Paul Watson’s posts tagged “Utopias”

begin to remake who we are and how we live

It is true that I am a sucker for goth-flavoured radical left hot takes on pretty much any subject, but I think it works particulary well in Greenaway's book as it is an outlook well-placed to grapple with how utopia necessarily needs to walk hand in hand with the bleakness of our current plight. Because utopian thinking is not about escapism, it is not naive and it is not blind to how bad things actually are. It is the other interlocutor in dialectical opposition to the abyss we're on the precipice of and without it, we'd be lost.

The parallels between the turbulent epochs preceding the medieval Renaissance and our present age verge on uncanny. Today, intersecting economic, political and environmental crises have incited widespread disorientation and despair reminiscent of the Dark Ages. Below these swirling surface breakdowns, advanced digital technologies are birthing new platforms for human creative participation that could see the dawn of a modern-day Renaissance 2.0.

Sean and Jack consider how to imagine an alternative to capitalism by exploring our relationship with the Xenomorph, the Terminator and TikTok Teens who travel to alternate realities.

Solarpunk is sometimes claimed as a window on the future we could have if we were willing to make it happen. But as with all forms of science fiction—even, if not especially, science fiction reduced to a visual aesthetic first and foremost—it is better seen as a window on the present.

Utopias tend to magically leapfrog today’s issues without ever fully addressing, let alone rectifying, inequities of the past. What is actually missing is: How do we get there? By centering the voices of people who are at the forefront of immediate harm, and by looking at their ideas, approaches, and the future they imagine, we have a much better chance of getting it right.

If living in a new weird ontology is the only way for people to keep living, what do we want to keep of ourselves? What does coexistence look like when coexistence requires deconstructing the self on a cellular level? Is it possible to consent to, and then claim agency over one’s own dissolution?