Artemis, Shmartemis
Color me unimpressed by repeats of sixty-year-old feats, especially when they are obviously being used as distraction.
How depraved is it that people who generally won’t lift a finger to do anything about Spaceship Earth latch on to Artemis in order to achieve their Prime Directive: to feel happy and hopeful despite total sessility in the face of physics-guaranteed omnicide? (Yes, sessility—like a benthic filter-feeder: “I can’t move; I am not a primate with at least apparent free will. Nope! I am a Hydra, and must therefore adhere to the ocean floor and filter-feed whatever the god-king Elon-AI-Trump’s neofascist futurism provides. Now fuck off—I have to bud!”)
It’s, like, “I know I’m doing nothing much to stop the rape happening right in front of me, but I just need to watch Star Trek reruns on my phone, drowning out the screams, because, you know, one must be happy and live in hope!”
The fantasy of technis-ex-machina escapes—whether to a bunker on the Moon or Mars (it’d be a short-lived prison-hell) or on earth (ditto)—prevents action now. Bunkers, wherever they may be, are just privatized micro-planets except far from self-sustaining.
NASA is basically in the space-bunker biz, promising a kind of Sean Connery-Outland of expanded profit, except with way more robots. Oh, and maybe some science if it’s not too woke.
All the enforced wonder is merely the analogue to ChatGPT, the gee-whiz, mostly fake frontier-expanding, can-do, America-is-still-great marketing designed to domesticate the real activity of AI, which amazingly is not telling you you are wonderful but rather firing you for profit.
But rest assured that the new photo of earth from space will definitely unite mankind, just like the previous ones! And the Dalai Lama said we would all achieve total consciousness on our deathbeds, too. So we got both things going for us. Which is nice. (Points if you know the ref!)
I expect dedication to this brand of delusion, and to all possible others, to continue, intensify, and never ever end till we do.
It’s not even tech worship. Why no comparable media-whipped excitement about, say, solar tech? Why aren’t batteries an avatar of American exceptionalism? Or any tech at all that might reasonably stop omnicide? Why the stale forced enthusiasm for a “remake” of the moon shot? Or for AI, the final coffin nail, if you like?
Could it perhaps have something maybe kinda tangentially related to perceived relative profitability for mega corps (including media), now almost exclusively run by brain-addled far-right sociopaths, combined with the Resistance’s Prime Directive? 🤔
They want to strip-mine the Moon so the 1% get richer. Dat’s it.