ϟ faca-de-ponta

Study shows that people interpret the same emoji in completely differently ways

Human activity is leaving a pervasive and persistent signature on Earth. Vigorous debate continues about whether this warrants recognition as a new geologic time unit known as the Anthropocene. We review anthropogenic markers of functional changes in the Earth system through the stratigraphic record. The appearance of manufactured materials in sediments, including aluminum, plastics, and concrete, coincides with global spikes in fallout radionuclides and particulates from fossil fuel combustion. Carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus cycles have been substantially modified over the past century. Rates of sea-level rise and the extent of human perturbation of the climate system exceed Late Holocene changes. Biotic changes include species invasions worldwide and accelerating rates of extinction. These combined signals render the Anthropocene stratigraphically distinct from the Holocene and earlier epochs.

For Berger, the point of transition is the 19th century: the 19th century is when we lose animals, for all intents and purposes, replacing them with cheap simulacra of themselves—cartoons, pets, zoo animals with their deadened stares—that are merely reflections of us. At that point of transition we find someone like Haggard, writing his way into the wilderness with a kind of deliberate abandon, and probably for all the wrong reasons. As John Miller has pointed out in Empire and the Animal Body, the exotic virtual fauna that live and die in Victorian adventure fiction, like the big game actually killed en masse in colonial territories, were viewed as a kind of antidote for “a segregation of humanity from wild non-humanity construed by some to have sapped the nation’s strength.” Victorian men, “enervated” by “the drawing rooms and theatres of civilization,” could be “rejuvenated” by killing animals in the jungles of India—or, less effectively, by reading books about killing animals in the jungles of India. Perhaps the most disturbing thing about Far Cry is that it recreates this process and makes it interactive. To kill a tiger and skin it is to become whole in a way that home no longer allows. Still, what Berger suggests—and what my student picked up on—is that this “enervation” the Victorians felt, this enervation we continue to feel, need not be conceived in such reductive and ideological terms, as a crisis of masculinity. It was and is a tiredness of the soul, which tales about fierce tigers, noble elephants, and mythic Yetis could salve—like ointment on skin—but never solve. Even a game as routinely masculinist as Far Cry understands that whatever joy or excitement you get out of encountering its virtual animals derives from the near-unthinkable distance of animality as such: unframed, uncolonized by human effort or imagination, ready to be plopped into a rhino-skin bag.