The Rise and Fall of Earthrise

This is so relevant to my interests it’s almost a parody. A nice chunky but very readable essay by Erik Davis, the foremost expert on the weird counter-culture (his book High Weirdness comes highly recommended) talking about the Apollo 8 mission around the moon, the Earthrise photo taken on that mission, its impact on the environmental movement and appearance on the cover of the Whole Earth catalogue, the contradiction of a product of the military-industrial complex being adopted by granola-chewing hippies, Gerry O’Neill’s advocacy of space colonisation, Buckminster Fuller’s concept of Spaceship Earth, Martin Heidegger’s distress over the existence photos of Earth from space, the fungible meaning embedded in photos of Earth from space, the variations of the Overview Effect felt by astronauts, and how all this led to, or fed into, the techno-utopian ideologies that have defined the tenor of the last 50 years of extractive capitalism.

Phew!

If you’re curious about what makes me tick, this is as good a primer as any.

Of course there were multiple messages in [the Whole Earth catalog], which makes for a certain irony today. First there’s the juxtaposition of the cover — a sublime artifact of advanced military-industrial technology — and the hippie arcana within, like macrame manuals, DIY tipi specs, and buckskin garment guides. This is the kind of contradiction that is, as the Apple products say, designed in California. Indeed, Anders himself grew up in San Diego.

The deeper irony is that the faith in “tools” the catalog represents, however beautiful and true within a humanist frame, becomes decidedly less charming when it simply greases the infinite instrumentalism of Extractive Capitalism. This egregore or asura has grown so ravenous and mighty that even the two ancient rock stars of the Apollo image — this planet, this moon — can be seen from a certain perspective as nothing more reservoirs of resources to fuel its own galactic self-realization.