Category: extinction

Call for Papers–Capitalism of Late Humans: Confronting Extinction (MLA 2027)

Deadline for Submissions: March 21, 2026

Organizer: Dr. Amit Ray/Rochester Institute of Technology

Contact: axrgsl at rit dot edu

This panel explores capitalism’s role in accelerating human extinction. How do late-stage economic systems shape ecological collapse, biopolitical abandonment, and end-times subjectivity? We welcome interdisciplinary work confronting survival, disposability, and the limits of the human. If accepted, this Special Session panel will convene during the 2027 Modern Language Association Conference in Los Angeles, January 7-10, 2027. Please send an abstract of 200-400 words to Dr. Amit Ray at axrgsl at rit dot edu no later than March 21, 2026.  

This is what extinction feels like.

A melting planet, an accelerating (accelerant) species. Hyper nationalism and ideological militancy… I mean what’s not to like about a species that toys with its own extinction, as it demands growth on every front that can be monetized and brought into financial logic? Our very extinction seems to be available for extraction and profit—a growth industry that ends in collapse. Ours is a species in bloom. #autocolonialism

Hybrid note to E and T

Capitalism and War unleash human biology in recombinant and hybrid ways. In this sense the human begins to actively restructure itself. And, militaries and companies are the ones that are exploring such processes most intensively. Such invisibility begets all kinds of trauma, deformation, and amnesia-cal qualities in a species toto. It boggles my mind. This is happening. Much has likely already happened. The big nation states have only ever been war machines, no?

And corporations eased themselves into alignment over much of the last century. Corpor-national phenomena.

They are our militarily industrialized complexities, within which secrecy abounds

This evacuates and exhausts me. I suspect it exhausts those within and outside what we might consider to be the spectrum between secrecy and propriety. Secrets of trade and otherwise.

Our missing cores, our absent presences.

We, as a species, are dangerous. And we are self-destructing.

And its as if there is nothing we can do…this is what we are made of. This is the tissue, the latticework of ages. These last remnants of (en-machinated) language.

These gasps, if you will. #languageisleavingus

I repeat: This is a species that will be content to self-destruct, given it was functionally built upon machines of war, first and foremost. As we extend into the nucleus of not just the atom, but of the cell. As mere decades pass. (And to think we’re still here.)

I don’t want to be a part of it, for the most part. But here we are. This is what extinction feels like. And we are doing it to ourselves. #autocolonialism

Capitalism and War unleash human biology in recombinant and hybrid ways. This happens not in decades, but in years. #talesofthelatehuman

We are bound for it to be this way. We lead with our own complicity in all of it. This is the human, of late.

We are the extinction event.

(Make of this word and brain salad what you will. Words fail me.)

Note to A and E, 3/12/20

A thought. Please indulge me.

CRISPR is derived from a bacterial mechanism that provides immunity from viruses by using RNA to cut and paste snippets of the viral attacker into the genetic code of the bacterium itself.

There are large scale endeavors to use genetic editing strategies to engineer responses to actual viruses. The arguments for expediency and exigency abound.

That these things come into our knowledge and come into technoscientific existence so quickly —seemingly all at once—- makes my brain hurt.

This is all happening so fast, my friends. Much of it in less than a decade. And even that short time scale seems to be compacting upon itself.

PostScript Sat March 15

But what we never seem to understand is that just because we have power doesn’t mean we are in control. Which, I am convinced, speeds up the process of humans attempting to colonize, cum synthesize, cum automate their individual AND aggregate activities. Whether we can admit it or not, synthetic biology is already here. A crisis like this will only expedite acknowledging the  transformation of current and subsequent Homo sapiens genetics, before, during and after “expression.”

A species expands asymptotically, no longer what it thought it was, unbecoming in media res.

Or so I tell myself. #talesofthelatehuman