IT’S NOT A WAR, IT’S A RESCUE MISSION! [re-released from the Grinding.be archives]

This is a re-release of my essay It’s Not A War, It’s A Rescue Mission – originally published on the now defunct website, Grinding.be, March 7th, 2011. Also available in this PDF version – (thanks lizbt!) And translated into Spanish, courtesy of @Rabbitz – No es una guerra, es una misión de rescate [PDF] – I’ve chosen to publish this […]

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Program Update: now in stereo

  I upgraded WordPress here the other day, so it must be time for another update. What’s been happening? Well there’s this interview Team Grinding participated in, where I say typically me things like: Saving the world as penance for the sins our fathers, building a life worth being near immortal in, then exploring the […]

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“Say it with me: I WILL NOT GO BACK INTO THE CAVE.”

“Either by the year 2050 we’ve succeeded in developing a sustainable economy, in which case we can then ask your question about 100 years from now, because there will be 100 years from now; or by 2050 we’ve failed to develop a sustainable economy, which means that there will no longer be first world living conditions, and there either won’t be humans 100 years from now, or those humans 100 years from now will have lifestyles similar of those of Cro-Magnons 40,000 years ago, because we’ve already stripped away the surface copper and the surface iron. If we knock ourselves out of the first world, we’re not going to be able to rebuild a first world.”

Say it with me: I WILL NOT GO BACK INTO THE CAVE.

Sustainability is zero sum bullshit. Hair shirt greens can eat my shorts. Either we build up and out, or we fall back and let the next species takeover in a million years.

May an asteroid wipe out any closed mind, human purist, Puritan Earth, false progress civilization. They won’t see it coming anyway. Ahem.

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Pitching a Metafictional Planetary Rescue Squad

Like many people I recently binge watched House of Cards. For me that meant the show in its entirety, because I’d quickly dismissed the remake as being far inferior to the supremely Machiavellian original series. But I was convinced to revisit it in light of the second series being dropped, and much recommendation of the first.

What hooked me early on was the backdrop of Energy Politics. Underwood trying to free himself from grip of the Big Oil lobbyists. Scheming to get renewable energy seriously deployed.

Playing chess with the evil billionaire, being a personification of the corrupt nature of Nuclear Power. And the complications involved in securing the rare earth minerals on which solar power, not to mention laptops and smart phones, depend.

Here, I thought, is a show that’s not just about power and politics, but seriously examining a civilisation in phase shift. Moving towards becoming a Type 1 Civilisation. Showing how the fingers of the energy cartels grip the corridors of power, and how that grip might be slipped and a new future born. A bright green future.

Here, I thought, just might be a mundane, contemporary set counterpart to Dracula. While the immediate fantastic comparison was Game of Thrones, just maybe the Fincher led remake was attempting to do more than portray primate politics, but also examine the nature of change on a global scale. Its price; its bloody at all costs, whatever it takes, do not back down, we are hijacking this reality and taking it to its scheduled destination, because we are beyond good and evil actors so don’t mind the ledger.

Nope, that’s just Dracula.

Spoiler: Underwood becomes President at the end of season 2.

The image above is the end moment of the current continuity. Newly minted President Underwood, who’s completed his move from House Whip, through Vice President to now Leader of the Free World TM, without a single vote from Amerika’s citizens. Punching the desk. Keeping his knuckles hard. Ready to defend his place at the top of the primate tree against any attackers.

No closer to overcoming Type 0 Civilisation problems. In fact, he’s the chief cause.

And how did the most weighty of recommendations describe this show? “Because primates.”

(Welcome to 2014: Obama loved this show.)

Because this is #Multiverse TV we turn to considering an expanded metafictional universe. Made all the more possible because if his lawyers are any good, Fincher should have to the rights to make this real (having directed The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo and presumably optioned the rest, and healming the (completely unnecessary) Utopia remake).

This was my immediate reaction:

Upon further reflection, in composing this entry, it seems even better to go completely nuts and pitch a 21st Century Planetary Rescue Squad.

The ultimate team up of Nietzschean, ubermensch characters to face off against the biggest, baddest, schemiest primate… a man that shits on the future, and holds all the cards.

The President of the US is something to be overcome.

  • we start with Lisbeth Salander joining Gavin Orsay, his furry familiar, Cashew, gnawing on the bleeding face of that FBI agent that had him literally, and his guardian, underfoot.
  • Salander reaches out to newly styled, no longer woolly jumper wearing, Sarah Lund of Forbrydelsen (The Killing), last seen boarding a plane to bring a billionaire to justice.
  • she in turn reaches out to her compatriot Scandinavian detective of Bron|Broen (The Bridge) fame, Saga Norén.
  • Luther and his gas masking wearing companion, Dr. Alice Morgan, were already hanging out at the Salander Icelandic base, so they’re in.
  • and it just happens that Alice started up a correspondence with a certain reformed serial killer that’s wandering around Alaska, looking for a mission beyond not ruining his family’s life; one Dexter Morgan.
  • And just as their introduction meeting is concluding, through a flash of arc lightening, John Connor and liquid metal Shirley Manson drop back through time, to destroy the past and save the future… again.
  • and lastly, Tesla Boy Gangster himself, Alexander Grayson III (aka Dracula), steps out of the shadows.

[Pose like a Team graphic PENDING]

And the plot computes itself…

…but if you wanna pay me Fincher, call me baby!

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Reflections on Zero History

Attention Conversation Notice: SPOILERS!  Big giant ones.  Also, not a review – though it may contain traces of one.  The author reserves the right to wax lyrical, reminisce, draw inappropriate comparisons between his own life and that of Gibson’s protagonists and slowly wander back to the subject at hand.  Highly dependant on the reader having […]

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Desert Storm

  This is my favourite piece from Rod Gray’s latest exhibit, Tracking Station (on show at Level 2/39 Little Collins St until Nov 21).  I stumbled upon Rod’s work when I was out for lunch at the Napier Hotel.  More accurately, my wife did, and dragged myself and lizbt up to see his work.  He is […]

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audio, picture and videomail

Warren Ellis said the following in his latest Bad Signal email: Sometimes I wonder why, in the age of ubiquitous webcams and dozens of services, I don’t get more videomail or audiomail. You’d think everyone would have a media-mail account — a separate Gmail account, or a Mailbucket account hooked up to an RSS reader. […]

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Harems, Mormons and Mars

Something Ariana said on the Whitechapel thread about Terraforming Mars has been bubbling away in the back of my head; namely that once we get there we need to breed like heck. Because it’s far cheaper to populate it by ‘ole fashioned reproduction, than to send ships back and forth. And to expand beyond anything […]

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