- See “ Comparative Planetology: An Interview with Kim Stanley Robinson, ” http://bldgblog .blogspot.com/2007/12/comparative-planetology-interview-with.html.
- That it is not surprising does not make it any less disappointing, but that famous “ blue marble ” photograph that ostensibly gave figural clarity to a globally politicized Ecology movement was taken by astronaut, Harrison Schmitt, later a vociferous climate-change denialist senator from New Mexico. Further, the original version of the photograph showed the continent of Africa with the tip of the Cape of Good Hope facing “ up ” and so putting the occluded areas Europe and the United States “ below ” Africa in perspective. There is no north or south in space, but the public versions of the photo inverted this perspective to a north-up map orientation restoring a completely artificial natural order.
- On Peter Thiel ’ s thesis see “ Technology Stalled in 1970, ” MIT Technology Review, September
18, 2014, http://www.technologyreview.com/qa/530901/technology-stalled-in-1970/.
- See my “ We Need to Talk About TED ” editorial published by The Guardian, December 30,
2014, http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted.
- Mike Davis, “ Who Will Build the Ark? ” New Left Review, no. 61 (January/February 2010): 45, http://newleftreview.org/II/61/mike-davis-who-will-build-the-ark: “ Tackling the challenge of sustainable urban design for the whole planet, and not just for a few privileged countries or social groups, requires a vast stage for the imagination, such as the arts and sciences inhabited in the May Days of Vkhutemas and the Bauhaus. It presupposes a radical willingness to think beyond the horizon of neo-liberal capitalism toward a global revolution that reintegrates the labour of the informal working classes, as well as the rural poor, in the sustainable reconstruction of their built environments and livelihoods. ”
- Martin Heidegger interview with Der Spiegel by Rudolf Augstein and Georg Wolff, September
23, 1966, published May 31, 1976.
- Latour ’ s unfortunate and broadly dismissive remarks on geoengineering: Bruno Latour, keynote speech (CAST Symposium: Seeing/Sounding/Sensing, MIT Media Lab, Cambridge, September 26, 2014), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R7hAP4wG71s.
- The case for geoengineering is made by David Keith, A Case for Climate Engineering (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2013). Nick Srncicek ’ s review of Keith ’ s book is at http://review31.co.uk article/view/196/prometheanism-and-the-precautionary-principle. On the importance of preemptive international agreements governing if, when, and how geoengineering may be initiated, see David G. Victor, Global Warming Gridlock: Creating More Effective Strategies for Protecting the Planet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011).
- Speaking of platforms, fossil-fuel-based economies are themselves subordinated by platform lock-in, in this case, for the extraction and transmutation of particular molecules.
- By all accounts, Amazon space is already built on the precision of an object flow that engineers the movements of human workers with a repetitious efficiency probably better suited to robots. In describing the stress and precariousness of work in Amazon fulfillment centers it may be that less human labor is more humane, but as Amazon (and really all the major Cloud platforms) absorbs, centralizes, and consolidates production labor into tighter strata of proprietary commerce-logistics algorithms, the future of work is made that much more uncertain, and along with it, the real economic power of their workers to also be their customer- Users.
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