The Future And Its Enemies
In
the article “The Future And Its Enemies ,” Virginia Postrel (2000)
acknowledges that human beings are driven by the need to be informed
about the
future. The author affirms that people in society hate not knowing
about the future. The need to know about different outcomes in business
and trends in lifestyle has led companies to employ people with the
necessary skills to predict trends in how the industry
will continue to be shaped in future. Predictions are made on the
claims that the individual making a claim is scientifically equipped to
make precise and accurate predictions about the phenomena under
prediction.
Often
predictions made on a particular subject go wrong. The author points
out that precise claims made about the future never come true, as they
do
not factor crucial information into the predictions they make. By using
an example of fashion and the predictions made about fashion trends in
the late 1990s, the author acknowledges that predictions by individuals
claiming precise knowledge about a particular
trend go wrong. The decision to take a general point of view on a given
subject may prove crucial in determining the outcome of a prediction
made by anyone. It is the opinion of the author that predictions made
should take general stands and not claim precise
knowledge.
X-factors
in a particular area contribute to the outcomes of predictions made on a
particular subject. Predictions made in any given field should account
for the X-factors in the field. For instance, an understanding of what
makes a particular fashion trend appeal to consumers makes the knowledge
of the phenomena crucial in making predictions about fashion. In
conclusion, the author acknowledges that knowledge
is dynamic and not static and that the success of a prediction is
determined by the ability to recognize these.
King CONG vs. Solartopia
In
the article “King CONG vs. Solartopia,” Harvey Wasserman (2017)
provides insight into the ongoing debate about nuclear power and green
energy. The
article is centered on arguments arising around the advantages and
disadvantages of using both fossil fuel and green energy. Furthermore,
the article is focused on providing information on ongoing activism
around the world on the need to decommission nuclear
plants. The author uses examples from around the world pointing out
ongoing efforts in the United States, Germany, China, and Japan.
Nuclear
power plants generate controversy all over the world. The author
reports that safety concerns begin to arise as a power plant grows
older. The
lack of popularity has seen the closure of nuclear power plants from
around the world in the last few years. In addition, ongoing protests
from around the United States and Germany have led to the
decommissioning and closing of a number of nuclear plants around
the two countries. Ideally, the industry has grown from a promising
one, with the potential of replacing the use of fossil fuel to one in
need of bailouts by the government. However, such bailouts have been
opposed by the majority of taxpayers in Ohio, Illinois,
and New York.
Around
the world, there have been increased initiatives to ensure that energy
policies go green. The author points out that increasing demonstration
in Germany on nuclear power prompted the Germany government to review
its nuclear energy power policies. However, the government only
committed to making the policy work when the Fukushima nuclear power
plant erupted. Although such movements continue to impact
positively on the transitions to green based energy, the policies
developed continue to face oppositions from capitalist profiting from
nuclear power.
In
conclusion, the author reports that change to renewable energy is
eminent. The number of individuals employed in the renewable and green
energy sectors
continues to increase. The war on energy reforms now leans towards
solartopia and green energy.
1 comment:
There are two precises here, it seems. It looks to me like you began to summarize the Postrel piece, but you were recapitulating it at such an incredibly fine-grained level it turns out this is more a rephrasing than an epitomization… if you had finished this first precis at the level of detail with which you began it, it would probably be as long or longer than the original! As is, you really were capturing the argument very precisely.
You probably were right to change directions as you did, since the second precis on nukes and renewables is much more comprehensive, concise, and apt. Environmental and anti-nuclear activists have long organized and protested to change American infrastructural affordances into a sustainable-renewable rather than extractive-polluting system of energy, transportation, agriculture, and information, insisting that society will neither flourish nor even survive unless it manages to change directions in ways that may seem impossibly radical, utopian. The commonplace you will hear so many repeat over and over again by the end of the course, when we contemplate the need and possibility of revolutionary change in the current technoscientific context, is that we find it easier to imagine ending the world of extractive-industrial consumer-financial corporate-militarism (others call this capitalism, others neoliberalism, etc) than changing it.
But quite apart from the radical political arguments long made by environmentalists about the anti-democratizing centralization of power involved in nuclear plants and vast hydroelectric dams or the spiritual death arising from generations of consumers assuming an extractive stance on the living world, what this piece emphasizes instead are the incredibly ruinous costs of these vast dangerous capital-intensive boondoggles. Quite apart from obscene world-ending spirit-ending costs of nuclear and petrochemical technologies, it may be that dumb realtime costs of doing business may actually contribute to the necessary shifts to come after all. The danger of pinning too many hopes on such a development (all the more fragile in a Trump era that seems to take perverse pleasure in undoing the kinds of regulations and incentives the piece is counting on here) is that these considerations don't just lead more to eschew nuclear but also more to embrace fracking, which is no more sustainable than the other.
I am interested in the fact that the article is still speaking -- maybe with tongue a bit in cheek, you can tell me what you think about that -- in terms of "solartopia," the utopian space of the radical renewable imaginary, even though so much of the article is about the accumulation of minute practical quotidian practical and commercial and regulatory nudges rather than revolutionary acts of sudden and totalizing transformations (one might even be tempted to say: singularities). Although you did not focus on this aspect of the text, I wonder if a rather simplistic and rather typically technofixated account of the iconic entrepreneurial conflict of Tesla and Edison set such mythic/mystifying narrative frames in motion, that the piece could not embrace the micropolitics of commercial bureaucratic realness to which the piece draws our attention.
Lots of good, clear writing and thinking here.
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