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Public Books is an online magazine of ideas, arts, and scholarship.
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Punk may indeed be read as “a cult of youthful exuberance” within which negation—and, at times, nihilism—may be conjured from angry disaffection. Then again, Annette Leibing and Matthew Worley write, the notion of a future could not fail to remain. buff.ly/87OMXkv
Mainstream narratives understand disability as something that needs to be overcome or cured. This toxic framework feeds the ascent of technosolutionist efforts, which are often outright eugenicist. buff.ly/6mCSZgS
“Perhaps what is more intriguing about ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” is which lines the post-apocalyptic genre have not crossed.” buff.ly/2DbJt1q
Plants are a key index of nature’s destruction. Given their massive presence (or growing absence) in human ecumene, and their participation in the regimes of air, rain, and energy—they are major players in the gloomy prospects of the Anthropocene. buff.ly/H63eQGn
"Geronticide, 'Plan 75' warns, is not merely the act of ending life; when society denies older individuals their future, it is the erosion of humanity itself." buff.ly/p4clodV
A focus on technosolutionist views of disabilities as conditions that can be overcome by the means of technological innovation, Anya Heise-von der Lippe writes, actually exacerbates existing prejudices. New at PB: buff.ly/6mCSZgS
“Our collective post-apocalypse may show us how to understand new futures within this already existing ‘no future.’ Still, a shared future depends on articulating a world or worlds that we can inhabit in sustainable and inclusive ways.” buff.ly/x2VZ6BV
“Offering distance and difference in vantage, the post-post-apocalyptic allows the imaginary lens to recenter its focus on a freed moment in time, along with its sovereign, mutable future.” buff.ly/2DbJt1q
In the final installment of our “No Future” series, Jason Danely & Ulla Kriebernegg use the film "Plan 75" to show how geronticide, or the killing of the elderly, excludes an older person from futurity through an ageism motivated by neo-Malthusian fantasy. buff.ly/p4clodV
“To recognize, individually and collectively, that things are unfair, a mess, corrupted, defective does not denote an end only.” New at PB: buff.ly/87OMXkv
Once, romanticism praised darkness through doom, evil, death, and apocalypses. Today, such romanticism has been curbed, in a practical level, toward an enrichment of actual human life. buff.ly/H63eQGn
“By assuming the universal applicability of accessibility technologies, technsolutionism suggest that disability can be and has been overcome—making it unnecessary to consider people with disabilities’s vision for their own future.” buff.ly/6mCSZgS
“Darkness expresses a mood, an atmosphere—polymorphous and ubiquitous as it may be—that attends to things to come, and does so in a melancholy or apocalyptical key.” buff.ly/H63eQGn
To get older while tied to a punk identity is complex, Annette Leibing and Matthew Worley write. It necessitates a dialogue with younger selves and negotiations of cultural—and political—meaning. buff.ly/87OMXkv
In practice, “no future” sentiments look like: adults now choosing to not have children, moving off the grid, or turning to lives of homesteading. But what are the other possibilities? New at PB, a series on no future: buff.ly/x2VZ6BV
New at PB, Anya Heise-von der Lippe examines the dangerous idea that technosolutionism can “eradicate” disabilities buff.ly/6mCSZgS.
While ‘Furiosa: A Mad Max Saga” suggests a post-apocalyptic world with traces from the previous world, the narrative emphasis lies not in harkening back but in embodying the contingencies of the present out of which the novel and unexpected can arise. buff.ly/2DbJt1q
What happens when the notion of No Future becomes interwoven with one’s own shrinking biographical horizon? New at PB: buff.ly/87OMXkv
If the future hasn’t changed in the past, how could it possibly change now? A new series explores what it means to have “no future,” new at PB: buff.ly/x2VZ6BV
A recurrent thread of modern Western sensibilities is an attraction and infatuation with “darkness,” the power of the shadows. This directly contrasts the modern hegemonic emphasis on light, characteristic of the philosophical and scientific revolution. buff.ly/H63eQGn