Hantavirus, AI, El Niño, Anarchism And The Future

I used to follow an anarchist guy. Subscribed to his substack.

He declared publicly that my writings inspired his own.

Then a few months ago he came out against ‘doomers’.

He began embracing AI.

He cheered for the kidnap of Maduro and the transformation of Venezuela into a client state of empire.

He said all dictators must fall and after Maduro that he hoped Iran would be next.

Yet in the same breath he would denounce the soul-crushing, life-sucking monotony of the 9-5 under neoliberal capitalism.

He felt trapped in a cage constructed by corporate-capital, but appeared, perhaps unwittingly, to be cheering for that very same cage to be imposed on others.

I could see that he was desperate for things to be better.

But in the end, that desperation, combined with the weight of his sadness and what appeared an incoherent ideological philosophy, led him to cheer on Sam Altman and Pete Hegseth.

Why am I saying this now?

Because I’m afraid he’s not alone. I’m afraid that as things get worse people will end up embracing movements, leaders, ideologies and emergent conditions which run counter to their interests.

I’m afraid that when everything comes on top, as the tunnel narrows and the light fades, that people will find hope in the hopeless, salvation in the immoral, intelligence in the fake, life in the death.

And I’m afraid that this is the point.

Without getting pseudo-religious or conspiratorial, I’m afraid that a world of suffering, anguish, precarity and fear is a boon to the forces of darkness, if not being deliberately constructed by them.

That’s not say there aren’t things to fear. On the contrary.

The point is how we react.

The reality is that most people will react predictably. Most people will do anything to survive.

But more than that, people will do what it takes to continue to live in the manner to which they have become accustomed.

So when the economy is hollowed out and reduced to AI companies, big tech giants and war-economy adjuncts, the fear is that people will feel they’ve little choice but to hand over their labour to people and entities that will entrench dystopian conditions.

I’m afraid that the panopticon will be made real by us. That to maintain a middle-class treat-world, people will cheerfully construct architectures of surveillance and control which rob us of our humanity and dignity under the guise of freedom.

I fear that in order to maintain consumptive privileges, people will choose to imprison themselves socially and technologically. That they’ll be convinced to design, build and cheer for a capitalist-carceral culture.

And the fear is that this culture, to maintain its domestic privileges, will double-down on the mass murder of people thousands of miles away to secure the resources necessary to sustain itself.

For the rare earths. For the oil. For the minerals. For the semiconductors.

And I’m afraid that without a coherent ideological framework, without an understanding of the social, political and economic conditions which underpin and govern our lives, this will simply become the default choice setting for people.

Slop choices in a murderous slop world.

I suppose I’m afraid that people will, ultimately, decide not to care about anything other than their own extremely narrow interests.

I’m sure some of you think we’re already there. There’s a fair argument to be made for that.

And I’m writing this now because I’m afraid what the next twelve months holds. I’m afraid that a material and psychological cliff edge is approaching that could throw people completely off their axis.

First off, and demonstrating the narrow interests point, we have hantavirus.

If there’s any place ideal for containing a viral outbreak, its a self-contained, essentially sealed environment of just 175 people floating far away from the rest of humanity.

So obviously, health authorities have let these people fly back to all corners of the world. Actually bonkers.

But why? Because quarantining 175 people for 45 days to spare hundreds or thousands of others was presumably against their human rights, or something.

Because in our neo-liberalised world, there is a presumption of consumptive freedom regardless of the impact that supposed freedom has on your friends, neighbours, community, or even the rest of humanity.

It’s 175 people. Would it be fun to stay on a docked ship for 45 days.

No.

Was it the most sensible option to fully and definitively contain the outbreak.

Obviously.

But these people were rich, white and entitled. So different rules apply.

Now a mad scramble is underway to track, trace and test because their freedom to eat, dine and travel was more important than global public health.

If I was pushed on the likely impact, I would say that this virus is too deadly and not contagious enough to become a pandemic (and those who’ve been with me since the early days will know I’m fairly well-versed in things viral).

A virus needs lots of asymptomatic or mildly ill hosts to really propagate. From what we know about hantavirus, the majority of cases are symptomatic and usually progress to severe disease.

Hanta doesn’t look to me like pandemic material.

But that doesn’t mean this is good news.

This was a perfect set-up for public health authorities, like ‘please model me the ideal start of a containable viral outbreak’ set-up, and they totally fucked it.

And as people in a globalised world use their consumptive freedom to grasp for experiences to fill the void (like birdwatching at a rubbish dump at the bottom of the world), the risk of spill-over viral events will only grow.

And when a pandemic virus does spill over, the chances of containing it are slim.

Hanta, with the entitlement of the passengers and the failure of health authorities, has given us a glimpse of that.

I fear what will happen when people radicalised by covid, and radicalised against public health, are asked to adjust their behaviours again to prevent another pandemic.

But before then, we have El Niño.

Some of the forecasts for how bad this might be are literally off the scale. A +4C global anomaly.

Mass heat death off the scale.

Famine-inducing off the scale.

Why? Pollution. Greenhouse gases. Every El Niño is boosted by an elevated baseline created by adding heat-trapping pollutants to the atmosphere at rates unprecedented for 66 million years.

Today’s mild El Niño is strong. Today’s strong El Niño is a monster.

The pollutants which have ratcheted up these events continue to underpin our economies and societies, and the AI data centre boom has added another accelerant to the system.

A boom which on top of the energy consumed, will destroy cropland, wild nature and communities in the process.

A boom which is imposing projects on communities that are cartoonishly evil.

The proposed Stratos data centre project in Utah is 62 square miles in size. This is a bigger footprint than entire cities like Miami or Pittsburgh. And it will need to be powered 24/7. It will need water. It will need steel and concrete and semiconductors.

And there are nearly 700 so-called ‘hyperscale-projects’ like Stratos currently planned globally, all fuelling the next El Niño.

If this one will be a monster, the next one might be a world-eater. And on and on.

And this El Niño will coincide with an oil crisis (yes, still incoming, despite the broad denial), a fertiliser crisis, and a globally depressed planting season.

A smaller global crop being wrecked by the droughts and floods triggered by El Niño would spell pain for those of us in the rich world, but absolute disaster for the poor. And the poorer you are anywhere in the world, Canada or Cameroon, the harder you will be hit.

I fear what this perfect storm will do to people’s minds, and to their behaviours.

I fear that if an anarchist anti-capitalist can be pushed to embrace imperialism during relatively benign conditions, what serious crisis conditions will do to all of us struggling under the weight of a baffling, unjust system rigged by imperial oligarchs.

I fear what happens when all of our choices narrow, and the politics and behaviours of reaction, and of fascism, are seen as the only way out.

I fear the seductive lure of false prophets, and hope enough of us can resist.

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