"We did not weave the web of life, we are merely strands in it. Whatever we do to the web we do to ourselves.” ― Chief Seattle. Awestruck Wanderer is written and edited by Eduardo Carli de Moraes, journalist, philosopher and musician. Write to me: awestruckwanderer@gmail.com. Cheers, fellow earthlings!
Cheers, fellow wanderers of this strange cosmos of ours! If you happen to find this extremely minute spot in the hugeness of the World Wide Web, I must let you know about the whys and hows of the defrosting process of the website you’ve reached.
I’ve created the Awestruck Wanderer back in 2014 when I was living in Canada with my wife Gisele, who was doing a post-doc research in Soviet Psychology at the York University in Toronto. I had just finished my Masters in Philosophy and I decided to hop along and try my luck as a journalist / writer in Canadian territory.
Back then English became my first language for everyday matters and I was willing to use the web as my training ground for scribblings. This site became some sort of melting pot of my adventurous writings while swimming away from the safe shores of my mother tongue (brazilian portuguese), mixed with my bibliophile and cinephile strivings that lead me to be some sort of collector and sharer of content I praise.
I won’t delete any of the previous content published here, but right now my aim is to make this melting pot even weirder – I’ll shamelessly venture into the Diariesterritory, in order to tell the tales of my adventures in my new phase in life; and I’ll also use this as a public forum to engage with meaningful discussions about the themes I’ve reflecting upon and writing about – you’re all invited to share a thought, suggestion or critique in the comments box or by email (eduardo.moraes@ifg.edu.br).
Well, now it’s September 2023 and I’ve decided to bring back from its cryogenic near-death this humble website of minor repercussions so I can share some of my impressions of the Nederlands. I’ll be living for 6 months in Amsterdam as a part of my PhD research in the filed of Philosophy of Art at the UFG (the Federal University of Goiás in Central Brasil). I’m currently affiliated researcher at the University of Amsterdam (UvA), more especifically at ASCA (Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis), supervised by Monique Roelofs, and seeking to elaborate on the theme of Philosophy and Film in our present predicament: the so-called Anthropocene.
I’ve been granted a scholarship (we call it sandwich) by CAPES, an institution connected with the Ministry of Education in Brazil, that allows researchers such as myself to spend from 6 to 10 months abroad. I’ve been living through the severe housing crisis in the Nederlands that I also wish to tell you a bit about in future posts, and after much struggle I could find a place to call home here in this almost-impossible metropolis.
I’m also engaged, as an independent filmmaker, in the process of creating a documentary or film-essay that I’ve already baptized as Amsterdamned in the Anthropocene. It’s a work in progress and the Awestruck Wanderer website will become some sort of moving exposition of the construction sites of this film. I’ll try out here some reels and fragments of this upcoming work dealing with the mélange of utopia and dystopia, wonderfulness and cruelty, that Amsterdam seems to encapsulate. It’s a city so ambiguous, labyrinthine and extremely comple that sometimes strolling its straats, bridges and cannals we get worried: is it possible to die suddenly of an overdose of fascination?…
See you soon, fellow wanderers!
Eduardo Carli de Moraes
(I usually shy out of sharing selfies, but well… here’s my ugly face while visiting for the first time the amazing Eye Film Museum in Amsterdam Noord).
In his <Pulitzer-winning treatise on The Denial of Death (1984), Ernest Becker> argued that the human psyche, regardless of place of birth or skin colour, operates with a deep rooted impulse to deny mortality. Each of us arrives at a world where institutionalized religions and hero-mythologies offer us ready-made and passed-through-the-generations means to deal with our anguish and fear concerning death.
And yet this denialism of demise, this refusal of finitude, which explains the power of faiths despite their incredible claims, is far from immutable. Certainly the denial of death has its historical-cultural mutations and changes also in correlation to society’s level of technological development.
Several sci-fi films have recently dealt with promises of a <technological-fix> for the often unnaceptable facts of death: Elysium’s high-tech 3D-printers of artificial organs and programs of cell-replacement; What Happened To Monday’s project of massive cryogenics leading to a freeze-up of thousands of human organisms destined to a later-on re-animation; or the series <Better Than Us> depiction of challenging surgery being done by highly intelligent and precise robots.
Paula Sibilia, thinker and author, wrote The Post-Organic Man
It’s also becoming undeniable that speculative fiction with anticipatory intentions is increasingly dealing with the promise of a post-organic human, with a fusion of brain and computer that would leads us into the brave new world of becoming post-human, carbon-plus-silicon cyborgs, no longer jailed in the usual confines of traditional death. Paula Sibilia wrote marvelously about it in her book (O Homem Pós-Orgânico, not translated into English yet) and the film <Restore Point>, a brand new Czech sci-fi blockbuster, needs to be placed within this context to be fully appreciated.
BACKED-UP FOR RESSURECTION
With its current meaning, the concept of “back-up” – copying and saving data in memory devices – has entered our lexicon very recently, after the technological revolution of digitalization, and it has seen a significant upsurge in its use in recent decades. In its analog incarnation, the expression “back-up” is usually used in a context of military or police operations: when soldiers or police officers are dealing with a challenging task or dangerous mission, they usually call the authorities in charge and ask for a back-up, which means an extra assistance or reforced personnel.
But the term has shifted with computation’s widespread use through all sectors of social life, and now it refers to a process of saving data deemed to be relevant or precious in an extra device (or several). The “back-up” craze is a manifestation of the ever rising technical reproducibility of images, sounds and texts that have reached a level undreamt by Walter Benjamin’s now canonical essay – which needs, of course, actualization for our new predicament.
Digitalization implies that making copies is easier than ever – the process of technical reproduction has been “democratized” and most of us are quite familiar with daily use of commands such as CTRL+C plus CTRL+V (it could be argued that this phenomenon aids in the decay of the aura). In Benjamin’s historical period, technical reproduction of photographs or film negatives was a much more costly and limited phenomenon – you needed wealthy individuals or corporations in the entertainment industry to provide high amounts of capital investments to make copies of films.
Nowadays, the common citizen has the power of technical reproduction with a few clicks or keyboard commands. For example: if I wish my photos and videos taken in Amsterdam to be safe from the menace of unrecoverable deletion, I shouldn’t keep them only in my PC’s hard drive – I should back it up on an extra hard disk and also save it on a “cloud”. Of course this also implies an intricate problematic in political-economy: which corporations are able to provide this backing-up services by selling hard disks or cloud-space (which also need a material infrastructure in data servers), and how should they be regulated by the national state and international law, in order to protect privacy while still allowing for cyber-crimes to be discovered and prosecuted.
We live in an historical period where almost no one judges to be absurd or preposterous to call our world a sphere under unprecedented domination by “Big Tech” and “Big Data” – and that context propels, let’s say, big back-up schemes and big data servers. Several scholars and researchers have delved into this new zeitgeist and have come up with a wide array of relevant critiques (E. Morozov, J. Bridle, J. Crary).This is the context in which to comprehend the brand new strands of cyberpunk sci-fi engaged in anticipatory narratives, a subgenre in which films such as <Upgrade (Whanell, 2018)> and a series such as Upload have explored.
The fact is that the “back-up” mindset – you shouldn’t keep all your cyber-treasures in just one digital-vault – has now mutated into one of the greatest assets for sci-fi creativity. Riding this wave, Restore Point (2023), the debut feature film by Robert Holz, screened at Imagine Fantastic Film Festival in Amsterdam, arrives with a very potent mix of murder mystery thriller and speculative fiction – proposing a technological fix to cheat death. This techno-solution tastes like a mixture of sweet and sour, utopia and dystopia, that makes the viewer, during the screening, oscilate between fear and hope, promise and threat, amazement and fright.
“Have you done your back-up today?” Citizens in the Czech-Republic’s capital are reminded, in huge electronic outdoors and on their omnipresent screens, that they shouldn’t forget to back-up their recent lived experiences. If you happen to die, you will only get a second life, through the so-called restoration process, if you have backed-up in the last 48 hours.
We are in Prague, 2041, and the territory of Central Europe is now fully embarked on the widespread use of a technology that seems to cheat death and also provide profits for new technocrats. Which is always a very problematic, troublesome endeavor: selling salvation can become a bloody mess. After religion, this human-invention that for millenia we’ve used to try and pretend that death will be vanquished, now science promises us that death shall be conquered by an array of techo-fixes: corpses brought back to life in high-tech tanks, brains re-animated and re-activated with backed-up data etc…
A co-production between Czech-Republic, Slovakia, Poland and Serbia, Restore Point deals mainly with the activities of an Institute that has mastered the restoration process but is also undergoing a privatization process that is highly controversial. Its CEO, Rohan, talks about the marvels of the private sector grabbing this market, but some journalists present at the press conference are not easily convinced: wouldn’t this mean that only a wealthy elite would be able to purchase the restoration process? While a majority of citizens gets locked out of this V.I.P. area, condemned to that old death we had accustomed to see as an unchanging factor of the human condition?
The plot thickens with another explosive ingredient: there’s an organization called “River of Life” that authorities describe as terrorists who are jeopardizing the whole project of the Institute of Restoration. The film deals with widespread social anxieties concerning terrorist attacks and the story begins with newsreels about a bus bombed by River of Life militants and that has killed several people. Thanks to the outstanding miracles of science, however, the corpses of the victims could be restored and brought back to life.
The film’s protagonist Emma Trochinowska (played by actress <Andrea Mohylová>) is a police woman and she has very emotional motivation to be engaged in a war against the River of Life terrorists: she was married with Peter, a pianist, who was supposedly killed in a concert hall in Dresden after the terrorists took over the precinct and began killing hostages one-per-hour.
Peter, unfortunately, was killed last, when more than 48-hours had elapsed since his last back-up, which means the Institute of Restoration couldn’t violate its rules and bring him back to life. Peter is dead for real – and Emma is now left with the souvenirs of her deceased husband not in the form of old-style photographs but rather in the guise of 3D projections – his “ghost” from the past, a 3D recorded version of him, can be summoned to be her piano teacher.
Emma’s main job in the film is to solve a murder case – one of the scientists who developed restoration biotechnology, David Kurlstat, and his wife Kristina, have been murdered in mysterious circumstances. Restore Point leads us to a whodunit plot far beyond what Agatha Christie and Conan Doyle dreamt of. It also shows that Kenneth Brannagh’s recent incursions in classy, well-made and compelling tales of Hercule Poirot’s investigations, straight out of Agatha Christie’s books, in his <trilogy Murder in The Orient Express, Death on the Nile and A Haunting In Venice>, fails to explore the ways in which current technology transforms radically the murder mystery genre.
The detective of nowadays explores the oceans of big data, scans photographs in search of tiny pixels, works helped not by a flesh-and-bone ally, such as Watson was for Sherlock, but rather with the help of A.I. and search engines of huge databases. In Restore Point’s complex plot, Emma suspects that a certain Viktor Toffer is involved in this crime and sets up on an action-filled chase to arrest him. But Toffer is far from being a one-dimensional villain.
The film deals a bit with the matters of hacking and cyber terrorism because the Restoration Institute is currently undergoing a crisis due to a virus, which Toffer is suspect of having inserted into the system,that deletes the back-ups. It’s a plot that might make viewers recallFight Club’s Space Monkeys plot to erase credit-card inequalities through terrorist bombing plus cyberattacks. It also shares a lot of themes with that awesome series Mr. Robot, still under-rated and deserving of more scholarly analysis.
The strangest aspect of the plot is the relationship developed between the police woman Emma and the restored version of David Kurlstat, murder victim brought back to life from an old-backup, in stark violation of the 48-hour-rule. Emma gets to experience, through David’s restoration, the side effects of the process kicking in his body. David is sick, coughing a lot, and needing constant injections on his bloodstream. David also reveals to her that the human body when “restored” is far from being pleasant to inhabit and is also prone to accelerated aging processes. She also discovers that some people are privileged enough inside this restoration biz to be brought back to life with a “gift”, a talent they didn’t possess in their normal lives – David, for instance, discovers he can play Debussy at the piano quite fluently in his recovered body.
SPOILER ALERT
The most mind-boggling aspect of the plot’s grand finale deals with the notion of River of Life being not a real terrorist organization willing to destroy the Restoration Institute – it’s suggested that CEO Rohan created it and financed all of these bombings and attacks. To create panic in society and make restoration purchases upsurge, it’s a good marketing plan to make the common middle class and upper class folks be immersed in horrorism (Cf. Cavarero). The film deals with the insurance market in a context of widespread “unnatural deaths”. This is anticipatory narrative for the coming age of biopolitics.
David is also far from being a good, generous scientist; he’s revealed to be actually a jealous husband, infuriated by the affair that Katarina is having with Toffer – which isn’t about sex only, but also about worldviews conflicting – Katarina has moved away from David’s mindset and seems to have become an ally of the rebels.
Toffer seems to be an almost archetypal figure for anarcho-primitivism – and also the commune of his aunt hints at that. I’m using this label of anarcho-primitivism inspired by the writings of John Zerzan to refer to people who believe the hi-tech restoration system to be deeply flawed from the ethics and politics viewpoint, and ripe for radical critique and practical destruction. The commune’s inhabitants live with no Internet or digitalized telecommunications; it sets itself apart from Prague’s tech-frenzied metropolis; it knows there’s something rotten in the Czech’s technocracy.
The film reaches its finale with a sort of happy end – the violent death of our protagonist Emma, played by an actress with a blonde beauty reminiscent of Scarlett Johannson; Emma is killed by the Europol cop which acts as a puppet for Rohan’s Institute. But the bitter death of the beautiful protagonist would send the spectators out of the screening and back into the world with a bitter taste in their tongues. No, the death of a female heroine is not a good choice for a film that needs money coming in from the box office to pay for its costly production. Emma, of course, gets restored.
She comes back upgraded. She now has the skills at piano-playing that made her deceased-husband Peter a well-renowned orchestra musician. The film ends in an almost optimistic key, marveling at this back-from-the-dead beautiful blondie that plays Debussy with dexterity. It’s a satisfying finale, but it softens the shocking ideas the film communicates.
I would have ended this a little bit differently – with a quick injection of Cronenberguian body horror. For any viewer not suffering from amnesia, the memory of side effects on David’s restored body lingers on the mind and leads us to think this: by the time the film ends, Emma is on an imminent road to feel those terrible symptoms also.
Perhaps it’s almost heresy for a film critic to abandon analysis of the artwork as it is and to propose that the director and screenwriter should have chosen otherwise. But I’ll try my luck with this sort of contrafactual criticism and go on to say: I would have ended this film in dissonance. She would be playing the piano beautifully, showering us with awesome melodies, and then – all of a sudden – her body would fail and falter. Debussy’s music would be shattered by discord, and the happy end would be buried under the rubble of dissonant keys and a cluster of noise.
This would be, perhaps, an impopular closing scene, but I can’t help but feel dissatisfaction when filmmakers deem necessary to end a very dystopian oeuvre in a “hopeful” key. Hope sells, I know, but this sort of closure seems a bit like commercialism, like submission to the entertainment industries pressures for happy endings. It seems to close doors for further discussions because it sends the spectators home with the impression that things turned out really well after all. When an alternative closure, such as the one I’ve imagined and depicted here, would be better to haunt us out of the movie theather and impel us to engage in fruitful discussion.
Another criticism I would like to make concerns the fact that the film’s script refuses to explain in detail how the practical science of restoration really works. It asks us to suspend our disbelief and only shows us briefly how the deceased bodies are brought back to life in tanks. Well, this seems to me a refusal of the film to engage more deeply with how this possibility of hybridization of brain and computer would actually be accomplished; the murder mystery and the action scenes get front row, and speculative science – which is at the core of the greatest science fiction – lags behind.
Despite that, this film is an excellent addition to the Czech sci-fi canon and puts Holz in our list of filmmakers who should be watched in his next steps – it’s a debut feature which manifests a very promising sci-fi director in his first emergence. It also proves that Karel Capek’s nation is still capable of providing us with mind-blowing and thought-provoking works of art in the futurology field: in the 1960s, some of the greats sci-fi films came from the Czech territory – such as<Ikarie XB1, by Pólak, based upon the S. Lem novel>, one of the greatest space-travel films and an inspiration for Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey.
There’s no end in sight for fictionalized accounts of the saga of an animal that refuses to be mortal and insists on attempts at cheating death through an ever-growing array of man-made artificialities. And yet death, even tough changing its manifestations, is still an unvanquished and un-deletable part of our condition. No matter how technology changes and advances, we’re the always impermanently alive beings which struggle, in fact and fiction, to overcome what is perhaps the insurmountable mountain.
It’s a trending topic, a buzz word, a “cognitive commodity” (says Rosi Braidotti): the Anthropocene is gaining ground, but what the heck is it exactly? A valid scientific theory bound to be embraced almost consensually? Or a quick-to-be-demodé hype-concept?
I’m far from satisfied with Andreas Malm response, even tough I share most of his critiques, when he calls it a myth: “blaming all of humanity for climate change lets capitalism off the hook”. The statement is true enough – it’s not humankind as a whole the entity to be blamed for the mess we’re in, and of course capitalism and global warming have causal connections, but does that make the “Anthropocene” into a myth?
Is it really the right word, or is Malm only equating ideology as false consciouness with the term myth, thus ignoring all the complexities – exposed, for instance, by Cassirer’s philosophy of symbolic forms – pertaining to how myths participate in the history of the human condition?
We might dislike the nomenclature (after all, Anthropocene really sounds like a word at least suspect of anthropocentrism;, we might think it’s the wrong word, but are we justified in desqualifying the work of a network of scientists that came up with this proposal, and seeing them all as puppets of capitalism’s cognitive acceleration that proliferates “multiples of one” in the realm of knowledge production (which seems to be Braidotti’s core-critique)?
Really? Crutzen, Stoermer, Seuss, Vernadsky, Lovelock, Margulis, a whole bunch of other researchers, which devoted their lives to the decipherment of our current predicament, don’t deserve of us a somewhat more respectful consideration than simple rejection of their Anthropocenical-bullshit? Just because it’s going through memefication, turning into the Anthropomeme Braidotti pokes fun at, is it a reason to discard it or dismiss it? A meme gone viral shouldn’t interest us more instead of less spreadful material?
Gallery 1: Examples of books recently published whose titles or subtitles refer directly to the Anthropocene
Of course the Anthropocene is not a consensus, it’s a highly controversial term, and it’s quite funny (we might laugh along with Braidotti) to see the proliferation of the “cenes”, that is, of alternative proposals of names to baptize the epoch in geohistory we’re immersed in here-and-now. But this proliferation of names perhaps tells something else than the tale of cognitive capitalism and publish-or-perish academia trying to accelerate intellectual and artistic production around the Anthropocene’s axis. Perhaps this proliferation is proof that human agency as a transformer of geohistory is a fact too huge to ignore and that intellecuals and scholars can’t refrain from trying to interpret and critique, given the urgency of the global environmental crisis we’re facing.
Yes, perhaps we should find a better name and toss the anthropos in the garbage bin: Chtulucene is Haraway‘s proposal, Capitalocene is championed by Moore and Malm, and others speak about the Plantation Scene, the Technocene, the Necrocene – and I’ll leave it to pop-culture analysts to decipher what the heck Grimes meant by it when she made her album Miss Anthropocene. Of course that the Anthropocene, entering the distorting realms of pop culture, would end up becoming something quite different than what geologists are talking about, and this adds another layer of complexity to the matter.
Erle C. Ellis has written an excellent very short introduction to the Anthropocene, published by Oxford University Press (2018), and I’d like to propose here a thought experiment, or better, a mind game (which will be also an hommage to Lennon & Yoko). Imagine this: what if in recent human history, let’s say the last few centuries, even before the Industrial Revolution, we could gather enough evidence of a previous evidence of radical and sudden climate changebrought about by human action (even tough not an action by all humans, just some of them), what would we conclude regarding our futurity?
Here’s what I’m talking about more concretely: the Conquest of America, taken as exemplary case, is surely an historical event of immense magnitude, and yet most of us are blinded to something quite crucial in its core: genocide and epidemics were followed by climate disruption. Here’s the evidence:
According to Ellis (2018), “the accidental ‘discovery’ of the Americas by Christopher Columbus set off a process of global social and environmental change like no other before, the Columbian Exchange… driven by European efforts to extract wealth from the Americas, human societies were integrated for the first time into a truly global world system of social, material, and biological exchange. All of these changes left evidence in the stratigraphic record, but one specific biological exchange stands out for its rapid transfomative effects:
The introduction of smallpox and other Old World diseases is estimated to have killed 50 million native Americans between 1492 and 1650 in epidemics of European diseases to which they had never before been exposed. The results were catastrophic, with whole societies collapsing in the face of rapid population declines of 50 to 90 per cent and more. Epidemics spread so rapidly through indigenous exchange networks that many native societies were wiped out before Europeans first reached them. Forced labour, resettlement, colonial violence, and imported slaves only accelerated the decimation. Before Europeans began transforming American landscapes into large-scale commercial plantations and ranches, the indigenous societies that had long cultivated crops and used fire to manage their vegetation had shrunk to a tiny proportion of their former extent. In their absence, forests began to regrow, taking up so much carbon in the process that they could have significantly reduced atmospheric carbon dioxide, an effect that may be evident in ice core measurements around 1610.” (ELLIS: 2018, chapter 5, pg 96)
Graeber and Wengrow also wrote about it in The Dawn of Everything in these terms: “There are those who place the origin of the Anthropocene rather, dating back to the end of the 16th century and start of the next. During this period there was a global drop in atmospheric temperature – part of the so-called “little ice age” – which cannot be explained by natural forces. Most likely, European expansion in the Americas had a role at that point with perhaps 90% of the indigenous population annihilated (out of a total estimated at 60 million inhabitants) as a result of conquest and disease infectious, forests have resumed in regions where terrace cultivation and Irrigation had been practiced for centuries. In Mesoamerica, in the Amazon and In the Andes, around 50 million hectares of cultivated land may have returned to be natural areas. Carbon absorption by vegetation has increased in scale enough to change the planetary system and trigger a period of global cooling driven by humans.” (GRAEBER; WENGROW: 2021, P. 282-283, quoted from the Brazilian edition published by Companhia das Letras)
This examplary case leads me to the following conclusions: we shouldn’t make the mistake of confounding the part with the whole, it’s not “the Europeans” (all of them) or “Europe” (as a name for a totalizing entity) that is responsible for the massive decline in Amerindian population; but of course the imperial enterprise spearheaded by some wealthy and powerful europeans brought about this “Little Ice Age” following the decimation of the natives of the continent afterwards baptized America.
This entails that it might be naive to blame the Anthropocene and global warming exclusively on the Industrial Revolution, when prior to it we have evidence of radical climate disruption connected with this “clash of the worlds” (“Old Europe” and “New America). Of course this nomenclature is also mistaken: we are in one planet, and there was no clash of two worlds, but an invasion of some humans on the territories of the continent where some 60 million human beings lived – a conquest which came grounded in an ideology of racism, slavery and theocracy.
It can also be said that the Little Ice Age was not an intended aim of the Europeans who invaded the territories they were intending to colonize and extract wealth from; it’s unintended consequence of the imperial enterprise, of course, and that’s quite tragic, but it doesn’t erase responsability and it doesn’t make the imperial enterprise any less accountable in futurity for the damage it has done. I’m sure most of the guys who came with Columbus and Cabral had no idea about microbiology and the dynamics of epidemics to predict that they were carrying in their bodies some germs as dangerous and murderful as their guns. But anyways these greedy ambitious europeans of imperial mind-set really did profit from genocide and slavery: who would be so naive as to believe the Industrial Revolution in Europe could have happened without the capital generated from the imperial plunder of America?
But another very important conclusion here is the fact: re-forestation could alter the earth’s climate with a cooling effect. When forests began to regrow, they absorbed CO2 in the atmosphere – and this very simples, unequivocal natural fact helps us tremendously to think about solutions for our futurity. Of course we’ll need to abandon fossil fuel burning and the hellish factory-farming pesticice-frenzy agrobiz model, but re-forestation is essential part of the solution of global warming. Why aren’t we shouting this more clearly on the streets and social media? Humankind must learn that to un-do the damage we’ve already inflicted in the Web of Life through the anthropogenic Sixth Extinction of biodiversity on the planet, we have to invent ways for the green to regrow, even if it means reducing our urbans sprawls, putting a sudden end to our junkielike addiction to petrol, plastic and concrete.
We must rewild, and that means much more than fighting fiercely for the protection of tropical forests (in territories nowadays located in countries like Brazil or Indonesia); it means re-forest instead of pressuring for further spread of urbanization and industrialization; it means extractivism of minerals (such as gold) must be brought to a sudden stop becaue it’s destroying tropical forests and killing Amerindian populations (such as the Yanomami in the Amazonia, which were victims of Bolsonaro’s genocide during the neo-fascist ecocidal rule of the far-right in Brazil [2018-2022]).
The so-called Anthropocene is a geological epoch where all life on earth is being damned to collapse or even extinction because of our accelerated production of manufactured wastelands. Re-wild and re-forest, which also means venturing into post-humanism and allowing flora and fauna other-than-human to flourish, are keys-of-action right now when we actually need the anthropos to step back, humble down and cool the fuck off.
Eduardo Carli de Moraes Amsterdam, October 2023
BOOK DESCRIPTION
The proposal that the impact of humanity on the planet has left a distinct footprint, even on the scale of geological time, has recently gained much ground. Global climate change, shifting global cycles of the weather, widespread pollution, radioactive fallout, plastic accumulation, species invasions, the mass extinction of species – these are just some of the many indicators that we will leave a lasting record in rock, the scientific basis for recognizing new time intervals in Earth’s history. The Anthropocene, as the proposed new epoch has been named, is regularly in the news. Even with such robust evidence, the proposal to formally recognize our current time as the Anthropocene remains controversial both inside and outside the scholarly world, kindling intense debates. The reason is clear. The Anthropocene represents far more than just another interval of geologic time. Instead, the Anthropocene has emerged as a powerful new narrative, a concept through which age-old questions about the meaning of nature and even the nature of humanity are being revisited and radically revised. This Very Short Introduction explains the science behind the Anthropocene and the many proposals about when to mark its beginning: the nuclear tests of the 1950s? The beginnings of agriculture? The origins of humans as a species? Erle Ellis considers the many ways that the Anthropocene’s “evolving paradigm” is reshaping the sciences, stimulating the humanities, and foregrounding the politics of life on a planet transformed by humans. The Anthropocene remains a work in progress. Is this the story of an unprecedented planetary disaster? Or of newfound wisdom and redemption? Ellis offers an insightful discussion of our role in shaping the planet, and how this will influence our future on many fronts.
Products made from oil are frighteningly everywhere. We’re addicted to many of them. We’re entangled inside this machine like Chaplin caught in the cogs of the factory in “Modern Times”. You might be a vegan that daily buys vegetables and fruits wrapped in plastics. You might be a cyclist and plant-lover, and throwing namastês to all winds and flowers, and yet you might also go around town frequently catching a payed-ride in fossil-burning Uberified transport gigs. Or you might be a communist with an smartphone.
Contradictions, that’s what we’re immersed in. In peril of drowning. It’s pretty hard to break away from this recent addiction of ours to the “black gold”, the terrible idol of petrol. We’ve begun extracting fossil fuels after 1850 and its continued burning is insane. The fact that most of human history happened without them is proof enough that the future will be one without them if we want it to be anything else than hellish dystopia. Fossil fuel burning simply doesn’t fit into any utopical map.
This film deals mainly with the matters concerning oil extraction the United Kingdom’s North Sea, but its main virtue lies in the lessons it has to teach everyone, every global citizen concerned with the environmental crisis and the impacts of it on future generations. Glasgow‘s and Edinburgn‘s uprisings of climate activists, school strikers, angst-ridden eco-traumatized adolescents shows the way: it isn’t conformity, it’s rebellion.
The film teaches through example that whaling vessels were for decades the main source of energy to light our lamps, that is to say: whales had to be killed like crazy, with infinite bloodshed at the seas, through the slaughter of these magnificent whales, and the time came, or better matured, and we gave it up; the analogy works like this: for millenia we have lived without fossil fuels and it’s preposterous to suppose we can’t give it up. We must.
The yongsters in Scotland, on the fringes of the COP and getting beaten and arrested by the cops, they lead the way for a future that’s worth living. Acting out of a sense of urgency, grounded in abnormality, suffering from a wide range of “eco-anxiety” psychoemotional conditions, “Greta’s Generation” is rising up – as the sea levels keep on rising.
They strike, they protest, they blog, they instamagramatize their práxis, they want sabotage of the fossil foolishness industry to be brought down from their pedestals. They have that teenage angst that is lacking in most of the conformists, the volunteered-blindness types, the accomplices of our derangemente, the obedient consumers of capitalism’s profitable apocalypse.
In one of the greatest scenes in these awesome documentary by Emma Davie, Tessa Khan reminds us that Bangladesh is responsible for almost nothing of greenhouse house gas emissions currently damning our atmosphere to catastrophic warming, and yet that great injustice that it’s one of the countries on Earth most badly hit by the on-going and yet-to-worsen climate crisis. The Bangladeshi people done almost nothing to cause the catastrophe and yet it suffers very heavily its consequences. The Banglaseshi will not be destroyed by the hurricanes of the Anthropocene, exactly, because it’s no “humankind” that produced this mega-storm, but industrial capitalist, the ideology of Progress in this pathologial encarnation in what Andreas Malm has called Fossil Capital. Bangladesh must drown it the decree of the cruel Mammon of the Capitalocene.
I’ll meet ya on the frontlines of the struggle for a liveable planet… we’ll meet where people are figuring out how to blow up pipelines, where folks are dismantling factory farms, and where artists take their guitars and drums and voices do streets shouting out: THERE’S NO MUSIC ON A DEAD PLANET! Neither there is a Planet B. And who would want to live in a de-musified silent wasteland such as that which business is usual is so busy producing?
SITE OFICIAL: THE OIL MACHINE “Oil has been an invisible machine at the core of our economy and society. It now faces an uncertain future as activists and investors demand change. Is this the end of oil?
By highlighting the complexities of how oil is embedded in our society – from high finance to cheap consumer goods – THE OIL MACHINE brings together a wide range of voices from oil company executives, economists, young activists, workers, scientists, and pension fund managers. It considers how this machine can be tamed, dismantled, or repurposed.
We have five to ten years to control our oil addiction, and yet the licensing of new oil fields continues in direct contradiction with the Paris Climate Agreement. This documentary looks at how the drama of global climate action is playing out in the fight over North Sea oil.
Oil companies are convinced that they can continue to keep drilling while keeping to Net Zero ambitions through adopting new technologies, such as carbon capture. But climate scientists are deeply sceptical of the Net Zero concept and the time it would take for these technologies to be effective.
The film reveals the hidden infrastructure of oil from the offshore rigs and the buried pipelines to its flow through the stock markets of London. As the North Sea industry struggles to meet the need to cut carbon emissions, oil workers see their livelihoods under threat, and investors seek to protect their assets. Meanwhile a younger generation of climate activists are catalysed by the signs of impending chaos, and the very real threat of global sea level rises. THE OIL MACHINE explores the complexities of transitioning away from oil and gas as a society and considers how quickly we can do it.”
<Eco-trauma> should be a trending topic. It deserves a hype as high-reaching as <Barbennheimer>. And yet it’s far away from the spotlights of mainstream culture most of the time: trauma doesn’t sell tickets like Avatar. No film or album is topping the charts with protagonists suffering from ecological grief or climate anxiety. Art dealing with trauma tends to be unpopular or extremely limited in its scope, consumed by a niche: there’s no box office super-hit dealing with Disaster Capitalism as a traumatizing machinery.
Perhaps that’s slowly changing, due to the repercussion of Bong Joon-Ho films, for instance. We can also feel the resistible ascension of radical cli-fi about violent action against what’s causing the eco-traumatization: <How To Blow Up A Pipeline>, a book by Andreas Malm and a film by Goldhaber inspired by it, being perhaps the best of recent artworks that encapsule this. But it’s still a matter looming on the underground and on the fringes of our dominant culture. In Academia, however, the theme is gaining momentum.
Most of us have heard we’re living through the <worst refugee crisis since World War II>, and that it correlates to climate disruption. Many of us can’t afford to care about global warming and its effects upon society, but those who are careless, and those who are choosing irresponsably the path of self-blindness, will also get hit by hurricanes. There’s no easy escaping from the whirlpools of climate extremities in the Anthropocene, even tough the wealthy dream on their Muskian dreams of running away to colonies in Mars, or enjoying their skyscrapping bunkers high above the toils of the Bangladeshi population – or even of future Amsterdammers and New Orleans residents… – who’ll be fleeing places headed to become like several new-born <Atlantis>.
The <United Nations> points out, concerning the refugees of the world (many of them also eco-traumatized, as the Syria-case states): “by the end of 2021, those displaced by war, violence, persecution, and human rights abuses stood at 89.3 million, up 8 per cent on a year earlier and well over double the figure of 10 years ago, according to UNHCR’s annual Global Trends report. Since then, the Russian invasion of Ukraine – causing the fastest and one of the largest forced displacement crises since World War II – and other emergencies, from Africa to Afghanistan and beyond, pushed the figure over the dramatic milestone of 100 million.”
This is eco-trauma on massive scale – and we all have recent memory of the Covid-19 pandemic to remind us of the extent and magnitude of the ecological crisis we’re immersed in. (Yes, of course the coronavirus outbreak was caused by eco-devastation and not by the malignant will of a virus…)
Eco-trauma is here and it will be even more present in future years. And yet geopolitics in the so-called “First World”, I mean public policy and citizenship in the “well-developed nations”, is often stuck in matters concerning how the wealthy nations can defende themselves from the invaders by building Trumpian walls, or by creating segregation and exclusion by the abuse of the principle of censitary privilege and rentism.
The moneyfull get a high-class cruise with caviar and cellos in this sinking Titanic, while the masses of the poor and desinfranchised get shot at by police, or imprisoned for being sans papiers by the repression forces. Police, Prison, Army etc. are the institutions that are often being appointed as the right and appropriate “social arms” to deal with refugees – and it sounds absurd to my ears: why not people from the fields of Education, Health, or Arts and Culture, for instance? Why is it we treat eco-trauma and climate refugees as matters of police and not psychology, imprisonment and not therapy?
Far-right populists thrive on xenophobia, and even relatively privileged, middle-class people defend themselves inside the gates of private properties that start smelling evermore like little bunkers. And we end up having a shallow or non-existent public debate about how we’ll deal wisely with a social phenomenon that won’t simply go away – worst, it’s bound do escalate: the traumatized by the ecologial crisis that the Capitalocene has brought about escalate while we seem to have diminishing resources to capacitade us to deal with that in the troubled field of our turbulent psyches. How can mental health and psychic healing be collectively ensured to all those in need of it?
We shouldn’t view the “eco-traumatized” person as some sort of abnormal creature, as an exception to the rule. Not only because the numbers of eco-traumatized people gets rising up in direct proportion with rising see levels. But also to avoid the attitude of paternalistic pity: oh, poor eco-traumatized fellas! Let’s buy’em some lollipops and give to them as charity! No! Eco-trauma is an experience that can make its “victim” refuse the status of further victimhood and choose the path of activism, of joining forces with others who have been also traumatized by Disaster Capitalism.
Eco-trauma can mean an awakening, and I admire the clarity of thought of Jem, 24, who told The Guardian:
– I am on antidepressants but I don’t think this is a solution. Things like antidepressants can’t fix things when it’s an external problem. It’s the world we have created that is causing these issues.”
“In a recent survey by the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP), almost three-quarters (73%) of 16- to 24-year-olds reported that the climate crisis was having a negative effect on their mental health, compared with 61% of all people in the UK.”
I endorse Garreth Morgan’s opinions. Eco-trauma shouldn’t be treated in the individual field, it can only be dealt with as a collective dilemma. It’s a psychic sphinx that will escalate in our future, it will spread all around our culture. Eco-trauma, I mean, is a matter that should concern us in the present tense, of course, but it’s also one of those factors we can be quite reasonably sure that will make it into our futurity with lot of weight. The future of eco-trauma in this planet of ours is bound to weight gigatons.
Given the magnitude of the menace, the breadth of the threat, are we reasonably discussing theraphy, and how it can be provided, in order to help heal the traumatized? Are we preparing to assist the eco-traumatized with mental health issues beyond the fallacy of medicalization as panacea? Are we ready to have a mature conversation also about psychedelic treatment for all kinds of post-traumatic stress disorder, including those caused by environmental catastrophes?
Yes, “there will be blood” (and trauma), as the title of P.T. Anderson‘s film stated, as long as “black gold” extraction, for example, keeps on happening in a world whose directions are still sadly dictated by Shells (from Hell) and other fossil fuel burners. And we are going to need artists to step in the scene with their artworks not only to depict the catastrophes that traumatize us, to criticize the forces and powers that caused them, but also to help out in some sort of healing process that needs to be done also artistically.
That’s one of the lessons I deem to have learned by watching Katrina Babies, the HBO-produced documentary “from first-time filmmaker and New Orleans native Edward Buckles, Jr.” which “offers an intimate look at the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina and its impact on the youth of New Orleans. Sixteen years after Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, an entire generation still grapples with the lifelong impact of having their childhood redefined by tragedy. New Orleans filmmaker Edward Buckles Jr., who was 13 years old during Katrina and its initial aftermath, spent seven years documenting the stories of his peers who survived the storm as children, using his community’s tradition of oral storytelling to open a door for healing and to capture the strength and spirit of his city.” (HBO.COM)
The film suggests that New Orleans can only be healed after this massive eco-trauma if we refuse what Naomi Klein called The Shock Doctrine,the onslaught of neoliberal capitalism using the disaster as opportunity for rebuilding the city with privatization and gentrification running amok. Katrina Babies is a collective and plurivocal manifesto of Afro-americans, a denounciation of the plight suffered by blacks during this very racially unequal tragedy which befell much more terribly the poorest and most oppressed part of the population.
Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts, from 2006, is also an excellent historical document in film form about this traumatic event – and it’s also smartly bursting with insight in all things concerning race matters. But Katrina Babies does not repeat the Spike Lee joints, it isn’t redundant, especially because it decides to portray and give the power-of-the-word to those black kids and adolescents who felt in their flesh the impact of that terrible storm.
The poster of the film includes a provocation: “our story, after the world stopped watching.” We watched New Orleans for a while, and then our short-attention span reclaimed our focus, we looked elsewhere – we trying to pretend Katrina didn’t leave behind a trail of trauma of stratrospheric proportions.
Disaster can also be turned into a spectacle. It can sell newspapers, pump up the audiences of breaking news programs. Disaster movies have taught us that catastrophic scenarios can thrill us, can generate in our hearts and minds very deep and profound commotions, and many os us are ready to pay for a ticket or a stream which provides us with delightful disasters. But Katrina Babies refuses to commodify the catastrophe and chooses rather to be an oral symphony for the eco-traumatized – almost them, in this case, also traumatized by racism.
These are people who feel that telling the tale of their trauma is a path to healing themselves. To talk about their vulnerability, their bruises, their losses, their scars, is a necessary step towards a possible cure also for the bruised territory that will never be the same after August 2005.
The film portrays documentary filmaking as a social space of seminal importance because it offers the Spielraum, the “running-room”, for storytellers to tell their tales – full of sound and fury, of course. Edward Buckles Jr. has made more than a good film, he has propposed some sort of social movement mediated by cultural production: making a film together as a means to heal together. And he ends the film letting the protagonists ensure the spectators that to tell the tale of our misfortune has been therapeutic, but… it’s also true that therapy has its limits within a society that keeps following a track that will lead to more and more escalating eco-trauma. It’s greedy, productivist, consumerist, fossil foolish society that needs badly an urgent therapy.
This film-essay has an author, who is quite clear about his locus of speech – born and raised in New Orleans, and one of the “kids” (or babies) who suffered Katrina in his flesh when he was barely a teenager, so it can also be read with the key of auto-biography. Katrina Babies collects fragments of autobiographies by the New Orleans eco-traumatized.
Buckles ends the film rappin’ about resilience. He doesn’t want resilience to become some sort of fake happy ending to this dark, sobering tale. “Even tough we are resilient, we can never get back what was lost.” This amazing, resonating phrase goes deep: some irreversible damage has been done, can’t be undone. Eddie Buckles ends the film saying that there was a loss that can never be healed or repaired. Tragedy.
Something in New Orleans is broke beyond repair, let’s avoid fooling ourselves – and there are traumas that won’t get healed, there are bruises that will lead only to suffering and death. Don’t let the fake certitude of resilience’s triumph push us into the barren terrain of toxic positivity, of bullshit cruel optimism. The filmmaker and his comrades have just shown us eloquently, through the aesthetic means of this film, by delivering us the collective gift of Katrina Babies, a film that knows how to sing its blues, how much vulnerability, how much brokenness beyond repair, how much tears over unrepairable losses lie at the core of such difficult and troubled resiliences which the survivors of Katrina attempt to embody.
The sphinx Amsterdam must be quickly deciphered or else it will devour me. This is far from being an easy enigma. I’ve arrived last Sunday, Sep. 10th, at Schiphol Airport, after grabbing a KLM flight from Guarulhos/SP. After the plane left the Brazilian northeast and began its journey above the Atlantic Ocean, some pretty heavy shaking began. The flight attendant asked us to fasten our seatbelts because we ·were “experiencing some hazards”.
I had Sun Ra’s delightful joyful jazz in my hearphones and was feeling sleepy but unable to relax during 30 minutes of turbulence. I dropped half a pill of Imovane (zopiclon remedy) and tried to get some very uncomfortable and almost nightmarish rest. I recalled BRIDLE’s writings I’ve been recently immersed in, and there it was: the certainty of rising uncertanties beginning for me, escalating for us all. Inside that shaky airplane I pondered in anguish: there’s a whole lot of shakin’ going on and due to climate disruption the future holds no promise of blue skies and kind winds for aviation.
After landing and meeting my German friend Jorg Andrés at the arrivals sector, I was told the news: the previous day, at the Hague, 10.000 people marched in protest and tried to block with their bodies the avenue that leads to the Dutch Parliament (they were “armed” with musical instruments and they did yôga postures). They wanted divestment from fossil fuels. They were gently received by anti-riot police with water canons and 2.400 protesters were detained (Read more on Reuters). This was organized by Extinction Rebellion and I’ve heard the multitude was chanting:
In the Extinction Rebellion.nl website, I read: “TIME IS UP – Hundreds of years of exploitation and destruction have brought us to the brink of the abyss. All over the planet people are losing their way of life, their environment, and their lives. We only have a few years left to avert the worst effects of the climate crisis, if we’re not already too late. The sixth mass extinction has begun. What we do in the next few years will determine the future of life on Earth.”
“There is No Hierarchy of Oppression” – by Audre Lorde
Read by: Lauren Lyons
“I was born Black, and a woman. I am trying to become the strongest person I can become to live the life I have been given and to help effect change toward a liveable future for this earth and for my children. As a Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, poet, mother of two including one boy and a member of an interracial couple, I usually find myself part of some group in which the majority defines me as deviant, difficult, inferior or just plain “wrong.”
From my membership in all of these groups I have learned that oppression and the intolerance of difference come in all shapes and sexes and colors and sexualities; and that among those of us who share the goals of liberation and a workable future for our children, there can be no hierarchies of oppression. I have learned that sexism and heterosexism both arise from the same source as racism.
“Oh,” says a voice from the Black community, “but being Black is NORMAL!” Well, I and many Black people of my age can remember grimly the days when it didn’t used to be!
I simply do not believe that one aspect of myself can possibly profit from the oppression of any other part of my identity. I know that my people cannot possibly profit from the oppression of any other group which seeks the right to peaceful existence. Rather, we diminish ourselves by denying to others what we have shed blood to obtain for our children. And those children need to learn that they do not have to become like each other in order to work together for a future they will all share.
Within the lesbian community I am Black, and within the Black community I am a lesbian. Any attack against Black people is a lesbian and gay issue, because I and thousands of other Black women are part of the lesbian community. Any attack against lesbians and gays is a Black issue, because thousands of lesbians and gay men are Black. There is no hierarchy of oppression.
I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.”
“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”
“Freedom is not something that anybody can be given. Freedom is something people take, and people are as free as they want to be.”
“Life is tragic simply because the earth turns and the sun inexorably rises and sets, and one day, for each of us, the sun will go down for the last, last time. Perhaps the whole root of our trouble, the human trouble, is that we will sacrifice all the beauty of our lives, will imprison ourselves in totems, taboos, crosses, blood sacrifices, steeples, mosques, races, armies, flags, nations, in order to deny the fact of death, the only fact we have. It seems to me that one ought to rejoice in the fact of death–ought to decide, indeed, to earn one’s death by confronting with passion the conundrum of life. One is responsible for life: It is the small beacon in that terrifying darkness from which we come and to which we shall return.” ― In: “The Fire Next Time”
Historic debate between James Baldwin vs. William F. Buckley Jr., in 1965, at Cambridge University on the question: “Is the American Dream at the expense of the American Negro?”
The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-hair’d shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.
Alas! for this gray shadow, once a man—
So glorious in his beauty and thy choice,
Who madest him thy chosen, that he seem’d
To his great heart none other than a God!
I ask’d thee, ‘Give me immortality.’
Then didst thou grant mine asking with a smile,
Like wealthy men, who care not how they give.
But thy strong Hours indignant work’d their wills,
And beat me down and marr’d and wasted me,
And tho’ they could not end me, left me maim’d
To dwell in presence of immortal youth,
Immortal age beside immortal youth,
And all I was, in ashes. Can thy love,
Thy beauty, make amends, tho’ even now,
Close over us, the silver star, thy guide,
Shines in those tremulous eyes that fill with tears
To hear me? Let me go: take back thy gift:
Why should a man desire in any way
To vary from the kindly race of men
Or pass beyond the goal of ordinance
Where all should pause, as is most meet for all?
A soft air fans the cloud apart; there comes
A glimpse of that dark world where I was born.
Once more the old mysterious glimmer steals
From thy pure brows, and from thy shoulders pure,
And bosom beating with a heart renew’d.
Thy cheek begins to redden thro’ the gloom,
Thy sweet eyes brighten slowly close to mine,
Ere yet they blind the stars, and the wild team
Which love thee, yearning for thy yoke, arise,
And shake the darkness from their loosen’d manes,
And beat the twilight into flakes of fire.
Lo! ever thus thou growest beautiful
In silence, then before thine answer given
Departest, and thy tears are on my cheek.
Why wilt thou ever scare me with thy tears,
And make me tremble lest a saying learnt,
In days far-off, on that dark earth, be true?
‘The Gods themselves cannot recall their gifts.’
Ay me! ay me! with what another heart
In days far-off, and with what other eyes
I used to watch—if I be he that watch’d—
The lucid outline forming round thee; saw
The dim curls kindle into sunny rings;
Changed with thy mystic change, and felt my blood
Glow with the glow that slowly crimson’d all
Thy presence and thy portals, while I lay,
Mouth, forehead, eyelids, growing dewy-warm
With kisses balmier than half-opening buds
Of April, and could hear the lips that kiss’d
Whispering I knew not what of wild and sweet,
Like that strange song I heard Apollo sing,
While Ilion like a mist rose into towers.
Yet hold me not for ever in thine East:
How can my nature longer mix with thine?
Coldly thy rosy shadows bathe me, cold
Are all thy lights, and cold my wrinkled feet
Upon thy glimmering thresholds, when the steam
Floats up from those dim fields about the homes
Of happy men that have the power to die,
And grassy barrows of the happier dead.
Release me, and restore me to the ground;
Thou seëst all things, thou wilt see my grave:
Thou wilt renew thy beauty morn by morn;
I earth in earth forget these empty courts,
And thee returning on thy silver wheels.
Sophie Scholl (1921-1943) was a German activist who is famous for speaking out against the Nazi regime. Scholl was a member of a protest group called The White Rose, which was formed by her brother Hans, and some of his university friends. The group mainly consisted of students in their early twenties who were fed up with the totalitarian rule of the government. The Nazis controlled every aspect of society – the media, police, military, judiciary system, communication system, all levels of education and all cultural and religious institutions. The White Rose distributed leaflets urging their fellow Germans to oppose the regime through non-violent resistance.
On 22nd February 1943, after the release of the sixth White Rose leaflet, Sophie, Hans and fellow member Christoph Probst were arrested by the Gestapo and convicted of treason. They were executed that same day by guillotine. Sophie was 21 years old.
UPDATE: The source of this quote has been disputed. It’s been sourced on Wikiquote, but on further investigation by some readers, it can’t be 100% confirmed. It could have originated from a 1991 play about Scholl written by Lillian Garrett-Groag.
A vida social é essencialmente prática. Todos os mistérios que seduzem a teoria para o misticismo encontram a sua solução racional na práxis humana e na compreensão desta práxis. [Karl Marx, 1845]
Combatendo a distorção e divulgação de notícias e conceitos falsos; Ocupando as redes sociais e denunciando moralistas e interesseiros de ocasião; Dialogando e formando amigos e conhecidos seduzidos por soluções autoritárias; Colaborando com ações e propostas conscientizadoras sobre as liberdades civis; Frequentando e defendendo os espaços plurais de produção, difusão e compartilhamento de saberes, conhecimentos e artes. RESISTA!
A W E S T R U C K _W A N D E R E R 