#ayure

It’s the fall of 2011. After catastrophic spring flooding throughout North America, 312 tornadoes in the southcentral United States in a seventy-two-hour period in April, a historically unprecedented summer drought in Texas, and a tropical hurricane in late August that devastates infrastructures in the state of Vermont and floods downtown Paterson, New Jersey, with fourteen feet of water, a candidate for U.S. president publicly states that climate change is undocumented science. It’s a joke to believe that we choose our nightmares (1997a, n.p.). Arnold Schwarzenegger, cyborg, outlives three filmic incarnations as the Terminator before presiding for two terms as governor of California, leaving office just as the state enters financial free fall and severe cutbacks in state expenditures include a [End Page 274] 20 percent reduction in public funding for the University of California system. The History of Consciousness Program at the University of California–Santa Cruz where Donna Haraway taught for thirty years is at risk of disappearing under pressures for consolidated curriculum and academic programs capable of generating independent profit streams. Undergraduate students in a science and technology class find the cyborg manifesto curiously relevant but somewhat impenetrable to read. Subatomic experience becomes a thinkable category as nanoscience mobilizes to deliver new techniques for the reprogramming of matter at nano scales. Proliferating drone technology automates political assassinations in Palestine, Afghanistan, Iraq, and Pakistan with minimal risk of casualties for the attackers and maximal terror for those on the ground. In Cairo, Tunis, Hama, London, Manama, Manchester, Sanaa, Homs, Amman, Madison, Wall Street, and hundreds of occupied U.S. cities, digital media helps resisters, revolutionaries, and dissidents create new forms and tempos of political movement while permitting unprecedented control of public communication during crises for governments willing and able to exercise it. Or. In other words. It’s here again, utopia. How will we inhabit it this time?