introduction to the coral log
In the process of re-organizing things, I have decided to set this up as a scrapbook dump for clippings I have written or am currently in the process of writing as long-form pieces, or as a place to re-post things I will be putting on a blog connected to that one website I plan on populating more this year, hopefully! Please feel free to subscribe to this in case various websites fail (but this one manages to stay miraculously intact).
coral log is intended to contain thoughts on social, political, and art topics (anything technical will likely be elsewhere). I am not an expert or a voice of academic authority1 but anything I seek to place here will ideally be argued clearly and cited as exhaustively as I can. Please do not take the words here as anything more definitive than ramblings between myself and community members2, streamlined into something readable. Throughout later work I may refer to this dynamic as the collective of haunting spectres. This is just a silly fluorish on consolidating the words and thought of books, papers, and the friends we made along the way. Furthermore, the arguments presented here are not yet academically rigorous, and would benefit from discussion on off-time to make them to that standard where necessary. Take this observation and opinion newsletter as seriously as you may desire.
The name coral log alludes to the bleaching of the coral reefs3, an event that has ticked on in the background of all the tumult since as long as I and perhaps you have been alive. As we reach 2C of warming4 with little evidence that governments have any desire beyond continuing the cycles of capital accumulation (and perhaps move into further forms of rent-seeking5 behaviour, or the transfer of capitalist hegemony into a new cycle6 if some kind of spatial fix7 can be uncovered before the crops fail8), there is a lingering urgency to try and consolidate the politics of class, race, and gender into a liberatory project for a communist horizon. let’s take ibuprofen sketch this together …
Thank you for reading. 💜
unless the academic credentials in question are related to … discrete mathematics and computer engineering? but not quite
friends and enemies and frenemies <3
Kleypas, Joan, et al. "Designing a blueprint for coral reef survival." Biological Conservation 257 (2021): 109107
https://unfccc.int/ndc-synthesis-report-2022#Projected-GHG-Emission-levels
Balibar, Etienne, and Immanuel Maurice Wallerstein. Race, nation, class: Ambiguous identities. Verso, 1991. [specifically, this is one point Wallerstein repeats on his analysis of capitalist classes in multiple essays]
Arrighi, Giovanni. The long twentieth century: Money, power, and the origins of our times. verso, 1994. [specifically, this is related to the central thesis of the work]
Li, Minqi. "China and the twenty-first-century crisis." University of Chicago Press Economics Books (2015). [specifically, spatial fix intuitively means the motivation behind outsourcing capital and labour exploitation to deal with a falling rate of profit. what happens when you can’t keep doing this because of a myriad of reasons, some of which may include the environment? this is a bit dated now, but perhaps good to read in tandem w/ the work of Kohei Saito?]
Kornhuber, K., Lesk, C., Schleussner, C.F. et al. Risks of synchronized low yields are underestimated in climate and crop model projections. Nat Commun 14, 3528 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-023-38906-7