Excerpt from The Myth of Human Supremacy

Science To the Rescue (p. 315)

From chapter "“Rebooting the World,” or The Destruction of All That Is"

The third story has to do with a recent cover article in Newsweek about geoengineering, titled, “Science to the Rescue: Rebooting the Planet.” Yes, one should never anthropomorphize, except when one is projecting machine/computer language onto the natural world. And by this point in the book, do I really have to point out that “rebooting” the planet has been precisely what this culture has been aiming for since the beginnings of human supremacism? The point from the beginning has been to “shut down” the natural world, in other words kill it, and then use our own technics to “restart” some facsimile of it. It’s the story of Noah’s Ark. It’s the story of the Second Coming of Jesus, with the destruction of the earth and its replacement by heaven (or in the new version, technotopia). It’s the story of cities (wiping out all native life and then converting the land solely to human use). It’s the story of agriculture (wiping out all native life and then converting the land solely to human use). It’s the story of pesticides. It’s the story of genetic modification. It’s the story of scientific experiments (wiping out all variables but one in a laboratory, and then manipulating that last variable in order to, as Dawkins put it, make matter and energy jump through hoops on command; or, as Descartes put it, to torture nature into revealing her secrets). It’s the management story. It’s the neo-environmentalist fantasy of a world controlled by us where “anything goes.” It’s the standard abuse story, where the perpetrator breaks down and remakes the victim. It’s the endpoint of this whole machine culture.

And do I have to mention that when they say “Science to the rescue,” they don’t actually mean the rescue of the planet: they mean rescuing this culture from the effects of “turning off”—sorry, reorganizing; oh fuck it, murdering—the world?

Of course they don’t mean the rescue of the planet. The machine über alles.