The new political quadrilateral

The American political scene has shifted again today. In the 1980s and 1990s, we could say that a neoliberal/white evangelical resonance machine formed to push wealth even more upward, to reduce the income and security of most, to overcome Keynesianism, the New Left, and Marxist structuralism, to demean and dismantle several movements toward multiculturalism, and to highlight Christianity as a unifying faith central to the vitality of the country as a nation. Its formation surprised liberals and those on the left, though some in both parties then battled it.Footnote ¹

That old right wing resonance machine has now morphed into a new, internally rambunctious, right wing quadrilateral. The latter is composed of neoliberals, white evangelicals and conservative Catholics in the working and middle class, Trump fascists, and high-tech multibillionaire bros. Each component of this quadrilateral folds a bit into the others, helping to make it a resonance machine. White evangelical men find an ally in the hi-tech bros’ Peter Thiel, who combines tech expansionary goals with warnings about a second coming. Elon Musk folds elements of Trump’s fascist agenda, with his control of X, into his demands for neoliberal acceleration of wealth distributed to the top along with new insecurities to the middle and bottom. He also, of course, attacked the deep state for Trump before they split, only to return again as they both arranged new financial ties with Saudi Arabia. Trump, the id of this quadrilateral, accentuates the racial, gender, and income securities of white working-class evangelical men while enacting fascist drives to send immigrants to Gulags and to blame white working class grievances on migration pressures and the liberal welfare state. The hi-tech bros love the Trumpian attacks on law firms, universities, courts, Congress, feminism, the state bureaucracy and other institutions of civil society because it gives them freer rein. The primacy of one version of Christianity has become a major theme too, especially for tech bros indebted to Rene Girard or Carl Schmitt. Indeed, it is not difficult to see how their new demands for radical human longevity, or even eternal life through computer uploads of hi-tech brains, reflects a transfiguration of old theo-hopes into more secular plans. And some of the tech bros grew up as evangelicals, with Peter Thiel leading the way.

The shortest way to characterize this new fourfold is to call it a movement of plutocratic fascism, a fascism that tempts several constituencies outside its highest circles by exacerbating their resentments against immigrants of color, feminism, climate repair, transgender people, citizens of color, and non-Christians. Musk played some of those cards effectively during the 2024 election by instituting a 300 million dollar campaign below the radar to convince young white men in three Midwestern states that uppity women demanding the best jobs were threatening their future livelihoods. Since entry jobs in the economy were already scarce, due in part to AI advances, the scare tactics were effective. And all factions of the fourfold accept or applaud the attack on universities, even as several universities were already compromised in advance by their participation in military research and AI investments. Indeed, one objective of the quadrilateral is to bring universities, the media, unions, churches, and localities under their control, so that its radical agenda can proceed apace.

Of course, there is much more to explore about the shape, effectiveness, and instabilities of the fascist quadrilateral, but I will leave things there for today. I focus now on the assumptions, priorities, demands, and dreamscapes of the newest members of this quadrilateral: multibillionaire tech bros who have moved in mass to join it and who seek to navigate it in distinctive directions. They are the new Prometheans, and their own turn toward the fascist right helps to shape the sensibilities of others in the quadrilateral.

Dreamscapes of the tech bros

The constellation I have in mind is composed of hi-tech thinkers, activists, cosmic dreamers, and those who indulge in voracious attacks on their opponents. Part of this, certainly, is due to the extreme sense of entitlement that regularly accompanies astounding wealth and power. But men such as Sam Altman, Marc Andressen, Jeff Bezos, Peter MacCaskill, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, Nick Zuckerberg, and Nick Bostrom elevate that agenda to a higher pitch, lifting it into rage against the fact that they face any limits from the state and into a supreme sense that the way they think and feel properly sets the standard of thought itself. This feature of their ethos indeed explains why they, like Trump, insist they are persecuted unless they have complete freedom to pursue their reckless agendas.

The tech bros often don’t like each other that much, but nonetheless collude on major projects, projects that pour even more entitlements and demands into massive projects that enact their ways of thinking and demands for the future. When I asked AI how much seven of them are worth cumulatively today, it spit out the figure of $730 billion, allowing us to make sure we do not underestimate their demands to shape the world to fit the dreamscapes that pull them, or, better, to design geoengineering projects that carry the dreamscapes forward before they come crashing down upon those of us without their investment clout, existential expectations, political influence, and capacities for escape.

What, then, are the contours of the tech bros’ dreamscapes? Well, they seek to accelerate radically neoliberal capitalism, to dismiss and defeat all obstacles to it, to excise “empathy” from dominant modes of thought—commonly treated by them to be a feminine characteristic—to treat universities as “bubbles” to be burst so they can better enact their singular image of intelligence, thinking and progress, to treat AI as the savior of all ills even though it eliminates low level jobs, is dangerous in its surveillance tendencies, uses amazing amounts of energy and huge amounts of water, and exacerbates the climate wreckage done already on this planet by concentrating it mostly to nontemperate regions. As we shall see, several tech bros leaders strive to carry capitalism to other planets such as Mars to accelerate their ultra-growth and wealth production agendas and to increase radically the longevity of human beings—or at least those they count as really human and “innovative.” They often project computer images into human thinking itself until it becomes possible to imagine human brains uploaded onto new fangled computers, to project an image of “the arrow of time” as the endless expansion of human capital and growth, and to proceed ruthlessly and recklessly to deter or eliminate old fashioned humanists and liberals who would block their way. Those latter constituencies promote “stagnation” and “retreat.” The tech bros’ agenda thus energizes the relentless attacks on universities, for that is where liberals and radicals have established a precarious foothold. It is also where the hi-tech callous and dumbed down models of “smartness” are challenged by those pursuing thoughtfulness. The tech bros, again, insist that supremacy is their right and they are being persecuted unless it is acknowledged.

Since my goal in this essay is not only to expose their games but to proceed to positive themes that surpass them and their sometimes unconscious fellow travelers, I will now merely illustrate these dreamscapes with a few quotes. Pay attention in these statements particularly to the contours of the “we” and the “our,” as well as to the coarse models of intelligence, thinking and “smartness” that inspire them.

Marc Andressen: “Our civilization was built on technology. Our civilization is built on technology. Technology is the glory of human ambition and achievement, the spearhead of progress, and the realization of our potential. For hundreds of years, we properly glorified this—until recently. I am here to bring the good news. We can advance to a far superior way of living, and of being. We have the tools, the systems, the ideas. We have the will. It is time, once again, to raise the technology flag. It is time to be Techno-Optimists.”Footnote ²

Jeff Bezos: “I would love to see a trillion humans living in the solar system. We can easily support a civilization that large with all the resources in the solar system. The only way is through giant space stations.’’Footnote ³

Stephen Hawking (a fellow traveler): “The Earth is becoming too small for us, our physical resources are being drained. When we have reached similar crises in our history there has usually been somewhere else to colonize. Columbus did it in 1492 … . But now there is no new world … the only places to go are in other worlds.’’Footnote ⁴

Elon Musk: “those who attack space maybe don’t realize that space represents hope for so many people.”Footnote ⁵ And: “I believe it is important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy … With first principles you boil things down to the most fundamental truths … and then reason up from there.”Footnote ⁶

Marc Andressen: “We believe intelligence is the ultimate engine of progress. Intelligence makes everything better. Smart people and smart societies outperform less smart ones on virtually every metric we can measure… . We believe intelligence is in an upward spiral—first, as more smart people around the world are recruited into the techno-capital machine; second, as people form symbiotic relationships with machines into new cybernetic systems such as companies and networks; third, as Artificial Intelligence ramps up the capabilities of our machines and ourselves. We believe we are poised for an intelligence takeoff that will expand our capabilities to unimagined heights. We believe Artificial Intelligence is our alchemy, our Philosopher’s Stone—we are literally making sand think. We believe Artificial Intelligence is best thought of as a universal problem solver. And we have a lot of problems to solve…”Footnote ⁷

Nick Beckstead: “To take another example, saving lives in poor countries may have significantly smaller ripple effects than saving and improving lives in rich countries. Why? Rich countries have substantially more innovation…”Footnote ⁸

Peter Thiel, during a 2010 interview with Max Chafkin: “he launched into an impromptu dissertation on the three recent bubbles. The first, of course, was the technology bubble; then came the bubble with subprime mortgages. Then there was the bubble we were currently in: ‘Higher education,’ he said. The higher education bubble was not like the bubble in subprime mortgages, he said. It was worse.”Footnote ⁹

Well, such statements could be elaborated endlessly, and Becker, Max Chafkin, Erik Carlson and others do a superb job of gathering them. Together, they expose the recklessness, colonial mentality, dumb-downed models of intelligence, and adamant temporal insistences shaping the tech bros’ dreamscapes. They thus impart a new urgency to humanists and entangled humanists who seek to oppose their well-funded agendas. The question of political strategy becomes critical here, too. While concurring with those two agendas—and even having attempted to contribute to them modestly–myself.Footnote ¹⁰ I also think they are insufficient.

Why? Well, the extrapolations into the future the tech bros make remain too close for comfort to models of thinking, cosmologies, and economic growth agendas that many regular liberals and humanists continue to support. So, I would like to complement those first two agendas—the exposés and political counter strategies—by outlining an alternative image of the cosmos, embodied thinking, events, cosmology, and care for the world to counter more radically the reckless, insistent, and ruthless dreamscapes of the tech bros. More radically, in the sense that it neither adopts assumptions and goals too close for comfort to theirs nor takes them on by returning to another planetary model that has historically been brought against them: the ideal of harmonizing with an organic Earth already oriented to us if we listen closely to it. Listening closely is surely important, but not quite in that way.

Perhaps, then, more of us also need to challenge them with an alternative, positive vision of embodied thinking, attention to intrusive events, life and death, cosmology, and care for the volatilities and acute sensitivities of the Earth. Doing so to make it more difficult for the rich tech bros to get their crude dreamscapes off the ground. For, on the alternative reading to be presented, they have not come to terms with a host of cosmic and planetary processes that vastly exceed human actual and potential control. Their wealth infused dreamscapes infect and move these neglected forces in multiple ways, but usually not in the ways they intend. Additionally, their model of thinking (“smartness”) itself is too narrow and coarse by comparison to a richer, embodied image. Exposé and critique are always important—particularly in this case. But they are also not enough.

Steps toward an alternative onto-cosmology

There are ample exposes of how, for instance, AGI systems fail in numerous ways.Footnote ¹¹ And these accounts are important. Here, I would like to delineate several features of human experience which show why the hi-tech notions of production, intelligence, thinking, and time are so faulty. The alternative cosmic-earthly-reflective perspective to be outlined also challenges things in logical empiricism, rationalism, Kantianism, structuralism, systems theory, and hermeneutics as we have known them in the West, though it may bear family resemblances to the work of Sophocles and Thucydides. More fundamentally, it draws freely upon themes in Gilles Deleuze, Michel Serres and Zarathustra, doing so to rescript the cosmic images and earthly dreamscapes of the new Prometheans. For these thinkers addressed cosmic and planetary processes too, but most definitely not in the way the hi-tech bros do. So, the task now is to consider a counter cluster of operative assumptions, affective priorities, and cosmological intuitions, with each of these folding to some degree into the others. It is important to rise to this level so the tech bros do not dominate cosmic explorations.

(1) Nonhuman Modes of Production. A nonhuman mode of production shapes the temporal trajectory upon which a process is set, either as established on its own or as currently understood by us. Debates over which of these two is most in play in this or that case are often intense. Regardless, new conjunctions might periodically alter formatted trajectories. Examples of nonhuman modes include formation of the planet Earth in relation to the Sun’s gravity, formation of the Moon after a planet hit the Earth, bacteria striving to reach sugar, glacier formations, formation of an ocean conveyor system, life moving from the sea to Earth, the shaping of coral reefs, the evolution of photosynthesis as a nonhuman production that makes life possible for plants and oxygen for animals, and innumerable other nonhuman modes of production.Footnote ¹² This plethora of cosmic/Earth formats exceeds marvelously anything the tech bros have created, though enactment of the dreamscapes that pull and tug upon these narcissists can turn and alter several of those formats in destructive ways. But the dreamscapes of the tech bros, as we will more closely see later, projects a fictive future which downplays the pertinence or overcomes the power of such nonhuman modes.

(2) The Porosity of Knowledge. Here, human knowledge is understood to be the rough capture of a current trajectory or temporality, typically exceeded by molecular pluripotentialities not now included in that capture. So, knowledge about a trajectory regularly comes with a modicum of uncertainty, uncertainties not always susceptible to solid quantitative estimates of probability loved so much by the tech bros. This alternative reading of uncertainty is so because soft and viscous processes form part of each trajectory; it is often not feasible to reduce these elements to hard data alone.Footnote ¹³ Those who study love affairs, detective investigations, political campaigns, viral disease crossings, Sophoclean dramas, species evolutionary changes, moments of criticality in glacier flows, and shifting wind currents are all familiar with such situations. They realize that neither deductive theories nor big data inductive extrapolations work that well in many cases. Knowledge is thus designed to work modestly upon and with other forces, not to overcome them or to conquer the Earth.

(3) The Ubiquity of Events. Events periodically interrupt previously formatted trajectories, either because we had not been able to detect how a format’s potential for new turns exceeds what it now appears to be or because it encounters a new nexus that encourages a creative change—or both. So, a projection or postulate of pulses of real creativity by which the new is sometimes brought into the world is made here. Creativity, in which new events periodically emerge out of a surprising nexus between heretofore separate processes. As, happened, perhaps, when two separate molecules, each with its own repository of evolved complexity, met by chance in the right hot setting to inaugurate life. Or when a viral species crossing occurs, sometimes crippling entire civilizations—turns of time. On such a reading, it is unlikely that we, as human thinkers, researchers, and experimentalists, will or could live in a world without the periodic interruption of events so conceived.

So, an alternative regulative ideal now enters into thought, displacing the stodgy ideal of complete knowledge presented often as an ideal that can never be fully realized but as one that must be projected into a singular future of possibility in principle. The tech bros adopt that regulative ideal. The counter regulative ideal is this: “Be on the alert for new events emerging out of an unexpected nexus between old formats.”Footnote ¹⁴

(4) Beyond Human Exceptionalism. Humans participate in a robust world that exceeds singular human capacities, with, first, a large variety of nonhuman agencies populating the world in ways that create efficacies for both each other and us. Some of them have recursive powers and others may not. Second, there are also numerous nonhuman forces on the planet and in the cosmos whose formatting may undergo significant changes in shape and trajectory. With respect to agency, which involves some degree of striving, there is no urgent need to search for a common measure through which to assess different modes of agency—it may not even be possible to do so. That is mostly a project, anyway, for those desperate to save human exceptionalism. Exceptionalists first set up a measure (the soul, reason, consciousness, recursivity, language, technology, etc., have been candidates, each to falter in turn as a sign of uniqueness) a measure which always seems to place humans at the top of a hierarchy their own species has constructed, and then they appraise whales, crows, octopuses, slime molds, bats, sunflowers, and bacteria according to that measure. What matters is, rather, the differential efficacies of different agencies and forces upon themselves and other entities with which they enter into close relations.Footnote ¹⁵ Pragmatism now becomes pluralized, radicalized, and endowed with a planetary dimension.

(5) Timescapes. When you place such a cluster of assumptions together you can now project the irregular consolidation of disparate events to interrupt and alter the trajectories of old formats. Sometimes, then, a novel cluster of events secretes a new timescape, a timescape which either turns the previous direction of time, or slows it down, or accelerates its pace. This experience may encourage more of us to move from either a linear or cyclical image of time to time as a multiplicity of intersecting temporalities, while retaining the notion that time is tethered obdurately to experience. It challenges head on the tech bros’ dream that time must be singular—the arrow of time—and that the true human destiny must be to accelerate and extend the singular course of conquest over nature set by early capitalism.

Once the idea of shifting timescapes is appreciated it may become wise to shift previous extrapolations into probable and possible futures from time to time, doing so in ways that respond to bends or turns in the proverbial arrow of time. Fate, too, now begins to change its meaning. It is now neither preordained, nor susceptible to human mastery, nor irrelevant as a theme. Fate now becomes a novel constellation of temporalities—a timescape—setting distinctive parameters of providence, danger and possibility. And, certainly, a timescape may close upon itself temporarily, engendering a cul de sac when, in one instance, a new climate optimum allows Rome to flourish and, in another, a constellation of foreign invaders, palace intrigues, climate cooling, and crop failures produces the faltering of Rome—fate as the congealment of diverse temporalities.

In my recent experience such experimentation with an altered image of time (a turn in thinking) is so shocking and disturbing to prompts and lures folded into secular/Christian proponents of a linear image, that those tethered to the former sometimes reject this mode of experimental thinking out of hand, even before considering its elaboration and possible merits. In doing so they may forget that the former images were themselves forged through specific civilizational lures and conquests that habituated people to them. What are the lures and assurances which engender this response? What are those which encourage some of us to rethink time itself in a world where a coalescence between two formats can engender new events? That is the topic of the final section. Event, time as multiplicity, and timescapes tend to support one another as themes, but perhaps not to require one another.

(6) Human thinking. While it supports interpretation, explanation, and knowledge, thinking in this image is not confined to these endeavors. Human thinking also involves, first, cultivating new modes of affective responsiveness to changed circumstances and, second, participating in creative adventures during which new concepts are invented in response to the emergence of new timescapes. Thinking, on this model, is irreducible to computation, and it is also never really detached—whereby the thinker rises above affect and emotion to report the world as it is. If it were, positivists and rationalists would not get so angry so often, as they ridicule views that do not fit their model even before disproving it with evidence or reason.

Rather, contrary to the detached images of the tech bros, thinking is always embroiled with affective dispositions and affect always has at least traces of thinking in it. (In something like the way Deleuze and Guattari said there are always traces of the state in non-statist societies and nomadism in sedentary societies, etc.) To rework affect-imbued prompts mimetically installed in us we need to start with strategies of what might be called counter-mimesis.Footnote ¹⁶ For example, new role experiments, in which you both behave and think differently, can help to set the stage for new thoughts to bubble up. Priming your dreams after pursuing a vexing intellectual problem can do so too. Recent work on gut/brain relays and mirror neurons lend support to such a reading.

If this image of thinking becomes plausible it may mean that you adjust situational thinking to the challenges posed by new timescapes, doing so both at refined levels by recursive means and at visceral levels by tactics or arts of the self. The latter is called micropolitics when it proceeds collectively. Or as I say in a parable—for parables do some of their work on affective prompts—thinking is never really detached from affect, but there are callous and coarse modes of thought carefully cultivated to extract care for the world from them.

(7) Experimentalism. In the world so conceived, interpretation regularly encounters junctures at which experimentalism is needed, cautious or bold depending on the circumstances. For an old timescape may take a surprising turn. The quest of such experiments is not to conquer the world but to respond intelligently to new turns of time.

(8) Practical Wisdom. The pursuit of practical wisdom in a world punctuated by events and new timescapes involves both cultivating by artistic means enhanced care for the world and responding creatively to new events. One prelude to this model of wisdom is the conviction that events will keep coming and timescapes may periodically shift, leaving us from time to time with the need to work on old extrapolations and to redefine established concepts. Once you become more impressed, for instance, with limits to human knowledge and human dependence upon nonhuman modes of production it becomes wise to adjust to turns in time rather than always to overturn them.

One problem you may face—if you have been inducted by multiple means into in a western settler civilization in which struggles between theologies of omnipotence and secularism dominate public discourse—is that when you first encounter these alternative themes profound existential disappointment may arise. The initial temptation, as Z says, will be either to become passive and despondent or to become a monstrous nihilist because the trajectories of the world no longer seem to fit the models you have become predisposed to adopt. Here, acute, double-barreled work on ourselves is needed, as Z finds he must do upon himself and his disciples over and over again. And, of course, Z’s animals and friends are voices within his pluralized self, as well as those of others conversing with him.

(9) Reworking embodied prompts. Such modes of cultivation may include reworking old orientations to death installed in you mimetically, doing so to better appreciate death as a condition of life, to become attuned more closely to interspecies interactions and intersections, and to come to terms more profoundly with the shaky place of the human species on this planet, though the regional, class, race and religious variations here are extremely significant. And it is critical to address the differential fates of nonhuman species too.

(10) The Elements of Conjecture. Since this orientation, very much like its most prominent competitors, invokes a fair amount of faith and conjecture, it may be wise to pursue a deeper onto-pluralism between contending intellectual traditions. In such relations of agonistic respect, intellectual parties jostle against each other and seek to convert one another, but none strives to destroy all the others, even as each perspectival mode of striving tries to make the best relational case possible for itself. This is what Nietzsche called the spiritualization of enmity, though he did not expect the invitation to be accepted by Christian prelates, Kantians, or secular positivists of his day. I call it the pursuit of agonistic respect. It reflects both the imperative to become thoughtful and to fold reciprocal modesty into the quest for thoughtfulness. You strive to make your onto-political case as best you can, and you adjust it periodically in response to others as you go. This is a preliminary precept but not a law. It may need adjustments during a time when movements of plutocratic fascism seek to demean and bury all other perspectives.

I take this summary to mesh well enough with several themes Deleuze, Serres and Nietzsche have advanced, collectively as it were. It also resonates with several feminist readings to be noted in the last section. I further suggest that it provides good intellectual ammunition through which to challenge and replace the wild dreamscapes of the tech bros today, during a time when the superrich bros belligerently join white evangelicals, Trumpian fascists, and neoliberals to diminish the complexity of thinking itself and to forge new worlds of conquest and bleakness. The quests of the tech bros cannot be achieved, but they can bring all of us down, except perhaps those who have accumulated enough power and wealth to fashion private escapes.

At any rate, I hope the last section of this essay illustrates how several of these elements can be brought into play in ways that contrast with the assumptions and dreams of the tech bros.

Crystallizing alternative dreamscapes

Perhaps one example of how to pursue practical wisdom today is pertinent now. Let’s call a lure a beacon that pulls you forward, like, variously, the vague promise of a new love, the desire to live forever, the desire to flee oppression, the pull to move closer to your god, the pursuit of more power and wealth, the quest to become a more subtle thinker, the hope for a nonviolent general strike to overturn the new quadrilateral, etc. Some lures may be closely articulated while others are experienced as vague pulls, more fluid than solid. A dreamscape, then, is a characteristic cluster of lures that pulls a cohort or emergent constituency together. It is composed of vague feelings of nostalgia and cloudy futures, mixed together. I am, thus, definitely not calling for an end to lures or to dreamscapes. My sense is that when those of us not trapped in the coarse models of intelligence, gross inequality, time, conquest, and mastery projected by the tech bros confront the dreamscapes pulling them, elements in our own tacit dreamscapes may now float more vibrantly into view. Indeed, the coarse dreamscapes of the tech bros help to highlight how several other orientations toward intelligence, unilateral progress, and constant growth skate too closely to them.

So let’s work for now with stark contrasts. Take, say, the consummate attraction among the tech bros to creating a new civilization on Mars. After we have appraised the inordinate expenses of this extremely risky endeavor, the crude image of calculative intelligence that allows people to dream of computer uploads of their brains (they forget the place of the gut in thinking, for starters), the fact that the dust covering Mars is poisonous, the relative dearth of an atmosphere there, the absence of oxygen on the planet, the probability that human tendencies to conflict would be exacerbated in such close quarters, the time it would take to travel back to the homeland, and so on, some tacit elements in the alter-dreamscapes loaded by the experience of life into most of the rest of us on Earth may now come into greater relief.

Indeed, the rage against death and demand for control over the world advanced by the billionaire tech bros fuels existential priorities and policies that increasingly render much of the nontemperate world on Earth barely livable for large masses of people and other species. AI, for example, requires huge “megacampuses” that plunder water and use vast amounts of electricity in places like Chile and Arizona already plagued by climate induced drought.Footnote ¹⁷ The tech bros’ agendas in fact would move large portions of the Earth closer to Mars. Here, it is the heat that eats into the soil, oceans, atmosphere, living species, and oxygen supply.Footnote ¹⁸ Their power priorities, existential anxieties, insistent images of linear time, curtailed images of thinking, and compensatory dreamscapes have a lot to do with this, since less than one percent of the Earth’s population today is responsible for about 40% of fossil fuel emissions.

They also ignore, as do too many others, the dynamic relations between capitalist CO₂ emissions, planetary amplifiers, and planetary distributors which coalesce to carry so much damage to life on the Earth today; they try to displace our anxieties about these effects onto juvenile dreams about life elsewhere; they strive to dumb down thoughtfulness by reducing thought itself to computer images; they contribute to desperate migration drives from south to north with their anti-eco-priorities; and they thus help to pull befuddled people in temperate zone states to the fascist border policies that so jeopardize the world today.

Let’s consider two examples of how the American quadrilateral, newly energized by the superrich tech bros, sets into motion planetary forces that exacerbate climate wreckage and augment an old American style of imperialism; they do so through practices and priorities that activate impersonal planetary amplifiers and distributors. Thus as, say, American CO₂ and methane emissions accelerate, they lengthen and intensify El Ninos in the Pacific. The latter nonhuman force in turn dries out trade winds heading south, damaging coffee and banana crops in Central America. These cascading causalities then encourage more suffering people in the south to launch long, painful migrations north to the American border. The migrations in turn encourage plutocratic fascists such as Trump and Musk to pretend their own policies have had nothing to do with that result, as they deploy these very migration drives on the home front to fan the flames of fascist nationalism. A series of cascading causalities, draw human and nonhuman, planetary forces together into a distinctive brand of imperialism.

Or consider a more passive planetary distributor. Emissions by rich temperate zone states speed the melt of the Thwaites glacier shelf in Antarctica, which in turn means that the large Thwaites glacier will slide down its mountain into the sea about seven times faster. If that glacier, entangled with the even larger West Antarctic Glacier, disturbs the latter too much there will be an eventual world-wide sea rise of about 10 feet. But its effects will not be distributed evenly. A passive planetary distributor intervenes. Lowest lying regions will suffer by far the most because of this passive distributor, with the Maldives, Bangladesh, the Marshal islands, Denmark, the coasts of Egypt and Tunisia, New Orleans, and the Netherlands hit particularly hard because of their low land levels. Here again, an impersonal planetary distributor ensures that many regions that have contributed the least to fossil fuel emissions incur the worst effects from them, while temperate zone states that have contributed a lot will initially be less affected.

That is perhaps why William MacCaskill says that while tropical zones would be decimated by new heat levels “richer countries would be able to adapt and temperate regions would emerge relatively unscathed.”Footnote ¹⁹ After you have digested the cruelty in that comment it is also wise to remember that the flooding outside temperate zone states would soon radiate back to them as civil wars and population migrations accelerate in tropical regions.

Of course, carriers of the new fascist quadrilateral either do not, or pretend not to know, much about the complex dynamics of capitalist emission triggers, planetary amplifiers, and planetary distributors. They, rather, focus our attention to a distant future elsewhere and downplay the planetary condition this world faces now. Trump, indeed, displaces attention to these issues in one way, Musk and his tech bros do so in another complementary way. They shore up one another, even while disliking each other.

But what about the rest of us—with the “us” being an invitation to all those who are earth centered? Perhaps the crude dreamscapes of the tech bros, the real, impersonal distributive dynamisms of climate wreckage, and new attention to our own slumbering dreamscapes can together help to awaken us. We can start, perhaps, by allowing the coarseness and cruelties a tech bros dreamscape about life on Mars to throw into sharper relief alternative dreamscapes hovering in the background of our lives.

What are some components of such an alternative dreamscape? Well, we are now in an even more favorable position to appreciate how blue skies, clean oceans, healthy forests, fecund soils, an oxygenated atmosphere, reliable ocean currents, seasonal monsoons, multiple species interactions, lovely sunsets, healthy aquifers, olive-green coral reefs teeming with microorganisms so much more, together provide a tacit cluster of lures—a dreamscape—pulling multiple civilizations on earth along. We are earthlings, not because we are stuck here, but because dreamscapes that tug upon us commit us to live on this Earth, in this atmosphere, near those mountains, under the canopy of that rainforest, in that urban zone, within this northern clime, upon this desert expanse, in that polar region, or on those prairie lands.

Even the little prepositions that tacitly guide our onto-thinking express such lures. Is it, for instance, wisest to speak of turns in time or turns of time?

Distinctive civilizations, indeed, are held together in part by living lures that inform life in them and their multiple connections to disparate, nonhuman processes. Each of those civilizations—for the tech bros show through their crude civilizational hierarchy why the word civilization must always be pluralized—differs from the others. And several tropical, semi-tropical, and polar civilizations today are extremely exploited by temperate zone civilizations in ways that must be opposed. Yet across those differences and exploitations a series of overlapping actualities and dreamscapes about the future also carry many well beyond the ruthless demands and dreamscapes of the temperate zone, multi-billionaire, tech bros. It is these affinities across differences that may carry some hope today to forge new cross civilizational assemblages, assemblages committed to civilizational plurality and to protecting shared lures that pull many in diverse places closer together as they help to render us more attuned to this world.Footnote ²⁰

So, yes, expose the cruel and desolate dreamscapes of the tech bros, and devise political strategies against them. As you do those things, however, also consolidate positive, counter-orientations to thinking and engagement with this world. And articulate more acutely than heretofore, affinities (but not identities) between the earthy and watery dreamscapes that pull and tug so many of us today across very different earthy settings. Cultivating such dreamscapes cannot suffice today; they are too vague and cloudy by definition to accomplish that goal alone. They must, rather infiltrate the exposes we produce and the strategies we construct. For, without cultivation of positive dreamscapes, we are apt to slide into either passivity or cynicism. The former gives up the ship and the latter slides too close for comfort to the adversary.

Humans may lack the acute responsiveness to the earth’s magnetic field that lures ocean turtles to travel a thousand miles to their breeding grounds every year, the refined echolocation capacities of whales and bats, and the incredible planetary navigational skills of butterflies. But we, too, come equipped with subtle lures and cloudy dreamscapes pulling and tugging us along.