Alan N. Shapiro, Hypermodernism, Hyperreality, Posthumanism

Blog and project archive about media theory, science fiction theory, and creative coding

Twenty Basic Principles of a New Green Politics, by Alan N. Shapiro

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Basic Principle #1: Universal publicizing of ecological disasters accomplishes their perpetuation. 

The disasters that we are facing in the areas of ecology, energy and the environment are well-known and they are truly horrific. However, the fact that everyone knows about these disasters is much more a factor contributing to nothing constructive been done about them than it is a factor contributing to something being done about them. In the Society of the Spectacle, the simulacrum of concern, caring and positive action substitutes for the real thing. It relieves us from the burden of really doing something.
Basic Principle #2: The New Green Politics must be well-informed about virtuality. 

A radical-liberal politics which challenges a society that is dominated by media culture and New Technologies must go beyond the naive belief in the ideology of “reality” and instead consciously confront the complex confusion of real and virtual, reality and simulation, that media culture has instituted. We inhabit the “virtual geography” of a global media space, and its operations and effects have yet to be understood. Virtuality is henceforth a scientific field of study that has to be taken seriously. Virtuality is itself (something like a) castastrophe, and the discourse of “reality” serves partly to manage the catastrophe (which is not one) which is virtuality itself.

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