Between Futurology and Extinction: A Transautographic Experiment in Two Turns

Abstract

This article is a writing experiment that engages critically with the traditional modes of academic praxis and explores an alternative, interactive way of writing as the necessary complement to a mode of thinking concerned with the possibility of freedom in the face of the progressively exhaustive computational rendition and datafication of existence. By using different yet not distinct voices (in ‘two turns’), this piece aims to foreground the trans-autographic connection at stake in autography and the role that friendship can play in opening a space of freedom suspended between the threat of extinction and the algorithmic government of planetary life. The essay hinges on Heidegger’s notion of 'futurology' as technical calculative appropriation of the future reduced to an extended present, and it proposes the threefold articulation of global computation, futurology, and climate emergency as a way to draw the coordinates of the elusive 'predicament' of our time and of a constellation of questions that go under the rubric of the 'Anthropocene'.