Prompt: But it’s also an open question as to whether those kinds of resources actually have substitutes. Plastic chairs can substitute for wooden ones, or plastic bags for paper — but can you build a substitute for an entire forest? Can human technologies or human labor substitute for the nonhuman work done by other organisms? Or are there certain kinds of work that only nature can do?  Today’s substitution optimists remain bullish. A group called the Ecomodernists, whose members include famed cultural entrepreneur Stewart Brand, geoengineering researcher David Keith, and Breakthrough Institute founders Ted Nordhaus and Michael Shellenberger, has taken up Brand’s famous injunction from the Whole Earth Catalog: “We are as gods and might as well get good at it.” Despite the signs of destruction all around, they assure us that human powers can yet be channeled to produce a “good Anthropocene.”  In their view, resource scarcity isn’t a problem: the Ecomodernist Manifesto of 2015 declares that “substitutes for other material inputs to human well-being can easily be found if those inputs become scarce or expensive.” There are no real limits to growth: the sun provides more energy than we can hope to use, and any other given physical resource can be replaced with something else. That implicitly includes nature’s reproductive functions. Carbon capture-and-storage technologies can replace a forest’s capacity to absorb carbon. Injecting aerosols into the sky to make clouds more reflective mimics volcanic eruptions that spew sulfur into the atmosphere, helping to cool the earth.  If Ecomodernists represent one extreme, the other end of the spectrum is occupied by those who spurn any kind of substitution. “Deep ecologists” see all of nature as intrinsically valuable: it’s simply impossible to substitute for the unique and irreplaceable value of any given organism. For other ecologically minded thinkers, including proponents of “degrowth,” the prospect of substituting technology for complex natural processes that we don’t even fully understand is a typical demonstration of human arrogance, one that’s certain to result in unintended consequences. In this view, technology is synonymous with the “techno-fix,” a futile attempt to avoid deeper social and economic change through innovation.

Response: Neither of these positions is satisfying. It’s true that the Ecomodernists are wildly optimistic about human capacities and willfully obtuse about their limits. But it’s not enough to smugly tut-tut at human hubris while the planet burns. Given how quickly the effects of climate change are materializing, even drastic decarbonization is unlikely to stop more mass die-offs and other forms of ecosystem dysfunction. We should hope that at least some ecosystem activities have substitutes, even if they can’t be perfect ones.  In her 1970 book The Dialectic of Sex, best known for advocating artificial wombs as a substitute for biological ones, the feminist thinker Shulamith Firestone also called for a revolutionary ecological program. Such a program should seek to seize “control of the new technology for human purposes, the establishment of a new equilibrium between man and the artificial environment he is creating, to replace the destroyed ‘natural’ balance,” she wrote.  Firestone, to be sure, had too much confidence in the possibility of liberation through technology, and too much fondness for the project of dominating nature. We have yet to automate human reproduction, and we’re similarly unlikely to exert total technological control over Earth’s reproductive functions. But we should nevertheless take seriously Firestone’s impulse to see technology as part of the project of making a liberatory and livable planet rather than aiming for an impossible return to a natural balance that’s everywhere in shambles and that in any case was never so harmonious as we imagine. We don’t have to build the equivalent of an artificial womb for the entire Earth. But we should think about how to use our technologies for purposes both human and nonhuman, in a world where nature and human artifice are now so thoroughly entangled as to be inseparable.  The story of Biosphere 2 offers a way of thinking through what that might look like — both its possibilities and limitations.


Prompt: The Garden and the Aircraft Carrier The question posed by Biosphere 2 was whether the entire Earth was substitutable. The biosphere, a concept first developed by the Soviet scientist Vladimir Vernadsky, refers to the thin layer of the planet capable of supporting life. Biosphere 2 sought to replicate those life-support systems. The countercultural figure behind it, John Allen — an eccentric visionary with a degree in engineering, an MBA from Harvard Business School, and an enthusiasm for theater, poetry, and alternative living — saw the project as simultaneously an experiment with utopia and a backstop against dystopia.

Response: “We poise ready now [sic] not only to cooperate consciously and creatively with the evolutionary potential of our present biosphere,” he proclaimed, “but also to assist in its mitosis into other biospheres freeing our earth-life to participate in the full destiny of the cosmos itself, both by giving the possibility to voyage and live throughout space.” Biosphere 2 would help bring about a new age of space exploration, Allen believed, by developing a way to sustain human life in hostile environments. It would also help protect human life against looming existential threats on Earth: Biosphere 2 would be a prototype of what Allen called “Refugia,” self-contained living spaces that could serve as “insurance” against the calamity of a nuclear winter.  Before Biosphere 2, Allen had managed an intentional community outside of Santa Fe organized along ecological principles. There he met Edward Bass, an eccentric child of the Bass oil dynasty who got into ecology in the 1970s. By the 1990s, Bass was the largest private sponsor of environmental research in the United States. He funded an Institute for Biospheric Studies at Yale and smaller research projects around the world. He also poured an estimated $150 million into Biosphere 2 through his company Space Biosphere Ventures.  Bass saw these contributions as investments in projects that would one day become profitable: in the early days of the biotech boom in the 1990s, it seemed eminently plausible that “ecotech” would take off too. The initial income from Biosphere 2 was to come from tourism — they charged people $12.95 to visit, and half a million people did — which would support the longer-term development of technologies that Bass expected “would have a very significant commercial application.” Biosphere 2 was, as one of its inhabitants called it, “the garden of Eden on top of an aircraft carrier.” Underneath the rainforest and desert landscapes was a massive technosphere, comprising three acres of electrical, mechanical, and plumbing systems. The technology was intended, as a Biospherian put it, “to replicate many of Earth’s free services” — the reproductive functions. On Earth, various planetary processes keep air and water moving, and nutrients and waste along with them. In Biosphere 2, that work was mechanized.


Prompt: Some machines treated wastewater and desalinated water from the miniature ocean to make rain. Others created breezes, mists, and ocean waves. Giant air handlers heated and cooled the air, running off generators powered by natural gas and diesel. To prevent the domes from exploding as the air inside warmed and expanded in the heat of the desert sun, a giant pair of rubber “lungs” acted as a safety valve.

Response: These innovations drew on two decades of research on how to keep humans alive in space, most notably a proposal by the twentieth-century ecologists Eugene and Howard Odum to build “bioregenerative life support systems” in spacecraft. Most spaceships were all technosphere: everything humans needed to survive was provided by a machine. The Odums’ idea was to replace some of those technological functions with organisms that could perform the necessary functions of oxygen generation, waste removal, and food production. Bioregenerative systems would bring down the cost of space travel, reduce the need for astronauts’ labor, and make it possible for astronauts to live longer in space without continually receiving supplies from Earth.


Prompt: Biosphere 2 would be the most ambitious embodiment of these ideas to date. When it opened, it was heralded by many in the press as a marvel of both technological and ecological engineering — Discover magazine called it “the most exciting scientific project” since the moonshot — even as many scientists looked on skeptically. The crew that entered Biosphere 2 in 1991 was to be the first of many: Allen imagined that new crews would enter every two years for an entire century, each building on the knowledge of those who had gone before. Cumulatively, they would inaugurate a new era in the understanding of life on Earth — and the possibilities of life beyond.  The Bubble Bursts Things didn’t go as planned. If the technology of the “aircraft carrier” was cutting-edge, what lay above wasn’t exactly the garden of Eden. Once the Biospherians were sealed inside, everything began to go drastically wrong. Though they had attempted to carefully calibrate the equilibrium of the internal ecosystem, an artificial balance was hard to strike.  Cramming seven biomes into just three acres led to some unexpected effects: the desert picked up condensation from the forest and became more like a shrubland. Nor had Biosphere 2 managed to replicate all of Earth’s services: many trees in the rainforest and the savannah that would usually grow “tension wood” in response to winds failed to do so in the calm Biosphere, leaving them weaker. Most troublingly, the Biosphere began to lose a huge amount of oxygen, while carbon dioxide and nitrous oxide levels rose dangerously. The Biospherians tried to sequester carbon by growing plants, and stopped tilling the soil to prevent carbon stored in the soil from being released into the air. But they couldn’t figure out how to actually stop carbon from accumulating.  It turned out that microbes in the soil were producing carbon dioxide faster than plants were producing oxygen, while the structure’s concrete foundations were absorbing a surprising amount of oxygen. Some speculated that the El Niño event of 1991–1992 also contributed to more cloud cover than usual, decreasing the amount of sunlight for plants to photosynthesize. Some of the vines that the Biospherians had planted to absorb carbon started to overtake food crops, requiring intensive weeding. Algae consumed the ocean, requiring Biospherians to clear it away by hand so the coral reefs below could receive sunlight.

Response: The complications multiplied. An estimated 30 percent of the 3,800 enclosed species died off, including all pollinators. The Biosphere was overrun by ants and cockroaches, stowaways inside the sealed system that soon outcompeted and outlasted other insects. By the time oxygen levels had dropped from 20.9 percent to 14.2 percent — the equivalent of living at an elevation of 15,000 feet — it became difficult to breathe, at which point the Biospherians broke the closed system to pump in oxygen and keep the crew alive.  The first crew left Biosphere 2 in September 1993, on schedule and underweight. The second crew of eight entered in March 1994. But by then Biosphere 2 was looking more like a boondoggle than a breakthrough: it cost a great deal to maintain, and seemed unlikely to develop a commercially viable product anytime soon. Bass began feuding with Allen and then fired most of the Biosphere 2 staff while the second crew was still inside. He hired Steve Bannon, at the time an investment banker experienced with company takeovers, to manage Space Biosphere Ventures’s financial affairs. Amidst the turmoil, the second crew left the structure six months later. They would be the last people ever to live inside Biosphere 2.  Bannon brokered a deal with Columbia University, which agreed to take the facility over. (Columbia eventually gave it up, citing exorbitant expenses; in 2005, Bass gifted Biosphere 2 to the University of Arizona, which now runs it as a research facility.) Space Biosphere Ventures ended up facing multiple lawsuits. Though the irresistible spectacle of Biosphere 2 had made it a media darling at the outset, as the project faltered it was decried as a stunt, a hoax, a fraud. The Village Voice described Biosphere 2 as the product of “an authoritarian — and decidedly non-scientific — personality cult.” The fact that the closed system had been breached to restore oxygen levels rendered the scientific value of the grand experiment dubious. Academic scientists, vindicated by the downfall of a flashy for-profit interloper, set about diagnosing the causes of the disaster.


Prompt: The most obvious lesson was that replicating the reproductive functions of Earth was much more complicated than anyone had imagined. As a pair of Columbia researchers wrote in an assessment shortly after Columbia took over the facility, “isolating small pieces of large biomes and juxtaposing them in an artificial enclosure changed their functioning and interactions rather than creating a small working Earth as originally intended.” You could not simply treat ecosystems as mechanical pieces to be assembled and slotted in and out. Ecologists didn’t even know what all the pieces of an ecosystem were, let alone how exactly they worked together. “At present there is no demonstrated alternative to maintaining the viability of Earth,” they concluded. “No one yet knows how to engineer systems that provide humans with the life-supporting services that natural ecosystems provide for free.” Ecosystems did not appear to be very substitutable at all.  Jury-rigging Spaceship Earth The story of Biosphere 2 seems to prove the substitution skeptics right: we can’t replace ecosystems and we shouldn’t try. But I can’t muster much schadenfreude about the failures of Biosphere 2. After all, the misfortunes of the Biospherians look worrisomely like our own.  Even if we manage to stop climate change from reaching truly cataclysmic levels, rising temperatures will transform Earth’s systems in ways that will make it difficult for many species to survive. Under the circumstances, pious affirmations of ecological holism can quickly tilt into premonitions of doom: if ecosystems are beyond human understanding and entirely irreplaceable, collapse is only a matter of time.  The biologists Paul and Anne Ehrlich once compared species to rivets on an airplane wing. If you were in a plane and looked out the window and saw a rivet fall off the wing, you might be a little concerned but not too worried — after all, the wing has thousands of rivets, enough to make any single one redundant. But if lots of rivets started popping off, you would probably start to freak out. Similarly, losing a species or two might be worrisome but not a sign of doomsday. Losing a lot of species, however, suggests that Spaceship Earth might be in trouble.

Response: We are going to lose more rivets. I hope we can jury-rig something to keep the plane in the air. Our lack of control over the biosphere is genuinely terrifying. But if we’re going to do more than mourn or panic, we have to take the idea of substitution seriously.  Instead of treating substitution as the frictionless replacement of one kind of thing for another, as if matter were totally commensurable, however, we could recognize that substitutes might be rough around the edges but can nevertheless help prevent total breakdown. In some cases, substitution might mean using one kind of organism in place of another; in others, it might mean substituting human labor or technology for the work of nature.  The idea that one species could do the same work as another was one of Charles Darwin’s great insights. As the environmental historian Donald Worster relates, when Darwin went to the Galápagos, he noticed that giant tortoises did the grazing work that bison did in North America. Different creatures, that is, held “the same place in Nature”; they could fill the same “office” within an ecosystem — what ecologists would eventually come to call a niche. Different organisms would do the job differently, of course: a tortoise would have different predators and reproduction patterns than a bison, even if they both grazed. But ecosystems weren’t fixed, timeless orders wherein each organism performed its appointed role for eternity. They were struggles to stay ahead of the competition or be replaced by something else.  This principle animated the selection of species in Biosphere 2. The thousands of species sealed in the dome were chosen not to faithfully replicate the exact relationships of existing ecosystems, but to provide particular functions: to serve as pollinators, to supply food crops, to recycle air, to decompose waste. If a particular species didn’t fit the practical needs of the Biosphere, it was replaced with another.


Prompt: Of course, human efforts to achieve particular ends by introducing new species don’t always go well. The genre of stories about “invasive species” is one of the most reliable sources of cautionary tales about unintended consequences of human meddling in nature. The East Asian vine kudzu, for example, was widely planted in Southern states to help address soil erosion in the aftermath of the Dust Bowl; it became the weed that ate the South.  But not every story of introduced species is a warning. Rewilding projects, for example, attempt to restore land domesticated and cultivated by humans into ecosystems operating without human presence. This usually means reintroducing species that have been driven out of their former habitats or killed off by human settlement. In some cases, species have gone fully extinct, yet some other kind of creature may be able to do the same work.  In the rewilded nature reserve of Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands, for example, the roles of extinct aurochs and tarpans — wild ponies and cattle — are filled by physiologically similar breeds that eat the same grasses and have similar roaming patterns. In the American Great Plains, meanwhile, sustainable cattle raising practices have tried to replicate the grazing patterns of bison. Since cattle tend to roam less extensively, doing so requires more intensive human labor to direct herds.  This raises an important point: natural systems that now operate automatically may require more human labor to function as nonhuman species disappear. Life in Biosphere 2 was a lot of work. As one participant later recalled, “Farming took up 25 percent of our waking time, research and maintenance 20 percent, writing reports 19 percent, cooking 12 percent, biome management 11 percent, animal husbandry 9 percent.” As Biosphere 2’s nonhuman life support systems started to falter, its human inhabitants had to work harder to keep them functioning, from chasing pests that had no predators to pollinating plants when the bees died off. As scientists observed in the aftermath, “Biospherians, despite annual energy inputs costing about $1 million, had to make enormous, often heroic, personal efforts to maintain ecosystem services that most people take for granted.”

Response: Of course, Biosphere 2 didn’t just rely on human labor to help nature function. Its vast technosphere was built expressly to fill in for Earth systems like ocean currents and water cycles. Biosphere 1 now has a rather substantial technosphere of its own, currently constituting 30 trillion tons of human artifacts, from computers to undersea cables to houses to lightbulbs. Most of it supports human life and pursuits. But some of it could also be put to use tending to the biosphere, as in Biosphere 2.  The garden of Eden and the aircraft carrier aren’t our only options. Most of our world is some combination of the two. Using technology to support ecological functions doesn’t have to involve building a giant array of machinery to replace Earth systems or trying to technologically manipulate the entire atmosphere, a la the Ecomodernists. But nor should it mean attempting to remove human activity and artifacts from ecosystems altogether. As Donna Haraway reminds us, “There is no Eden under glass.” Technology can play an important role in actively maintaining ecosystems rather than replacing them wholesale, in conjunction with human labor.  Some of this work is already happening. Drones are being used to reseed land for restorative purposes, effectively performing the work of birds while reducing human presence in remote areas. In the Great Barrier Reef, a robotic vessel protects indigenous coral species by killing the crown-of-thorns starfish that is suffocating the reef.  Paradoxically, these unmistakably human interventions often occur in the absence of actual humans. Robots can offer ways to preserve nonhuman ecosystems without more direct forms of human intrusion. They aren’t total replacements for organisms, of course. A drone can drop seeds but can’t lay eggs; a robot fish can kill starfish but can’t grow new coral. Indeed, none of the options available to us — nonhuman proxies, technological tools, human labor — is a perfect substitute for what they replace, and none ever will be. At best, they can provide rough approximations of certain functions. But these jury-rigged rivets might be our best hope for making a future on a damaged planet.


Prompt: How Are You Going to Pay for It? Nature, Raymond Williams once said, is the most complex word in the English language. But I’ve come to think that “natural” mostly means “freely given.” Nature offers the “free services” on which human life depends. More generally, nature describes what we take for granted, what we expect to happen of its own accord. From “natural birth” to “natural beauty,” nature hides a lot of work done behind the scenes. As the scholar Merve Emre reminds us, “all reproduction, even reproduction that appears ‘natural,’ is assisted.” Emre is concerned with human reproduction, but it holds just as true for the reproduction of nature itself.  We can no longer take the reproduction of our world for granted, or assume that the work of nature will take place automatically. Reproducing life on Earth will require a great deal more assistance from us, in our simultaneously extraordinary and limited capacities as a single species on a planet of millions. It will also require a great deal more recognition of the assistance provided by all those other species. What the feminist theorist Sophie Lewis calls “full surrogacy” — a call to distribute labor more broadly, to cultivate reciprocal practices of kinship and care — is as applicable to our nonhuman relationships as to our human ones.  While we may be able to perform some work on nature’s behalf in order to stabilize our biosphere, however, the expense will be enormous. Indeed, the biggest barrier to developing substitutes for certain ecological services may turn out to be cost.  The ecologist John Avise observed that the true lesson of Biosphere 2 was an economic one. In the late twentieth century, economists had tried to estimate the value of Earth’s freely provided services, but had usually stumbled over the technical difficulties of doing so. Biosphere 2 made it possible to construct “a more explicit ledger,” Avise wrote. All told, it had cost over $150 million to keep eight humans alive for two years. As Avise pointed out, “if we were being charged, the total invoice for all Earthospherians would come to an astronomical three quintillion dollars for the current generation alone!” Replacing human labor with machines usually saves money. Replacing the work of nature with machines or human labor is the opposite: it makes what was free expensive.

Response: This means that substitution is rarely economical. In China’s Hanyuan County, for example, where pesticides have wiped out many bee colonies, human workers have subbed in, using feather dusters to pollinate pear trees by hand. But human pollination is only viable in Hanyuan because it’s cheaper than renting beehives. In a system (capitalism) that aims to keep costs down above all else, the cost of human labor has to be approaching zero for it to compete with nature’s gifts.  So as we ask who, or what, will do the work of nature, we should also ask another question: Who will pay for it? Earthly survival will require new ways of organizing not only our social and technological relationships, but our economic ones. As Biosphere 2 demonstrates, filling in for the work of nature is unlikely to be a profitable enterprise. Capitalism is unlikely to pay the extra costs. The question of what can replace it may be the biggest substitution problem of all.


Prompt: In 2019, Berlin celebrated Equal Pay Day by offering women discounts on public transit. It provided these discounts automatically, by analyzing the faces of people purchasing tickets. On the face of it, as it were, this approach might appear innocuous (or even beneficial — a small offset to gendered pay disparities!). But in actual fact, the technology in question is incredibly dangerous.

Response: Automated Gender Recognition (AGR) isn’t something most people have heard of, but it’s remarkably common. A subsidiary technology to facial recognition, AGR attempts to infer the gender of the subject of a photo or video through machine learning. It’s integrated into the facial recognition services sold by big tech companies like Amazon and IBM, and has been used for academic research, access control to gendered facilities, and targeted advertising. It’s difficult to know all of the places where it’s currently deployed, but it’s a common feature of general facial recognition systems: anywhere you see facial recognition, AGR might well be present.


Prompt: The growing pervasiveness of AGR is alarming because it has the potential to cause tremendous harm. When you integrate the assumptions embedded in this technology into our everyday infrastructure, you empower a system that has a very specific — and very exclusive — conception of what “gender” is. And this conception is profoundly damaging to trans and gender non-conforming people. AGR doesn’t merely “measure” gender. It reshapes, disastrously, what gender means.

Response: The Algorithmic Bathroom Bill So what precisely is AGR, and where does it come from? The technology originated in academic research in the late 1980s (specifically in psychology — but that’s another story) and started off with a particularly dystopian vision of the future it was creating. One early paper, after noting AGR’s usefulness for classifying monkey faces, proposed that the same approach “could, at last, scientifically test the tenets of anthroposcopy (physiognomy), according to which personality traits can be divined from features of the face and head.” Malpractice and harm have never been far from these systems.


Prompt: Image courtesy of Os Keyes. When you run into a system that uses AGR, it takes a photograph (or video) of you, and then looks at your bone structure, skin texture, and facial shape. It looks at where (and how prominent) your cheekbones are, or your jawline, or your eyebrows. It doesn’t need to notify you to do this: it’s a camera. You may not even be aware of it. But, as it works out the precise points of similarity and difference between the features of your face and those of a template, it classifies your face as “male” or “female.” This label is then fed to a system that logs your gender, tracks it, and uses it to inform the ads that an interactive billboard shows you or whether you can enter a particular gendered space (like a bathroom or a changing room).

Response: “Automatic detection and aggregation of demographics and behavior of people,” a patent for a system that includes AGR. Google Patents. There’s only one small problem: inferring gender from facial features is complete bullshit. You can’t actually tell someone’s gender from their physical appearance. If you try, you’ll just end up hurting trans and gender non-conforming people when we invariably don’t stack up to your normative idea of what gender “looks like.” Researchers such as myself and Morgan Scheuerman have critiqued the technology for precisely this reason, and Morgan’s interviews with trans people about AGR reveal an entirely justified sense of foreboding about it. Whether you’re using cheekbone structure or forehead shape, taking a physiological view of gender is going to produce unfair outcomes for trans people — particularly when (as is the case with every system I’ve encountered) your models only produce binary labels of “male” and “female.” The consequences are pretty obvious, given the deployment contexts. If you have a system that is biased against trans people and you integrate it into bathrooms and changing rooms, you’ve produced an algorithmic bathroom bill. If you have a situation that simply cannot include non-binary people, and you integrate it into bathrooms and changing rooms, you’ve produced an algorithmic bathroom bill.  A True Transsexual So AGR clearly fails to measure gender. But why do I say that it reshapes gender? Because all technology that implicates gender, alters it; more generally, all technology that measures a thing alters it simply by measuring it. And while we can’t know all of the ramifications of a relatively new development like AGR yet, there are a ton of places where we can see the kind of thing I’m talking about. A prominent example can be found in the work of Harry Benjamin, an endocrinologist who was one of the pioneers of trans medicine.


Prompt: Working in the 1950s, Benjamin was one of the first doctors to take trans people even marginally seriously, and at a vital time — the moment when, through public awareness of people like Christine Jorgensen (one of the first trans people to come out in the United States), wider society was first becoming seriously aware of trans people. While media figures argued back and forth about Jorgensen, Benjamin published The Transsexual Phenomenon in 1966, the first medical textbook about trans people ever written.

Response: Containing case studies, life stories, diagnostic advice, and treatment approaches, The Transsexual Phenomenon became the standard medical work on trans subjects, establishing Benjamin as an authority on the matter. And it was, for its time, very advanced simply for treating trans medicine as a legitimate thing. It argued that trans people who wanted medical interventions would benefit from and deserved them, at a point when the default medical approach was “psychoanalyze them until they stop being trans.” Benjamin believed this was futile, and that for those patients for whom it was appropriate, interventions should be made available.


Prompt: To identify whether someone was such a patient, and what treatments should be made available, Benjamin built his book around his Sex Orientation Scale, often known simply as the Benjamin Scale.  The Sexual Orientation Scale from Harry Benjamin’s The Transsexual Phenomenon (1966). Courtesy of the Digital Transgender Archive.

Response: A doctor using the Benjamin Scale would first work to understand the patient, their life, and their state of mind, and then classify them into one of the six “types.” Based on that classification, the doctor would determine what the appropriate treatment options might be. For Type V or Type VI patients, often grouped as “true transsexual,” the answer was hormones, surgical procedures, and social role changes that would enable them to live a “normal life.”  But this scale, as an instrument of measurement, came with particular assumptions baked into it about what it was measuring, and what a normal life was. A normal life was a heterosexual life: a normal woman, according to Benjamin, is attracted to men. A normal life meant two, and only two, genders and forms of embodiment. A normal life meant a husband (or wife) and a white picket fence, far away from any lingering trace of the trans person’s assigned sex at birth, far away from any possibility of regret.  Further, it meant that trans women who were too “manly” in bone structure, or trans men too feminine, should be turned away at the door. It meant delay after delay after delay to ensure the patient really wanted surgery, advocating “a thorough study of each case… together with a prolonged period of observation, up to a year” to prevent the possibility of regret. It meant expecting patients to live as their desired gender for an extended period of time to ensure they would “pass” as “normal” after medical intervention — something known as the “real life test.” Ultimately, Benjamin wrote, “the psychiatrist must have the last word.” So to Benjamin, a “true” trans person was heterosexual, deeply gender-stereotyped in their embodiment and desires, and willing to grit their teeth through a year (or more) of therapy to be sure they were really certain that they would prefer literally anything else to spending the rest of their life with gender dysphoria.


Prompt: No More Ghosts On its own, Benjamin’s notion of a “normal life” would have been nothing but laughable — and laugh is what most of my friends do when I point them to the bit where he doesn’t think queer trans people exist. But because of how widely his instrument of measurement has worked its way into systems of power, it has been deeply influential.  Benjamin’s textbook and, more importantly, his scale, became standard in trans medicine, informing the design of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) definitions of gender dysphoria and the rules of the World Professional Association on Transgender Health (WPATH) — considered (by doctors) to be the gold standard in treatment approaches. Those rules still contain a “real life” test and psychiatric gatekeeping, and the DSM only began recognizing non-binary genders as real in 2013. More broadly, public narratives of transness still tell “the story” popularized and validated by Benjamin — the trans woman “born a girl, seeing herself in dresses,” the trans man who has “always known” — even when that story does not and has never represented many of us.

Response: The consequences for people who do not conform have been dire. People are denied access to medical care for not meeting the formal medical definition of a “true transsexual”; people are denied legitimacy in trans spaces for not “really” being trans; people are convinced by these discourses that their misery must be fake — that because they don’t fit a particular normative idea of what a trans person is, they’re not really a trans person at all, and so should go back into the closet for years or decades or the rest of their lives. All because of a tool that claimed merely to measure gender. Inside and outside our communities and selves, Benjamin’s ghost continues to wreak unholy havoc.


Prompt: So what is the point of this (admittedly fascinating) psychomedical history? The point is that there’s no such thing as a tool of measurement that merely “measures.” Any measurement system, once it becomes integrated into infrastructures of power, gatekeeping, and control, fundamentally changes the thing being measured. The system becomes both an opportunity (for those who succeed under it) and a source of harm (for those who fail). And these outcomes become naturalized: we begin to treat how the tool sees reality as reality itself.  When we look at AGR, we can observe this dynamic at work. AGR is a severely flawed instrument. But when we place it within the context of its current and proposed uses — when we place it within infrastructures — we begin to see how it not only measures gender but reshapes it. When a technology assumes that men have short hair, we call it a bug. But when that technology becomes normalized, pretty soon we start to call long-haired men a bug. And after awhile, whether strategically or genuinely, those men begin to believe it. Given that AGR developers are so normative that their research proposals include displaying “ads of cars when a male is detected, or dresses in the case of females,” it’s safe to say the technology won’t be reshaping gender into something more flexible.

Response: AGR might not be as flashy or obviously power-laden as the Benjamin Scale, but it has the potential to become more ubiquitous: responsive advertising and public bathrooms are in many more places than a psychiatrist’s office. While the individual impact might be smaller, the cumulative impact of thousands of components of physical and technical reality misclassifying you, reclassifying you, punishing you when you fail to conform to rigid gender norms and rewarding you when you do, could be immense.


Prompt: The good news is that the story of the Benjamin Scale shows us that resistance is possible. We did not go quietly into the psych; we fought, we lied, we hit back, and we continue to do so. But resistance is not enough. The norms that the Benjamin Scale worked into the world are still being perpetuated. Carving out space to breathe and live is good, but those battles are only necessary if you have already lost the war.

Response: So rather than focus on reforming AGR — adding new categories or caveats or consent mechanisms, which are all moves that implicitly accept its deployment — we should push back more generally. We should focus on delegitimizing the technology altogether, ensuring it never gets integrated into society, and that facial recognition as a whole (with its many, many inherent problems) goes the same way. Do not just ask how we resist it — ask the people developing it why we need it. Demand that legislators ban it, organizations stop resourcing it, researchers stop designing it. Forty years after Benjamin’s death, we are still haunted by his ghost. We don’t need any more.


Prompt: Climate action today is increasingly a question of exponents. Merely reducing greenhouse gases won’t cut it; according to the UN Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, emissions must be halved in ten years and halved again in subsequent decades if we are to avoid the worst effects of global warming. Similarly, renewable energy needs to do more than just increase its market share; it must spread exponentially, replacing fossil fuel energy sources within fifty years.  These mandates represent an unprecedentedly rapid transition in the nature of our energy grids, transportation, housing, and all of the related patterns and habits that make up our daily lives. Decarbonization, if it is adequate to the climate math, must be both incredibly ambitious and incredibly disruptive.

Response: Changes on this scale are difficult to imagine. To complicate matters, history offers scant examples for reference. Accordingly, the task of charting a pathway through decarbonization is in large part also a question of stretching our metaphorical imagination to reframe the possible. This is difficult, creative, and necessary work. It is also fraught with hazards.


Prompt: In the global orbit of Silicon Valley thought, where disruption is a word with more positive cachet, one analogy is gaining momentum: we should think about carbon like we think about computers. The story of the microprocessor, after all, is a story of exponential growth curves and adoption rates: per Moore’s Law, the density of semiconductors has doubled every two years, making computers cheaper, smaller, and more powerful — a win-win that fueled the digital revolution. Couldn’t renewable energy follow a similar path?  This idea is at the root of a sweeping policy proposal currently circulating in both UN climate conferences and Davos event halls: a global “Carbon Law,” styled after Moore’s Law, that sets a roadmap for exponential climate action. Unlike most views of climate change, this future is surprisingly optimistic. Carbon Law proponents point out that renewable energy, although currently representing only about 2 percent of global electricity generation, has already followed an exponential growth curve in its short history. They expect this trend to continue, given the proper incentives from governments and investment from industry. With the right social alignment, as they see it, the technology will simply take over.

Response: The risk here, as with any framing comparison, is that the metaphor will not hold. Stories of digital disruption have long been sources of prediction, optimism, and analogy — as well as sites of dangerous fantasies. As a framework for energy transition, the Carbon Law can do more harm than good if it imparts the wrong lessons, provides false comfort, or seeks to mobilize the wrong people.  Metaphors matter: nothing less than the future of the planet is at stake. And interrogating the charisma of exponential thinking suggests that the Carbon Law is unlikely to help make that future a fair and habitable one. Insofar as silicon’s history helps us understand carbon’s future, its lessons are the opposite of those circulating at Davos. The story of silicon doesn’t teach us to sit back, relax, and let technology save us. On the contrary: its real lesson is the power of purposeful struggle within systems of constraint.


Prompt: Legislating Moore’s Law Exponential growth is remarkable wherever you find it, and the steady gains in chip densities that began in the late 1960s remains a defining standard for rapid technological advancement. Moore’s Law, however, is not a law of physics. It took considerable social effort and material happenstance to make the growth curve hold.  In 1965, Gordon E. Moore was the director of research at Fairchild Semiconductor, a pioneering firm that helped create Silicon Valley. In a magazine article, he observed that the number of components in integrated circuits had grown exponentially over the past seven years and would likely continue on this trajectory a decade hence. This prediction could have easily faltered. At the time, shrinking transistor sizes seemed to many engineers to invite disaster through unneeded complexity and melted components. Miniaturization, moreover, was an imperative unique to military contracts that needed chips small enough to fit onto rockets, while researchers were quite content to have room-sized computers.

Response: It took considerable barn-raising by key figures in the industry, as well as hefty military spending, to make Moore’s prediction into a de facto law by changing industry R&D allocations and targets. The ensuing rates of growth were formally ratified in national and international industry roadmaps in the 1990s, essentially securing Moore’s Law as a group-fulfilling prophecy.  From the start, a combination of peer organizing and institutional mandates propelled Moore’s supposition into a standard. The technology did not simply take over.  Yet this is not to say that exponential doubling is a purely socially constructed outcome. The unique properties of silicon supported the otherwise unlikely win-win of densification and miniaturization. The price, size, and processing power of chips are tightly correlated; smaller silicon circuits require less energy to power, produce less heat, and can process at faster speeds.  Writ large as an industry-wide trend, this fact about silicon’s thermo-electric properties led to the massive popularization of cheaper, smaller, and more powerful digital devices. But this isn’t true of electrical grids, photovoltaics, or other forms of technology that don’t experience consistent density scaling across their components. If, for example, Moore’s Law applied to air travel, a New York City-to-Stockholm flight today would hold 120 million passengers and take eight minutes.  However, even within the scalar logics of silicon, the predictive success of Moore’s Law today is widely acknowledged to be over. Microchips are heating up, R&D costs threaten to outpace density gains, and, as engineers parse the design challenges of nanometer circuits, they may simply be running out of atoms. Future prospects for densification are multiple and uncertain. Rather than relying on exponential growth in processing capacities, software designers are increasingly depending on gains in efficiency first developed for mobile applications — seeking as an industry, if somewhat belatedly, to do more with less.


Prompt: Surfing the Waves of the World Spirit  Techno-optimism is easy when exponential growth holds. Proponents of the Carbon Law largely see technology — both digital and electric — in this register. As a result, exponential decarbonization appears to them as little more than a technological coordination problem. It requires innovation and cooperation on the part of politicians and green tech companies, but asks very little from citizens. Its model of power is predicated on the agency of executives and devices, not political mobilization by large numbers of people.

Response: Two men sit at the center of the Carbon Law’s development and distribution, and their backgrounds help explain some of its political character: Johan Rockström, director of the Stockholm Resilience Center, and Johan Falk, the director of Intel’s Stockholm IoT Ignition Lab until he quit to work with Rockström. At Intel, Falk’s mandate was to promote the spread of smart networks to new industries — to spread narratives of exponential growth and scalar disruption. Rockström’s center, on the other hand, develops and disseminates “resilience thinking” across high-profile climate talks and a C-suite executive education program. Together, they have targeted political and corporate elites with a simple message: the climate crisis can’t be solved without exponential thinking, which requires elite “accelerators” to reenact the roadmap and feedback loops that propelled Moore’s Law forward.  Strip away the Silicon Valley language from this proposal and the details are themselves common enough to most mainstream climate governance plans: price carbon, make cuts across multiple sectors, increase energy efficiency, and fund renewable R&D. What’s unusual here is the emotional register of the plan and the apolitical certainty of its promise — factors that can’t be disentangled from tech industry tropes. For instance, Falk’s “Exponential Roadmap Report” argues that decarbonization “is nothing short of a global economic transformation. But transformation appears assured through revolutions driven by digitalisation. Harvesting this power will help drive unstoppable momentum.” Similarly, Rockström predicts that under the Carbon Law, “big masses [will] simply surf along a sustainable journey without knowing that they’re doing it.”  In short, the technology will do the work. Exponential growth curves will continue along an unchanging trajectory, as if by natural law. Existing social arrangements, fossil fuel interests, and the economic and environmental justice barriers to the energy transition will cede to the power of elite leadership and digital disruption. In turn, our carbon footprints, seemingly without effort, will just shrink and shrink.


Prompt: Creativity Within Constraints This top-down, technologically determined future ignores all the ways in which energy transitions aren’t just a question of market shares, but of the social pressures and material constraints that cut across them. Decarbonization will demand more than just a different kind of technology curve, accelerating sharply into the horizon. It will very likely require abrasive changes to well-worn cultural norms, the structure of cities and trade, and perhaps even the valorization of economic growth in its broadest terms. It will be conflictual, classed, and expensive.

Response: Technology alone proves to be a poor analytic for these kinds of social changes. Moreover, as demonstrated by recent waves of popular opposition to climate policy, market fixes without considerations for equity are politically disastrous. People, infrastructure, and culture don’t fit into industry roadmaps or silicon wafers. They contain differences and resistances that can’t be universally scaled.


Prompt: If Moore’s Law is to be a useful story through which to approach this future, it will be for all the reasons its green proponents currently ignore. The history of the microprocessor revolution is ultimately about the immensity of effort that goes into maintaining the dream of exponential growth — and its inevitable collapse. Moore’s Law was neither a socially constructed prophecy nor a materially determined outcome. It was a period of coordinated action within specific material parameters that have now passed. It leaves us facing a technological future that will require creativity within new constraints.

Response: Rockström and Falk are correct that time is short and the need to muster political and technological resources is great. Where they are wrong is the assumption that a better future will arrive on our desks without a fight. Instead, it will require a public that can stand up and push. Since 1992, volunteers have tagged more than 1.5 million monarch butterflies. Tagging a butterfly involves capturing it in a net, attaching a label to its wing, and releasing it back into its habitat. The identifying information on the tag goes into a database that tracks the monarch’s famous winter migrations from locales east of the Rockies to Mexico. Chip Taylor, founder and director of Monarch Watch, the nonprofit that organizes this vast volunteer effort, says the process is easier than it sounds and that the monarch butterfly is hardier than it appears. Even students can participate, and they often do so as part of their science classes, guided by teachers. Taylor noted that 2018 held the record for the largest number of butterfly tags distributed, with over 320,000 mailed to interested volunteers across North America.  Monarch butterflies are unique. Not only are they resilient to being captured and tagged by volunteers, they are also widely loved. In addition to Monarch Watch, there are numerous Facebook groups dedicated to the orange and black beauties, including Monarch Butterfly Garden with over 50,000 followers, and The Beautiful Monarch with over 25,000 members. Volunteers are eager to study and protect them.


Prompt: What about species that aren’t as charming? Who will account for the creepy crawlies and the drab species? These are some of the questions underlying the scientific community’s increasing reliance on crowdsourced environmental data. Monarch Watch helped pioneer the crowdsourcing model, but its analog, low-tech approach has since been overtaken by a wave of apps and platforms that have made the process of collecting data much more accessible. The proliferation of smartphones and the rise of the mobile web has enabled more people to contribute more observations, on more species. And while this phenomenon has been growing for years, it has acquired a new urgency since the election of Donald Trump. Under Trump’s leadership, scientists have seen a decrease in funding for environmental research and an official denial of climate change despite mounting evidence. This means that research scientists need crowdsourced data more than ever before, incomplete as it may be.  “Community scientists” can help. In addition to not relying on government budgets, these nature-loving, albeit untrained and unpaid, members of the public have another advantage: they can use apps to collect data about more species, over a larger physical area, than the comparatively small number of professional environmental scientists can. But if community scientists completely drive scientific research agendas, society risks losing valuable information about critically important species. Community science efforts can only augment scientific research, not replace it.  Shrooms at Scale The aughts saw an explosion of community science apps and websites that let users collect photos, dates, times, and geo-coordinates for different plant and animal sightings. Love birds? Join the hundreds of thousands of users on eBird, a database started in 2002 that now has hundreds of millions of bird observations. More of a mushroom person? There’s Mushroom Observer, which has spawned hundreds of thousands of observations from thousands of participants since it started in 2006.

Response: There are online spaces for generalists as well. One example is iNaturalist, an app, website, and online community that launched in 2008. A user on a hike can upload a photo of a plant or animal and have immediate access to the platform’s community of naturalists to help identify it. iNaturalist has amassed 25 million observations, over 10 million of which are research-grade. The platform is also a popular public engagement tool for museums and other institutions that use it as part of their programming.


Prompt: The scale of data collection that’s possible with these platforms surpasses anything a team of scientists could ever hope to match over the course of a career, even with ample funding. Users of iNaturalist and eBird have collectively recorded observations of over 200,000 species. This data often makes its way into scientific research. Despite Mushroom Observer being dominated by amateurs, one of the site’s developers, Joe Cohen, says that trained researchers actively participate in forum discussions, track particular species, and share specimens with other users. iNaturalist, Mushroom Observer, eBird, and Monarch Watch all submit user-collected data to the Global Biodiversity Information Facility (GBIF), a central repository that brings together data on species occurrences from tens of thousands of different data sources. Scientists can easily access the data filtered by their species of interest. Data collected by app users and accessed via GBIF has been cited hundreds of times in scientific research.  Burnt Out on Butterflies But the apps and websites that make this large-scale data collection possible are not designed for conducting scientific research. iNaturalist, for example, makes clear that its first priority is “to connect people to nature” — the breadth and volume of the environmental data collected is a fortuitous side effect of community-building. And since producing data specifically for scientific research is not what these platforms are for, sampling problems abound.

Response: Data collection sites that are near users’ homes or are easy to get to become hotspots for observations, regardless of their value for scientific research. While scientists often travel to field sites to collect data, Mushroom Observers, for example, typically collect data near where they live.  When community scientists do travel, they may be more interested in going to places where they can expect to find a particular species, either because the species is more prevalent or because the place supports data collection in some way. Chip Taylor of Monarch Watch remarked that monarchs are better represented in Iowa because its county conservation boards facilitate tagging efforts. Volunteers also prefer to report species they find interesting. Rare species may be overreported because people are excited to see them and may even travel specifically to see them — a data collection pattern encouraged by some platforms’ design features, like eBird’s rare bird alerts. In 2018, the monarch butterfly was the most observed species in iNaturalist’s research-grade observations in ten of the forty-eight states in the continental US, though it’s unlikely that monarch butterflies are the most prevalent species in any of those states. Meanwhile, relatively little data was collected by users on the less charismatic Bridgeoporus nobilissimus mushroom.


Prompt: Misidentifications can also be a problem, even though companion apps for community scientists generally require multiple identifications before an observation is confirmed, and some apps like iNaturalist use computer vision to suggest identifications. In an effort to ensure the quality of their dataset, scientists using crowdsourced observations for research may treat the number of contributions a user has made as a proxy for data quality, and filter out users with a weak contribution history.

Response: Since the charisma, visibility, rareness, and location of a given species can all affect data collection in ways that don’t necessarily reflect the species’ actual distribution, it can be difficult to determine whether an absence of observations corresponds to a real decline of the species or something else. Some platforms try to account for this in different ways, but others, wary of user attrition, are hesitant to add barriers to submitting observations. After all, what matters most to the platforms is attracting and retaining users. Helping out scientists is a secondary concern.


Prompt: Bridging the Gap Researchers do their best to account for the limitations of crowdsourced data. They add instructions to particular data collection efforts or work in tandem with volunteer data collectors on training initiatives about the need for high-quality data. “Data fusion” methods and integrated population models have also become popular tools to bring data together from different sources, weighing the strengths and weaknesses of each dataset. Gaps in community science data can inform scientists’ future data collection, providing opportunities to improve sampling design and data collection efficiency.  Despite their limitations, then, platforms like iNaturalist, Mushroom Observer, and eBird are still valuable for scientists. The scale of biodiversity is such that scientists alone cannot record everything, particularly in an era of slashed research budgets and anti-science public policy.  Still, defunding science has serious consequences and we can’t afford to narrow our focus at such a critical moment of ecological change. There are inevitable, irreparable gaps in data collected by community members. Going back in time to collect better data on a particular species or in a specific region is impossible. When scientists are more reliant on data collected by volunteers, the fluctuating interests of the public can destabilize research efforts. We still need data about boring species, and from faraway places. These gaps take infrastructure and resources to fill, and we ignore them at our peril.

Response: Clean energy advocates envision an electrified home running on 100 percent renewable energy with a Tesla parked in its garage, solar shingles gleaming on its rooftop, and a smart meter dutifully collecting usage data and uploading it to the cloud. But swim upstream and eventually you arrive at the extractive frontiers of the renewable energy transition.  It was 8:45 am on the first day of the 11th Lithium Supply & Markets Conference in the basement level of the W Hotel in Santiago, Chile. There was no way for me to blend in. “Providence College” on my name tag rendered me a curiosity. Still, I was glad I remembered to wear lipstick and that my backpack had straps that converted it into a tote.  I found an empty seat in the sea of suits, almost all men but of different ages. They hailed variously from China, Australia, Chile, the United States, the United Kingdom, and Argentina. They were market analysts and prospectors; equipment salesmen and regulators; executives, consultants, and peddlers of information in the notoriously opaque world of lithium, a “space,” in Silicon Valley talk, not quite meriting the word “market.”  As I slid into my seat, the chairman of one of the largest lithium companies in the world, with a sordid past in a corrupt privatization process under Augusto Pinochet’s brutal dictatorship, took to the stage. “Mining is the spine of Chile; mining runs through our veins.” I might have been the only person in the room who immediately thought of Eduardo Galeano’s anti-colonial page-turner, Open Veins of Latin America — incidentally penned the same year Pinochet came to power, brutally crushing the dream of democratic socialism in Chile. But I don’t think the chairman meant to call to mind the vampiric iconography of global capital. The dead sapping the living; the blood and sweat and tortured landscapes of extraction, especially in its colonial variant.  Arm Wrestling in the Atacama Lithium is the third element in the periodic table. It is highly reactive and exists either in compounds with other minerals in rock formations, or in clay deposits, or dissolved as an ion in brine. It is also the active ingredient in the lightweight rechargeable batteries that power electric vehicles (EVs) and store energy on renewable grids. This is why lithium is essential for the coming energy transition.


Prompt: In the United States, transportation is the single largest source of carbon pollution, accounting for about 30 percent of emissions. Achieving anything like a safe climate means we have to swap internal combustion engine vehicles for EVs, and hook up those cars, trucks, and buses to an electric grid powered by wind or sun. (Transitioning from a model of individual cars to one of mass transit would facilitate this process, and have other positive environmental effects.) Lithium enters into this equation twice. First, it is a material input for EV batteries. Second, batteries are in effect an energy storage technology, and grids that operate on intermittent gusts of wind and rays of sun need a mechanism to smooth supply and match it to demand. (Dramatically reducing our overall energy consumption would also help.) The brines of Chile’s Salar de Atacama lie 7,500 feet above sea level on an Andean plateau and supply roughly 30 percent of the world’s lithium. These salty underground reservoirs are located beneath a closed basin ringed by the Andean mountain range. A perfect storm of climate, geology, and chemistry has concentrated lithium in the waters below the rugged surface of the vast Atacama salt flat, which in total measures about two-thirds of the surface area of my home state of Rhode Island.  But resource extraction throws this vulnerable desert wetland out of whack. Getting the lithium entails sucking up the brine at an astounding rate. SQM, the company whose chairman I heard at the conference, pumps out brine at a rate of 1,700 liters a second — 95 percent of which is then evaporated. In other words, extracting lithium involves drawing up a lot of water and throwing most of it into the air.  Almost any corporate representative will say that extracting and evaporating brine has no effect on freshwater. But talk to any scientist or regulator familiar with the Atacama basin and they will tell you that the two types of water interact — that removing the brine eventually lowers the water table, threatening supplies needed for drinking and irrigation.

Response: You can think about it like an arm-wrestling match. The brine water is underneath the salt flat. The freshwater systems are located at the flat’s perimeter. The two kinds of water are separated by a dynamic interface: a surface tension generated by the fluid’s differing density levels. Brine is much denser than freshwater, weighed down by dissolved elements like lithium. But while brine has the force of mass on its side, freshwater — which originates from snowmelt high up in the Andean peaks and the aquifers they feed — has the force of gravity in its favor. They are locked in a contest: mass versus gravity. When brine is removed, the interface separating them shifts towards the center of the salt flat, dragging freshwater with it — and away from the Indigenous communities located on the flat’s perimeter.


Prompt: Flamingos and Quince I first saw the Salar de Atacama after driving around the mountains on the border of Bolivia. The Licancabur volcano loomed over us. We drove through a sandstorm, my first — memorable for its force, noise, and the way the suspended sand revealed the dance of the air’s rapid movement — which was made stranger by being paired with a rainstorm. We drove through many microclimates. The vegetation completely changed with the elevation. Gaining in altitude, the cooler and wetter air supported denser life; scrubby patches gave way to lusher meadows.

Response: A gate in Toconao. Photo by author. Descending again, we entered the desert. Oases dotted the landscape: trees and shrubs congregated around the streams that flowed through mountain ravines. These quebradas are the basis of the built environment and social life of the eighteen Indigenous communities that neighbor the salt flat. Traveling through stone canals and filters, the quebradas feed small farms. The plots are enclosed with rustic wood fences and strategically planted trees for shade. They produce an incredible variety of produce. On a visit to the community of Toconao, I spotted figs, pomegranates, and quince along with the usual maize.


Prompt: Quince in Toconao. Photo by the author. Driving further east, we reached the Los Flamencos National Reserve: an immense sweep of white and grey, rimmed by mountains in all directions. To our left was pure salt crust; to our right was the same crust interspersed with lagoons, where flamingos fed on tiny brine shrimp. The lagoons were tinted red in places, from the interaction of algae, sun, and wind. It was expansive in a way I associate with the ocean. The ground was crunchy and knobby beneath my hiking boots.  An unusually rapid stream after a major rain storm. Photo by author.

Response: Just out of view were the zones of extraction. Thirty kilometers away, swallowed by the horizon, stood the big lithium installations. During the conference in Santiago, I had heard executives say that environmental protection measures should be improved — but also that there was nothing to be worried about. The rich ecosystem of these desert wetlands — the cotton-candy-pink Andean flamingos, white tufted grebes, and regal vicuña — did not figure prominently in the discussion. Indigenous communities were briefly invoked, and workers got a mention or two. But for most of the conference, the human and ecological texture of the salar receded from view.  The Los Flamencos National Reserve. Photo by the author.


Prompt: Yet communities like Toconao are already feeling the effects of extraction on their everyday lives. Abnormally arid conditions reduce the streams’ flow, constraining access to water for crops and drinking. And, due to global warming, the swings are getting more unpredictable: long dry spells are punctuated by mega-rains that destroy infrastructure and plants, and can’t easily be absorbed by the soil. These changes also threaten habitats for wild vegetation and animals: biologists have found reduced species counts for the Andean flamingos.  For the suits at the W Hotel, the Atacama was an extraction site, an operational landscape, the beginning of a long trail of logistics and profit. But what of the vicuña and the quince, and the communities rooted in the flow of the desert’s precious water? What would it look like to bring these into view?  Teeming, Crawling, Floating, and Flying The day after my first visit to the salt flat, I met Ramón. We spoke for three hours, neglecting other appointments, over coffee and medialunas de manjar de leche, which are croissants filled with caramel made from condensed milk.  In contrast to many of the petit-bourgeois transplants in San Pedro, the mushrooming tourist hub in the Atacama, Ramón is from a working-class family on the rural outskirts of Santiago. He is a cofounder of the Plurinational Observatory of Andean Salt Flats (el Observatorio Plurinacional De Salares Andinos), a transnational network of environmentalists, concerned scientists, activist lawyers, and residents of affected Indigenous and campesino communities from across the Andean plateau known as the “lithium triangle.” The lithium triangle encompasses parts of Argentina, Bolivia, and Chile, and contains more than half of the world’s known lithium reserves — although members of the Observatory dislike the term for reducing their world to the resource extracted from it. (Full disclosure: I am a member.) The Observatory pushes back against “green extractivism”: the subordination of human rights and ecosystems to endless extraction in the name of “solving” climate change. Its platform affirms the broader cultural, natural, and scientific value of the salt flats — not just the economic value of its lithium.

Response: It’s challenging work. The Observatory is trying to weave together a novel organizational form, with ambitions at the transnational scale of extractive capital. But organizing across three national borders, in rural spaces crosscut by dirt roads and underserved by transit and WiFi, is hard. At the industry conference in Santiago, there were tensions between capitalists and the state, and between potential investors and mining firms. But on the whole, these elite alliances are relatively easy: lubricated by money and airplanes, smartphones and endless hors d’oeuvres. The obstacles facing international movement-building are much larger.  These obstacles were in evidence at an Observatory gathering at the University of Atacama in June 2019. The Argentinian delegation never made it: snow had rendered the border crossing impassable. The president of the association of eighteen Indigenous Atacameño communities, Sergio Cubillos, was likewise absent. The communities he represents, along with Indigenous groups throughout the country, were engaged in an all-out mobilization against Chilean President Sebastián Piñera, whose government was trying to further fragment and privatize Indigenous territory.  But those who made it to the gathering were able to help develop a different vision for the habitats and wetlands of the region — an alternative to the one being pursued by the suits in Santiago. This vision is vividly captured in the work of Portuguese artist Mafalda Paiva, which were displayed at the Observatory event. In her paintings, the salt flats hum with a preternatural vibrancy, an effect produced by the exaggerated density of species and radically foreshortened topography. This teeming, crawling, floating, and flying life was invisible at the Santiago conference but composed the emotional core of the Observatory gathering. Paiva offers a kind of eco-utopian hyperrealism — and orients us to a very different future than that imagined by lithium capitalists.


Prompt: Mafalda Paiva, “Salar de Atacama”. Image courtesy of Mafalda Paiva, Parmenides Ltd., and the University of Atacama. Common Futures The Observatory opposes green extractivism because of the very real harm it inflicts on humans, animals, and ecosystems. But their position raises thorny questions about the renewable energy transition. As each dire climate science report makes clear, emissions from fossil fuels are rendering the planet increasingly unlivable. At the same time, building a low-carbon world carries its own environmental and social costs: every wind turbine, solar panel, and electric vehicle requires vast quantities of materials mined from the earth, transported in container ships over great distances, manufactured in factories likely still powered by coal, and transported again to consumers. This globally dispersed supply chain, like any other under capitalism, facilitates a race to the bottom, as capital perpetually seeks cheaper labor and cheaper nature.  Not all communities along this chain have a say in who bears the social and environmental costs, or how much effort should be expended to reduce them — unless they force the matter. The vaster and more complex the chain, the more challenging it is to mobilize across it. This global spread isn’t new: the Industrial Revolution was enabled by raw materials extracted and harvested far from industrial centers. But in recent decades, technologies that disperse production even further have proliferated, from container ships to new trade agreements, computer-enabled “just-in-time” manufacturing to Special Economic Zones, making global capitalism an infinitely more intricate and interdependent web than Adam Smith ever dreamed.

Response: When it comes to the renewable energy transition, how this web works has especially high stakes. It is a question of who controls our future. A world buzzing with hundreds of millions of Teslas (or worse, e-Escalades), made with materials rapaciously extracted without the consent of local communities, manufactured under a repressive labor regime in polluting factories — in other words, a world not unlike our own, but powered by wind and sun — is not an inevitability.  Other futures are also possible. The already unfolding energy transition offers a historic opportunity to dismantle the American lifestyle of privatized and segregated suburban affluence and build something better in its place. This lifestyle has always been a nightmare, ecologically and politically. The less energy we consume, the fewer raw materials we will need. This is not a call for eco-austerity: currently, energy consumption is highly unequal and wasteful. We can construct a society that is both low-carbon and plentiful in the ways that matter for most of us.


Prompt: Doing so will require acknowledging how the material substrate of our lives is intimately, and often violently, connected to ecosystems and people beyond our borders. Trade, production, and consumption could, in theory, be reorganized to prioritize climate safety, socio-economic equality, Indigenous rights, and the integrity of habitats.  Yet achieving such an outcome will take political power, strategically deployed. Amid the overwhelming complexity of contemporary capitalism, it’s easy to forget that supply chains are not the product of geographic destiny. Indeed, a key aspect of environmental injustice is that contaminating processes — mines, power plants, or factories — are sited where ecosystems and human lives are seen as disposable or deemed to lack political influence.  The corollary is that force from below can obstruct and even reshape global flows. This force is particularly effective when exercised at “chokepoints”: points of obligatory passage for people and goods. In addition to the factory floor itself, the infrastructure of logistics (ports, ships, warehouses) and the sites of extraction (mines, rigs, refineries) are potential bottlenecks, and thus nodes of vulnerability for the system as a whole. In other words, they are strategic sites for disruption.  I might not know the exact shape of the world I want. The present weighs heavily and makes imagination difficult. But I know it starts with relating to this planet’s bounty as mysterious, vital, and nourishing; envisioning abundance as shared flourishing; and broadening our solidarities to encompass people we may never meet and places we may never visit but whose futures are bound up with our own. The salar will thank us.

Response: Let’s begin at the beginning. Can you tell us a little bit about your childhood?  I grew up in Denver, in the kind of white, middle-class neighborhood where people had gotten mortgages to build housing after the war. My father was a sportswriter. When I was eleven or twelve years old, I probably saw seventy baseball games a year. I learned to score as I learned to read.


Prompt: My father never really wanted to do the editorials or the critical pieces exposing the industry’s financial corruption or what have you. He wanted to write game stories and he had a wonderful way with language. He was in no way a scholar — in fact he was in no way an intellectual — but he loved to tell stories and write them. I think I was interested in that as well — in words and the sensuality of words.

Response: The other giant area of childhood storytelling was Catholicism. I was way too pious a little girl, completely inside of the colors and the rituals and the stories of saints and the rest of it. I ate and drank a sensual Catholicism that I think was rare in my generation. Very not Protestant. It was quirky then; it’s quirky now. And it shaped me.  How so?  One of the ways that it shaped me was through my love of biology as a materialist, sensual, fleshly being in the world as well as a knowledge-seeking apparatus. It shaped me in my sense that I saw biology simultaneously as a discourse and profoundly of the world. The Word and the flesh.  Many of my colleagues in the History of Consciousness department, which comes much later in the story, were deeply engaged with Roland Barthes and with that kind of semiotics. I was very unconvinced and alienated from those thinkers because they were so profoundly Protestant in their secularized versions. They were so profoundly committed to the disjunction between the signifier and signified — so committed to a doctrine of the sign that is anti-Catholic, not just non-Catholic. The secularized sacramentalism that just drips from my work is against the doctrine of the sign that I felt was the orthodoxy in History of Consciousness. So Catholicism offered an alternative structure of affect. It was both profoundly theoretical and really intimate.


Prompt: Did you start studying biology as an undergraduate?  I got a scholarship that allowed me to go to Colorado College. It was a really good liberal arts school. I was there from 1962 to 1966 and I triple majored in philosophy and literature and zoology, which I regarded as branches of the same subject. They never cleanly separated. Then I got a Fulbright to go to Paris. Then I went to Yale to study cell, molecular, and developmental biology.

Response: Did you get into politics at Yale? Or were you already political when you arrived?  The politics came before that — probably from my Colorado College days, which were influenced by the civil rights movement. But it was at Yale that several things converged. I arrived in the fall of 1967, and a lot was happening.


Prompt: New Haven in those years was full of very active politics. There was the antiwar movement. There was anti-chemical and anti-biological warfare activism among both the faculty and the graduate students in the science departments. There was Science for the People [a left-wing science organization] and the arrival of that wave of the women’s movement. My lover, Jaye Miller, who became my first husband, was gay, and gay liberation was just then emerging. There were ongoing anti-racist struggles: the Black Panther Party was very active in New Haven.  Jaye and I were part of a commune where one of the members and her lover were Black Panthers. Gayle was a welfare rights activist and the mother of a young child, and her lover was named Sylvester. We had gotten the house for the commune from the university at a very low rent because we were officially an “experiment in Christian living.” It was a very interesting group of people! There was a five-year-old kid who lived in the commune, and he idolized Sylvester. He would clomp up the back stairs wearing these little combat boots yelling, “Power to the people! Power! Power!” It made our white downstairs neighbors nervous. They didn’t much like us anyway. It was very funny.  Did this political climate influence your doctoral research at Yale? I ended up writing on the ways that metaphors shape experimental practice in the laboratory. I was writing about the experience of the coming-into-being of organisms in the situated interactions of the laboratory. In a profound sense, such organisms are made but not made up. It’s not a relativist position at all; it’s a materialist position. It’s about what I later learned to call “situated knowledges.” It was in the doing of biology that this became more and more evident.  How did these ideas go over with your labmates and colleagues? It was never a friendly way of talking for my biology colleagues, who always felt that this verged way too far in the direction of relativism.  It’s not that the words I was using were hard. It’s that the ideas were received with great suspicion. And I think that goes back to our discussion a few minutes ago about semiotics: I was trying to insist that the gapping of the signifier and the signified does not really determine what’s going on.

Response: But let’s face it: I was never very good in the lab! My lab work was appalling. Everything I ever touched died or got infected. I did not have good hands, and I didn’t have good passion. I was always more interested in the discourse, if you will.  But you found a supervisor who was open to that?  Yes, Evelyn Hutchinson. He was an ecologist and a man of letters and a man who had had a long history of making space for heterodox women. And I was only a tiny bit heterodox. Other women he had given space to were way more out there than me. Evelyn was also the one who got us our house for our “experiment in Christian living.”  God bless. What happened after Yale? Jaye got a job at the University of Hawaii teaching world history and I went as this funny thing called a “faculty wife.” I had an odd ontological status. I got a job there in the general science department. Jaye and I were also faculty advisers for something called New College, which was an experimental liberal-arts part of the university that lasted for several years.  It was a good experience. Jaye and I got a divorce in that period but never really quite separated because we couldn’t figure out who got the camera and who got the sewing machine. That was the full extent of our property in those days. We were both part of a commune in Honolulu.  Then one night, Jaye’s boss in the history department insisted that we go out drinking with him, at which point he attacked us both sexually and personally in a drunken, homophobic, and misogynist rant. And very shortly after that, Jaye was denied tenure. Both of us felt stunned and hurt. So I applied for a job in the History of Science department at Johns Hopkins, and Jaye applied for a job at the University of Texas in Houston.  Baltimore and the Thickness of Worlding How was Hopkins?  History of Science was not a field I knew anything about, and the people who hired me knew that perfectly well. Therefore they assigned me to teach the incoming graduate seminar: Introduction to the History of Science. It was a good way to learn it!


Prompt: Hopkins was also where I met my current partner, Rusten. He was a graduate student in the History of Science department, where I was a baby assistant professor. (Today I would be fired and sued for sexual harassment — but that’s a whole other conversation.)  Who were some of the other people who became important to you at Hopkins? [The feminist philosopher] Nancy Hartsock and I shaped each other quite a bit in those years. We were part of the Marxist feminist scene in Baltimore. We played squash a lot — squash was a really intense part of our friendship. Her lover was a Marxist lover of Lenin; he gave lectures in town.  In the mid-to-late 1970s, Nancy and I started the women’s studies program at Hopkins together. At the time, she was doing her article that became her book on feminist materialism, [Money, Sex, and Power: Toward a Feminist Historical Materialism]. It was very formative for me.

Response: Those were also the years that Nancy and Sandra Harding and Patricia Hill Collins and Dorothy Smith were inventing feminist standpoint theory. I think all of us were already reaching toward those ideas, which we then consolidated as theoretical proposals to a larger community. The process was both individual and collective. We were putting these ideas together out of our struggles with our own work. You write in a closed room while tearing your hair out of your head — it was individual in that sense. But then it clicks, and the words come, and you consolidate theoretical proposals that you bring to your community. In that sense, it was a profoundly collective way of thinking with each other, and within the intensities of the social movements of the late 1960s and early 1970s.


Prompt: The ideas that you and other feminist philosophers were developing challenged many dominant assumptions about what truth is, where it comes from, and how it functions. More recently, in the era of Trump, we are often told we are living in a time of “post-truth” — and some critics have blamed philosophers like yourselves for creating the environment of “relativism” in which “post-truth” flourishes. How do you respond to that? Our view was never that truth is just a question of which perspective you see it from. “Truth is perspectival” was never our position. We were against that. Feminist standpoint theory was always anti-perspectival. So was the Cyborg Manifesto, situated knowledges, [the philosopher] Bruno Latour’s notions of actor-network theory, and so on.

Response: “Post-truth” gives up on materialism. It gives up on what I’ve called semiotic materialism: the idea that materialism is always situated meaning-making and never simply representation. These are not questions of perspective. They are questions of worlding and all of the thickness of that. Discourse is not just ideas and language. Discourse is bodily. It’s not embodied, as if it were stuck in a body. It’s bodily and it’s bodying, it’s worlding. This is the opposite of post-truth. This is about getting a grip on how strong knowledge claims are not just possible but necessary — worth living and dying for.  When you, Latour, and others were criticized for “relativism,” particularly during the so-called Science Wars of the 1990s, was that how you responded? And could your critics understand your response? Bruno and I were at a conference together in Brazil once. Which reminds me: If people want to criticize us, it ought to be for the amount of jet fuel involved in making and spreading these ideas! Not for leading the way to post-truth. We’re guilty on the carbon footprint issue, and Skyping doesn’t help, because I know what the carbon footprint of the cloud is.  Anyhow. We were at this conference in Brazil. It was a bunch of primate field biologists, plus me and Bruno. And Stephen Glickman, a really cool biologist, a man we both love, who taught at UC Berkeley for years and studied hyenas, took us aside privately. He said, “Now, I don’t want to embarrass you. But do you believe in reality?”  We were both kind of shocked by the question. First, we were shocked that it was a question of belief, which is a Protestant question. A confessional question. The idea that reality is a question of belief is a barely secularized legacy of the religious wars. In fact, reality is a matter of worlding and inhabiting. It is a matter of testing the holding-ness of things. Do things hold or not?  Take evolution. The notion that you would or would not “believe” in evolution already gives away the game. If you say, “Of course I believe in evolution,” you have lost, because you have entered the semiotics of representationalism — and post-truth, frankly. You have entered an arena where these are all just matters of internal conviction and have nothing to do with the world. You have left the domain of worlding.


Prompt: The Science Warriors who attacked us during the Science Wars were determined to paint us as social constructionists — that all truth is purely socially constructed. And I think we walked into that. We invited those misreadings in a range of ways. We could have been more careful about listening and engaging more slowly. It was all too easy to read us in the way the Science Warriors did. Then the right wing took the Science Wars and ran with it, which eventually helped nourish the whole fake-news discourse.

Response: Your opponents in the Science Wars championed “objectivity” over what they considered your “relativism.” Were you trying to stake out a position between those two terms? Or did you reject the idea that either of those terms even had a stable meaning? Both terms inhabit the same ontological and epistemological frame — a frame that my colleagues and I have tried to make hard to inhabit. Sandra Harding insisted on “strong objectivity,” and my idiom was “situated knowledges.” We have tried to deauthorize the kind of possessive individualism that sees the world as units plus relations. You take the units, you mix them up with relations, you come up with results. Units plus relations equal the world.  People like me say, “No thank you: it’s relationality all the way down.” You don’t have units plus relations. You just have relations. You have worlding. The whole story is about gerunds — worlding, bodying, everything-ing. The layers are inherited from other layers, temporalities, scales of time and space, which don’t nest neatly but have oddly configured geometries. Nothing starts from scratch. But the play — I think the concept of play is incredibly important in all of this — proposes something new, whether it’s the play of a couple of dogs or the play of scientists in the field.  This is not about the opposition between objectivity and relativism. It’s about the thickness of worlding. It’s also about being of and for some worlds and not others; it’s about materialist commitment in many senses.


Prompt: To this day I know only one or two scientists who like talking this way. And there are good reasons why scientists remain very wary of this kind of language. I belong to the Defend Science movement and in most public circumstances I will speak softly about my own ontological and epistemological commitments. I will use representational language. I will defend less-than-strong objectivity because I think we have to, situationally.  Is that bad faith? Not exactly. It’s related to [what the postcolonial theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has called] “strategic essentialism.” There is a strategic use to speaking the same idiom as the people that you are sharing the room with. You craft a good-enough idiom so you can work on something together. I won’t always insist on what I think might be a stronger apparatus. I go with what we can make happen in the room together. And then we go further tomorrow.

Response: In the struggles around climate change, for example, you have to join with your allies to block the cynical, well-funded, exterminationist machine that is rampant on the earth. I think my colleagues and I are doing that. We have not shut up, or given up on the apparatus that we developed. But one can foreground and background what is most salient depending on the historical conjuncture.


Prompt: Santa Cruz and Cyborgs To return to your own biography, tell us a bit about how and why you left Hopkins for Santa Cruz.  Nancy Hartsock and I applied for a feminist theory job in the History of Consciousness department at UC Santa Cruz together. We wanted to share it. Everybody assumed we were lovers, which we weren’t, ever. We were told by the search committee that they couldn’t consider a joint application because they had just gotten this job okayed and it was the first tenured position in feminist theory in the country. They didn’t want to do anything further to jeopardize it. Nancy ended up deciding that she wanted to stay in Baltimore anyway, so I applied solo and got the job. And I was fired from Hopkins and hired by Santa Cruz in the same week — and for exactly the same papers.

Response: What were the papers? The long one was called “Signs of Dominance.” It was from a Marxist feminist perspective, and it was regarded as too political. Even though it appeared in a major journal, the person in charge of my personnel case at Hopkins told me to white it out from my CV.  The other one was a short piece on [the poet and novelist] Marge Piercy and [feminist theorist] Shulamith Firestone in Women: a Journal of Liberation. And I was told to white that out, too. Those two papers embarrassed my colleagues and they were quite explicit about it, which was kind of amazing. Fortunately, the people at History of Consciousness loved those same papers, and the set of commitments that went with them.  You arrived in Santa Cruz in 1980, and it was there that you wrote the Cyborg Manifesto. Tell us a bit about its origins.


Prompt: It had a very particular birth. There was a journal called the Socialist Review, which had formerly been called Socialist Revolution. Jeff Escoffier, one of the editors, asked five of us to write no more than five pages each on Marxist feminism, and what future we anticipated for it.  This was just after the election of Ronald Reagan. The future we anticipated was a hard right turn. It was the definitive end of the 1960s. Around the same time, Jeff asked me if I would represent Socialist Review at a conference of New and Old Lefts in Cavtat in Yugoslavia [now Croatia]. I said yes, and I wrote a little paper on reproductive biotechnology. A bunch of us descended on Cavtat, and there were relatively few women. So we rather quickly found one another and formed alliances with the women staff who were doing all of the reproductive labor, taking care of us. We ended up setting aside our papers and pronouncing on various feminist topics. It was really fun and quite exciting.  Out of that experience, I came back to Santa Cruz and wrote the Cyborg Manifesto. It turned out not to be five pages, but a whole coming to terms with what had happened to me in those years from 1980 to the time it came out in 1985.

Response: The manifesto ended up focusing a lot on cybernetics and networking technologies. Did this reflect the influence of nearby Silicon Valley? Were you close with people working in those fields? It’s part of the air you breathe here. But the real tech alliances in my life come from my partner Rusten and his friends and colleagues, because he worked as a freelance software designer. He did contract work for Hewlett Packard for years. He had a long history in that world: when he was only fourteen, he got a job programming on punch cards for companies in Seattle.  The Cyborg Manifesto was the first paper I ever wrote on a computer screen. We had an old HP-86. And I printed it on one of those daisy-wheel printers. One I could never get rid of, and nobody ever wanted. It ended up in some dump, God help us all.


Prompt: The Cyborg Manifesto had such a tremendous impact, and continues to. What did you make of its reception? People read it as they do. Sometimes I find it interesting. But sometimes I just want to jump into a foxhole and pull the cover over me.  In the manifesto, you distinguish yourself from two other socialist feminist positions. The first is the techno-optimist position that embraces aggressive technological interventions in order to modify human biology. This is often associated with Shulamith Firestone’s book The Dialectic of Sex (1970), and in particular her proposal for “artificial wombs” that could reproduce humans outside of a woman’s body.

Response: Yes, although Firestone gets slotted into a quite narrow, blissed-out techno-bunny role, as if all her work was about reproduction without wombs. She is remembered for one technological proposal, but her critique of the historical materialist conditions of mothering and reproduction was very deep and broad.


Prompt: You also make some criticisms of the ideas associated with Italian autonomist feminists and the Wages for Housework campaign. You suggest that they overextend the category of “labor.” Wages for Housework was very important. And I’m always in favor of working by addition not subtraction. I’m always in favor of enlarging the litter. Let’s watch the attachments and detachments, the compositions and decompositions, as the litter proliferates. Labor is an important category with a strong history, and Wages for Housework enlarged it.

Response: But in thinkers with Marxist roots, there’s also a tendency to make the category of labor do too much work. A great deal of what goes on needs to be thickly described with categories other than labor — or in interesting kinds of entanglement with labor.  What other categories would you want to add? Play is one. Labor is so tied to functionality, whereas play is a category of non-functionality.  Play captures a lot of what goes on in the world. There is a kind of raw opportunism in biology and chemistry, where things work stochastically to form emergent systematicities. It’s not a matter of direct functionality. We need to develop practices for thinking about those forms of activity that are not caught by functionality, those which propose the possible-but-not-yet, or that which is not-yet but still open.  It seems to me that our politics these days require us to give each other the heart to do just that. To figure out how, with each other, we can open up possibilities for what can still be. And we can’t do that in in a negative mood. We can’t do that if we do nothing but critique. We need critique; we absolutely need it. But it’s not going to open up the sense of what might yet be. It’s not going to open up the sense of that which is not yet possible but profoundly needed.


Prompt: The established disorder of our present era is not necessary. It exists. But it’s not necessary.  Playing Against Double Death What might some of those practices for opening up new possibilities look like? Through playful engagement with each other, we get a hint about what can still be and learn how to make it stronger. We see that in all occupations. Historically, the Greenham Common women were fabulous at this. [Eds.: The Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp was a series of protests against nuclear weapons at a Royal Air Force base in England, beginning in 1981.] More recently, you saw it with the Dakota Access Pipeline occupation.  The degree to which people in these occupations play is a crucial part of how they generate a new political imagination, which in turn points to the kind of work that needs to be done. They open up the imagination of something that is not what [the ethnographer] Deborah Bird Rose calls “double death” — extermination, extraction, genocide.  Now, we are facing a world with all three of those things. We are facing the production of systemic homelessness. The way that flowers aren’t blooming at the right time, and so insects can’t feed their babies and can’t travel because the timing is all screwed up, is a kind of forced homelessness. It’s a kind of forced migration, in time and space.  This is also happening in the human world in spades. In regions like the Middle East and Central America, we are seeing forced displacement, some of which is climate migration. The drought in the Northern Triangle countries of Central America — Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador — is driving people off their land.  So it’s not a humanist question. It’s a multi-kind and multi-species question.

Response: In the Cyborg Manifesto, you use the ideas of “the homework economy” and the “integrated circuit” to explore the various ways that information technology was restructuring labor in the early 1980s to be more precarious, more global, and more feminized. Do climate change and the ecological catastrophes you’re describing change how you think about those forces?  Yes and no. The theories that I developed in that period emerged from a particular historical conjuncture. If I were mapping the integrated circuit today, it would have different parameters than the map that I made in the early 1980s. And surely the questions of immigration, exterminism, and extractivism would have to be deeply engaged. The problem of rebuilding place-based lives would have to get more attention.