Page - 186 - in Siting Futurity - The “Feel Good” Tactical Radicalism of Contemporary Culture in and around Vienna

186 siting futurity giant clone in China, the case studies here all offer an alterna- tive kind of “how-to” guide to recognizing workable collectives capable of negotiating and navigating their surroundings, using historical coordinates, ghosts if you will, to avoid succumbing to the overwhelming complexity wrought by digital technolo- gies on those surroundings. Ivakhiv has shown how quickly the scary monsters that are hyperobjects can be, and indeed have been, produced: The AnthropoCapitalist Thing (henceforth, A/C Thing) in- cludes humans, ruminants, cereal grasses, fossil fuels, com- bustion engines, cities, techno-economic networks, and a proliferating array of things made for the Thing and things made to make other things for the Thing. Even things made by the A/C Thing seem to be getting livelier and more com- plex: digital life, nanotechnology, online worlds. We are building a complex meganetwork atop a complex meganet- work, but with relations between the two—Terra 1.0 and Terra 2.0 — growing ever more tenuous and fragile. (Ivakhiv 2018, 29–30; italics in original) A phrase both Bosker and Mitchell employ now strikes me as quite prophetic: “Boots on the ground are a must,” Bosker de- clared in her acknowledgements (Bosker 2013, xi), while Mitch- ell describes a clone army as consisting of “all foot soldiers, ‘boots on the ground’ as the standard synecdoche for infantry puts it” (Mitchell 2011, 41; italics in original). In order to reclaim “the digital future as humanity’s home” (Zuboff 2014), we need to pay proper attention to where our boots are and to recog- nize and tap into the life-giving strands of our surroundings. Adopting a Buddhist-like zen attitude towards possessions and imagining the Anthropocene and humankind as a geological layer of history, as Ivakhiv proposes as a way of addressing “the crisis of agency” that is very much a part of our historical mo- ment (Ivakhiv 2018, 18), may work well in the context of those haunted by the faces of Jesus, Mohammad, and Moses and thus