 
one’s means of existence, even if the only time to do so is found during 
lunch breaks. Yet placed alongside the scale, vision, and material means 
of delinking activities of the world’s very wealthy and the force they 
mobilize, these scattered efforts too often seem to reflect a 
/powerlessness/—an inability to build real power or autonomy—rather than 
the opposite.

Life exigencies and lack of resources often mean that, at best, such 
practices result in an increased preparedness to survive the next 
Coronavirus or hurricane (no minor feat itself of course), in a time 
where the definition and horizon of life has become “normalizing 
survival.”34 Still, even prepping is often animated by important 
questions such as how to help oneself and others and how to not be 
hostage to relief agencies, FEMA camps, or governments that disdain 
whole populations. How to save your family from sleeping on a gym floor, 
like the Kims in Bong Joon-ho’s /Parasite/? How not to allow oneself to 
be reduced to scrounging for the last can of beans at the panic-ravaged 
grocery store? How to take care of oneself and one’s own communities—the 
things and beings you love? Such questions are a pragmatic and 
existential matter of refusing to be dependent on corporations and 
algorithms. Addressing them also opens up much broader horizons.

Protesters overtake and burn the Minneapolis Police Protesters overtake 
and burn the Minneapolis Police's 3rd Precinct Station. Photo by 
Hungryogrephotos, May 28, 2020.

As the Anthropocene progresses, will emancipatory trajectories of 
delinking take shape at a comparative scale and depth of power to those 
of the planet’s ruling classes? Will the epoch be marked by a widespread 
movement of peoples delinking from dehumanizing structures to create 
other, rich, unbounded territories, ones infrastructurally and 
subjectively capable of deciding how to live on their own terms? Using 
recent work by geographers on the concept, “territory” here might be 
thought of less in terms of a two-dimensional bounded area and instead 
as heterogenous, emergent assemblages on land or sea; powerful 
“volumina” made of their own technologies of living, ways of moving, 
geopowers, and relations with humans and nonhumans.35 Although it is an 
antagonistic concept, “territory,” philosopher Elizabeth Grosz writes, 
is also “artistic, the consequence of love not war, of seduction not 
defense.”36

It’s impossible to know in advance whether this would lead to more 
livable futures. But surely exploring the possibility offers a more 
promising direction than affirming precarious entanglement and 
abdicating human hubris to the rich. Delinking and relinking on one’s 
own terms are not techniques that conservative forces monopolize. 
However difficult it may be to explore this direction, given that most 
lack a financial or territorial base to begin from, it seems crucial to 
build material power. But then again, maybe some zoomer will say this is 
an antiquarian modality; that more power can be found enmeshed in 
ethereal flows accessible alone in one’s bedroom on a laptop (whether 
using Google or Tor). For some this might be unacceptable or at least 
not enough, but that doesn’t make it wrong.

Precarity-entanglement thinking recognizes something important about the 
Anthropocene: we require new ways of thinking and living. But the task 
of thought should never be to instruct others in how to live, to provide 
universals to define life, or to flank governmental assertions that 
“nothing else is possible” other than the resilient continuation of 
existing structures while the world burns and floods. Taking the claim 
that old world is ending seriously opens up much broader horizons. The 
end of the “one world world”—or what I call the Anthropocene’s “back 
loop”—is not the time for reasserting new universal definitions for what 
life should be, but for reaching out into the infinite range of what we 
and others might make it.37 Just as scholars such as Clive Barnett and 
Stephen Collier have argued against reductive or ontologizing critiques 
of government, so too is there a need for critical Anthropocene thinking 
to resist this approach.38

Acknowledging that the world is not there “for us,” that the earth has 
its own intractable forces and autonomy, need not require as its 
corollary to sink into self-hatred or disavowal of human capacities. 
Surely there are other possibilities beyond this false binary that some 
versions of Anthropocene thinking tether human being to. As Chandler 
suggests “perhaps it is a false and forced choice to choose between ‘the 
human’ and ‘the world’? Perhaps rethinking modernity does not 
necessarily involve the refutation of any possibility of political 
alternatives other than those based on accepting our newfound fragility 
and vulnerability?”39

At a time when human power and hubris have become objects of disdain for 
some, it is important to insist on its critical importance in the 
Anthropocene. One could look back to a vast and varied range of 
hubristic human efforts, with some dominating nature or oppressing 
populations and others embodying collective struggles for freedom. But 
emancipatory struggle is not an object of remembrance. Rather, it is a 
basic human need elaborated in ever-new ways. Thus, it is fitting and 
appropriate that the 2010s opened and closed with global waves of 
anti-government uprisings (although resistance at the decade’s close was 
notably subdued in the US). What’s needed now is a hubris proper to both 
the Anthropocene and the subjects trying to escape from it. Without such 
a hubris, without the embrace of profound experimentation with 
existence, we cede the future and our lives to the billionaires and 
petty warlords, technocrats and politicians.

/Accumulation/ is sponsored by the PhD Program in Architecture at the 
University of Pennsylvania Weitzman School of Design.

*Stephanie Wakefield* researches human-environment relations, urban 
resilience, and social-ecological systems thinking. She is an Urban 
Studies Foundation International Postdoctoral Research Fellow at Florida 
International University.


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