Facile Futurology in the Gulf

It should go without saying that from my perspective all the capping and junk shotting and top killing petro-criminal big-talkers on my tee vee are peddling futurological false hopes.

This is just the sort of futurological "false hope" that drives corporate-militarist marketing and promotional salesmanship from high-level think-tank scenario-sketching about "geo-engineering" all the way down to windmill and sunflower images in mainstream greenwashing advertising discourse.

When BP skirted regulatory oversight by promising that off-shore drilling disasters were inconceivable and that unspecified -- because non-existent -- techno-fixes were surely available for every possible contingency in any case, they were indulging in the same hyperbolic irresponsible immaterializing futurology that characterizes the neoliberal/neoconservative corporate-militarist imaginary across the board.

From the financialization and logo-ization of the economy, to the digital-utopianism of media theorists, to the phony cosmeceuticals and boner pills and infantile Boomers in full-on body-loathing death-denial, to the accelerationalizations of techno-fetishist pundits who repackage amplified neo-feudal predation as an "escape velocity" delivering humanity from the difficulties of democratic stakeholder politics and material history as social struggle -- all these empty promises mistaken for products, all this hype mistaken for description, all this fraud mistaken for hope suffuses the public justificatory and aspirational discourse of our debased and distressed epoch.

And all, it is much to be feared, to our ruin as actually incarnated, actually earthly, actually socialized beings in the world.