Editorial

Grey goo is a hypothetical end-of-the-world scenario involving molecular nanotechnology in which out-of-control self-replicating robots consume all matter on Earth while building more of themselves, [...] a scenario known as ecophagy (‘eating the environment'). [...] Self-replicating machines of the macroscopic variety were originally described by mathematician John von Neumann, and are sometimes referred to as von Neumann machines. The term grey goo was coined by nanotechnology pioneer Eric Drexler in his 1986 book Engines of Creation.

- Wikipedia.org

The joy of this spectacularly dystopian meme is not only that it provides a sci-fi analogue for the carnage reaped by capital accumulation but also that it conceives of its residue - a world not definitively destroyed, but degenerated into a mass of undifferentiated, yet still active goo. The goo's combination of inhuman self-replication and destruction is a Marxist's wet dream, but also an image of how the pop imaginary conceives of The End. Not as a break ushering in the transvaluation of all values, but as an infinite extension of more of the same old shit. In this issue of Mute we are thinking through the prospect of The End in all its divergence: its lure for revolutionary dreams, Hollywood scaremongering, the extension of markets into the atmosphere, the defensive cleavage to old models of security such as the family, the general expansion of cynicism.

As Evan Calder Williams discusses in his article [p.32] seeking to explain the recent explosion in Hollywood catastrophe movies, crisis, catastrophe and apocalypse are all highly specific terms. While apocalypse offers a moment of insight and reordering, crisis offers the insight without the reordering, and catastrophe is simply a disastrous breakdown without either possibility. Hollywood, which favours the latter, is a grey goo spewing macro-bot, and will doubtless soon be rendering this specific end-of-world scenario in one of its dreamworks.

Beyond the saturated pixels of spectacular ecophagy, there is a greyness that descends when encountering the institutional logic powering culture as it teeters on the brink of the double dip's second dip. JJ Charlesworth in his piece on London's Institute for Contemporary Arts [p.20] shows how omnivorous neoliberal logic has claimed casualties in terms of the institution's perilous dependence on sponsorship, its management style and the culture it values. As its director Ekow Eshun is quoted as saying in a vision document, ‘All that matters is now.' A conviction which quickly breaks down into the formula: more celebrities equals more sponsorship cash.

The oppressiveness of this tautological manoeuvre whereby what is already present is endlessly represented because it is already present, finds its parallels in management cultures. Pop eats itself at one end of the scale, while at the other, circuits of time-wasting, self-affirming procedures proliferate (sociophagy perhaps?). Mark Fisher gave a stark example of this in a presentation on the NuBureaucracy this February at Goldsmiths University: the requirement for students to fill out feedback forms at universities to maintain their department's funding levels results in lecturers pressurising them to give positive responses so as not to jeopardise funding, so they, in turn, receive a good degree from a credible university which will actually count for something in the work place. This circuit he described as ‘consensual cynicism'.

The excerpt from Matthew Fuller's forthcoming novel Elephant & Castle [p.62] deals with the grey goo's proliferation through techno-managerial processes, but without Fisher's restorative faith in the possibility of a socially useful bureaucracy. Fuller's story describes, with polymorphous perversity, the way a system makes use of itself and its operatives at every imaginable scale to self-replicate for an entirely obscure purpose. ‘This', he writes, describing a management chief's vision of the system's life-sucking upgrade, ‘is a move of incorporation which thrills participants in its capacity for swallowing.' This sounds like capitalism's standard response to resistance - if it can't be stopped it can always be assimilated.

In his article on the Copenhagen summit on climate change, Ilya Lipkin describes the self-defeating desire to turn environmental chaos into yet another basis of scarcity and value; a refusal to see its challenge as the life-threatening limit to capitalism's operative logic that it actually is. Recognising a limit to production's ceaseless expansion would be to acknowledge that not everything can or should be swallowed.

Behind the reified appearance of normality - in which business as usual seems unstoppable, climate change seems like manageable collateral damage etc. - anti-capitalist theorists are always looking for the real ‘tendency', writes Benjamin Noys [p.44]. This is where the surface appearance of normality and stasis melts, at a deeper level, into a ‘truer' picture of the flows of historical movement. In the minds of some theorists, however, obscured ‘tendency' becomes more real than actuality, and a disconnect occurs, taking political philosophy onto the level of fantastical imaginings, many of which are apocalyptic! Noys wants to remind us that what is hidden is sometimes very different from the picture of accelerated capitalist expansion (and hence rupture) we are often led to believe in. Instead of falling for the prospect of an apocalyptic crash-and-burn scenario and accompanying new dawn, we need to look at something closer to a grey goo scenario in which a deeper homoeostasis is achieved by a system indefinitely dragging out its endgame as a survival strategy. Sober insight is never easy (much less sobriety!), but the benumbing solace of Hollywood style catastrophe, and even pseudo-apocalypse is thankfully starting to wear thin.

Josephine Berry Slater <josie AT metamute.org> is Editor of Mute and reformed pram pusher