5 Signs we’re headed for an Exterminist future. (number three will make you tie a noose, number four will make you use it). Olly Haynes Follow Mar 10, 2019 · 6 min read

I while ago I read Peter Frase’s book Four Futures in which he posits four different future scenarios scored to the soundtrack of climate collapse: Communism, Socialism, Rentism and Exterminism. Where we end up according to Frase depends on whether we manage to eliminate hierarchies and scarcity — Communism eliminates both, Socialism eliminates hierarchy, Rentism preserves hierarchy and eliminates scarcity, Exterminism eliminates neither. It is an interesting, challenging and intelligent book, though by no means perfect. I remain pretty unimpressed by his suggestion that in a communist utopia we would automate carework and have our elderly relatives cared for by robots. The phrase “it’s not immediately obvious what the difference is between a cute dog and a cute robot” sounds like a line cut from an interior Patrick Bateman monologue for being too on the nose. I do not subscribe to the idea that we must respect the elderly arbitrarily just by virtue of them having lived that long. Living that long also means subjecting other people to their bullshit for longer… But, I do think the elderly should, as everyone should, be treated with dignity and I can’t help but shake the feeling that our increasing elderly population won’t find it particularly dignified if we turned round and said “fuck off Gran C3PO can look after you while you cough out your death rattle, I’m off to play football”. That being said, Frase’s chapter on exterminism, where the rich hoard all the resources while the earth burns and automate the process of the murder of the lower classes who they no longer need, is particularly chilling. And this time for the right reasons.

So here are 5 signs that we might be headed towards an exterminist future.

1. Number one comes from my time following the Gilet Jaune movement. On the 19th of February in Paris, as with many other weekends one could go down to near the Champs Elysee and watch the most Hunger Games scenes explode on the streets as protesters get beaten, gassed and shot by riot cops while people look down from the balconies of their luxury hotel rooms and consume it like entertainment. This is pretty dystopian in itself, but the specific instance that stuck out to me was a Deliveroo driver who became very distressed talking to riot cops saying he couldn’t cycle through meaning his route was disrupted. We live in hell. Nothing says dystopia like being so wedded to your gig economy job that you’re willing to cycle through a quasi-riot into the no man’s land between cops and protesters just so you won’t be screamed at by whichever management consultant’s sushi didn’t arrive perfectly in time for the tanins on his bottle of Bordeaux to breathe. I’m not judging the Deliveroo rider, I’d probably have done the same in his situation — but the fact that that is a rational reaction in his situation is damning, even more so when it occurred in Macron’s “liberal” paradise.

2. The second exterminist warning sign is less of a blinking light on a dashboard, more like the dashboard punching us collectively in the face screaming something is wrong. The election of the Economist’s favourite fascist Jair Bolsonaro to Brazil, the world’s 4th largest economy, home to the biggest carbon sink in the world. He’s friends with Tony Blair (could we need more of a sign as to what caused the current crisis) and his political philosophy is simple: “if it’s good, kill it”. The gun-toting, rape-advocating Pinochet fanboy seems to have an ideological commitment to destroying the environment. Bolsonaro’s foreign minister labelled climate change a plot by “cultural Marxists” (Not them again!) and got rid of the climate change division within his ministry. Bolsonaro favours argribusiness over preservation and seems intent on turning the whole rainforest into a cattle ranch for the new MCeugenics burger. Pneumonia is fighting a losing battle with a bad case of Bolsonaro at the moment, which is truly a shame, the man could well be a harbinger of the apocalypse, at least for those of us that don’t have bunkers, and ending his presidency would have been enough to earn the condition a Nobel peace prize.

3. The US, at this point is basically an exterminist state. Gun violence is normalised, immigration detention centres separate children from their families, drone-king Obama levelled as much of Libya as he could, and Silicone Valley produces something new for the exterminist toolkit every other day. But, for number three on the list of exterminism warning signs is the state of crowdfunding. There’s nothing intrinsically wrong with crowdfunding itself, but in a country where the president owns a gold tower named after himself and yet isn’t even in the top 250 wealthiest people, it is a fucking disgrace that 1 out of every 3 campaigns on GoFundMe is for healthcare. The year is 2029, net-neutrality has been repealed, traffic to GFM is impossibly slow. Jeff Bezos, as his bank balance constantly rises and he accrues more of all there is, burns medical textbooks and kills doctors with impunity just because he can. Occasionally something resembling an emotion twitches within him at the sight of an orphan coughing up blood and he pauses, scans the Amazon employee RFID chip implanted in her wrist and tips her 1 quarter of a Bezo, the cryptocurrency she can use to purchase healthcare services from the medical arm of the Amazon megacorporation. She doesn’t make it, because her job at Amazon doesn’t pay her enough to afford the Amazon bus to the doctor. Her blood is then cleaned and pumped directly into Bezos, to keep the Amazon dream alive.

4. Number four on the list of exterminist omens comes direct from London and the UK more broadly where school children recently held a strike to protest inaction by the government over climate collapse. What could put a dampener on such an obviously positive thing? Young people getting involved in politics, showing people that they care and pressuring politicians on the single most pressing issue facing humanity today? Surely that could only be interpreted positively. Well, of course it wasn’t interpreted that way. The response of our ruling elites was generally of condemnation for the students. Belittling the young plebs who clearly just wanted a day off school and couldn’t possibly actually care about the fact that by the time they reach middle age Cornwall will be submerged beneath a boiling sea. The apotheosis of elite derision at children trying to save the planet was Christopher Hope, Chief Political Correspondent for the Telegraph who, upon seeing the young protesters outside parliament square tweeted; “[they] have now wrecked the newly planted grass. And they are worried about climate change? What about the lawn”. He did so without a hint of irony, genuinely believing that safeguarding the interests of the grass outside Britain’s absurdly pompous parliament, is more important than the niche special interest group that is children who don’t want an early death. This is occurring in a period of deeply strange weather. It is February, normally the dead of Winter, and yet people stroll past trees with no leaves in shorts, as they enjoy the ultra-violet rays which will eventually kill us. And our elites? Well to be fair they do have to tend to the lawn.

5. Every previous example on the list has been specific to one locale. True, Bolsonaro being elected to the Brazilian presidency and the idiocy of the British political and media class in the face of climate crisis do have global effects, but the examples themselves were localised instance of reaction to the hyperobject that is climate change. Number 5 however, pertains to the global architecture of surveillance and how late capitalism has taken this over for profit. Shoshana Zuboff coined the phrase “surveillance capitalism” in 2014, which denoted a new mode of accumulation that uses surveillance to commodify reality in order to sell data to future behavioural markets. Under surveillance capitalism, nothing isn’t for sale. It is not just surveillance and not just late capitalism, but a horrifying mixture of the two. It is tantamount to there being a gift-shop inside the panopticon that compels you to buy erasers and T-shirts that comment on your behaviour patterns. Being constantly surveilled and then marketed to is certainly dystopian, it is not necessarily exterminsist, but we have to stop and think, if they are willing to monetise and manipulate every aspect of our reality that they possibly can in the present, what will tech billionaires be willing to do to make money in the future. Once everyone is on Facebook and the crossfire of data and information is so constant as to be a roar in the background of all of everyday life, such that it is no longer useful, we have to consider what they will be willing to do in order to carry on making money. When there are no more external markets to expand into and when behaviour is so manipulated as to be worthless, the logical end point will have been reached. Facebook will morph from a social networking site into a library of leather-bound tomes in Zuckerberg’s data centres each containing the severed Faces of the people he deems unworthy.