Alarmist Discourse of the Future: From Cyberpunk to Ecology

Abstract

The Coronavirus pandemic forces us to reconsider our usual ideas about the future and historical development. The eternal present, the end of history, and many other concepts that problematize the possibility of the future are almost unusable for analyzing modern historical expectations. The return of concepts of the utopian and political, the return of concept of the future are visible to the naked eye not only in the public field, but also in scientific and philosophical discussions. However, the pandemic not only reactualizes the old discourses of the future, but also brings to the fore completely new or just appeared. The latter include the alarmist discourse of the future, which is considered in the article. The author proposes to consider its main characteristic the idea of the future as a threat to the life of mankind. Unlike eschatological historical representations, such an end of the world cannot be presented as the “goal” or “meaning” of human history. The invasion does not come from the realm of the transcendent and divine, not from the space of utopia/anti-utopia, but from the “neighboring” competing realm of the non-human. Unlike utopia and the transcendent, which can be imagined as alienated humanity, the invasion of non-humans is fundamentally external to us. And if N. Land's cyberpunk can still be represented as a progressive development, when a person turns out to be a means of existence of machines, a transitional link of evolution, then modern “ecological” and “materialistic” philosophies speak of literally non-human: animals, viruses, asteroids, carbon derivatives, etc. This “neighborhood” with a Stranger most resembles mythological, pre-religious ideas, especially in their interpretation by E.V. de Castro. Therefore, the project of anthropology of the latter is the author's main theoretical reference point when considering the alarmist discourse of the future. The second approach to its theorization is connected with the development of the analysis of modern capitalism, primarily with the concepts of N. Srnicek (platform capitalism) and H. Frank (attention economics).