Whose apocalypse? Biosphere 2 and the spectacle of settler science in the desert

Blockchain urbanism: Evolving geographies of libertarian exit and technopolitical failure

“…The majority of the land lies within the Tahoe-Reno Industrial Center (TRIC), a large industrial district home to Tesla’s Gigafactory I and data centers for companies like Google and Switch. The location in the Nevada desert is perhaps unsurprising given the long history of utopian/dystopian experiments in desert landscapes (Koch, 2021b). Indeed, Blockchain’s property is located only around 100 miles south of another desert-based utopian libertarian experiment, the annual Burning Man festival (Rohrmeier and Starrs, 2014).…”

“…Yet, recognizing the difficulty of succession from the United States, most proposals for exit rely on the desire for a "blank slate" or terra nullius from which to "start from scratch"-reproducing centuries of settler colonial imaginaries (Hobart, 2019). Perhaps unsurprisingly, this search for a terra nullius has primarily focused on a series of sites and locations that have long been the object of utopian imaginaries and political experimentation: on oceans and islands (Baldacchino, 2010), deserts (Koch, 2021b), purportedly "empty" lands often in the Global South (Liberti, 2013), and outer space (Smiles, 2020).…”

Black as Drought

“…Indeed, Harry Verhoeven has shown how depictions of arid African spaces, particularly Sudan, as harbingers of climate change collapse and "green wars" has obfuscated local grievances and local claims to equitable responses to environmental change (2011: 692). Natalie Koch (2021), drawing on the work of Potawatomi scholar Kyle Whyte (2018) and Diné scholars Andrew Curley and Majerle Lister (2020), describes how the conjuncture of environmental catastrophism and technological modernism affi rms a white settler imaginary of deserts as simultaneously dystopic and utopic, erasing generations of indigenous life in these spaces. Similarly, Axelle Karera argues climate change apocalypticism oft en works to disavow racialized violence and envisions a post-apocalyptic racial re-alignment that presumes the continuity of Black death (2019: 34).…”