Hole Earth

My friend Michel Bauwens has kindly directed the attention of his readers at the Foundation for Peer to Peer Alternatives to a critique of Stewart Brand I wrote back in January. The piece had long seemed to me unsatisfactory -- I wrote it in a state of extreme annoyance at some glib article I had read, and the writing was more unwieldy and impetuous even than usual -- but I also kept coming back to it myself, thinking that it contained the kernel of a more sustained treatment of what for me is a pretty characteristic theme, namely, the clash between futurological and ecological thinking. I revised the three part piece in something of a panic at the thought of the earlier version being read by lots of people, and the three revised texts are available here:

one -- Stewart Brand, King of Pop Futurology
two -- Surveying Stewart Brand's Greenback-Green Futurological Litany
three -- All Futurisms Tend to be Functionally Retro-Futuristic in Their Political Substance.

I welcome comments and criticisms, especially now. As I have mentioned before, I have reduced my teaching load for the upcoming academic year from four to two courses a term in order to give myself time for serious writing. I have been teaching twelve courses a year (including summer intensives) since I received my PhD, and this has left me little time for serious writing and research, only time for the more impressionistic sort of writing I do here on my blog. I think my first writing project will be to make something out of the ideas in the collection of posts under the heading Futurology Against Ecology (which is where you can also find all the Anti-"Geo-Engineering" posts of the last few weeks), of which the revised "Hole Earth" critique of Brand's futurology is a key part.