Fragmentos do Antropoceno

[Music] ''Postponing the end of the world is to tell more stories- Ailton Krenak'' [Explosion] [Title] FRAGMENTS OF THE ANTHROPOCENE. [Radio1] It's a boy, copy that. [Radio1] It's a boy.

[Radio2] Roger That. It is a boy. [Narrator] When the United States detonated the first hydrogen bomb in the world, in 1952, the military man responsible for the test sent this message: "IT'S A BOY!

" This image and this sentence are a good summary of our times. The greatest devastation ever caused by a weapon of mass destruction being represented by a MAN. This is the world we live in today, a man's world.

A male view, this idea that the more strength the better. Concentrated power. The ability to change everything quickly.

To destroy or to create with the push of a button. The desire to become some kind of god. Perhaps you are familiar with this painting called The Origin of the World, made by the realist painter Gustave Courbet in 1866.

It's an erotic piece. Some people call it pornography, not art. Anyways, this work was the inspiration for this other, made more than 100 years later, by the French artist Orlan The name of this rereading, which has a man in the place of the woman, was The Origin of War Men were responsible for three wars that had gigantic impacts to the planet.

The first two were so-called hot wars, with millions of deaths in the trenches. An open conflict between several countries. The third started in the middle of the 20th century and it became known as the Cold War.

Man It's called a Cold War, because armed forces, although used as a threat, are rarely unleashed, and blood is not spilled as in the massive battles that we think of as war. It was more of a power and worldviews struggle than a world-class armed combat. But it may have left deeper marks around the planet, even more than the previous ones.

When the Soviet Union imploded, the socialist utopia seems to have disappeared with it. And the capitalism defended by the United States seemed to be end of the story. Even today, it's practically impossible to imagine the future without it.

This narrative that capitalism is the final point of human development maybe is the main consequence of that war. Music It was also a very specific vision of the future. The technological race promised Jetsons-style utopias, which would be happening now, in the 21st century.

It was the future within reach of the hands. We would dominate nature in the name of a better, longer and fuller life. And since the machines would do all the work, we would also have more free time.

We still believe in this version of world, where technology will always be able to overcome challenges and improve everything. That there are no limits to what the human invention can achieve. And that even if we are not able to imagine solutions to the problems of the future, artificial intelligences that are better and faster than the human mind will be able to solve any situation.

Nano robots will eat garbage from the sea or that clean the fat in our blood, no matter how many big macs do you eat. It looks like our timeline is a continuous evolution towards something better, but it is precisely this belief that is the central point we need to re-evaluate so we can move forward. This idea of inexorably ​​bright futures becomes stronger in 1965, with the mathematician Gordon Moore.

His prediction was that every six months, the processing capacity of a computer would double and its size would decrease by half. This became known as Moore's Law, and for decades, it was as if it worked like a law of physics, like the Law of Gravity. Everything gets better and better, always.

Life expectancy has increased, medicines, vaccines, and maybe a good part of the people in the world, now live not just longer, but better with hot water and a sewer system. The basics. The younger generations had greater education, health, and jobs than the previous ones.

But with the combination of climate collapse and technological disruption, the younger generations will be lucky if they stay in the same level as their parents. We urgently need to abandon this impression that things will get better automatically, at any cost. That it's just not true.

First, it is necessary to understand that no technology is neutral, and not all technological development is good. There is always a context, a goal for which anything was created. You can even use a revolver as paper weight, but it was made for another purpose.

Technology is not neutral. Many of the advances we see today are thought of as a source of profit. Not profit as it was in the 20th century, but exponential profit, as it has occurred in the major online platforms, Facebook, Apple, Amazon, and Google.

The exponential growth represents what doubles of size every determined period of time. Babies or trees, for example, have a linear growth: they grow centimeters a year, slowly. New technologies have grown in a exponential way.

The phone took half a century to reach 50 million users. Television, 22 years old. The cell phone, 12 The internet 7, years.

Facebook, 4. The Pokemon Go mobile game did that in 19 days. Growing exponentially it's not very natural.

This growth generated impactful changes on the planet. Scientists debate whether it would be the case of saying that we have entered a new geological era, an era marked by human action on the planet. This era has been called the Anthropocene, the Age of Man.

The Anthropocene would have started in some moment of the 19th century, around the industrial revolution, and it would have started a exponential acceleration period in 1945. This was the year that World War II ended, when the United States dropped two atomic bombs over Japan, killing more than 300,000 people. After that more than 2 thousand nuclear tests have already been done in the world.

Nuclear energy brought advances, illuminated cities, but at the same time it has caused perhaps irreversible problems: leaks in nuclear power plants destroyed entire regions of the planet. In addition to nuclear energy, the planet has been altered by air pollution, by garbage in the seas, by consumerism and it's constant encouragement to produce and sell more everytime, generating disposable products and impacts on nature. Even though recognizing that the current way of life is unsustainable, we keep chasing the same goals as decades ago, but expecting different results.

Making mistakes is human, but insisting on the error, making the same old things while waiting different results is the own definition of madness. In the economic front, the same story. The main objective of the countries has been to seek growth from a calculation called Gross Domestic Product.

This is the sum of all richness produced in a certain territory within a year. It's the sum of the value of all products sold and all services provided. The more a country produces, the more you sell products, the more GDP grows.

Aiming for the growth of GDP permanently is to seek a steady growth of the economy in world, an exponential growth. There is no way to sustain such growth, in terms of the energy needed for the production, or by the waste produced by this consumption. It seems obvious, but it is necessary say it that is not possible to grow infinitely on a planet that is finite.

Few things in nature have exponential growth, because this type behavior usually leads to systemic crisis. Tumors have exponential growth. Also viruses, which cause epidemics.

The human being is a social animal. It chose to live together, in agglomerations. More than that, after they learned to plant food, they decided that they would stay in a single place, instead of walking around the world without fixed home, which brought more stability.

That's how cities started. In 2050, 70% of people in world will live in some city, with neighbors, and only 30% will live in the countryside, in rural areas, far away from everyone. At the turn of the year 2000, there were 371 cities with more than 1 million inhabitants in the world.

In 2020 there were more than 550, 17 of them in Brazil. It is estimated that in 2030, there will be more than 700, of which at least 40 will be megacities, with populations larger than than 10 million inhabitants. Thinking about how to make better cities became a field of study: urbanism, turned also a field of discussion.

Best for who? According to what point of view? A well-known story is that of Paris.

Napoleon the Third, nephew of that Napoleon that we know, was the first president elected by direct vote in France, in 1848. Along with the mayor of the city, he made a plan that it would change the French capital completely. Nearly 20,000 historic buildings were demolished, giant avenues were open, parks and buildings lined, cream shaded, neoclassical style buildings were built.

They made a underground sewer and gas system public toilets, rows of trees. In 20 years, Paris was something else. No other city had changed so much, from an urban planning.

It was beautiful. We will always have Paris. But not everything was pretty.

At least 350 thousand people were expelled by the gigantic works. There began the process of putting the poorest in periphery, leaving the center for whoever could afford better rents. There, major renovations and plans for building cities of the future from a blank slate started.

In 1925, the architect Le Corbusier made another projectto demolish Paris again. That didn't come forward, but Corbusier's ideas took effect in other places. His futuristic vision arrived in Brazil, and was able to build a city from scratch, in the middle of a desert.

[Record} Brasília, in 1957 was an extension of arid and desert land, where everything was yet to be built. Building a city is a gigantic and arduous task. But Brasília was born from the hands of pioneers, inspired by the deepest faith, and dominated for the sincere love of the land.

Brasília is an urban Utopia that went wrong. It was designed by technicians from modern architecture, who imagined a city ​​where ministers and doormans could live on equal terms. With one range of services offered in a way no one needed to travel much to get access to the basics.

On the contrary, it has become a great example of exclusion, where the highest per capita income inhabitants of in the country live in the planned city, while pockets of poverty formed in satellites cities. Furthermore, Brasilia was planned for cars. This idea of future and speed.

Cars, today we know, are not exactly the best future possible. Today, other technicians try to propose new urban utopias, and again all as an utopian city that only them know how to make. Now they are programmers and tech companies claiming to know how to make cities better.

"Reloaded modernism" proposes something that has been called smart cities. No longer concrete, glass, and wide avenues, but cables of optical fiber, networks, and above all a software infrastructure, monitoring and capturing data. According to these new visionaries, with data and with more information it is possible create a future where everything works well.

The advertising is actually beautiful: How to make cities more efficient and resilient for those who live and work on them? How will cities meet the needs? The answer is to put the technology in innovation at the service of citizen.

And our company can help this way. How? Our platform does the diagnosis and mapping of solutions to make cities smarter and more efficient.

We collect and cross the data from more than 100 indicators. Based on our marketplace with more than 100 suppliers, we identify the best solutions, regardless of your need and budget. Our data will be able to anticipate problems.

Your city can be smarter! Access our platform and find out how. Upgrade your city!

But there is one thing that is not said in none of these advertising pieces. The interest of technology companies is not just selling new tools for governments. They say data is the new oil.

The only difference is that the oil will run out one day. Mapping people and processes of a whole city is very profitable. Only that data is not oil.

Data does not come from the Earth. Data is produced by people, even if they don't realize it. A city with millions of people can be a great opportunity for whoever profits from data.

And megacities can be mega opportunities. Whoever controls the data will decide what type of democracy we will have - and even if we will have democracy or not. An internal Google video defended the following hypothesis: a world in which everyone's data was captured could be a better world.

So, governments or companies could influence the decisions of individuals in a personalized way, to create a better society. Called Google Ledger, it would be as a diary of each person, with all the places they go, what they write, or even what they say. Facebook has a clause in the terms of use that allows it to record what you say near the cell phone without your knowledge.

Surely you already went through it. Like receiving an ad about a hotel after commenting with someone that you need to take a vacation. Let's go back to the central point: the technologies are not neutral.

we can have a smart city with cars that drive alone, but could also be quite smart to reduce the number of cars, have more and better public transport that pollutes less, preferably. We know that the technology and innovation can serve the profit, to control systems. But which ones are the possible technologies for better worlds?

How would cities be smarter to improve the lives of people, generate greater social participation, more democracy? What technologies can us help save the planet? Where are the smart citzens?

Part 3- Abandoning the Ilusion of Control When a species attacks all too much, the ecosystem isolates it, and if it it does not lose its ferocity, it is eliminated. The planet is occupied by man, who, we know, it's destructive. And the current stage of capitalism accelerates these destruction processes.

The profit, not the life, has been the compass that guides man. Coronavirus is a disease of the Anthropocene. The earth is defending itself against systematic attacks we have done to it in recent decades.

Humanity also suffers from diseases of this era focused on productivity without limits. The lack of sleep, work 24/7 the bigger and bigger goals. All this generates more anxiety, stress, depression and the increase in exclusion and inequality.

The idea that man can be a machine, that the world is a great computer system and which cities are factories of living, reaffirms technology in the center the narrative as the solution for everything. The belief that the technology will solve all man-made problems is a kind of faith. It is necessary to abandon that faith in technology and change our actions because there is no God Ex-Machina.

At the Greek theater, this expression was used when a dramatic problem was solved by a God who sprang from anywhere, descending from the heavens with the help of a machine that at the time were cables, ropes and pulleys. No God will spring from our fiber optic cables. to prevent the end of the world, but there are other possible paths, other possible futures.

If we look for the native folk, for the women, for black people, peripheral populations, the people of the Global South, we can learn something about resistance, about resilience, about how to survive in difficult times. The environmentalist Ailton Krenak said that, in the coronavirus epidemic, he was worried about whites, who never were attacked like this before, never suffered genocide, as the natives have suffered for hundreds of years. The whites they don't know how to survive.

We live too on the domain of the linear Cartesian thought, We see the world in such a way and we look for answers based on a determined path of how to understand the things around us. But there are others ways to see the world. There are others technologies.

There are other intelligences There are two forms of potency. The positive power is the power to do something The negative power, on the contrary, is the power of not doing, the power of saying no. It's not about impotence, about the inability to do.

It is about the affirmation of the no. The refusal to go on a given direction, refusing to do which is imposed. It is necessary to deny the world that is being imposed on us.

To invent other possible futures. The idea is not to replace a form of thinking for another. Inventing just one possible future and trying to make the dispute in relation to what is posted.

It is not about looking for a single answer. Nor there is only one way. Every complex problem has a simple, obvious and wrong solution.

Finding a simple and objective solution would be the Cartesian, linear, male and anthropocentric way to think. The world is complex, and therefore requires a complex thinking. It is not right to replace one map with another.

This still would be to insist on the error. There is no map, there are thousands of maps. Nor we are alone on this planet.

It will be necessary to take into account not just humans, but other beings that inhabit this planet. For many cultures it doesn't make sense to say the word nature, because everything is nature, including us. The view we have is that the nature is there somewhere and we are here.

Defending nature is defend ourselves. It's fighting for our existence itself. The human being only exists in relation to the other, independently of who the other is.

The desire for a relationship is the desire for exchange, desire for life, for hope. If we don't have it, a lot more species will disappear. And it will for sure shorten the time of the human season on earth.

The wish for life is the only thing that will bring us a new future with more joy. [Music] The question that remains in the air, and is always asked is "But what can we do? " There are people doing a lot of things.

In many different places. None is able to face the crisis alone. All have strengths, limitations contradictions and similarities.

We are proposals under construction. Complementary. Capable of creating other futures.

Let's count these stories and others. Different stories can show us different futures. .

. . .

. and postpone the end of world.