Extinctiopolitics: Existential Risk Studies, The Extinctiopolitical Unconscious, And The Billionaires' Exodus from Earth

Abstract

One of the most prominent intellectual attempts to grapple with human extinction in recent decades is existential risk studies. For its proponents, like Nick Bostrom and Toby Ord, there is a one-in-six chance that humanity will go extinct in the next century, whether from an asteroid hit, nuclear Armageddon or misaligned artificial intelligence. The field has powerful supporters, with Silicon Valley billionaires like Elon Musk and Jaan Tallinn donating large sums to institutions researching existential risk. In this article, I consider the ideological function of the imaginaries of catastrophe proposed by existential risk studies. To this end, the article begins by examining the distinctive mode of politics, termed extinctiopolitics, elaborated by Bostrom and Ord. Via a critical comparison with the concept of biopolitics, I suggest that extinctiopolitics aims to optimise the future life of humanity through the prediction and prevention of risks that threaten its annihilation. Borrowing the Freudian notion of screen memory, I then argue that extinctiopolitics both acknowledges and represses the ecocidal tendencies of contemporary capitalism. The image of the collective death of the species evokes a range of disastrous events in the present, especially the climate crisis, but in such a way that their social conditions are obscured. By way of conclusion, I briefly reflect on how science fiction texts use the image of human extinction to unpick the ideological manoeuvres of extinctiopolitics and restage the real contradictions of capitalism.