Science fiction is mainstream now. The supermarket on the corner has had no dairy products or special offers of any kind for a month because hackers have destroyed its digital infrastructure. I can hardly talk to my work colleague anymore because algorithms have saturated him with such toxic information that nothing but populism and xenophobia reaches him. Yesterday, I took a little girl to see “Off through the Hedge,” an animated film recounting the loss of natural habitats that embodies the same emphatic notion of love and ecology as the film “Wall-E. The Last One Cleans Up the Earth.” The warning about the codes comes in the form of codes, machine-readable; after being decoded by machines, it is potentially understandable by humans.
But can we still read? Are we not too tired? (1) Aren’t we too exhausted? Can we still? Will we still? Yes?
Great! The solutions are all there. From Uwe Schneidewind to Donna Haraway, from Hans-joachim Schellnhuber to Greta Thunberg, all the building blocks are ready. 10,000 people are simultaneously tinkering with the “Crochet Coral Reef” as we speak to express your concern for coral reefs (2). What effort is the welfare of the whole world worth?
Anybody, of course.
That would be normal.
1 Jonathan Crary: 24/7. Schlaflos im Spätkapitalismus.
Übersetzt aus dem Englischen von Thomas Laugstien.
Verlag Klaus Wagenbach, Berlin 2014. und Byung-Chul Han: „Müdigkeitsgesellschaft“, Verlag Matthes & Seitz, Berlin 2010,
2 https://www.margaretwertheim.com/crochet-coral-reef