The mirror of terraforming is “xenoforming” — think here of the “red weed” mentioned in H.G. Wells’s The War of the Worlds, making the Earth alien-like, or of the strangeness from the Southern Reach Trilogy. Gentrification is like xenoforming. It isn’t some extraterrestrial force though, no little green men are showing up to pry off the old house numbers and put up the addresses rendered in metal Neutraface, the official font of gentrification.
Read MoreThe trajectory is like this: Israel is the last-established Settler-Colonialist project. It is also the last such project I see being feasible. Fundamentally, it is the same kind of state as America, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa; other states have had Settler-Colonialist phases – such as the Japanese annexation of Hokkaido, the settlement of Taiwan, and basically anywhere you see (nation)-ification or -cization – Russification, Sinocization, Romanization. This refers to the replacement of an indigenous culture with a colonialist one. Sometimes, this is accompanied with political policies that lead to demographic shifts.
Read MoreThe tendency of profits to decline is is what drives the supposed innovation of the capitalist system: the need to always move to a different horizon of extraction, to find untapped sources of value that can stave off this heat-death for just a little longer. Sometimes the state intervenes and slaps them away from one horizon of extraction (see: child labor laws,) but this only rarely happens.
Read MoreOne thing I noticed during the course of this conversation is a confusion of terms, though. We didn’t agree on what capitalism actually is. I’ve been turning this idea over and over in my head and that’s what I’m going to do today: provide a working definition of the problem.
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