pessoptimism, coined by the Palestinian writer Emile Habibi, fusing pessimism and optimism to name the inseparability of hope and despair. We act, knowing it might be recuperated, and we act anyway.This year AND are going to TAKE BACK THE FUTURE! (to avoid inevitable extinction)
Please play these songs while reading:
Future Is So Bright You Gotta Wear Shades — Timbuk 3Wear Sunscreen — Baz Luhrmann / Mary SchmichHow can we reclaim our future and avoid inevitable extinction?
We want to have an honest and open discussion about how difficult things are and what we might actually do about it.
A lot of people now agree capitalism is crazy. You may or may not agree with this diagnosis of disaster capitalism, but it is true that while we live in a time of extraordinary technological achievement and have abundant food, energy and infrastructure resources, the large majority of us suffer insecurity, inequality and exclusion as everyday conditions of life.
Globally, over half of our 8 billion human siblings face extreme poverty with no guaranteed access to food, energy, water or health care.
It is clear that the world needs new ways of working together to avoid ecological collapse, protect human progress and prevent conflict between nations and peoples. However, the financial and political systems that organise our cities, care, labour, housing, logistics, infrastructure, consumption, and more, have become so routine that they appear natural, inevitable and simply beyond question — we can't even imagine an alternative. 2)
Architectures for the most part sit fairly happily within this terrible impasse, serving the physical needs of capital investment, creating spaces for rent and ensuring productive returns on investment — all at the same time as doing our best to reduce the negative impacts.
But even as we work every day to try and make things better, unfairness is 'killing people on a grand scale' (UN Commission on Global Health Inequalities), species extinctions are occurring at an increasing rate and non-survivable climate conditions are becoming much more frequent.
Jason Hinkel argues that climate change is a form of class exploitation, as 70% of all global CO2 is produced by the capitalist class who control production and can mostly avoid the impacts.
Read the research on climate change and inequality.
Ruth Wilson-Gilmore argues that capitalism has its roots in colonial exploitation and inherently relies on 'the production of group differentiated vulnerabilities to preventative deaths'. It will always seek to divide people according to perceived differences from the dominant group (race, gender, sexuality, political agreement), something we see playing out increasingly boldly in the USA today.
The huge contrast in the positive and negative impacts of global capitalism are felt most prominently between continents and countries, but also between cities, neighbourhoods, communities and people of different abilities and identities.
The planet is a global resource that we all have a right to share — a commons — which is being abused by a few to the detriment of the many and ultimately leading us towards extinction.
Collecting and sharing resources like shelter, crops or care (commoning to create a commons) is not a choice from a menu for most people on the planet but a necessary requirement for survival.
For example, community land trusts or self-built and self-serviced neighbourhoods take housing permanently out of the market across the Global South.
These aren't charity or utopias; they're how people actually reproduce life under exclusion to avoid erasure.
But what could we do that we are not already doing?
How can we move beyond this apparently inevitable extinction to an (at least survivable) future?
What if we refuse to surrender to the despair of learned helplessness and insist on finding potential in the future?
A word we might refer to is pessoptimism, coined by the Palestinian writer Emile Habibi, fusing pessimism and optimism to name the inseparability of hope and despair.
We act, knowing it might be recuperated, and we act anyway.
Capitalist Realism