Terminal Modernity
And so it came to pass that the sci-fi author William Gibson’s statement—”the future is already here, it is just unevenly distributed”—had to be revised for a more accurate description of the catastrophe: the apocalypse is already here, it is just unevenly distributed. Likewise, the popular declaration that it was “the end of the world,” merely hid the fact that many worlds had ended already. It was the end of a world, always, already, all the time. So it began to dawn on us that world-ending was more than a particular side effect of modernity; modernity, we were stunned to understand, was propelled by the destruction of worlds. The so-called apocalypse—on loan from Christianity—had been applied in a laser-guided targeted manner to people groups, cities, species, ecosystems, oceans; anything that could be expropriated into value and destroyed with impunity, all in the name of Christ. Flourishing europeans brooked no virgin forests, no un-mined metals, and no unexploited human population. Worlds needed to be destroyed, often and continually, in order to satiate the accumulation of private property by the elite few. The greater the concentration of wealth, the greater the acceleration of extinction;* vast sums of private property were amassed until we had robbed our own posterity. We had become so enchanted by money that we were willing to follow it even unto the ends of the earth. So began the era of the luxury bunker.
note: The first axiom of x/acc: accumulation of wealth = acceleration of extinction
