CNDI - TDP Affirmative

California National Debate Institute 2008 12095192.
doc
BROCKWAY/SHACKELFORD LAB 1
Index
Index................................................................................................................................................................................1
1AC.................................................................................................................................................................................3
1AC.................................................................................................................................................................................4
1AC.................................................................................................................................................................................5
1AC.................................................................................................................................................................................6
1AC.................................................................................................................................................................................7
1AC.................................................................................................................................................................................9
1AC...............................................................................................................................................................................10
1AC...............................................................................................................................................................................11
***TDP***...................................................................................................................................................................15
Solvency—Global Warming.........................................................................................................................................16
Solvency—Laundry List...............................................................................................................................................17
Solvency—Dead Bodies ..............................................................................................................................................18
Solvency—Oil ..............................................................................................................................................................24
Solvency—Oil...............................................................................................................................................................25
***K Advantage***......................................................................................................................................................28
Energy Policy Link.......................................................................................................................................................29
Environmental Management Link.................................................................................................................................33
Environmental Neoliberalism Link—Biopower I/L.....................................................................................................36
Environmental Crisis Link—AT: Environment DAs....................................................................................................37
Necropolitics Link– Fear of Death ...............................................................................................................................42
Commodification Impact..............................................................................................................................................43
Consumerism Impact—Root Cause..............................................................................................................................46
Consumerism Impact—Self-Oppression—Questioning Key.......................................................................................47
Consumerism Impact....................................................................................................................................................48
Capitalism Impact.........................................................................................................................................................49
Necropolitics Impact—War/Violence...........................................................................................................................53
Necropolitics Impact—Genocide .................................................................................................................................54
***Kritik Solvency***.................................................................................................................................................56
Solvency – Focus on the Body Good............................................................................................................................60
Solvency—AT: People Will Reject Plan.......................................................................................................................65
Genealogy Solvency.....................................................................................................................................................69
Genealogy Solvency.....................................................................................................................................................71
Parody Solvency...........................................................................................................................................................75
Parody Solvency...........................................................................................................................................................76
Parody Solvency...........................................................................................................................................................77
Parody Solvency...........................................................................................................................................................78
Parody Solvency...........................................................................................................................................................79
Parody Solvency...........................................................................................................................................................80
Parody Solvency...........................................................................................................................................................81
Parody Solvency...........................................................................................................................................................82
California National Debate Institute 2008 12095192.doc
***2AC Answers***....................................................................................................................................................84
1AC
Observation One: The Problem
Peak Oil is coming, its try or die…literally!

Alkalize For Health 2008 “Peak Oil and the Extinction of Humanity,”
http://www.alkalizeforhealth.net/Lpeakoil.htm
Global oil production is peaking. We are at the top of the "bell curve" for global oil production. It is
expected we will start sliding down the backside of the bell curve starting about 2011. The decline in oil
production will be precipitous and humanity is about to go over a cliff. By 2050, global oil production is predicted to
be reduced by about 50%, with the decline still continuing after. Do an Internet search for "peak oil" or "oil production peak" and see for yourself.
We will know all of this for certain when we have the benefit of 20/20 hindsight. However, oil
experts are shouting from the
rooftops now, if anyone will listen. Unless alternative sources of energy such as wind, solar and geothermal are
developed very soon, it will not be possible to develop them at all because production and
transportation at this time depend on oil. If we continue on our present course, the human population on
the planet will experience a significant die-off while oil production falls.
And current alternative’s to oil are not getting the job done—they create too much waste,
make necessary a more efficient solution to our energy problem.
Wolford, a student in the Environmental Management Master’s program at Webster University, 03
(Michael, March 22, “Transforming Waste into Fuel”, www.thermaldepolymerizaton.org)
The United States produced 245.7 million tons of municipal solid waste in 2005 and 133.3
million tons was sent to landfills (EPA, 2005). The US population reached 300 million in 2006
and will continue to increase waste generation, so where to do we put the trash? Many
municipalities have used recycling, reuse, and other reduction processes to decrease the amount
of waste going to landfills. Some of these processes have relieved the problem, but other
technologies should be investigated to reduce or possibly eliminate the need for landfills.
The United States consumed 20.03 million barrels of oil per day in 2003 importing over
13 million barrels per day (CIA, 2006). Changing World Technologies claims that they can
produce one to three barrels of fuel oil for every ton of municipal waste (Appel, 2006) which
could yield between 107 million barrels and 321 million barrels of oil a year. Add to this waste
stream the waste sludge from waste water treatment facilities, animal waste from slaughter
houses, over six billion tons of agricultural waste, and the numbers can significantly increase.
The amount we could produce from waste would fall short of the oil consumption rate in the US
by four million barrels per day, but would exceed the import rate by over three million barrels
per day alleviating the dependency on foreign oil; it would also eliminate a nuisance – waste.
1AC
In this light, we offer the following modest proposal:
The United States federal government should offer individuals a complete exemption to the
Federal Estate Tax if they volunteer their bodies to thermal depolymerization plants.
1AC
Observation Two: We solve
Thermal Depolymerization solves the entire energy crisis – We can turn anything into oil,
stopping waste, dependency, and global warming.
Lemley 03 (Brad, May 1st, “Anything into Oil”, Discover Magazine)
Gory refuse, from a Butterball Turkey plant in Carthage, Missouri, will no longer go to waste. Each day 200 tons of turkey offal
will be carted to the first industrial-scale thermal depolymerization plant, recently completed in an adjacent lot, and be transformed into various
useful products, including 600 barrels of light oil. In an industrial park in Philadelphia sits a new machine that can change almost
anything into oil. Really.
"This is a solution to three of the biggest problems facing mankind," says Brian Appel, chairman and CEO of
Changing World Technologies, the company that built this pilot plant and has just completed its first industrial-size installation in Missouri.
"This process can deal with the world's waste. It can supplement our dwindling supplies of oil. And it
can slow down global warming."
Pardon me, says a reporter, shivering in the frigid dawn, but that sounds too good to be true.
"Everybody says that," says Appel. He is a tall, affable entrepreneur who has assembled a team of scientists, former government leaders, and
deep-pocketed investors to develop and sell what he calls the thermal depolymerization process, or TDP. The process is
designed to handle almost any waste product imaginable, including turkey offal, tires, plastic bottles, harbor-dredged muck,
old computers, municipal garbage, cornstalks, paper-pulp effluent, infectious medical waste, oil-refinery residues, even biological weapons such
as anthrax spores. According to Appel, waste goes in one end and comes out the other as three products, all valuable
and environmentally benign: high-quality oil, clean-burning gas, and purified minerals that can be used as
fuels, fertilizers, or specialty chemicals for manufacturing. Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch
into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come
out the other end as 38 pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of
sterilized water. While no one plans to put people into a thermal depolymerization machine, an intimate human creation could
become a prime feedstock. "There is no reason why we can't turn sewage, including human excrement, into a glorious oil," says
engineer Terry Adams, a project consultant. So the city of Philadelphia is in discussion with Changing World Technologies to begin doing exactly
that. "The potential is unbelievable," says Michael Roberts, a senior chemical engineer for the Gas Technology Institute, an energy
research group. "You're
not only cleaning up waste; you're talking about distributed generation of oil all over
the world."
"This is not an incremental change. This is a big, new step," agrees Alf Andreassen, a venture capitalist with the
Paladin Capital Group and a former Bell Laboratories director.
The offal-derived oil, is chemically almost identical to a number two fuel oil used to heat homes. Andreassen and others anticipate that a large
chunk of the world's agricultural, industrial, and municipal waste may someday go into thermal depolymerization machines scattered all over the
globe. If the process works as well as its creators claim, not only would most toxic waste problems become history, so would imported oil. Just
converting all the U.S. agricultural waste into oil and gas would yield the energy equivalent of 4 billion barrels of oil annually.
1AC
And, dead human corpses are perfect for the job.

Michael C. Ruppert in 2006 (March 7, 2006, “WOOLSEYS IN SHEEP'S CLOTHING, How Dumb Can the Left Get?,” From the
Wilderness, http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/030706_woolseys_sheep.shtml)
James Woolsey is also a big fan of a process called thermal depolymerization. We have written about thermal
depolymerization in FTW and in Crossing the Rubicon. In
that process, anything from scrap plastic to human beings (alive or
dead) can be thrown into one end of a machine (using an unspecified amount of electrical and chemical inputs) and out the
other end comes high-grade oil.
Great… Soylent Oil. Here’s a quote from a 2003 Discover Magazine article on thermal depolymerization: “Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such
as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38
pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water.”[iii] Thermal depolymerization just scares the bejeesus out of me.
I am not the first and I won’t be the last to think of the dying-off of human population that is coming with Peak Oil and wonder how well the elites have planned to
make money on the way up and the way down. I can hear someone thinking now: “Let’s see. If
we can average 30 pounds of oil out of each
person, and suppose we kill two billion due to starvation, disease, etc., and let’s say we have a major
epidemic of Bird Flu and declare an emergency where all the bodies require special treatment, we could
get the bodies, make the oil, and tell the world that this new oil came from new discoveries or our great
technological advances. We’d have it made!” It may sound far-fetched to you but in 1941 and 1942 the Third Reich was debating
on the best ways to kill off every Jew in Europe (as well as every other enemy of the Reich). Their biggest logistical challenges were
transportation, means of death, and disposal of the bodies. Do you realize that in the above scenario, if victims of a pandemic (possibly
bioengineered) voluntarily came to FEMA hospitals using their own energy, all three problems would be
solved. I am not saying that this is what I believe is happening now, but I believe that it is possible. The probability of this dark scenario being
correct is actually greater than the probability that the above solutions Woolsey pushes will actually help. Only one thing will help now, and that
is a drastic reduction in human consumption and the cessation of growth, and that is not what Jim Woolsey’s selling.
1AC
Offering exemptions to the estate tax is the perfect incentive. It won’t cost the state revenue
and will ensure radical accumulation of wealth and power, all while putting an end to
unnecessary social charity and justice.
Boyd in 1999 (The Federa1 Transfer Tax Is an Incentive Tax, National Public Accountant, The, Nov, 1999 by Ben Harlan Boyd,
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m4325/is_9_44/ai_n25026803)
Today, the transfer tax only represents approximately 1% of revenue collected. Further, the need to raise revenue
when the tax was instituted in 1932, during the Great Depression, is not present in 1999. Revenue is no longer a significant policy consideration.
The transfer tax does not raise a large proportion of federal revenue, and furthermore the revenue is not needed. Obviously, though, revenue is not
always the primary policy consideration. For example, the Code's numerous exceptions to taxable individual income, i.e. the exceptions to [ss]61,
all reduce revenue. Nonetheless, either for the sake of progressivity or social incentive, these provisions are not
questioned either by Congress or the taxpaying public. Another example of indifference toward the effect on revenue is the
mortgage interest deduction. The mortgage interest deduction significantly reduces revenue and raises negative implications under the efficiency
and fairness categories. The mortgage interest deduction may be the purest example of a tax provision based solely on the policy of incentive.
Because, home ownership has roots in the principles that founded the United States and is part of the "American Dream," the opportunity to
provide home ownership incentive in the tax law is an irresistible idea that greatly outweighs all other tax policy issues.
2) Incentive and Fairness, Policies in Support of the Transfer Tax

Beginning in 1924, Congress began to employ a new policy in support of an estate tax. Explaining the need for a new transfer tax, a 1932 Senate
Finance Committee report indicates that the intent of the transfer tax was to raise revenue, "but also [to] 'tend' to
prevent undue accumulation of wealth." This quotation from the Congressional record has been referred to by commentators,
time and time again, as the heart of the policy behind the transfer tax. What was meant by "undue accumulation of wealth?" Is this policy still
relevant, and is it sufficient to justify continuing a tax born in 1932? In the modern lexicon, "the undue accumulation of wealth" raises tax policy
issues under the categories of incentive and fairness. The incentive policy contained within the meaning of "undue
accumulation of wealth" is designed to encourage large estates holders to voluntarily break up their
estates, and distribute the estate property in anticipation of death. Three fairness tax policy ideas contained within the
meaning of 'undue accumulation of wealth' are egalitarianism, Puritanism, and the right to property. Egalitarian and Puritan ideas conflict with the
right to property. These conflicts generate what is known as the liquidity problem. In a nutshell, the liquidity problem arises when the recipients
of estate property are not in a sufficiently liquid economic position to pay the transfer tax. This often results in the recipients having to sell estate
assets such as businesses and homes. The comment here is that in a way mollify, if American society is to continue to benefit from the outcome of
the transfer tax incentive policy, the conflicts present within the fairness policies must be balanced in a way that mollifies the liquidity problem.
Otherwise, the liquidity problem may lead to the complete repeal of the transfer tax.
Incentive to Voluntarily Break Up and Distribute Large Estates

To prevent an undue accumulation of wealth is a check against an undue accumulation of power, both
economic and political. The rationale behind the transfer tax is analogous to the rationale supporting the doctrine of separation of
powers. Separation of powers is the outline by which the United States Constitution was written. As a matter of political and social culture
Americans do not believe that benevolent power can be maintained. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely.
A fundamental tenet in the design of American political and economic institutions is that power must be divided by a system of checks and
balances. Honest competition is the backbone of both our economic and political systems. Clearly, when personal wealth grows to
the size of that held by historic individuals such as J. Paul Getty, and Bill Gates there exists a very real potential for
an 'undue' exercise of economic and political power that can undermine legal process and fair market competition.
This is not to say that the wealthy do not earn their fortunes or that wealth is inherently bad. The incentive policy merely provides a check against
the potential of an undue accumulation of personal power, against that which may "tend" toward an undue accumulation. In August 1999,
Bill Gates announced that he had reformed his charitable foundation and donated $6 billion dollars in
cash, raising the over all size of the foundation to $17 billion. Why do people give their property away? There are many personal
reasons, but we also appreciate the tax advantages. The tax advantage gained by charitable giving above the modest allowable annual
income deduction is exclusively offered by the transfer tax. Faced with the choice of either haying an estate divided by the government or
distributing it themselves, who would not choose the latter? Charity in the United States has flourished under the transfer
tax.
1AC
Observation Two: Soylent Green is…People!
Scene One: The Almighty Dollar

Current alternative energy programs are trapped within a narrow economic framework
which conceives of these fuels as new commodities to be traded—this approach is doomed
to failure as the profit motive drives corporations to destroy third world environments and
cultures in the name of making a quick buck. Only refusing this understanding of energy
can get us off the course of neoliberal disaster.
Revolution Newspaper, Paper of the Revolutionary Communist Party, 2007
“Capitalism and the Consequences of Biofuels,” http://www.rwor.org/a/083-special/biofuels-en.html
About the time when capitalism was first putting humanity on the road to the global warming we face today, Karl
Marx and Frederick Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto, “Modern bourgeois society with its relations
of production, of exchange and of property, a society that has conjured up such gigantic means of production and of
exchange, is like a sorcerer who is no longer able to control the powers of the nether world whom he has called up
by his spells.”
Over 150 years later, the truth of this statement still stands out sharply when confronting the issue of global warming and
the particularities of the deal between BP and UC Berkeley. The workings of the capitalist/imperialist system, with its lopsided
and distorted social relations, private ownership, and its relentless drive for profit stands in the way of using
scientific knowledge to address the needs of humanity.
Biofuel, the subject of the UC Berkeley/BP venture, refers to fuels derived from recently living organisms, or their
metabolic byproducts. Today this is mostly in the form of ethanol that can be produced from plants such as sugar cane, soybeans, and oil
palm. While there are many technical problems in the production of biofuels—specifically they often use more energy to produce than they
contribute—many scientists hope that these problems can be solved and that biofuels can replace much gasoline used today. Because the carbon
(the substance that causes global warming) in biofuels comes from CO2 that is taken out of the atmosphere by the living plants, some scientists
argue that biofuels could contribute much less to global warming than fossil fuels. And, unlike oil, the supply of which is limited, biofuels could
be grown year after year.
Other scientists question the sustainability of biofuels saying that they require the use of fertilizers, which increase CO2, replace other plant life
that were also using CO2, deplete the soil, and are very water intensive.
Regardless of the debate over the sustainability of biofuels, in today’s world the use of biofuels has led to horrific
consequences for the people of the world and the environment.
A key feature of imperialism is the division of the world between a handful of rich imperialist countries and the rest
of the world. Eighty percent of the world’s resources are absorbed by the advanced capitalist countries, which make
up 15 percent of the world’s population. Imperialism has produced a wasteful and destructive pattern of economic
activity and industrial development.
This division of the world has meant, and will almost certainly continue to mean, that the growing of crops for fuel
—mostly for export to Europe, Japan and the United States—is being done on large-scale plantations in the third
world. In order to make room for these plantations ancient forests are being cut down, threatening extinction for
many species. Reduction of greenhouse gases is lost when carbon-capturing forests are cut down to make way for
biofuel crops, worsening the problem of global warming.
In Malaysia, the production of palm oil for biodiesel is a major industry. According to a recent report by Friends of the Earth, "Between 1985 and 2000 the
development of oil-palm plantations was responsible for an estimated 87 per cent of deforestation in Malaysia." In Sumatra and Borneo, some 4 million hectares of
forest have been converted to palm farms. Now a further 6 million hectares are scheduled for clearance in Malaysia, and 16.5 million in Indonesia.
In the Guardian newspaper George Monibot writes: “Almost all the remaining forest is at risk. Even the famous Tanjung Puting national park in Kalimantan is
being ripped apart by oil planters. The orangutan is likely to become extinct in the wild. Sumatran rhinos, tigers, gibbons, tapirs, proboscis monkeys and thousands of
other species could go the same way. Thousands
of indigenous people have been evicted from their lands, and some 500
Indonesians have been tortured when they tried to resist. The forest fires which every so often smother the region in
smog are mostly started by the palm growers. The entire region is being turned into a gigantic vegetable oil field.”
(Guardian, 12/6/2005)
And in an editorial in the Berkeley Daily Planet, UC Berkeley Professor Miguel Altieri and Eric Holt-Gimenez of the group Food First
wrote: “Hundreds of thousands of small-scale peasant farmers are being displaced by soybeans expansion. Many more
stand to lose their land under the biofuels stampede. Already, the expanding cropland planted to yellow corn for
ethanol has reduced the supply of white corn for tortillas in Mexico, sending prices up 400 percent. This led peasant
leaders at the recent World Social Forum in Nairobi to demand, ‘No full tanks when there are still empty bellies!’”
1AC
These peasants, along with those displaced by other forms of imperialist domination and environmental devastation,
are then forced to become virtual slaves on these large-scale plantations.
Capitalism cannot deal with the environment in a sustainable and economically rational way for three basic reasons:
First, its logic is “expand-or-die”: to cheapen cost and to expand in order to wage the competitive battle and gain
market share. Companies like BP are locked in fierce competition with other companies. An article in the business
section of the New York Times writes, “For investors in alternatives to oil and gas, the driving force has been
the belief that whoever develops the next great energy sources will enjoy the spoils that will make the gains from
creating the next Amazon.com or Google seem puny by comparison.” (3/16/2007)
Second, the horizons of capitalism tend to be short term. They seek to maximize returns quickly. They don’t think
about the consequences in 10, 20, 30 years. In the development of biofuels this means that they do not pay attention
to long-term effects like soil depletion, water usage, and cutting down ancient forests, or even increasing global
warming.
Third, capitalist production is by its nature private. The economy is broken up into competing units of capitalist
control and ownership over the means of production. And each unit is fundamentally concerned with itself and its
expansion and its profit. The economy, the constructed and natural environment, and society cannot be dealt with as
a social whole under capitalism.
In the article “Capitalism, the Environment, and Ecology Under Socialism” in Revolution #52 (6/25/2006)
Raymond Lotta wrote, “So capitalism is incapable of addressing environmental issues outside its framework of
private ownership and production for profit, and its blind logic of expansion. And on a world scale, we see the
effects. But socialism can address environmental issues in a sustainable, rational, and socially just way: because
ownership of the means of production is socialized as expressed through the proletarian state and this makes it
possible to consciously plan development; and because economic calculation is radically different.”
The debate over these issues—how the world has gotten to the point where the very survival of our species and the
planet is being called into question, and what must be done to change this—is too often ruled out of order. In the
name of realism, opponents of the system too often end up in debate over how to
work within a system that is itself the problem. The debate over these issues needs to be pried open
as a crucial part of the struggle to save the planet.
And, this logic of commodification has goes beyond just fuel—under this rubric,
everything, even the human body, becomes a piece of property to be traded.
Lipschultz 2005 (Ronnie D. Lipschutz; Professor, Department of Politics, University California: Santa Cruz; Director, Politics; PhD
Program Co-director, Center for Global, International and Regional Studies. “‘Soylent Green…is…PEOPLE!’ Labor, Bodies and Capital in the
Global Political Economy”, Conference Proceeding Paper from The International Studies Association, March 5, 2005)
This is not, however, a paper about food, except in a tangential way. Rather, it is about the work that is required
to make the body an object and means of capitalist accumulation. Even as capital has sought new commodity
frontiers to colonize— ecotourism, knowledge, kitty clones—it has not ignored the potential of the body as
a Final Frontier. To be sure, adornment of the body is an ancient practice, and the fashion industry, dedicated to
the transformation of bodies into status objects has a long history. Yet, today, under a global regime of neo-
liberal accumulation, the body is, more than ever, a focus of simultaneous production and consumption.
The labor we put into producing and consuming is a form of “property” that we are only too ready to
alienate in order to create both image and identity. More to the point, what people consume today is not
only that which has been acquired through their physical and intellectual labor in return for wages but
also the body itself. Increasingly, capitalism finds commodity frontiers in the physical and intellectual
features of the body—genes, body parts, preferences, ideas—and sells these products of the body back to
those who “produced” them. We consume ourselves.
1AC
This reduction of all life to raw materials has devastating consequences—the penetration of
the law of value into the totality of social existence makes mass extermination an
inevitability as all life which is no longer sufficiently productive must be eliminated in
order to ensure the “smooth functioning” of the capitalist machine—this instrumental
rationality will be used to justify the destruction of all life on earth
Internationalist Perspective 2000
“Capitalism and Genocide,” http://www.geocities.com/wageslavex/capandgen.html
The real domination of capital is characterized by the penetration of the law of value into every segment of social
existence. As Georg Lukács put it in his History and Class Consciousness, this means that the commodity ceases to
be "one form among many regulating the metabolism of human society," to become its "universal structuring
principle." From its original locus at the point of production, in the capitalist factory, which is the hallmark of the
formal domination of capital, the law of value has systematically spread its tentacles to incorporate not just the
production of commodities, but their circulation and consumption. Moreover, the law of value also penetrates and
then comes to preside over the spheres of the political and ideological, including science and technology themselves.
This latter occurs not just through the transformation of the fruits of technology and science into commodities, not
just through the transformation of technological and scientific research itself (and the institutions in which it takes
place) into commodities, but also, and especially, through what Lukács designates as the infiltration of thought itself
by the purely technical, the very quantification of rationality, the instrumentalization of reason; and, I would argue,
the reduction of all beings (including human beings) to mere objects of manipulation and control. As Lukács could
clearly see even in the age of Taylorism, "this rational mechanisation extends right into the worker's `soul'." In short,
it affects not only his outward behavior, but her very internal, psychological, makeup.
The phenomenon of reification, inherent in the commodity-form, and its tendential penetration into the
whole of social existence, which Lukács was one of the first to analyze, is a hallmark of the real domination of
capital: "Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a `phantom
objectivity', an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its
fundamental nature: the relation between people." Reification, the seeming transformation of social relations into
relations between things, has as one of its outcomes what the German-Jewish thinker H.G.Adler designated as "the
administered man" [Der verwaltete Mensch]. For Adler, when human beings are administered, they are treated as
things, thereby clearing the way for their removal or elimination by genocide. The outcome of such a process can be
seen in the bureaucractic administration of the Final Solution, in which the organization of genocide was the
responsibility of desk killers like Adolf Eichmann who could zealously administer a system of mass murder while
displaying no particular hatred for his victims, no great ideological passion for his project, and no sense that those
who went to the gas chambers were human beings and not things. The features of the desk killer, in the person of
Eichmann, have been clearly delineated by Hannah Arendt. He is the high-level functionary in a vast bureaucratic
organization who does his killing from behind a desk, from which he rationally plans and organizes mass murder;
treating it as simply a technical task, no different than the problem of transporting scrap metal. The desk killer is the
quintessential bureaucrat functioning according to the imperatives of the death-world. As a human type, the desk
killer, that embodiment of the triumph of instrumental reason, has become a vital part of the state apparatus of late
capitalism.
Here, the Lukácsian concept of reification, the Adlerian concept of the administered man, and the Arendtian
portrait of the desk killer, can be joined to Martin Heidegger's concept of das Gestell, enframing, in which
everything real, all beings, including humans, are treated as so much Bestand, standing-reserve or raw material, to
be manipulated at will. This reduction of humans to a raw material is the antechamber to a world in which they can
become so many waste products to be discarded or turned into ashes in the gas chambers of Auschwitz or at ground
zero at Hiroshima.
1AC
While the reification which attains its culminating point in the real domination of capital may contain within itself the possibility of mass murder
and its death-world, it does not in and of itself explain the actual unleashing of the genocidal potential which, because of it, is now firmly
ensconced within the interstices of the capitalist mode of production. To confront that issue, I want to elucidate two concepts which, while not
directly linked by their authors to the unfolding of the capitalist law of value, can be refunctioned to forge such a link, and have already been
effectively wielded in the effort to explain genocide: the concept of the obsolescence of man [Die Antiquiertheit des Menschen], articulated by
the German-Jewish philosopher Günther Anders, and the concept of bio-politics, articulated by Michel Foucault.
For Anders, the first industrial revolution introduced the machine with its own source of power as a means of
production, while the second industrial revolution saw the extension of commodity production to the whole of
society, and the subordination of man to the machine. According to Anders, the third industrial revolution, in the
epoch of which humanity now lives, has made humans obsolete, preparing the way for their replacement by
machines, and the end of history (Endzeit). For Anders, the Holocaust marked the first attempt at the systematic
extermination of a whole group of people by industrial means, opening the way for the extension of the process of
extermination to virtually the whole of the human species; a stage which he designates as "post-civilized
cannibalism" [postzivilisatorischen Kannibalismus], in which the world is "overmanned", and in which Hiroshima
marks the point at which "humanity as a whole is eliminatable"[tötbar]. Anders's philosophy of technology is
unabashedly pessimistic, leaving virtually no room for Marxist hope (communist revolution). Nonetheless, his
vision of a totally reified world, and technology as the subject of history, culminating in an Endzeit, corresponds to
one side of the dialectic of socialism or barbarism which presides over the present epoch. Moreover, Anders's
concept of an overmanned world can be fruitfully linked to the immanent tendency of the law of value to generate
an ever higher organic composition of capital, culminating in the present stage of automation, robotics, computers,
and information technology, on the bases of which ever larger masses of living labor are ejected from the process of
production, and, indeed, from the cycle of accumulation as a whole, ceasing to be -- even potentially -- a productive
force, a source of exchange-value, in order to become an insuperable burden for capital, a dead weight, which, so
long as it lives and breathes, threatens its profitability. This "obsolescence of man" can at the level of total capital
thereby create the necessity for mass murder; inserting the industrial extermination of whole groups of people into
the very logic of capital: genocide as the apotheosis of instrumental reason! Reason transmogrified into the nihilistic
engine of destruction which shapes the late capitalist world.
1AC
Scene Two: The Joke’s On You
Our performance has political significance—we’ll isolate four warrants
First, Interrogating the Spectacle -

Politically focusing on the body is important. By textually endorsing turning humans into
energy we expose and challenge consumption, life and death, and capitalism’s drive to
commodify the body.
Lipschultz 2005 (Ronnie D. Lipschutz; Professor, Department of Politics, University California: Santa Cruz; Director, Politics; PhD
Program Co-director, Center for Global, International and Regional Studies. “‘Soylent Green…is…PEOPLE!’ Labor, Bodies and Capital in the
Global Political Economy”, Conference Proceeding Paper from The International Studies Association, March 5, 2005)
The late economist, Julian Simon, was famous for calling humans “the ultimate resource” (Simon, 1996),
but he was also well-known for arguing that humanity could “never run out of resources.” What Simon
had in mind was quite different from Soylent Green but, as we shall see later, not so removed from his claims
as one might think. The concepts of “human capital” and “human resources” do, however, reflect the
idea that people are money and that, where there is money, there is also the potential for accumulation
and profit. Of course, human bodies have been a “technology of production” for millennia, as both
slave and sex objects, but in those instances it is ownership of forms of work that mediates between
labor and capital. What has never been fully commodified is the very stuff of the body itself (although
the growing trade in organs is changing this). Some economist once noted that the “value” of the body’s
minerals amounted to no more than a few cents while even the Nazis, as frugal as they might have been,
could hardly have made much of a profit from the raw materials left behind by those they killed and burned.
The production system depicted in Soylent Green, however, closes the cycle: in the world of 2022, what
is in greater supply and surplus than human bodies? When the oceans are dying and the farms cannot
produce enough, what better source of protein than the newly-dead? And how else to feed the teeming
billions than by “growing” crops of humans to be systematically harvested, processed, and turned into
edibles from which a few can profit enormously (redolent of the cultivation of “batteries” in The Matrix)?
After all, is not capitalist prosperity dependent on the continual discovery of new market niches and
ways to fill them? That the Soylent Corporation is a state-sanctioned monopoly hardly matters in this case,
for where else can the hungry population turn for food?
1AC
Second, Over-identification –
Our reading of the 1AC is a form of radical affirmation and subversion. It effectively
criticizes and challenges a prevailing ideology without the risk of cooptation.
Rok Vevar in 2007(“The more of us there are, the faster we'll reach our goal!" Originally published as “Ve13 kot nas bo, hitreje bomo na
cilju!” in Ve13er, 1st September 2007, Translated from Slovenian by Denis Debevec, http://www.aksioma.org/sec/vevar.html)-mikee
The theoretical apparatus available in the field of artistic and/or political activism allows us to categorise their
gesture as that kind of subversive affirmation called over-identification; however, we should know that in the case
of the said artists this gesture is, from now on, in a constant process: it will be semiotised in connection with their every new work of art and
public appearance, therefore it is not excluded it will take some turns not known until now. What is subversive affirmation about?
"Subversive affirmation is an artistic/political tactic that allows artists/activists to take part in certain social,
political, or economic discourses and to affirm, appropriate, or consume them while simultaneously
undermining them. It is characterised precisely by the fact that with affirmation there simultaneously
occurs a distancing from, or revelation of, what is being affirmed. In subversive affirmation there is
always a surplus which destabilises affirmation and turns it into its opposite. /.../ Subversive affirmation and over-
identification - as 'tactics of explicit consent' - are forms of critique that through techniques of affirmation,
involvement and identification put the viewer/listener precisely in such a state or situation which s/he
would or will criticise later. What the various tactics and parasitic practices have in common is that they employ the classical
aesthetic methods of: imitation, simulation, mimicry and camouflage in the sense of 'becoming invisible'
by disappearing into the background," can be read in one of the latest issues of Maska magazine, which in fact deals with different
types of subversive affirmation in the history of contemporary arts and political activism.
Third, Parody –
You should endorse the aff as a particular project of deconstruction. Using the same structures and
justifications of traditional debate and neo-liberalism allows us to criticize without fear of cooption.
Phiddian, Lecturer in English at Flinders University of South Australia. He is the author of Swift's Parody, 95
I'd like to go a step further, and assert that parody
is a form of deconstruction. I want to assert this with all the force that metaphor
can muster, with all the tropical force attributed to metaphor in "White Mythology." I'm
not just arguing that parody is like
deconstruction; I'm arguing that they are secretly the same thing. Consider this passage from Of
Grammatology: "The movements of deconstruction do not destroy [sollicitent] structures from the
outside. They are not possible and effective, nor can they take accurate aim, except by inhabiting those structures. Inhabiting
them in a certain way, because one always inhabits, and all the more when one does not suspect it.
Operating necessarily from the inside, borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of subversion
from the old structure, borrowing them structurally, that is to say without being able to isolate their
elements and atoms, the enterprise of deconstruction always in a certain way falls prey to its own work."
20 It is clear that deconstruction, especially as Derrida practices it, nests in the structure of the texts and
ideas it criticizes, as a cuckoo infiltrates and takes over the nests of other birds. It operates from
inside the arguments of metaphysical texts and systems such as structuralism and phenomenology,
showing how they cannot totalize the visions they proclaim, and precisely where they double and
collapse. It is not primary thought, always secondary, always "borrowing all the strategic and economic resources of
subversion from the old structure." And this is precisely what parody does too.
1AC
Fourth, Empirics -
Our project is viable: The Yes Men, a group that opposes global capitalism, similarly
exposed the commodification of the body by posing as representatives from ExxonMobil
and staging a press conference announcing a plan to turn dead bodies into oil.
Yes Men Press Release 07. “EXXON PROPOSES BURNING HUMANITY FOR FUEL IF CLIMATE CALAMITY
HITS”. June 14, 2007. < http://www.website.net.nz/post/exxon-proposes-burning-humans-for-fuel> Accessed 7/24/08.
Imposters posing as ExxonMobil and National Petroleum Council (NPC) representatives delivered an
outrageous keynote speech to 300 oilmen at GO-EXPO, Canada’s largest oil conference, held at Stampede Park in
Calgary, Alberta, today.
The speech was billed beforehand by the GO-EXPO organizers as the major highlight of this year’s
conference, which had 20,000 attendees. In it, the “NPC rep” was expected to deliver the long-awaited conclusions of a study
commissioned by US Energy Secretary Samuel Bodman. The NPC is headed by former ExxonMobil CEO Lee Raymond, who is
also the chair of the study. (See link at end.)
In the actual speech, the “NPC rep” announced that current U.S. and Canadian energy policies (notably the massive,
carbon-intensive exploitation of Alberta’s oil sands, and the development of liquid coal) are increasing the chances of huge global
calamities. But he reassured the audience that in the worst case scenario, the oil industry could “keep fuel flowing”
by transforming the billions of people who die into oil.
“We need something like whales, but infinitely more abundant,” said “NPC rep” “Shepard Wolff” (actually
Andy Bichlbaum of the Yes Men), before describing the technology used to render human flesh into a new
Exxon oil product called Vivoleum. 3-D animations of the process brought it to life.
“Vivoleum works in perfect synergy with the continued expansion of fossil fuel production,” noted “Exxon rep”
“Florian Osenberg” (Yes Man Mike Bonanno). “With more fossil fuels comes a greater chance of disaster, but that
means more feedstock for Vivoleum. Fuel will continue to flow for those of us left.”
The oilmen listened to the lecture with attention, and then lit “commemorative candles” supposedly made of
Vivoleum obtained from the flesh of an “Exxon janitor” who died as a result of cleaning up a toxic spill. The
audience only reacted when the janitor, in a video tribute, announced that he wished to be transformed into
candles after his death, and all became crystal-clear.
At that point, Simon Mellor, Commercial & Business Development Director for the company putting on the event, strode up and
physically forced the Yes Men from the stage. As Mellor escorted Bonanno out the door, a dozen journalists surrounded
Bichlbaum, who, still in character as “Shepard Wolff,” explained to them the rationale for Vivoleum.
“We’ve got to get ready. After all, fossil fuel development like that of my company is increasing the chances of
catastrophic climate change, which could lead to massive calamities, causing migration and conflicts that would
likely disable the pipelines and oil wells. Without oil we could no longer produce or transport food, and most of humanity would
starve. That would be a tragedy, but at least all those bodies could be turned into fuel for the rest of us.”
“We’re not talking about killing anyone,” added the “NPC rep.” “We’re talking about using them after
nature has done the hard work. After all, 150,000 people already die from climate-change related effects every
year. That’s only going to go up - maybe way, way up. Will it all go to waste? That would be cruel.”
***TDP***
Solvency—Global Warming
A shift to TDP would slow global warming, make the oil industry cleaner and more profitable, and keep
carbon still in the ground where it is.
Hart (no date) Hart, Kelly. She and her husband manage a website on building eco-friendly homes. They both have worked in
the construction business. No date. “New Technology Turns Waste into Valuable Components”. Green Home Building. Accessed
7/23/08.
The TDP could make the petroleum industry itself cleaner and more profitable. When you refine petroleum,
you end up with a heavy solid-waste product that is a big problem, but this technology can convert these waste
materials into natural gas, oil, and carbon. The coal industry may become the biggest fossil-fuel beneficiary from the use
of TDP; experiments show that the TDP can pre-treat coal and extract sulfur, mercury, naphtha, and olefins, making the coal burn
hotter and cleaner.
Since the industrial revolution, human beings burning fossil fuels have boosted concentrations of atmospheric carbon more than
30 percent. According to global-warming theory, as carbon in the form of carbon dioxide accumulates in the atmosphere, it traps
solar radiation, which warms the atmosphere. But if there were a global shift to TDP technologies, belowground
carbon would remain there. On the surface, the accoutrements of the civilized world would then become
temporary carbon sinks. At the end of their useful lives, they would be converted in TDP machines into short-chain fuels,
fertilizers, and industrial raw materials, ready for plants or people to convert them back into long chains again. So the only
carbon used would be that which already existed above the surface. This may slow down the accumulation carbon
dioxide [CO2] in the atmosphere, especially if we focus on ways of creating and utilizing energy that doesn't rely on burning
fuels, which is very exciting prospect!
Solvency—Laundry List
TDP will remove the threat of future energy shortages, lower costs, improve productivity, improve global
living standards and raise GDP growth rates—85% energy efficient, self-sufficient, no emissions, and no
shortage of raw materials.
Birger 03 Birger, Jon. Staff writer for CNN Money. “Can This Tiny Energy Company Really Change The World? EMPTY THE
LANDFILLS! TURN OLD TIRES INTO HOT COMMODITIES! ELIMINATE TOXIC WASTE! KEEP A LID ON MAD COW
DISEASE! SAY HASTA LA VISTA TO OPEC! SAVE THE ALASKAN WILDERNESS! BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!” CNN
Money. July 1, 2003. <http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/2003/07/01/344701/index.htm>
Accessed 7/23/2008.
What Appel describes as "the eureka moment" came toward the end of 2001, when Changing World developed a way to vent out
most of the impurities. "The funny thing is, if you separate them from the oil, all those bad actors become good actors that have a
real market value," Appel says. Eventually, Changing World's scientific team--led by Terry Adams, a mechanical engineer who
joined the company following a long career in the paper industry, and Bill Lange, a jack-of-all-trades industrial-design
specialist--were able to produce a low-sulfur light oil that is essentially a gasoline-heating oil blend. Even more impressive, the
process turned out to be 85% energy efficient--in other words, for every 100 BTUs of energy in the waste that's used,
only 15 are used to run the plant. (The Philadelphia test facility is powered entirely by the methane and other gases that are
byproducts of TDP.) News of their accomplishment has been met with skepticism. "They haven't published anything that can
be verified," says Stefan Czernik, a researcher at the National Renewable Energy Lab in Colorado. "Frankly, I doubt it can be as
economical as the company claims." One of the few independent scientists who has studied TDP is Jeff Tester, a chemical
engineering professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Tester visited the Philadelphia plant last year and came away
impressed. "The evidence I saw was very reasonable," says Tester, director of the MIT Energy Lab. "What's so nice about it
is you really don't have any gaseous emissions--you don't produce the dioxins which result from incineration."
The big question in Tester's mind isn't whether the technology works, but how much oil it can produce. "The chemistry is there,
but there is a very large scale-up from the pilot plant stage to what they ultimately hope to accomplish," he says.
GROWING PAINS Whether TDP turns out to be a niche technology or an actual solution to two of the world's greatest problems
hinges almost entirely on its scalability. The first commercial TDP plant in Carthage will produce 600 barrels of oil daily, which
barely qualifies as a drop in the bucket. Every day the U.S. imports some 12 million barrels of oil.
P.J. Samson, president of the Conagra-Changing World joint venture that owns global TDP rights for
slaughterhouse and agricultural waste, says future plants will likely handle 10 times the volume of the Carthage
facility. There's no shortage of potential raw materials, he says, especially now that concerns about Mad Cow disease
have so many countries considering bans on animal feed made from rendered animal parts. Even so, Changing World and its
licensees would probably need to build a thousand TDP plants to replace the amount of oil we now import. Appel is under no
illusions about how long it would take to end the country's dependency on imported oil. "That's 25 to 30 years away," he says.
"What I tell everyone is that we're going to put up dozens over the next five years, then hundreds, then thousands. But you've got
to start with one plant." The good news for his investors is that the company won't need to build a thousand plants to make
money. Changing World's internal financials project approximately $10 million in annual after-tax income from a large TDP plant
producing 1,800 barrels a day. Of course, those are just projections. If cheap Iraqi oil were to flood the world market, Changing
World's business plan would become more challenging. Then there's the issue of acquiring the raw materials for TDP. While
there's certainly no shortage of old tires, agricultural waste and other garbage in this country, that junk is not all centrally located.
"There are more logistical challenges than meet the eye," cautions J.P. Morgan's Wolfe. THINK BIG Even so, after spending a
couple of days with Appel and his team, I can't help but feel more optimistic. A child of the 1970s energy crisis, I remember all
those warnings about how we'd run out of oil within 30 years. As wrong as those predictions turned out to be, oil remains a finite
resource. "Right now there's an oil glut, but that will change as countries like China and India further develop their economies,"
says Milton Ezrati, senior economist at Lord Abbett funds. "If [TDP] really were a reliable and renewable source of
oil, it would go a long way toward removing the threat" of future energy shortages. "It would," adds Comerica's
Littman, "lower industrial costs, improve productivity, improve global living standards and probably raise real
GDP growth rates globally by a full percentage point."
Solvency—Dead Bodies
TDP could easily turn a dead body into pounds of black gold.
Ruppert 06. Ruppert, Michael. staff writer for From The Wilderness. “Woolseys in Sheep’s Clothing”. From The Wilderness
Publications. 3/7/06. < http://www.fromthewilderness.com/free/ww3/030706_woolseys_sheep.shtml> Accessed 7/23/08.
James Woolsey is also a big fan of a process called thermal depolymerization. We have written about thermal
depolymerization in FTW and in Crossing the Rubicon. In that process, anything from scrap plastic to human beings
(alive or dead) can be thrown into one end of a machine (using an unspecified amount of electrical and chemical inputs)
and out the other end comes high-grade oil.
Great… Soylent Oil. Here’s a quote from a 2003 Discover Magazine article on thermal depolymerization:
“Unlike other solid-to-liquid-fuel processes such as cornstarch into ethanol, this one will accept almost
any carbon-based feedstock. If a 175-pound man fell into one end, he would come out the other end as 38
pounds of oil, 7 pounds of gas, and 7 pounds of minerals, as well as 123 pounds of sterilized water.”[iii] Thermal
depolymerization just scares the bejeesus out of me. I am not the first and I won’t be the last to think of the dying-off of human
population that is coming with Peak Oil and wonder how well the elites have planned to make money on the way up and the way
down. I can hear someone thinking now: “Let’s see. If we can average 30 pounds of oil out of each person, and suppose we kill
two billion due to starvation, disease, etc., and let’s say we have a major epidemic of Bird Flu and declare an emergency where
all the bodies require special treatment, we could get the bodies, make the oil, and tell the world that this new oil came from new
discoveries or our great technological advances. We’d have it made!”
Solvency—Efficiency
TDP is safe and effective—and it will turn quite a profit too.
Lemley 03(Brad, May 1st, “Anything into Oil”, Discover Magazine)
. So far, says Adams, "nothing hazardous comes out from any feedstock we try."
"The only thing this process can't handle is nuclear waste," Appel says. "If it contains carbon, we can do
it." This Philadelphia pilot plant can handle only seven tons of waste a day, but 1,054 miles to the west, in
Carthage, Missouri, about 100 yards from one of ConAgra Foods' massive Butterball Turkey plants, sits
the company's first commercial-scale thermal depolymerization plant. The $20 million facility, scheduled to go online
any day, is expected to digest more than 200 tons of turkey-processing waste every 24 hours. The north side of Carthage smells like Thanksgiving
all the time. At the Butterball plant, workers slaughter, pluck, parcook, and package 30,000 turkeys each workday, filling the air with the
distinctive tang of boiling bird. A factory tour reveals the grisly realities of large-scale poultry processing. Inside, an endless chain of hanging
carcasses clanks past knife-wielding laborers who slash away. Outside, a tanker truck idles, full to the top with fresh turkey blood. For many
years, ConAgra Foods has trucked the plant's waste—feathers, organs, and other nonusable parts—to a rendering facility where it was ground and
dried to make animal feed, fertilizer, and other chemical products. But bovine spongiform encephalopathy, also known as mad cow disease, can
spread among cattle from recycled feed, and although no similar disease has been found in poultry, regulators are becoming skittish about feeding
animals to animals. In Europe the practice is illegal for all livestock. Since 1997, the United States has prohibited the feeding of most recycled
animal waste to cattle. Ultimately, the specter of European-style mad-cow regulations may kick-start the acceptance of thermal depolymerization.
"In Europe, there are mountains of bones piling up," says Alf Andreassen. "When recycling waste into feed stops in this country, it will change
everything."
Because depolymerization takes apart materials at the molecular level, Appel says, it is "the perfect process
for destroying pathogens." On a wet afternoon in Carthage, he smiles at the new plant—an artless assemblage of
gray and dun-colored buildings—as if it were his favorite child. "This plant will make 10 tons of gas per day,
which will go back into the system to make heat to power the system," he says. "It will make 21,000 gallons of
water, which will be clean enough to discharge into a municipal sewage system. Pathological vectors will be
completely gone. It will make 11 tons of minerals and 600 barrels of oil, high-quality stuff, the same specs as a
number two heating oil." He shakes his head almost as if he can't believe it. "It's amazing. The Environmental
Protection Agency doesn't even consider us waste handlers. We are actually manufacturers—that's what our permit
says. This process changes the whole industrial equation. Waste goes from a cost to a profit."
He watches as burly men in coveralls weld and grind the complex loops of piping. A group of 15 investors and
corporate advisers, including Howard Buffett, son of billionaire investor Warren Buffett, stroll among the sparks and
hissing torches, listening to a tour led by plant manager Don Sanders. A veteran of the refinery business, Sanders
emphasizes that once the pressurized water is flashed off, "the process is similar to oil refining. The equipment, the
procedures, the safety factors, the maintenance—it's all proven technology."
And it will be profitable, promises Appel. "We've done so much testing in Philadelphia, we already know the
costs," he says. "This is our first-out plant, and we estimate we'll make oil at $15 a barrel. In three to five
years, we'll drop that to $10, the same as a medium-size oil exploration and production company. And it will
get cheaper from there."
Solvency—Efficiency
TDP works, ongoing tests prove the process’ efficiency
Lemley 03 (Brad, May 1st, “Anything into Oil”, Discover Magazine)
Thermal depolymerization machines turbocharge the process by precisely raising heat and pressure to levels
that break the feedstock's long molecular bonds.
Many scientists have tried to convert organic solids to liquid fuel using waste products before, but their efforts
have been notoriously inefficient. "The problem with most of these methods was that they tried to do the
transformation in one step—superheat the material to drive off the water and simultaneously break down the
molecules," says Appel. That leads to profligate energy use and makes it possible for hazardous substances to
pollute the finished product. Very wet waste—and much of the world's waste is wet—is particularly difficult to
process efficiently because driving off the water requires so much energy. Usually, the Btu content in the resulting
oil or gas barely exceeds the amount needed to make the stuff.
That's the challenge that Baskis, a microbiologist and inventor who lives in Rantoul, Illinois, confronted in the
late 1980s. He says he "had a flash" of insight about how to improve the basic ideas behind another inventor's waste-
reforming process. "The prototype I saw produced a heavy, burned oil," recalls Baskis. "I drew up an improvement
and filed the first patents." He spent the early 1990s wooing investors and, in 1996, met Appel, a former
commodities trader. "I saw what this could be and took over the patents," says Appel, who formed a partnership with
the Gas Technology Institute and had a demonstration plant up and running by 1999.
Thermal depolymerization, Appel says, has proved to be 85 percent energy efficient for complex feedstocks,
such as turkey offal: "That means for every 100 Btus in the feedstock, we use only 15 Btus to run the process." He
contends the efficiency is even better for relatively dry raw materials, such as plastics.
Solvency – Environment
TDP solves environment
The population increase in the United States will continue to prove problematic with regards to oil consumption and
waste disposal. Over seven billion tons of organic waste is produced every year and could be used to make oil using
the thermal conversion process. The process converts organic material to an equivalent of #4 diesel fuel. A
commercial production facility has been built in Carthage, Missouri and processes 200 tons of turkey offal a day
with a conversion rate of approximately 2.5 barrels of oil per ton of waste. This process also turns the bone from
these carcasses into a paste and separates it from the oil; this fuel is sold as heating oil for boilers and the bone paste
is sold as a high grade fertilizer. Tests were conducted on various forms of plastics (also called shredder residue)
from the automotive industry and proved this feedstock would also be an excellent source for the thermal conversion
process.
Producing a renewable and clean fuel from waste will have a positive affect on the environment. The air emissions
of thermal conversion fuel is comparable to those fuels refined from crude oil; although there are emissions from
processing, emission of concern at the Carthage facility is odor and CWT has fixed that problem by covering offal
that is waiting for processing. The products produced at the Carthage facility are oil, fertilizer, and excess water; the
water is released into the local sewer system. Processing shedder residue produce hazardous materials, but these
materials can be recycled and other hazardous compounds were neutralized in the thermal conversion process. The
production of oil at the Carthage facility kills pathogens and prevents the growth of bacteria during the process and
storage of the oil which makes this a viable option for medical waste disposal as well. The oil from the thermal
conversion process can also be accepted by the oil refining industry for further processing into other fuels, making
this a valuable source of renewable fuel.
Solvency - Incentives
Incentives empirically solve
Lemley 03(Brad, May 1st, “Anything into Oil”, Discover Magazine)
"The longest carbon chains are C-18 or so," says Appel, admiring the liquid. "That's a very light oil. It is essentially
the same as a mix of half fuel oil, half gasoline."
Private investors, who have chipped in $40 million to develop the process, aren't the only ones who are
impressed. The federal government has granted more than $12 million to push the work along. "We will be
able to make oil for $8 to $12 a barrel," says Paul Baskis, the inventor of the process. "We are going to be able
to switch to a carbohydrate economy." Making oil and gas from hydrocarbon-based waste is a trick that Earth
mastered long ago. Most crude oil comes from one-celled plants and animals that die, settle to ocean floors,
decompose, and are mashed by sliding tectonic plates, a process geologists call subduction. Under pressure and heat,
the dead creatures' long chains of hydrogen, oxygen, and carbon-bearing molecules, known as polymers, decompose
into short-chain petroleum hydrocarbons. However, Earth takes its own sweet time doing this—generally thousands
or millions of years—because subterranean heat and pressure changes are chaotic.
Solvency – Oil
TDP solves Oil shortage, waste disposal, and landfills
Changing World Technologies has developed a thermal conversion process that can transform waste to fuel. This
technology would be a feasible alternative to sending municipal waste, bio-waste, and other organic wastes to a
landfill as well as offer a source of fuel to aid in relieving our dependency on foreign oil.
The waste-to-oil numbers clearly indicate that the amount of waste we could convert to oil every year could not only
eliminate our need for foreign oil, but would reduce or eliminate waste disposal in the United States. The science
behind the process is valid and the commercial production of renewable oil has been a success for CWT. The
process works for any organic material and would be an excellent technology to add to an existing municipal solid
waste management system. The concerns of heavy metals and chemical by-products of the waste have been proven
to be of no concern in the shredder residue and animal offal conversion, but further study would be required for
other forms of waste.
Environmentally speaking, this process would convert some of the waste streams into a usable product and eliminate
or neutralize other toxins and pathogens. Landfills could be reduced in number and size or eliminated completely
with the development of a waste management system that incorporates all four components of the EPA’s
recommendation for waste management and a fifth component of waste to fuel.
Using CWT oil for manufacturing of other fuels will significantly decrease, if not completely eliminate, the
need to import foreign oil; at least in the immediate future. Oil demands will increase with the population increase,
but so will waste disposal needs. With further increases in fuel saving technologies, we could continue oil
production from waste that will meet our needs for many years.
Solvency—Oil
TDP would end our dependence on foreign oil and turn hazardous waste into $10 a barrel oil—can convert
everything from slaughterous refuse to old computers to hazardous chemicals into gas.
Birger 03 Birger, Jon. Staff writer for CNN Money. “Can This Tiny Energy Company Really Change The World? EMPTY THE
LANDFILLS! TURN OLD TIRES INTO HOT COMMODITIES! ELIMINATE TOXIC WASTE! KEEP A LID ON MAD COW
DISEASE! SAY HASTA LA VISTA TO OPEC! SAVE THE ALASKAN WILDERNESS! BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!” CNN
Money. July 1, 2003. <http://money.cnn.com/magazines/moneymag/moneymag_archive/2003/07/01/344701/index.htm>
Accessed 7/23/2008.
I'd been sent a link to a Discover magazine story about a groundbreaking waste-to-oil technology called thermal
depolymerization, or TDP for short. The 30-person company behind it, aptly named Changing World Technologies, said TDP
could produce high-quality oil from almost any carbon-based waste product--discarded computers, infectious
medical waste, mixed plastics, sewage, slaughterhouse refuse, tires and even chemical waste containing
benzene, PCBs and other carcinogens. (Changing World believes TDP can render harmless any nonnuclear
waste.) What's more, the technology was already economically viable. Changing World's first commercial plant will
soon produce a heating oil-gasoline blend at a cost of $10 to $15 a barrel--about 50% below wholesale prices.
Changing World thinks production costs could eventually fall to $6 to $8 a barrel.
Needless to say, the implications seemed astounding. If TDP was everything Changing World said it was--a big if, to be sure--it
had the potential to end our dependence on foreign oil while simultaneously cleaning up the environment.
"We'll be able to switch to a carbohydrate economy," TDP inventor Paul Baskis would later tell me. No more cozying up to
Mideast dictators, no more hand-wringing over labor disputes in the Venezuelan oil fields, no more wild
fluctuations in oil prices and no more thorny NIMBY disputes about what to do with trash and hazardous
waste. Comerica Bank chief economist Dave Littman raised an even bolder possibility--no more OPEC.
Solvency—Oil
Biomass will always be useful, and will cushion peak oil impacts dramatically
Bento 08. Bento, Martin. Contributor to Peak Oil News. “Does Thermal Depolymerization Solve the Problem of Peak Oil?”
Peak Oil News and Message Boards. March 09, 2008.< http://www.peakoil.com/article21.html> Accessed 7/23/08.
But that is not the whole story either. Although biomass is commercially produced largely with fossil fuels, this need not be so
and is not so in nature. It is debatable whether alternative approaches can ever equal the productivity of fossil fuel approaches,
but they certainly do not have a productivity of zero, and they certainly do produce polymer waste products. Also, humans and
animals will always produce manure. So long as there are plants and animals on the Earth, there will be
biomass whose polymers can potentially be harvested for energy. After all, eating itself is largely a way to
harvest energy from other biomass, and eating is a sustainable project in the ecosystem (though not, perhaps, for a
human population of its current size). Viewed this way, depolymerization can be a sustainable source of energy and,
indeed, of "oil". In the shorter term, of course, it will be a pleasure to deplete the backlog of synthetic polymers
we have created.
For example, if we reform our behavior so as to improve the health of our oceans, there may well be a sustainable level of
harvesting of micro-algae (technically cyanobacteria) for energy. Micro-algae is probably responsible for the majority of the
world's photosynthesis. Depolymerization could enable us to capture this some of this energy in a sustainable way (attention
Changing World: I expect a ten percent royalty on this idea!). This doesn't necessarily mean that we will be able to continue
consuming energy at current first-world levels. For the next few decades at least, we must tame our energy consumption. But
current levels are very wasteful and dangerously polluting in any case, and more efficiency would be a good thing. By
cushioning the fall and promising an eventual sustainable supply of oil, depolymerization can indeed
contribute significantly to the vital task to saving civilization. Though no cause for complacency, it is indeed
some cause for hope.
Solvency – AT: Doesn’t Work

TDP works, it’s a simple scientific process of breaking down hydrocarbons.
We get our fuels and many other products from crude oil. Crude oil is a combination of
hundreds of different types of hydrocarbon chains that are useless unless you separate them. The
refining process is fairly simple and hydrocarbons can be separated by heating the crude. Each
type of hydrocarbon has a specific boiling point so the crude is heated and the carbon chains are
distilled into separate useful products. The length of these chains will define the type of product
that is made; see Table 2 for the types of products and the associated carbon chain length. The
thermal conversion process takes the long carbon chains in the plastics, waxes, heavy oils, etc.
and converts them to smaller chains or fuels (How Stuff Works, 2007). CWT (and the automotive
industry) has approached refineries with the idea of adding their fuel to the refining process to
yield other products such as gasoline and was told they would be able to do this without many
issues.(Appel, 2006) The process of converting this fuel into other products would be fairly
simple. The refineries will be able to put the thermal conversion fuel into their distillation
process and crack (break down) the longer chains of hydrocarbons into shorter ones to make
fuels such as gasoline. The refining process only converts about 40% of the crude oil to
gasoline, but by using a chemical processes to combine hydrocarbons (unification or catalytic
reforming) or alter (a process called alkylation) them will produce more transportation fuels;
therefore, the thermal conversion fuel could also be used for these processes. (How Stuff Works,
2007) The thermal conversion fuel is not as heavy as the crude oil and should be fairly easy to
convert to gasoline and other fuels with the normal refining processes.
A2: Spending
TDP saves money and is cost-efficient in the short term.
There are other factors that should be considered when using this thermal conversion technology:
what by-products will result in the process and will their disposal be problematic? Animal waste
sent through this process produces a product that can be useful to the agricultural community and
other by-products that are released into existing waste water facilities, treated, and released back
into the environment without significant environmental impacts. It is possible that sludge from
these facilities can be sent back through the thermal conversion process and produce more oil.
This would not be the single answer to waste management, but should be integrated into existing
waste management plans. Municipalities currently sell recycled materials and recycling markets
are growing as newer technologies are introduced that use recycled material. Municipalities can
also use the waste-to-fuel concept and sell the oil for heating fuel or sell it to refineries for
processing into other fuels. Should a usable by-product be produced from this process, it can be
sold as well. The cost of building facilities should pay for itself in a few years.
***K Advantage***
Energy Policy Link
Current governmental policy approaches towards energy redefine ecology in terms of a

capitalist economy, resulting in global warming and a loss of biodiversity.
Byme et al ’01 (Bulletin of Science, Technology & Society Bulletin of Science Technology Society 2001; 21;
443 John Byrne, Leigh Glover, Gerard Alleng, Vernese Inniss, Yu-Mi Mun and Young-Doo Wang Politics “The
Postmodern Greenhouse: Creating Virtual Carbon Reductions From Business-as-Usual Energy”
http://bst.sagepub.com/cgi/conte nt/abstract/21/6/443)
Considered together, the flexibility mechanisms of the Kyoto Protocol rewrite the principle of ecology. A material
understanding of nature and its interconnectedness is being replaced by a virtualist ecology inwhich human
manipulation of modeled nature through accounting schemes, simulations, and the practice of neoclassical
economics is presumed to accurately represent actual ecological conditions. In terms of measurable material impact,
none of the flexibility mechanisms appears likely to reduce actual GHG emissions. Emissions trading is likely to
stimulate purchases of increases in GHG releases in Russia, the Ukraine, and other nations (compared to present
levels) as though they were reductions. In this way, trading postpones real domestic actions by Annex I trading
partners. The CDM will encourage developing nations to inflate forecasts of their future GHG releases and then
auction future emissions that have not occurred as substitutes for reductions in present-tense releases by Annex I
countries. And, carbon sequestration promises to count carbon already stored as a deduction against anthropocentric
emissions or, worse, to encourage revisionist ecology in which carbon stores are destroyed to make way for humanly
designed “high efficiency” ones. All three promise only to make money for participating parties, not assist efforts to
avert climate change. In this respect, international negotiations on climate change appear to have postmodernized
ecology, infusing the material with a virtual representation in ways that make it difficult to detect which is which.
Except, of course, the actual processes of surface warming, sea level rise, loss of biodiversity, and island triage will
not be fooled by postmodern ecology. Only the social domain of the society-nature relation can be deceived. Still,
we seem haughtily ready to indulge in postmodern fallacy with the same arrogance as the economist, who on being
informed that continued pursuit of optimality might bring human life to an end is reported to have responded, “So
what?” (Gare, 1995, p. 12). Of course, the compromise of ecology for economic gain is not new. What distinguishes
climate change negotiations is the attempt to capture global ecology within a globalist regime of economic relations.
Although agriculture, urbanization, and industrialization have, at ever-increasing scales, reorganized specific
environments to serve economic interests (see Foster, 1994, and Crosby, 1988), the geography of impact could be
spatially delimited. Even as these forces globalized, ecological disruption was spatially and biologically distinct.
This is largely because economic interest in nature was concentrated on its resource dimension, as economic actions
in nature sought to exploit specific plants, animals, ores, nutrients, energy forms, and so forth. The locations of these
resources were specific, and the economic interest in mining nature for its commodity value was likewise specific.
But, as Escobar (1996) and others have noted, economic interest has transformed recently with regard to nature.
Increasingly, nature’s processes and structures command economic interest, shifting attention away from exclusively
commodification-focused activity to ones intending to capitalize, for example, the biology, geology, chemistry, and
climatology of the natural order. Climate change negotiations are an archetype of this shifted focus.
Energy Policy Link
The current US approach towards environmental and energy issues necessitates perpetual
energy wars.
Klare 2001 (Michael T. Klare, professor of peace and world security studies at Hampshire College; Nation defense
correspondent, The Nation, “Energy Imperialism”, July 12, 2001 < http://www.thenation.com/doc/2001072
3/klare>)
Even more worrisome are the implications of increased US dependence on the oil supplies of the Persian
Gulf. As the report notes, the Gulf is the only area with sufficient petroleum reserves to satisfy expanding
American demand over the long term. Given the instabilities in the region, a permanent US military
presence there will be necessary, along with intervention in local conflicts. The basic thrust of the Bush
energy policy is clear: To acquire an ever-enlarging supply of imported oil, Washington will have to step up
its meddling in the internal affairs of numerous countries around the world, many of which are deeply
divided along political, ethnic and religious lines. The accompanying risk of involvement in foreign wars
will grow proportionally. Opposition has already been voiced to oil drilling in the Arctic National Wildlife
Refuge and to the construction of new nuclear power plants. Now it must be joined by vociferous protest
against White House plans to funnel more and more of the world's oil to the United States, which will only
lead to increased anti-Americanism overseas and endless energy wars.
The current US policy of searching for “quick fixes” to energy issues will fail, leaving
energy shortages to destroy a laundry list of socioeconomic systems.
King 2008(Byron King, writer, The Daily Reckoning “US energy policy driving the economy – into a brick wall?”
September 4, 2008; honors graduate of Harvard University, advanced degrees from the University of Pittsburg and
the U.S. Naval War College)
Energy policy – and getting it right – is a long-running theme in my writing. And if the US does not get
energy right, nothing else really matters all that much. Bad US energy policy will take down everything.
You name it. Pick your favorite issue: the economy, health care, Social Security, education, immigration or
the environment, without assured supplies of good-quality energy – which will not come cheap or fast – all
of these problems will just get much worse.
Energy Policy Link
The US is an international laughing stock when it comes to energy policy. Current

governmental approaches to energy issues amount to little more than self-absorbed,
corrupt stalling. If current trends continue, action will come only when it is too late.
King 2008(Byron King, writer, The Daily Reckoning “US energy policy driving the economy – into a brick wall?”
September 4, 2008; honors graduate of Harvard University, advanced degrees from the University of Pittsburg and
the U.S. Naval War College)
When it comes to energy policy, the US is a world-class laughing stock So what have I been seeing lately?
Well, the screens have been hopping. Prices for just about every commodity have been gyrating. And I
don't need to comment too much on the general stock market. Days of deep losses are followed by some
days of spectacular gains. Every day, I open the newspapers or fire up the screen and wonder what new
monetary disaster is going to surface. Will the Fed lower rates some more? Yes, indeed. That's what this
world needs – more cheap money (just kidding). The rest of the world is watching the US. People in world
capitals are asking, “Is the US serious about its energy issues? Or is the US just wasting time? Are its
people just collectively flattering themselves with their sense of exceptionalism?” The US is a world-class
laughing stock when it comes to its national energy policy. Maybe when oil prices get to $250 per barrel,
the US Congress will finally allow those evil oil companies to park some rigs offshore and drill that oil. But
don't hold your breath. If the US started an offshore leasing and drilling program tomorrow morning, it
might take 10 years for the first barrel of oil to make landfall. That would be... um... Easter 2018. I know I
can't wait.
US policymakers, corrupted by politics, fail to address the issue of an acceptable energy

policy, refusing to fund sustainable solutions in favor of more popular short-term fixes.
Moon 2008(George Moon, writer, The Tampa Tribune, “U.S. Energy Policy Needs a Zap”, June 22, 2008, <
http://www2 .tbo .com/content/2008/jun/22/bz-us-energy-policy-needs-a-zap/>
Peter Drucker said, "There is nothing so useless as doing efficiently that which should not be done at all."
Politicians on both sides of the aisle make claims for the need of a United States energy policy. Yet, all they
have given us is a slightly raised fuel economy standard for automobiles and a nebulous list of items, some
ridiculous and other unattainable. They include subsidies for ethanol, coal, landfills and nuclear industries.
All of which have dire aspects and are couched around our supposed "addiction to foreign oil." The
government has pledged billions of dollars in tax exemptions, research grants and loan guarantees for
seeking the "Holy Grail" and our emancipation. Many of the plans enrich select industries and would harm
mainstream Americans.
Energy Policy Link
The Bush administration has centered American energy policy around unsustainable, dead-
end quasai-solutions, kowtowing in almost every instance to the influences of lobbyists.
Stiglitz 2006 (Joseph E. Stiglitz is professor of economics at Columbia University, recipient of the 2001 Nobel
Prize in economics; “Bush’s Bad-Faith Energy Policy”, Project Syndicate, copyright 2006)
Similarly, these experts concede that the fact that the United States has not signed the Law of the Sea, the
international convention determining who has access to offshore oil and other maritime mineral rights,
presents a risk of international conflict. But they also point to the upside: the oil industry, in its never-
ending search for more reserves, need not beg Congress for the right to despoil Alaska. President George
W. Bush has an uncanny ability not to see the big message. For years, it has become increasingly clear that
much is amiss with his energy policy. Scripted by the oil industry, even members of his own party referred
to an earlier energy bill as one that “left no lobbyist behind.” While praising the virtues of the free market,
Bush has been only too willing to give huge handouts to the energy industry, even as the country faces
soaring deficits. There is a market failure when it comes to energy, but government intervention should run
in precisely the opposite direction from what the Bush administration has proposed. The fact that
Americans do not pay the full price for the pollution – especially enormous contributions to greenhouse
gases – that results from their profligate energy use means that energy is under-priced, in turn sustaining
excessive consumption. The government needs to encourage conservation, and intervening in the price
system – namely, through taxes on energy – is an efficient way to do it. But, rather than encouraging
conservation, Bush has pursued a policy of “drain America first,” leaving America more dependent on
external oil in the future. Never mind that high demand drives up oil prices, creating a windfall for many in
the Middle East who are not among America’s friends. Now, more than four years after the terrorist attacks
of September 2001, Bush appears to have finally woken up to the reality of America’s increasing
dependence; with soaring oil prices, it was hard for him not to note the consequences. But, again, his
administration’s faltering moves will almost surely make matters worse in the immediate future. Bush still
refuses to do anything about conservation, and he has put very little money behind his continuing prayer
than technology will save us. What, then, to make of Bush’s recent declaration of a commitment to make
America 75% free of dependence on Middle East oil within 25 years. For investors, the message is clear:
do not invest more in developing reserves in the Middle East, which is by far the lowest-cost source of oil
in the world. But, without new investment in developing Middle East reserves, unbridled growth of energy
consumption in the US, China, and elsewhere implies that demand will outpace supply. If that were not
enough, Bush’s threat of sanctions against Iran poses the risks of interruptions of supplies from one of the
world’s largest producers. With world oil production close to full capacity and prices already more than
double their pre-Iraq War level, this portends still higher prices, and still higher profits for the oil industry –
the only clear winner in Bush’s Middle East policy. To be sure, one shouldn’t begrudge Bush for having at
last recognized that there is a problem. But, as always, a closer look at what he is proposing suggests
another sleight of hand by his administration. Aside from refusing to recognize the importance of global
warming, encourage conservation, or devote enough funds to research to make a real difference, Bush’s
grandiose promise of a reduction of dependence on Middle East oil means less than it appears. With only
20% of US oil coming from the Middle East, his goal could be achieved by a modest shift of sourcing
elsewhere. But surely, one would think, the Bush administration must realize that oil trades on a global
market. Even if America were 100% independent of Middle East oil, a reduction in supply of Middle East
oil could have devastating effects on the world price – and on the American economy. As is too often the
case with the Bush administration, there is no flattering explanation of official policy. Is Bush playing
politics by pandering to anti-Arab and anti-Iranian sentiment in America? Or is this just another example of
incompetence and muddle? From what we have seen over the past five years, the correct answer probably
contains more than a little bad faith and sheer ineptitude.
Environmental Management Link
The message of preserving the Earth and changing our assumptions about consumerism have
been coopted by “sustainable development” and rational, “scientific” policies—manifestations of
capitalism and state power.
Luke 97. Timothy W. Luke, Department of Political Science, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University. “The
(Un)Wise (Ab)Use of Nature: Environmentalism as Globalized Consumerism?” March 18-22, 1997. International Studies
Association. <http://www.cddc.vt.edu/tim/tims/Tim528.PDF> Accessed 7/28/08.
Gore's program for earth stewardship takes a unique geoeconomic turn when he calls for a Global
Marshall Plan to embed sustainable development at the heart of his green geo-politics. In that historic post-
WWII program, as Gore notes, several nations joined together "to reorganize an entire region of the world and change its way of
life."16 Like the Marshall Plan, his new Global Marshall Plan would "focus on strategic goals and emphasize actions and
programs that are likely to remove the bottlenecks presently inhibiting the healthy functioning of the global economy...to serve
human needs and promote sustained economic progress."17 In other words, the green geo-politics of this Global Marshall Plan
provides a justification for advancing Strategic Environmental Initiatives. That is, the U.S. should be "embarking on an all-out
effort to use every policy and program, every law and institution, every treaty and alliance, every tactic and strategy, every plan
and course of action--to use, in short, every means to halt the destruction of the environment and to preserve and nurture our
ecological system."18 At the end of the Cold War, we cannot simply show interventionist state bureaucracies to the door nor can
we allow them to remobilize society around dangerous geo-economic programs of mindless material development. On the
contrary, we must bring the state back in to manage production and consumption by being mindful of "the e-factor," or "ecology"
as efficiency and economy. The ecological sustainability of consumption is remolded here into an economic
growth ideology. Sustaining Nature by preserving consumption from it ecosystems in this green
geopolitics becomes now one essential goal among many in his Strategic Environmental Initiative, which
will focus on "the development of environmentally appropriate technologies."20 Unsustainable
development is largely caused, Gore suggests, by older, inappropriate, anti-environmental technologies. A
global campaign is needed to find substitutes for them, and the United States must lead this mobilization t
o heal its economy and, of course, the environment. Gore says the right things about changing our
economic assumptions about mindless consumerism, but his bottom line for sustainable development is
found in sustaining American business, industry and science through more mindful forms of consumption.
As the world's leading capitalist economy, Gore concludes "the United States has a special obligation to discover effective ways of using the
power of market forces to help save the global environment."21 In the final analysis, ecologically sustainable development, as
Makower observes, boils down to another expression economic rationality. It is "a search for the lowest-cost method
of reducing the greatest amount of pollution" in the continued turnover of consumer-centered production
processes.22 Almost magically, sustainable development can become primarily an economic, and not merely an
environmental, calculation. The initiatives taken by some businesses to prevent pollution, reduce waste, and maximize energy
efficiencies are to be supported. Ecology can win, but only if it can reaffirm on a higher, more perfect register most of fast capitalism's
existing premises of technology utilization, managerial centralization, and profit generation now driving
advanced corporate capitalism. These maneuvers are not taken simply to preserve Nature, mollify green
consumers, or respect Mother Earth; they are done to enhance corporate profits, national productivity, and state
power, because "the e-factor" is not simply ecology--it also is efficiency, excellence, education, empowerment, enforcement, and economics.
As long as realizing ecological changes in business means implementing an alternative array of
instrumentally rational policies, such as finding lower-cost methods of energy use, supply management, labor
utilization, corporate communication, product generation or pollution abatement, sustainable development also will maintain the
economy. Gore's new stewardship through sustainable development may not be strictly ecological, but his green geopolitics cultivates the
image, at least, of being environmentally responsible.23 This compromise allows one to work "deliberately and carefully, with an aim toward
long-term cultural change, always with an eye toward the bottom line, lest you get frustrated and discouraged in the process" so that these
"environmentally responsible businesses can be both possible and profitable.
Environmental policy designed with stopping pollution or global warming as visible objectives
are really part of the global commodification of nature, subjecting it to human disciplinary
designs.
Under this terraforming horizon, what seems little more than an a pious aside in Agenda 21, in fact, reveals a great deal more. When this
document would have us recognize "the integral and interdependent Nature of the Earth," it emphasizes how the Earth is "our home."31
Terraforming, then, is a form of globalized "home building," whose processes and progress should be monitored from two sets of now
commonly-denominated books: the registers of oikonomia as well as the ledgers of oikologos. The infrastructuralization of the
Earth reimagines it as a rational responsive household in which economically action commodifies
everything, utilizes anything, wastes nothing, blending the natural and the social into a single but vast set
of household accounts whose performativities must constantly weigh consumption against production at
every level of analysis from suburbia to the stratosphere in balancing the terrestrial budgets of ecological modernization. The
infrastructuralization of Nature through environmentalizing movements and discourses propels contemporary societies and economies beyond the
autogenic giveness of Nature into terraformative anthropogenesis, dissolving the formal boundaries between inside/outside, Nature/Culture, or
earth/economy. As Baudrillard observes, "it implies practical computation and conceptualization on the basis of a total abstraction, the notion of a
world no longer given but instead produced--mastered, manipulated, inventoried, controlled: a world, in short, that has to be constructed."32 The
workings of "the environment" as a concept now bring many contemporary terraforming efforts to rescue the Earth's ecology back to the sources
of its original meanings. To note this ironic conjunction does not uncover some timeless semantic essence; it merely reaccentuates aspects in the
term's origins that accompany it from its beginnings into the present. As a word, environment is brought into English from Old French, and in
both languages "an environment" is a state of being produced by the verb "environ." And, environing as a verb marks a type of strategic action, or
activities associated with encircling, enclosing, encompassing or enveloping. Environing, then, is the physical activity of surrounding,
circumscribing, or ringing around something or someone. Its first uses denote stationing guards, thronging with hostile intent, or standing watch
over a place or person. To environ a site or a subject is to beset, beleaguer or besiege. Consequently, an environment--either as the means of these
activities or the product of such actions-- should be treated in a far more liberal fashion. An environmental act, even though the
connotations of most contemporary greenspeak suggests otherwise, is a disciplinary move.33
Environmentalism in these terms strategically polices space in order to encircle sites and subjects
captured within these enveloping maneuvers, guarding them, standing watch over them, or even besieging
them. And, each of these actions aptly express the terraforming programs of sustainable development. Seen
from the astropanopticon, Earth is enveloped in the managerial designs of global commerce, which
environmentalize once wild Nature as now controllable ecosystems. Terraforming the wild biophysical excesses and
unoptimized geophysical wastes of the Earth necessitates the mobilization of a worldwatch to maintain nature conservancies and husband the
worldwide funds of wildlife. Of course, Earth must be put first; the fully rational potentials of second nature's terraformations can be neither
fabricated nor administered unless and until earth first is infrastructuralized.34 This is our time's Copernican revolution: the anthropogenic
demands of terraforming require a biocentric worldview in which the alienated objectivity of natural subjectivity resurfaces objectively in
managerial theory and practice as "ecosystem" and "resource base" in "the environment." Terraforming the Earth
environmentalizes a once wild piece of the cosmos, domesticating it as "humanity's home" or "our
environment." From narratives of world pandemics, global warming, or planetary pollution, global
governance from the astropanopticon now runs its risk analyses and threat scenarios to protect Mother
Earth from home-grown and foreign threats, as the latest security panics over asteroid impacts or X-File extraterrestrials in the
United States express in the domains of popular culture. Whether it is space locusts from Independence Day or space rocks snuffing out Dallas in
Asteroid, new security threats are casting their shadows over our homes, cities, and biomes for those thinking geo-economically in the
astropanopticon. From such sites of supervision, environmentalists see from above and from without, like the NASA-eyed view of Earth from
Apollo spacecraft, through the enveloping astropanoptic designs of administratively controllable terraformed systems.35 Encircled by
enclosures of alarm, environments can be disassembled, recombined, and subjected to expert managers'
disciplinary designs. Beset and beleaguered by these all encompassing interventions, environments as ecosystems and terraformations can
be redirected to fulfill the ends of new economic scripts, managerial directives or administrative writs.36 How various environmentalists might
embed different instrumental rationalities into the policing of ecosystems is an intriguing question, which will be explored below.
Most environmentally-friendly policies are just consumerist campaigns that allow the mass
consumption of energy and resources under the false façade of protecting the environment.
To preserve the various ecologies of the planet on a global scale, as many environmental groups assert, the
inhabitants of each human community must rethink the entire range of their economic and technological
interconnections to their local habitats, as national discourses of green geo-politics and grey geo-economics illustrate, in terms
of how they are meshed into the regional, national, and international exchange of goods and services. Beginning this
strategic review immediately poses the question of protecting all existing concrete "bioregions" in first nature, or the larger biosphere of the
planet, within which the ecologies of any and all human communities are rooted. Bioregions historically have constituted the particular spatial
setting of human beings' social connections to specific lands, waters, plants, animals, peoples, and climates from which their communities
culturally constitute meaningful places for themselves in the "first nature" of the natural biosphere.37 The "domination of nature" is not so much
the total control of natural events in the environment as much as it is the willful disregard of such localized ecological conditions in building
human settlements.38 The abstract "technoregions" constructed within the human fabrications of "second nature," or the always emergent
technosphere of the planet, within which modernizing human communities are now mostly embedded, operate by virtue of environmental
transactions that often are over, beyond, or outside of rough equilibria of their natural habitats. These transactions create new anthropogenic
ecological contexts, which typically generate an artificial hyperecology of an ultimately unsustainable type.39 A great deal of time and
energy might be expended in core capitalist countries upon environmental regulations, resource surveys,
ecological studies, and conservation policies, but these initiatives almost always are consumerist campaigns,
aiming to reform the costs and regulate the benefits of these unsustainable flows of goods and services
through the hyperecologies of second nature.40 Consumer society constitutes an entirely new system of objects out on the
terrains of second nature. Baudrillard shrewdly aspires to be recognized as second nature's Linneaus, asserting that second nature plainly has a
fecundity or vitality of its own: Could we classify the luxuriant growth of objects as we do a flora or fauna, complete with tropical and glacial
species, sudden mutations, and varieties threatened by extinction? Our urban civilization is witness to an ever-accelerating procession of
generations of products, appliances and gadgets by comparison with which mankind appears to be a remarkably stable species. This pollulation of
objects is no odder, when we come to think about it, than that to be observed in countless natural species.41 Finding a rationality and
systematicity in this quickening procession of products, Baudrillard believes his new technified taxonomies for every object (products, goods,
appliances, gadgets, etc.) of the system permits us to plumb the system of objects propounded by contemporary economies of mass
production/mass consumption. To do so, however, one must push past the silences of the silent majorities, and decipher the meanings of mass
consumption as the consuming masses reveal them. Exploring consumption of objects in particular might disclose "the
processes whereby people relate to them and with the systems of human behavior and relationships that
result thereform," and thereby allowing anyone to reach "an understanding of what happens to objects by virtue of their being produced and
consumed, possessed and personalized."42
Here is where habitus emerges from the systems of objects and objects of systems compounded with the technosphere. Bourdieu asserts habitus
emerges out of "the capacity to produce classifiable practices and works, and the capacity to differentiate and appreciate these practices and
products (taste), that the represented social world, i.e., the space of life-styles, is constituted."43 Yet, the dual dimensionality of habitus as a
structured and structuring structure parallels the properties of habitat, which when taken in environmental terms, provides a scheme of systems
generating classifiable practices and products as well as a scheme for systems of appreciating and comprehending within and amidst specific
settings. Consequently, the habitats of second nature out on the technoregionalized ranges of anthropogenic technospheres are formed out of
habitus, or the system of distinctive signs in practices and works driving lives styled by the system of objects. In these new spaces,
terraformative hyperecologies can be monitored to judge their relative success or failure in terms of
abstract mathematical measures of consumption, surveying national gains or losses by the density, velocity,
intensity, and quantity of goods and services being exchanged for mass consumption. Here one finds geo-economists
pushing for wiser uses of all biotic assets in all anthropogenic exchanges. Consumption is outsourced from many different planetary sites by
using varying levels of standardized energy, natural resources, food, water and labor inputs drawn from all over the Earth through transnational
commodity, energy, and labor markets.44 Geo-economic forms of state power and/or market clout, in turn, allegedly will provide the requisite
force needed to impose these costs on the many outside for the benefit of the few inside. By substituting "Earth Days" for real ecological
transformation, the hyperecologies of transnational exchange are successfully repacking themselves in green
wrappers of ecological concern; but, they still often involve the profligate waste of energy, resources, and
time to maintain the abstract aggregate subjectivity of "an average consumers" enjoying "the typical
standard of living" in the developed world's cities and suburbs. Yet, if this is indeed happening, then how did these patterns develop?
Environmental Neoliberalism Link—Biopower I/L
Neoliberal environmentalism reduces nature to an object of management, capturing both

ecosystems, and the people who are supposed to be their responsible consumers, in this ever
expanding web of biopolitical control.
Robertson, Ph.D. in Geography at University of Wisconsin, 04 (Morgan M, January 23rd, “The
neoliberalization of ecosystem services: wetland mitigation banking and problems in
environmental governance”, www.sciencedirect.com)
A neoliberal consensus shared by both the current US Administration and the Kyoto Accord signatories suggests that
ecosystem service commodification might soon happen at a global scale, and a flood of recent titles such as “Hard
Green” (Huber, 1999) and “Nature's Services” ( Daily, 1997) reflects the growing belief that conservation is best
approached with a CEO's sensibility. However, the history of wetland banking suggests that the process by which
the language of ecosystem ecology is used to commodify nature as “services” may encounter very different
obstacles than the use of more traditional, reductionist measures (in which, for example, the commodity is defined as
a ton of CO2). The theoretical premise of this paper is that wetland banking is a special case of what has come
to be known as “the regulation of biopower” (Luke, 2000; Braun, 2000; Darier, 1999), or “environmental
governance” (Bridge and Jonas, 2002; Feldman and Jonas, 2000). This is defined as the nation-state's project of
securing hegemony1 by regulating ecological relations within its territory so as to assure the stability of capitalist
relations of power and accumulation. In this paper, I suggest that the massive process of codifiying and
commodifying the ecological relations around us is a never-concluded project of disciplining both ecosystemic
relations and people as consumers of these relations. I interpret the development of banking as an “actually existing
[environmental] neoliberalism” ( Brenner and Theodore, 2002), a project of mobilizing ecological forces in the
service of neoliberal hegemony, in order to understand the work that banking does in creating and stabilizing new
areas for capitalist activity, even as it is subject to the tendential crises of capitalism which guarantee that this work
is never concluded (Polanyi, 1944; O'Connor, 1994). I will focus here on two aspects of banking which complicate
the smooth neoliberal account of the process of commodifying ecosystem services: • The Problem of
Measurement: Countless studies of capitalist modernity have made it clear that standardized methods of abstraction
are a basic tool in the regulation of a smoothly running socio-economic system (e.g., capital treats only with labor-
power, which is an abstract quanta homogenizing diverse particular labors). But nothing has vexed the banking
community so much as the task of creating abstract and generalizable measures of the commodity that they sell. The
use of ecosystem science to define ecosystem services in easily measured, abstract units that can be transacted
across space (as all commodities must) without losing their value has proven to be very difficult in practice. • The
Problem of Governance: Banking reveals that environmental governance is achieved through negotiated relations
between and among different levels of government and the private sector. There is a lack of clear dominance among
scales of state governance, scales of market activity, and scales of ecological process, the result of which has been
the creation of a haphazard spatial patchwork of regulatory regimes controlling wetland banking. In banking, the
work of environmental governance has encountered a major obstacle in aligning the separate but “structurally
coupled” spheres of the state, capital and ecosystem science to achieve the commodification of ecosystem services.
I will first describe the institutional structure and history of mitigation banking, a subject likely to be unfamiliar to
all but the most dedicated of environmental policy wonks. This is followed by a discussion of the obstacles current
political economic theory poses in addressing our relations with ecological phenomena. To illustrate the difficulties
neoliberalism faces in the creation of ecosystem commodity markets, I will then discuss in depth the two “problems”
noted above. Much of the material supporting these arguments is interview-based data from ongoing research
discussions with bankers and regulators around the United States.
Environmental Crisis Link—AT: Environment DAs
Crisis rhetoric and corresponding solutions extend the hand of the market into new and uncharted spaces,
paving the away for an adjustment of capitalist to falsely incorporate green interests. This transformation is
not a more just form of economics, but the ultimate form of capitalistic exploitation that extends its panoptic
view into all aspect of life. All of life becomes commodified in the name of protecting the environment.
Hwang 99 ( Ph. D. candidate in political science at the University of Connecticut. “Ecological panopticism; the
problematization of the ecological crisis”)
Crisis functions economically only as a disciplinary mechanism for capitalism.So far, I have tried to identify the
rhetorical devices of greenism which shape ecological concerns in such a way as to reify the current relations of
power. This ecological grammar dictates which sentence can be spoken and which cannot in terms of the tense, the
case, the mood, and the syntax. It proclaims the crisis, identifies the cause, and provides the solution of ecological
breakdown in terms of the sustainability, not of man in nature, but of capital against nature. Such problematization
of the ecological crisis, while equivocating the responsibility for its cause and contorting the feasibility of its
solution, entails a green regime that incorporates the challenge within the confines of the dominant logic. The
discursive ordinance of the regime homogenizes the specific features of ecology into a manageable environment,
quantified in terms of numbers and degrees of pollution, desertification, extinction, and so forth. It cages the
ecological imagination in current vocabulary which assures the automatic operation of capitalism. In other words, it
provides a mental schema that dilutes "greenism" in favor of capitalism. Challenge and complicity have been to
capitalism historically both sides of the same coin. The hypothetical declaration that "we are faced with an
ecological crisis," while dispatching an acute alarm all over the world, paves the way for a structural adjustment of
capitalism. Michael Burawoy, noting the mutual disciplining effect between capital and labor, argues that "class
struggle was not the gravedigger of capitalism but its saviour" (1979, 195). As observed, welfarism and democratic
rights that the Left achieved laboriously have helped the proper functioning of capitalism and now their reversal
does the same job. Greenism follows suit. Environmentalism authorizes the business-as-usual of capitalism, while
ecologism impels capitalism to recognize reflectively its own limits and excesses. ``Foucault designed a prison
system, drawing from the Benthamite idea of the Panopticon, and developed it into a cruel method of inquisition that
perpetuates sweeping surveillance. The panoptic scheme "arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is
not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy constraint, to the functions it invests, but is so subtly present in
them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact" (1977, 206). In ecological
panopticism, the hypothetical declaration of the ecological crisis constitutes "a faceless gaze" which transforms the
whole social body into a field of perception (Foucault 1977, 214). Apparently the panoptic gaze generates a
symbiotic relationship between the observer (capitalism) and the observed (green sympathizers); it seems to provide
the former with the effcient means of control and the latter with a better living condition. Yet the shared benefits do
not reverse the power relation between the capitalist as the incarnation of capital and the public at large who go
green by the regime of perception. Both are tamed by green capitalism.Of course, disciplinary power is not the only
force capitalism summons to incorporate the ecological challenge within its orbit. Traditional types of power,
negative in its exercise, perform the prop and stay of capitalism. Colonialism provides a historical illustration of
negative power in plundering the ecological basis as well as the human roots of the colony. Neo-colonialism merely
adds a legal smoke screen to the stark exploitation. For capitalism, nature exists only to be excavated, exploited, and
exterminated. Capitalism changes the face of the earth, while "dripping from head to toe, from every pore, with
blood and dirt" (Marx 1976, 926). However, as the global reach of capital comes to an end, the so-called "nature
question" gains another dimension. Nature, which has long been conceived in the image of capital, takes its revenge
in terms of the capitalist conditions of production. Faced with the limits of geographical extension, capitalism
desperately needs a non-capitalist sphere to be manipulated for an "intensive" colonization. It also has to discipline
the global ecosystem to the emerging question of how to distribute "bads" as well as "goods." The economy of
power requires the formation of the panoptic machine, while carrying on the conventional methods of coercion. The
disciplinary modality of power does not replace, but infiltrates all the others, "linking them together and extending
them and above all making it possible to bring the effects of power to the most minute and distant elements"
(Foucault 1977, 216). Greenism as a production of ecological panopticism assures "an infinitesimal distribution of
the power relations" (Foucault 1977, 216). Environmentalism and ecologism collaborate with capitalism to freeze
into place the current social relations of production. The former has long abandoned the consideration of the
commons by following the dictates of "free market." The latter sweetens and stupefies the public by introducing
irrelevant but plausible fantasies of a green society. As a consequence, the ecological project of capitalism permits
no exit. One intriguing paradox is that "the rich are unlikely to give up an amenity `at any price' whereas the poor
who are least able to sustain the loss are likely to sacrifice it for a trifling sum" (Harvey 1996, 368). It is a dismal
truth that the sustainability of capitalism is positively compatible with the further existence of man and nature in
unsustainable conditions. Who will dare to be against "sustainability?" The term has the aura of a categorical
imperative since its inception by the Brundtland Commission in 1987. Panoptic power fabricates the promised
panacea to cure all ecological problems. The "metafix" demonstrates emergent power-effects in the ecological stage
of capitalism. It makes all actors compliant-not by force, but by consent-with the capitalist recipe for the ecological
catastrophe, and facilitates the complete hegemony of capitalism over physical and human nature as "the last
colony." In a word, it normalizes green capitalism. It is quite natural that greenism paves the way for the radical
extension of privatization into previously unclaimed spheres of nature. The inherent tendency of capitalism to turn
everything into a commodity asserts itself, even without gunpowder or bibles. Thus green capitalism may portend
the ultimate form of capitalism, that is, the triumphant capitalism which finally subjugates not only nature, but also
its revenge, under the inexorable market. Thus might the capitalism be unmasked in all its stark and sheer reality,
with no political mitigation, no humane refinement, and no romantic compassion-in other words, the consummate
capitalism which has for the first time truly penetrated every aspect of life without decoration or disguise . As Marx
said, "the vampire will not let go `while there remains a single muscle, sinew or drop of blood to be exploited"'
(1976, 416). It is no wonder that some sell "sustainability" while others buy it.
Proclimationsof ecological crisis under the auspices of green values is inseparable from the capitalist problem
that ensures environmental degradation. Without questioning the very exploitation that made crisis possible,
the aff perpetuates a capitalist system of discipline and control.
Hwang 99 ( Ph. D. candidate in political science at the University of Connecticut. “Ecological panopticism; the
problematization of the ecological crisis”)
During the past three decades the ecological crisis has been problematized: social power, knowledge, and values
have interacted inextricably to construct an ecological ideology, a comprehensive set of ideas by which a social
group makes sense of the ecological condition. My purpose in this paper is to identify a disciplinary apparatus
behind the problematization of the ecological crisis, an apparatus that is intertwined inseparably with capitalism into
a specific mode of domination. I will argue that the ecological crisis has been problematized in a certain way that
highlights some issues over others; deliberately omits its class content; personalizes its responsibility to the victims;
calls for a voluntarist future on a given past; and provides a case for global management. Such problematization of
ecological issues rarely allows capitalism itself to be examined for its categorical imperatives-profit maximization,
capital accumulation, and market expansion-which require the continuous subjection of nature, human and physical.
It disregards the history and the genealogy of ecological problems. The point is that the ecological crisis has been
framed to construct an ecological grammar that conceptualizes and encodes ecological issues in order to rescue a
capitalism in impasse. Today almost everyone in the West is a self-proclaimed environmentalist or ecologist.
Greenism carries with it a sense of moral justice. It provides substantial credentials for politicians. The green label,
as a certificate of eco-friendliness, is an indispensable attribute of many commodities. In academic conferences,
"environment"-or its related terms, "nature," "ecology," "earth, etc.-usually makes up a substantial number of panels,
denoting anything from "man and nature" to "tradition and ecotopia." Yet despite these proclamations, ecological
degradation accelerates: conspicuously in such phenomena as global warming, ozone depletion, resource exhaustion,
and toxic pollution. Along with those deteriorating conditions, "green" values-e.g., peace, equality, harmony, and
liberation-have never been more threatened. How does the popularity of ecological sensibility end in ruin? How
could a process of social greening destroy the values it purports to support? From the beginning, the shadow of
failure has haunted the greenism of the middle-class nature-lovers who hoisted green flags without changing their
other political colors. They established a green agenda based upon the threat of a future disaster, not upon the past
practices by which nature had been exhausted beyond a critical threshold of recuperation. The all-encompassing
"greenwash"-the global brainwash with respect to ecological degradation-endorses the Foucaultian assumption of
panopticism: domination is not only a territorial and economic exploitation, but inevitably also a subject-constituting
project. Panopticism as a type of power is not a negative force that punishes, orders, controls, prohibits, limits,
excludes, and subjugates. Instead, it produces "docile bodies"-normalized, individualized, and homogenized in the
disciplinary society. It is the "power of mind over mind" which leaves no escape (Foucault 1977, 206). Ecological
panopticism, or the modality of disciplinary power over the green movement, serves to maintain the present
relations of power by forging subjects themselves and fabricating their interests. The misleading problematization
could be easily detected in the declaration of greenism which we are now accustomed to hearing: "we are faced with an
ecological crisis." Several conceptual pitfalls reside in this pithy declaration which has molded the greening of capitalism.
Commodification Link—Now Key

The time to act is now. Capitalism has corrupted creativity and taken a stranglehold on individual thought.
This intellectual fetishism is the beginning of capitalism’s emergence into the “final frontier” of
commodifying the body.
Lipschultz 2005 (Ronnie D. Lipschutz; Professor, Department of Politics, University California: Santa Cruz;
Director, Politics; PhD Program Co-director, Center for Global, International and Regional Studies. “‘Soylent
Green…is…PEOPLE!’ Labor, Bodies and Capital in the Global Political Economy”, Conference Proceeding Paper
from The International Studies Association, March 5, 2005)
Capitalism based on body labor seeks to add value to material goods through what might be called identity
fetishism. Intellectual fetishism, by contrast, transforms mental work into material goods. Here we go beyond
Soylent Green and into the realm of Julian Simon’s infinitely “renewable resources.” Ingenuity and innovation are
thought to be unlimited; there is always a better mousetrap that can be built, a more popular book to be
written, a better set of lyrics and a beat to set people dancing. But under capitalism, such innovations are of
only limited value if anyone can copy and manufacture them. Hence, we have developed a means of
commodifying the fruits of the mind—patents, copyrights, trademarks—which we call “intellectual property
rights” (IPRs). Intellectual fetishism is not new, but as practiced today, it is certainly more widespread and
intense that in the past. As Peter Drahos and John Braithwaite explain in Information Feudalism (2003), patents
were invented in 16th century England in order to grant monopolies to certain manufacturers and supplies of goods
to the throne. During the 19th century, the patent system was extended to new inventions, as a further development
of Locke’s arguments about labor and property, and on the theory that inventors and designers ought to be rewarded
for their commitments of time and money. Copyright extended this notion to printed matter, again on the principle
that writers and musicians deserved to benefit from effort put into their creations. But such intellectual property
rights were applied only to material objects: machines, devices, books, sheet music. Moreover, they were of
limited scope and duration, and unenforceable outside of the jurisdictions in which they were granted. What
we today call “intellectual piracy” was widespread, although it was hardly the stuff of high politics. Still, the
very notion of stealing ideas is a peculiar one, inasmuch as nothing is ever created ex nihilo, without the varied
contributions of many individuals and generations. Indeed, it can be (and has been) argued that knowledge
constitutes a global commons to which everyone contributes and from which everyone benefits. The creation
of IPRs thus represents a form of enclosure—privatizing that which was formerly open to all—and, by
contrast with a physical commons, imposing access restrictions on that which ought to be non-rival and non-
depletable. Yet, if human ingenuity and innovation are unlimited, how can the products of the mind be privatized
and fetishized, especially if inventors and innovators are drawing on a pool of knowledge available to all? As with
enclosure of the English commons, the creation and assertion of property rights is something of a trick and a
cheat. But the conceptual basis of IPRs is even more than this: it represents the means of appropriating surplus
value from mental “labor,” something possible only in a social context in which one’s body is also property.
An example of this can be seen in the kinds of databases that contribute to the flood of mail-order catalogues so
common in the United States. Underlying their distribution is an assumption about the preferences of the targeted
consumer (one that is confirmed if the target actually purchase something). These preferences are inferred from
information regarding reading and buying habits, individual preferences and tastes, and other characteristics, all of
which presumably have been developed only after some degree of mental and material effort on the part of the
individual. But to whom do these preferences belong? Buyer or seller? To be sure, I am buying something from you,
and that information is no longer strictly proprietary (unless a contract specifies it to be so). One might imagine
individual predilections to be a private matter, of concern to others only on birthdays or certain holidays.
Nonetheless, an exchange of money for goods manifests a preference that, if recorded, acquires the character of
property and, indeed, amounts to a theft of the intellectual labor needed to acquire that preference. Such information,
linked to a name, an address, and other such bits and bytes, is now owned by whomever has labored to enter it into a
database, and it can then be sold to others who seek to sell their wares to the unwary consumer. We, of course, are
hardly aware of this sleight of hand until we are besieged by unwanted catalogues in the mailbox and phone calls
during the dinner hour. How far does title to such intellectual labor extend? In Neal Stephenson’s cyberdystopia
Snow Crash (1993), industrialist Bob Rife worries that he has no way to maintain control over the minds of his
software programmers when they go home at night. And their thoughts are his property. As he says in a
television interview, if you’ll just follow my reasoning for a bit, that when I have a programmer working under me
who is working with that information, he is wielding enormous power. Information is going into his brain. And it’s
staying there. It travels with him when he goes home at night. It gets all tangled up into his dreams, for Christ’s sake.
He talks to his wife about it. And, goddam it, he doesn’t have any right to that information. If I was running a car
factory, I wouldn’t let the workers drive the cars home or borrow tools. But that’s what I do at five o’clock each day,
all over the world, when my hackers go home from work (Stephenson,1993: 116). These days, industrial
confidentiality agreements are de rigueur, of course, and many contracts forbid managers from jumping to a
competitor once they have left a company. Academics are, increasingly, required to share patents with their
universities (although such requirements seem less common when drugs are developed and tested through private
funding at public institutions). Nor is it clear that college instructors even own the electronic media rights to their
lectures, especially to the extent that university-owned technology is used to prepare and deliver them. It is not so
difficult to envisage new intellectual enclosure attempts in the future, as administrators seek to squeeze
additional surplus value from their faculty’s mind labor. By now, the parallel to Soylent Green should be clear:
whereas in the film, people pay to consume the protein that they, in turn, are “working” to process for future
generations, in our world, people work to create intellectual “goods” that are privatized which ought to be non-
rival and non-depletable. In theory, the creator of an intellectual product sells it to those unable to create such
goods; in practice, however, the creator is also drawing on an immense intellectual commons in order to
generate private benefits. This logic is intrinsic to capitalism—harvesting diffuse resources to generate
concentrated benefits— and, if this commons is as large as some say, the body-based commodity frontier might
well be an unlimited one, just as Julian Simon claimed.
Necropolitics Link– Fear of Death
Sovereignty is assumed to be based on the need to protect life, but truly gains
its power from enforcing the risk of death upon the population. Death is life
that cannot be utilized by the state, an excess.
Mbembe 03. Mbembe, Achille. Researcher at the Institute of Social and Economic Research at the University of
the Witwatersrand. “Necropolitics”. Public Culture 15.1 (2003).
<http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/public_culture/v015/15.1mbembe.html> Accessed 7/27/08.
Georges Bataille also offers critical insights into how death structures the idea of sovereignty, the political, and the
subject. Bataille displaces Hegel's conception of the linkages between death, sovereignty, and the subject in at least three ways. First, he
interprets death and sovereignty as the paroxysm of exchange and superabundance—or, to use his own
terminology: excess. For Bataille, life is defective only when death has taken it hostage. Life itself exists only
in bursts and in exchange with death. 12 He argues that death is the putrefaction of life, the stench that is at
once the source and the repulsive condition of life. Therefore, although it destroys what was to be, obliterates what was
supposed to continue being, and reduces to nothing the individual who takes it, death does not come down to
the pure annihilation of being. Rather, it is essentially self-consciousness; moreover, it is the most luxurious form of
life, that is, of effusion and exuberance: a power of proliferation. Even more radically, Bataille withdraws death from the horizon of
meaning. This is in contrast to Hegel, for whom nothing is definitively lost in death; indeed, death is seen as holding great
signification as a means to truth.
Second, Bataille firmly anchors death in the realm of absolute expenditure (the other characteristic of sovereignty), whereas Hegel tries to keep
death within the economy of absolute knowledge and meaning. Life beyond utility, says Bataille, is the domain of
sovereignty. This being the case, death is therefore the point at which destruction, suppression, and sacrifice
constitute so irreversible and radical an expenditure—an expenditure without reserve—that they can no longer be
determined as negativity. Death is therefore the very principle of excess—an anti-economy. Hence the metaphor of
luxury and of the luxurious character of death.
Third, Bataille establishes a correlation among death, sovereignty, and sexuality. Sexuality is inextricably linked to violence and to the dissolution
of the boundaries of the body and self by way of orgiastic and excremental impulses. As such, sexuality concerns two major forms of polarized
human impulses—excretion and appropriation—as well as the regime of the taboos surrounding them. 13 The truth of sex and its deadly
attributes reside in the experience of loss of the boundaries separating reality, events, and fantasized objects. [End Page 15]
For Bataille, sovereignty therefore has many forms. But ultimately it

is the refusal to accept the limits that the fear of
death would have the subject respect. The sovereign world, Bataille argues, "is the world in which the
limit of death is done away with. Death is present in it, its presence defines that world of violence,
but while death is present it is always there only to be negated, never for anything but that. The
sovereign," he concludes, "is he who is, as if death were not. . . . He has no more regard for the limits of identity than he does for limits of death,
or rather these limits are the same; he is the transgression of all such limits." Since the natural domain of prohibitions includes death, among
others (e.g., sexuality, filth, excrement), sovereignty requires "the strength to violate the prohibition against killing, although it's true this will be
under the conditions that customs define." And contrary to subordination that is always rooted in necessity and
the alleged need to avoid death, sovereignty definitely calls for the risk of death. 14
By treating sovereignty as the violation of prohibitions, Bataille reopens the question of the limits of the political. Politics, in this case, is
not
the forward dialectical movement of reason. Politics can only be traced as a spiral transgression, as
that difference that disorients the very idea of the limit. More specifically, politics is the difference put into play by the
violation of a taboo. 15
Commodification Impact
The threat of the impacts of the commodification of the body is not confined to fantasy. Even in our world, the
body as a source of profits opens the floodgates to a plethora of economy-driven abuses and dehumanization.
The obvious punchline here is that “capitalism devours all” and, if left to its own devices, can
lead only to the “stark utopia” decried by Karl Polanyi in The Great Transformation (2001). It
is only logical that, in an over-populated world in which everything else is dead or dying,
the ultimate resource as well as the ultimate profit center is the body itself, that is, its very
substance (and how apropos to such a self-centered society as ours). But even in our world,
which does not much (yet) resemble that of Soylent Green, this is not so far from the truth:
the body may very well be the “final commodity frontier” and a source of windfall profits,
even if it is not yet that on which we must feed to survive.
Commodified consumerism has entrenched itself in modern life as an addiction which

devalues the most privileged of lives.
Rai 2005 (Alexander Rai; Drexel University, Stanford University Graduate School of Business, CEO Zivylin,
LLC; “Good consumerism vs. Bad Consumerism”, Etalkinghead, April 26, 2005)
Piles of car magazines, worn posters dangling on walls peppered with tack marks, a desk littered with
corpses of writing utensils whose gelatin life force have long waned, assignments from school and work
heaped askew, licentiously co-inhabiting with half used nose wipes whose yellow blotches of viscous
wetness had hardened into a fibrous clot. Coins of denominations casting a metal menagerie on the dust
laced deskscape. Troves of useless pennies, some shining like gaudy Mexican tourist trinkets, others
crusted with 60s vintage gringo dirt and lint: strewn like clamshell tokens of conscience. Dust specks
layering every possible article and surface, the slightest movement of limb setting off a sneeze. Welcome to
suburban life in the capital of world consumerism. This perpetual obsession with hoarding is a marked
denominator of existence in this part of the world, or at least, parts of this part of the world I have had the
opportunity to frequent, including my family’s living room. It’s a peculiar psychosomatic condition that is
triggered by the impulse to buy cheap things when they are cheap, and trust me, these things are eternally
cheap because the protector of man and the master of the Universe made them that way. The penny wise,
pound foolish middle class miser, who strives to find a merry compromise between the perception of
economy and the perception of aesthetic to a point, where both Economics and Aesthetics become diluted
Sciences, and the need to possess cheap things in abundance becomes a overriding state of mental
compulsion bordering on the perimeters of obsession. Leaping from one cheap acquisition to another, the
hour blends into the night, and the night blends into the hour. Cheapness becomes an addictive placebo
tablet in the realm of rat race. Every cheap conquest is an accomplishment. “Life” continues. The
“splurges” go on. But as the reality of cheapness persists around one, existence feels cheap. The dollar
value in everything is so clear cut that the receipts shine through the cracks, nicks, and sags of the
bookcases. The permanent scratches and blotch marks on the thirty dollar mail-in-rebate writing desk that
came with a screeching wheeled chair with a cloth pad for a back rest torment the suppressed consciousness
of sensibility. Is there peace in this way of life? We call it utilitarian, economic, and many other self-
conciliatory things. We give ourselves consolation prizes. But in the end of the day, we come back home
exhausted and as we lay sprawled upon our untidy sheets like a human swastika, through the aloof and inert
corners of our eyes surveying the surreal ornamentations of our existence in its assorted dusty hues. Who
knew the demographics of cheapness could come in such dazzling colors, textures, and shapes? Alas, some
amongst us know all too well. We devote so much of our life balancing interest rates, juggling portfolios:
collecting paychecks at the end of the month, and invoices at the end of the day; trying to outdo Mexico
and its lawn mowing migrants in standards of living. Yet, our retarded minds, perpetually tormented and
misguided by our economizing, forget what quality of life means. Consumed with the idea of a safe and
sweet retirement we forget that life doesn’t continue beyond now, for all that matters. Without knowing it,
we are living in Michael Jackson’s Never Land. Our faces are cosmeticized by artificial implants of fake
smiles. Our hairs are colored with unnatural hues. We torture ourselves on unwieldy diets. ?Hi! How ya
doin?!?
Globalized capitalism’s voracious quest of expansion and commodification has

supercharged and exploited the sex-drives and insecurities of modern youth. This assult,
paramount to a D-Day on the world’s youth, dehumanizes future generations through the
perpetuation and necessitation of child exploitations of the worst kind.
Rai 2005 (Alexander Rai, Drexel University, Stanford Graduate School of Business; “Stockings, Social Identity,
and The Destiny of the Sexes”, October 30, 2005, < http://www.etalkinghead.com/archives/stockings-social-
identity-and-the-destiny-of-the-sexes-2005-10-30.html>)
“It's difficult for teens to develop healthy attitudes towards sexuality and body image when much of the
advertising aimed at them is filled with images of impossibly thin, fit, beautiful and highly sexualized
young people. The underlying marketing message is that there is a link between physical beauty and sex
appeal” and popularity success, and happiness. Fashion marketers such as Calvin Klein, Abercrombie &
Fitch and Guess use provocative marketing campaigns featuring young models. These ads are selling more
than clothing to teens, they're also selling adult sexuality” reports the Media Awareness Network The
insatiable marketing schemers, not satisfied with systematically sexualizing an unsustainable youth, have
become the ultimate criminal gang. It is the lust driven, morally drained, Corporate Pedophile, inserting its
green long unconscionable fingers into the private parts of our young people. Read this: “One of the most
important recent developments in advertising to kids has been the defining of a "tween" market (ages 8 to
12). No longer little children, and not yet teens, tweens are starting to develop their sense of identity and
are anxious to cultivate a sophisticated self-image. And marketers are discovering there's lots of money to
be made by treating tweens like teenagers. The marketing industry is forcing tweens to grow up quickly.
Industry research reveals that children 11 and older don't consider themselves children anymore. The Toy
Manufacturers of America have changed their target market from birth to 14, to birth to ten years of age.”
Media Awareness Network The problems they perpetrate are systematic, ruthless, profound, and is spelling
a disaster for our psychosomatic race the likes of which have never been seen before. The flower of our
youth, the progeny itself, is under a thorough and complete assault. In 2005, it’s D-Day+++. The beaches
swarm with bathing suit stars, ‘successful' graduates of dieting schools earning their certificates, and young
men and women embracing each other in the only way they know to these days. Globalization despite its
boons, have made Child Exploitation a worldwide event, creating a group of young people who are
fundamentally dysfunctional, dwelling and competing on sex, physical perfection, and sex instead of
athletics, scholarly explorations, and the profound and rigorous ideas. By treating young saplings as if they
are adults, new pressures are being impressed upon them: Sexual Pressures. True, the Youth must be tested.
But this is the most perverted, twisted, degenerate, psychologically debilitating, spiritually mauling, and
yes, Sinister test ever crafted.
Consumerism Impact—Root Cause
Consumerism leads to structural violence: people fall into a moral sleep as long as their possessions
are not in danger. This is the root of all impacts.
McGregor 03. McGregor, Sue. Coordinator, Undergraduate Peace and Conflict Studies Program. Mount Saint Vincent
University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. “Consumerism as a Source of Structural Violence”.
<http://www.kon.org/hswp/archive/consumerism.pdf> Accessed 7/26/08.
Johan Galtung (1969) first coined the term structural violence intending it to refer to the presence of justice (positive peace) to
balance the prevailing focus on negative peace, the absence of war and violence. Whereas direct violence and war are very
visible, structural violence is almost invisible, embedded in ubiquitous social structures, normalized by stable
institutions, and regular experience. Because they are longstanding, structural inequities usually
seem ordinary, the way things are and always have been done. Worse yet, even those who are victims of
structural violence often do not see the systematic ways in which their plight is choreographed by
unequal and unfair distribution of society’s resources or by human constraint caused by economic
and political structures. Unequal access to resources, political power, education, health care, or legal
standing are all forms of structural violence (Winter & Leighton, 1999). Structural violence can also
occur in a society if institutions and policies are designed in such a way that barriers result in lack
of adequate food, housing, health, safe and just working conditions, education, economic security,
clothing, and family relationships. People affected by structural violence tend to live a life of
oppression, exclusion, exploitation, marginalization, collective humiliation, stigmatization,
repression, inequities, and lack of opportunities due to no fault of their own, per se. The people most
affected by structural violence are women, children, and elders; those from different ethnic, racial, and
religious groups; and sexual orientation. Those adversely affected by structural violence are not involved in direct
conflict that is readily identifiable. Because they, and others, may not comprehend the origin of the conflict, they feel they are to
blame, or are blamed, for their own life conditions. This perception is readily escalated because people’s perceptual and cognitive
processes normally divide people into ingroups and out-groups. Those outside “our group” lie outside our scope of interest and
justice. They are invisible. Injustice that would be instantaneously confronted if it occurred to someone in
“our group” is barely noticed if it occurs to strangers or those who are invisible and irrelevant. Those who
fall outside “our group” are easily morally excluded and become demeaned or invisible, so we do not
have to acknowledge the injustice they suffer (Winter & Leighton, 1999). “Consumerism is the drug that
causes people to fall into moral sleep and remain silent on all kinds of public matters. As long as
their little world of peace and relative prosperity is not disturbed, they are happy not to get
involved. It is against this background of consumer complacency that all kinds of moral relaxation
can arise . . . . A consumer society is one that is prepared to sacrifice its ethics on the altar of the
material ‘feel-good’ factor” (Benton, 1998). Persons living in a consumer society live a comfortable life
at the expense of impoverished labourers and fragile ecosystems in other countries. Too often, they
conclude that they must arm themselves to protect their commodities and the ongoing access to them. This
position justifies war and violence (Cejka, 2003). The “veil of consumerism” enables them to overlook the
connections between consumerism and oppressive regimes (governments, world financial institutions, and
transnational corporations) that violate human rights, increase drug trade, and boost military spending
(Sankofa, 2003). This disregard is possible because consumerism accentuates and accelerates human
fragmentation, isolation, and exclusion for the profit of the few, contributing significantly to violence (Board
of the Commission of the Churches on International Affairs, 1994). Society has ignored the “new slavery” and the resultant
disposable people through ignoring the implications of consumption decisions on third world citizens, the next generation, and
those not yet born (Sankofa).
Consumerism Impact—Self-Oppression—Questioning Key
If people do not critically question market ideology, they will continue to

oppress others, the environment—and themselves.
McGregor 03. McGregor, Sue. Coordinator, Undergraduate Peace and Conflict Studies Program. Mount Saint Vincent
University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. “Consumerism as a Source of Structural Violence”.
From yet another perspective, McGregor (2001) suggests that consumerism is also a form of slavery to those doing the
consuming. She tantalizes us with the ideas that people behave as they do in a consumer society because
they are so indoctrinated into the logic of the market that they cannot “see” anything
wrong with what they are doing. Because they do not critically challenge the market
ideology, and what it means to live in a consumer society, they actually contribute to their
own oppression (slaves of the market and capitalism) as well as the oppression of others
who make the goods and of the natural ecosystem. Strong and unsustainable consumption
patterns have developed and have been unchallenged over a long period of time to the point
that consumerism and structural violence represent dominant forces in human social
interaction, and these forces are transforming human life in powerful and destructive ways
(Santi Pracha Dammha Institute, 2001). Consumerism has caused a visible and dramatic increase in human kind’s obsession with
possessions and in the identification of one’s person with what one owns. The trend has significantly grown over the last century
and with it the violence it entails (Sols, 2002). Witness the killing of youth by youth for brand name running shoes or jackets.
Witness the violence present in advertisements, video games, music, videos, and children’s programming on television. Witness
the not so silent violence in the home due to dual income and single parents working to meet increasing costs of living. Witness
the latch key kids, underfunded day care, and escalating violence in schools. These are symptoms of violence in a society
structured around consumerism. Carter (1999) agrees and advances the idea that the root causes of youth violence can be partially
blamed on the focus society places on consumerism.
Consumerism Impact
Consumerism leads to a glorification of greed, a breakdown in family and the community, a rise of
lawlessness, racism, increase in alienation, cooption of people’s lives, community, and spirit, and will never
fulfill the deeper needs of humanity.
McGregor 03. McGregor, Sue. Coordinator, Undergraduate Peace and Conflict Studies Program. Mount Saint
Vincent University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. “Consumerism as a Source of Structural Violence”.
A consumer society has the following characteristics (drawn from McGregor, 2001). Identities are built
largely out of things because things have meaning. People measure their lives by money and ownership of
things. People are convinced that to consume is the surest route to personal happiness, social status, and
national success. Advertising, packaging, and marketing create illusory needs that are deemed real because
the “economic” machine has made people feel inferior and inadequate. To keep the economic machine moving,
people have to be dissatisfied with what they have, hence, with whom they are. Consequently, the meaning of
one’s life is located in acquisition, ownership, and consumption. In a consumer society, market values
permeate every aspect of daily lives. Marketplaces are abstract, stripped of culture (except the culture of
consumption), of social relations, and of any social-historical context. Consumers are placed at the center of the
“good society” as individuals who freely and autonomously pursue choices through rational means, creating a
society through the power they exercise in the market. Consequently, in a consumer society, there is a widespread
lack of moral discipline, a glorification of greed and material accumulation, an increased breakdown in family and
community, a rise of lawlessness and disorder, an ascendancy of racism and bigotry, a rise in the priority of national
interests over the welfare of humanity, and an increase in alienation and isolation. Social space is reorganized around
leisure and consumption as central social pursuits and as the basis for social relationships. A consumer society
needs leisure to be commercialized and the home to be mechanized in order that time and energy are freed up
for shopping and producing more things to buy. Social activities and emotions are turned into economic activities
through the process of commodification. In a consumer society, the act of consuming eventually leads to
materialism, defined as a culture where material interests are primary and supercede other social goals (Friedman,
1993). Durning (1992) claims that people living in a consumer culture attempt to satisfy social, emotional, and
spiritual needs with material things. This materialism eventually co-opts people’s physical lives, community, and
spirit because it gives a misleading sense of being in control and secure, in the short term. A consumer society is fast
paced, based on round the clock living but people were not biologically designed for this pace. To compensate for
the stress, as a quick fix, people believe that all problems have a material or money solution. People use
spending and materialism as a way to build a new ego. People try to become new persons by buying products
that support their self-image. Displaying all of the goods one has accumulated helps one gain prestige and
envy, thereby living out the ideology of conspicuous consumption. Unfortunately, this practice creates a false,
temporary sense of inner peace because the religion of the market (a system of beliefs) co-opts aspects of humanity
and spirituality. People eventually begin to think that things are out of whack, that their priorities are mixed up, that
their moral center is being lost so . . . they spend more to cover up the fear. To exacerbate this fear, technology has
left people isolated with no sense of belonging. It has cocooned them to the extent that they are blinded to their
destructive ways. Wisalo (1999) suggests that such destructive consumerism occurs because of humans’
insecurity in their hearts and minds. Ironically, people allegedly consume to gain this security. He says that
people feel they can become a new person by purchasing those products that support their self-image of
whom they are, want to be, and where they want to go. Unfortunately, this approach to becoming a new
person, to developing a sense of self, is unsustainable. People "under the influence of consumerism" never feel
completely satisfied because owning something cannot help meet the security of heart and mind, the deeper needs of
humanity. Constantly spending and accumulating only gives short-term fulfilment and relief from the need to
have peace and security in life.
Capitalism Impact
The globalized capitalist system is behind war in the Middle East, well established and
profiting from both sides of the conflict. The only hope to break its grasp is to educate
today’s youth and future leaders. This debate is the ideal platform to stop capitalism’s
disruptions of peace.
LLC; “What ends first:Globalization or the Multinational State?”, Etalkinghead. October 12, 2005, < http://www.eta
lkinghead.com/archives/what-ends-firstglobalization-or-the-multinational-state-2005-10-12.html>
The war fought in the deserts of Babylon is unprecedented in its use of Corporate resources: it is a war
supported and sustained by many military contractors. Strong and resolute alliances are firmly in place in
strategic and binding locations such as Israel (of course), Egypt, Saudi Arabia; with a swift eye towards
Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria. It is romantic, naive, and uneducated to pretend the rise and ultimate
consolidation of the Corporate, Multinational Megapower, is not happening, and even if it is, to say,
Democracy and Patriotism shall set things straight back on the same collision course they have been for
centuries (that’s the romantic part). Globalization is not ending, it has only started. And where it is going
will be determined by the Corporate scions of the next order. The most creative and fundamental question
lies not so much in what is going to happen? but Exactly who is going to make it happen?: to assuage the
complexities rising everyday, to reconcile the most compelling questions of all times by setting them on
their proper track, we need to know where this fresh blood is coming from. For that, we look to the quality
of our new and future leaders. Till then, all other questions are irrelevant, and asking questions that are
bigger than the compounded existence of present time, the current hour; is like playing God. Let us look at
the events of the next minute, so that we may examine the following few seconds. And if there is any hope
to be had, let us see to it that our Young people are educated enough to persevere beyond the distinct
limitations and suppressed woes of their present times.
Capitalism Impact
Neoliberal capitalist systems have infiltrated modern-life, eliminating individual freedoms

with biopolitical, societal influences, and seeks to commodify human culture and
communication. The impact to this commodification is the anaesthetized normalization of
the human psyche.
LLC; “Neoliberalism Globalization and The Commodification of Global Culture” Etalkinghead. December 16,
2005, < http://www.etalkinghead.com/archives/neoliberalism-globalization-and-the-commodification-of-global-
culture-2005-12-16.html>
Though based on theoretical and economic models, Neoliberalism is a profoundly subtle but deeply
transforming Cultural Phenomena. The theoretical and economic surefootedness of neoliberalism lies in its
wanton perpetuation and acceptance as a cultural form, perpetrating its doctrine through cunning principles
and technologies of Bio-Power. As Jim McGuigan, an acclaimed sociologist, expresses “Theoritical
critique of neo-liberal thought and practice is necessary but what captures my attention most, as a culture
analyst rather than a political economist, is the command of neo-liberalism over popular consciousness and
everyday life” (2004). Free trade zones open themselves up to the deluge of millions of products and
services and a good proportion of them are cultural, though in a sense not understood hundred years ago.
“When all forms of communication become commodities, then culture, the stuff of communications,
inevitably becomes a commodity as well. And that is what’s happening. Culture-the shared experiences that
give meaning to human life- is being pulled inexorably into the media marketplace, where it is being
revamped along commercial lines” (Rifkin, 2000: 140). The Culture of Neoliberalism is a brand name
culture and the careful bio-political manipulation of these ingredients of human consumption define a
transformation of Culture that creates new sanctions on who buys what, who views what, who eats what,
leading to an anaesthetized normalization of the human psyche.
Capitalism Impact
Capitalism seeks to destroy free consciousness in favor of a biopolitically controlled

corporate-favored consciousness, hidden under the veneer of democracy.
The eradication of a national, traditional, and spiritual consciousness is critical and part and parcel to the
Neoliberalization of the World Order. Insomuch on the surface it is not a bad idea as it destroys
nationalism, rigid mores, and religious mandates. However, Neoliberalism intends to replace those old
hearth values with new Corporate ones, creating an essential global bourgeoisie that it normalizes through a
double speak, selling commercialization and free market choices as democracy.
Capitalism is moving quickly to expand and dominate the social space, selling false
manifestations of hopes and dreams rather than physical items. “Cultural capitalism”
threatens the very commodification of life itself.
The agenda of free-trade is inherently an agenda of Cultural Capitalism. Using shells of old cultures and
vestiges of marginally extant tradition as familiar icons and anti-icons, creating a set of customized diverse
and international homogenously inspired products aimed to generate maximum profit and address a
fundamental consumption based solidarity sugarcoated and sold as Equality, Diversity and of course,
Globalization. This is Cultural Capitalism. According to Jeremy Rifkin (2000), ('Cultural
production is beginning to eclipse physical production in world commerce and trade (p8); This is the era
of cultural capitalism McGuigan 2004). By Cultural Capitalism, Rifkin does not just mean the
priority of an information and service economy over an industrial economy, he means the
commercialization of experience itself (McGuigan 2004). All economy and culture are coming closer to the
prototype cultural industry of Hollywood, dealing in dreams and meanings. In this Weightless economy the
physical economy is shrinking (Rifkin 2000: 30). Additionally, the gatekeeping function of the new
Culture Capitalists creates a widespread commercialization of a few brand genres keeping out a larger output
of local innovation and originality through high barriers to entry, making these virtually imperceptible and
financially bankrupt in the deluge of cultural systemization, hyper-marketing, and iconization of a few select
artists.
Capitalism Impact
Capitalism has commodified happiness – this commodification of human emotion is just

the tip of the iceberg – dildos prove.
Rai 2006 (Alexander Rai, Drexel University, Stanford Graduate School of Business; “Democracy, Dildos, and The
Declaration of Independence,” March 31, 2006, <http://www.etalkinghead.com/archives/democracy-dildos-and-the-
declaration-of-independence-2006-03-31.html>
Etched in a parchment somewhere, sealed in dated ink, in cascading curled up calligraphy are the following
inscribed words: “Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness”. Since the day that the fateful ink stained
sentences into that piece of paper, in that single “Declaration of Independence”; the deepest, most visceral,
most tremulous feelings of all men and most women have been articulated, if not in those words, certainly
in other words. For instance, Spicygear.com, a company that specializes in “highest quality” vibrators,
dildos, personal lubricants, and condoms offers happiness. Spicygear.com also clearly values Liberty, as it
assures with emphasis in clear cut italics, “If you are just not happy with your product, you many return the
product to us for a Spicy Gear Store Credit.” The exercise of Liberty has been facilitated further by
SpicyGear’s punctuality, as a happy and liberated citizen testifies, "My SpicyGear experience was very
positive. I was able to order the item I wanted, and it arrived confidentially and in the time I was told it
would arrive." A Stanford University student comments, “Placing an order was simple and receiving my
items was even better. Thank you so much!! You better believe that I am and will continue to be a regular
customer!” So too today, nearly 300 million satisfied customers of Life, Liberty, and Happiness have set a
precedent for the world, spearheaded by a Declaration of Independence, seamlessly facilitated in their self-
evident pursuits by outlets of independence such as SpicyGear.com. But SpicyGear.com is not the only
outlet for Life, Liberty, and Happiness. Indeed, in a world where Independence is declared in such fine
inked curls, Happiness is an institution upon itself. Happiness is not merely the stuff of customer service, it
is a civic encounter, it is a currency, a dialogue, a dissertation. It is Diplomacy and Quid Pro Quo.
Necropolitics Impact—War/Violence
Modern sovereignty has manufactured “norms” for a society, in which reason

and ‘the good life” are privileged over all else. Its real, hidden function is to
destroy populations at its discretion, not utilizing reason but the distinction
between life and death.
The aim of this essay is not to debate the singularity of the extermination of the Jews or to hold it up by way of example. 6 I start from the idea
that modernity was at the origin of multiple concepts of sovereignty—and therefore of the
biopolitical. Disregarding this multiplicity, late-modern political criticism has unfortunately privileged
normative theories of democracy and has made the concept of reason one of the most important
elements of both the project of modernity and of the topos of sovereignty. 7 From this perspective, the
ultimate expression of sovereignty is the production of general norms by a body (the demos) made up of
free and equal men and women. These men and women are posited as full subjects capable of self-understanding, self-
consciousness, and self-representation. Politics, therefore, is defined as twofold: a project of autonomy and the
achieving of agreement among a collectivity through communication and recognition. This, we are
told, is what differentiates it from war. 8
In other words, it
is on the basis of a distinction between reason and unreason (passion, fantasy) that late-
modern criticism has been able to articulate a certain idea of the political, the community, the
subject—or, more fundamentally, of what the good life is all about, how to achieve it, and, in the
process, to become a fully moral agent. Within this paradigm, reason is the truth of the subject and
politics is the exercise of reason in the public sphere. The exercise of reason is tantamount to the
exercise of freedom, a key element for individual autonomy. The romance of sovereignty, in this case, rests on the belief that the subject
is the master and the controlling author of his or her own meaning. Sovereignty is therefore defined as a twofold process of self-institution and
self-limitation (fixing one's own limits for oneself). The exercise of sovereignty, in turn, consists in society's capacity for self-creation through
recourse to institutions inspired by specific social and imaginary significations. 9
This strongly normative reading of the politics of sovereignty has been the [End Page 13] object of numerous critiques, which I will not rehearse
here. 10 My concern is those figures of sovereignty whose central project is not the struggle for
autonomy but the generalized instrumentalization of human existence and the material destruction
of human bodies and populations. Such figures of sovereignty are far from a piece of prodigious insanity or an expression of a
rupture between the impulses and interests of the body and those of the mind. Indeed, they, like the death camps, are what
constitute the nomos of the political space in which we still live. Furthermore, contemporary
experiences of human destruction suggest that it is possible to develop a reading of politics,
sovereignty, and the subject different from the one we inherited from the philosophical discourse of
modernity. Instead of considering reason as the truth of the subject, we can look to other foundational
categories that are less abstract and more tactile, such as life and death.
Necropolitics Impact—Genocide
Sovereignty is the right to to designate the “enemy” for destruction. The

murderous functions of biopower in the modern state and its exploitation of
the difference between life and death, self and Other have provided the
justification for horrors such as the Holocaust.
Having presented a reading of politics as the work of death, I turn now to sovereignty, expressed predominantly
as the right to kill. For the purpose of my argument, I relate Foucault's notion of biopower to two other concepts: the state of exception
and the state of siege. 16 I examine those trajectories by which the state of exception and the relation of enmity have
become the normative basis of the right to kill. In such instances, power (and not necessarily state power)
continuously refers and appeals to exception, emergency, and a fictionalized notion of the enemy. It
also labors to produce that same exception, emergency, and fictionalized enemy. In other words, the question is: What is the relationship between
politics and death in those systems that can function only in a state of emergency?
In Foucault's formulation of it, biopower

appears to function through dividing [End Page 16] people into those
who must live and those who must die. Operating on the basis of a split between the living and the
dead, such a power defines itself in relation to a biological field—which it takes control of and vests
itself in. This control presupposes the distribution of human species into groups, the subdivision of the population
into subgroups, and the establishment of a biological caesura between the ones and the others. This
is what Foucault labels with the (at first sight familiar) term racism. 17
That race (or for that matter racism) figures so prominently in the calculus of biopower is entirely justifiable. After all,
more so than class-thinking (the ideology that defines history as an economic struggle of classes), race has been the ever present
shadow in Western political thought and practice, especially when it comes to imagining the
inhumanity of, or rule over, foreign peoples. Referring to both this ever-presence and the phantomlike world of race in
general, Arendt locates their roots in the shattering experience of otherness and suggests that the politics of race is
ultimately linked to the politics of death. 18 Indeed, in Foucault's terms, racism is above all a technology
aimed at permitting the exercise of biopower, "that old sovereign right of death." 19 In the economy of
biopower, the function of racism is to regulate the distribution of death and to make possible the
murderous functions of the state. It is, he says, "the condition for the acceptability of putting to
death." 20
Foucault states clearly that the sovereign right to kill (droit de glaive) and the mechanisms of biopower are
inscribed in the way all modern states function; 21 indeed, they can be seen as constitutive elements of state power in
modernity. According to Foucault, the Nazi state was the most complete example of a state exercising the right
to kill. This state, he claims, made the management, protection, and cultivation of life coextensive with
the sovereign right to kill. By biological extrapolation on the theme of the political enemy, in
organizing the war against its adversaries and, at the same time, exposing its own citizens to war,
the Nazi state is seen as having opened the way for a formidable consolidation of the right to kill, which
culminated in the project of the "final solution." In doing so, it became the archetype of a power
formation that combined the characteristics of the racist state, the murderous state, and the suicidal
state. [End Page 17]
It has been argued that the complete conflation of war and politics (and racism, homicide, and suicide), until they are indistinguishable from one
another, is unique to the Nazi state. The perception of the existence of the Other as an attempt on my life, as a
mortal threat or absolute danger whose biophysical elimination would strengthen my potential to
life and security—this, I suggest, is one of the many imaginaries of sovereignty characteristic of both
early and late modernity itself. Recognition of this perception to a large extent underpins most traditional
critiques of modernity, whether they are dealing with nihilism and its proclamation of the will for power as the essence of the being;
with reification understood as the becoming-object of the human being; or the subordination of
everything to impersonal logic and to the reign of calculability and instrumental rationality. 22 Indeed,
from an anthropological perspective, what these critiques implicitly contest is a definition of politics as the
warlike relation par excellence. They also challenge the idea that, of necessity, the calculus of life
passes through the death of the Other; or that sovereignty consists of the will and the capacity to
kill in order to live.
Taking a historical perspective, a number of analysts have argued that the material premises of Nazi extermination are to be found in colonial
imperialism on the one hand and, on the other, in the serialization of technical mechanisms for putting people to death—mechanisms developed
between the Industrial Revolution and the First World War. According to Enzo Traverso, the gas chambers and the ovens were
the culmination of a long process of dehumanizing and industrializing death, one of the original
features of which was to integrate instrumental rationality with the productive and administrative
rationality of the modern Western world (the factory, the bureaucracy, the prison, the army). Having become
mechanized, serialized execution was transformed into a purely technical, impersonal, silent, and
rapid procedure. This development was aided in part by racist stereotypes and the flourishing of a
class-based racism that, in translating the social conflicts of the industrial world in racial terms, ended up comparing the
working classes and "stateless people" of the industrial world to the "savages" of the colonial
world.
***Kritik Solvency***
Code Red Overview

Two power relations operate on human beings: government law and secret societal norms.
Capitalism is the intersection of these two ideas. These relations can be represented by the film A Few
Good Men. In this film, two soldiers are put on trial for the murder of a soldier who has been deemed to
have broken the ethical code of the marines. Their superior officer had declared a “Code Red”, ordering
the soldiers to beat their nonconforming fellow to death. This example illustrates the distinction between
these two different levels of power. Ask: why is the soldier killed? It is not law that a person must
conform to the ethical norms of the marines. What, then, is the force that deems such nonconformity as
wrong?
There is a disparity between the laws and rules written down as government law and those that
guide the actions of individuals. These secret norms, the ones that drive the other soldiers to conspire to
kill one who deviates from those norms is where true power lies and its where resistance must begin.
The general reaction to the oil crisis is some great market solution to the problem. TDP is the
ultimate expression of this logic. What our aff problemizes is the concept of “business of usual”. Energy
Policy has its own “Code Red”. The norm that drives us is capitalism: each person encouraged to keep
consuming, keep finding ways to consume, keep finding new spheres of existence that can be
incorporated into the logic of capitalism. It doesn’t matter what you consume, just keep consuming. The
worth of a person is dictated by their ability to produce and consume; those few who do not subscribe to
these concepts and do not maximize their consumption are deemed “unsuccessful”, “unproductive”,
“failures”. They are unwritten codes that are strengthened by destroying those who stray from their logic.
It is on this terrain that we must fight our battle.
Zizek 93. Zizek, Slavoj. 1993. “Why are Laibach and NSK not Fascists?” NSK State Website.
<http://www.nskstate.com/appendix/articles/why_are_laibach.php> Accessed June 24, 2008.
Superego is the obscene "nightly" law that necessarily redoubles and accompanies, as its shadow, the
"public" Law. This inherent and constitutive splitting in the Law is the subject of Rob Reiner's film A Few Good Men,
the court- martial drama about two marines accused of murdering one of their fellow soldiers. The military
prosecutor claims that the two marines' act was a deliberate murder, whereas the defense succeeds in proving that the
defendants just followed the so-called "Code Red," which authorizes the clandestine night-time beating of a
fellow soldier who, in the opinion of his peers or of the superior officer, has broken the ethical code of the
marines. The function of this "Code Red" is extremely interesting: it condones an act of transgression- illegal
punishment of a fellow soldier- yet at the same time it reaffirms the cohesion of the group, i.e. it calls for an act of
supreme identification with group values. Such a code must remain under the cover of night,
unacknowledged, unutterable- in public everybody pretends to know nothing about it, or even actively denies
its existence. It represents the "spirit of community" In its purest, exerting the strongest pressure on the
individual to comply with its mandate of group identification. Yet, simultaneously, it violates the explicit rules
of community life. (The plight of
the two accused soldiers is that they are unable to grasp this exclusion of "Code Red" from the "Big Other," the domain of the
public Law: They desperately ask themselves "What did we do wrong?" since they just followed the order of the superior officer.)
Where does this splitting of the Law into the written public Law and its underside, the "unwritten," obscene
secret code, come from? From the incomplete, "non-all" character of the public Law: explicit., public rules
do not suffice, so they have to be supplemented by a clandestine, "unwritten" code aimed at those who,
although they violate no public rules, maintain a kind of inner distance and do not truly identify with the "spirit of
community."
Solvency—Consciousness and Exposure Good

Capitalist systems such as body labor fail when their subjects stop believing that their influences on the mind
are natural. We must free our minds from the logic of capitalism in order to stop its march towards the
permanent commodification of our bodies.
Body labor and intellectual fetishism will not thrive in a world in which they are not regarded them as
“natural.” Indeed, such “property” cannot exist in a world that does not reify individualism as the highest human
value. This is one reason why, in capitalist societies, nationalism is on the rocks: demand for the flag and
clothing of the father- or motherland is much more limited than that for the accoutrements that facilitate
consumer identities. Transformation of the body into the final commodity frontier—a boundary along which
the United States holds a substantial comparative advantage—rests on occupation of the mind, on the subtle
yet unmistakable changes in personality and character whose appetite knows no bounds. As the not-yet-
invaded niece complained, “He looks and sounds like Uncle Ira, but there’s something wrong. He’s not Uncle Ira!”
Invasion of the Body Snatchers was based on a Fordist paradigm: everyone turned into an identical pod person, as it
were. Today’s “body invasion” encourages difference, uniqueness, and constant change. It is difficult for
Americans to recognize how, over the past 30 years, imperial economics has become an occupying force, a
totalitarian one that consumes the very bodies it produces. The consumer society, with its ubiquitous
advertisements and promises of improvement and constant renewal, is now almost a century old. During the 1950s,
television brought evidence of these transformative possibilities into every home, but the objective was more
“keeping up with the Joneses” than “creating a new you.” And all of this revolved around things, real material
objects: washers, refrigerators, cars, houses. Today, the imperial economy depends less and less on the things
themselves and more and more on the image and identity the consumer wishes—is virtually driven—to project.
That identity, moreover, is less and less an independent creation than one suggested by capital’s colonization of
the mind. Both body labor and mind labor regard the self as raw material, without intrinsic value, that can be
endlessly recycled into new, more expensive representations. We consume what we are. It is not Soylent Green,
perhaps, but it is…PEOPLE!
Solvency—Estate Tax
Including the death tax is critical. Our demand focuses on the one area that the gatekeepers
of sovereignty and control have left unguarded.
Anthony C. Infanti, who is an Associate Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh School of Law, in 2006 (“Homo Sacer, Homosexual:
Some Thoughts on Waging Tax Guerrilla Warfare,” UNBOUND Vol. 2: 27, , pg. 26-50, 2006)-
Thus, in place of our current approach of engaging the law on its own terms, we might consider using the
law strategically in an effort to provoke the closure of the door to the law and, concomitantly, to destabilize
heterosexual privilege. We could begin by rec- ognizing that, despite the quotation marks that so frequently surround the phrase, the “culture
war” is more than just a rhetorical device for the reactionary right. It is a very real war, and lesbians and gay men have too often found
themselves the victims of reactionary violence.98 Clearly outnumbered by our foes, we might take a page from the government’s playbook
when it litigates against its citizens,99 and adopt (and adapt) the tactics of guerrilla warfare100 — using the law to harass
the government and provoke it to close the door to the law firmly against us — in an attempt to erode support for the
het- ero status quo among the “civilian” population. I realize that this probably sounds like quite a radical suggestion; yet, as we
will see, it might require only the most ordinary of action to accomplish.101 Given the title of this essay and my
self-professed status as a tax geek, I’m sure that you won’t be surprised to learn that I think that tax would be the perfect area in
which to test these guerrilla warfare tactics against the government. Despite being an area of the law
that touches the life of nearly every lesbian and gay man, tax is the one door to the law that is generally left
unattended by the experts who have been co-opted into serving as doorkeepers.102 As a result, tax is one area
of the law where we will be able to approach the doorkeeper of the law directly, without having to pass
through a gauntlet of experts attempting to dissuade us — or, worse, actively prevent us — from making
our way to the already open door to the law. Approaching such a relatively unguarded door to the law may provide us
the advantage of surprise in our attack (depending, of course, on who reads this essay). I
Solvency – Focus on the Body Good
Capitalism necessitates the relationship between one’s identity and the economic participation necessary to
maintain that identity, attempting to “close the loop” between the consumer and the producer. This
commodification of the body as a malleable element of the system makes the body the ideal subject of our
political interrogation.
In mainstream social science, identity is conventionally linked to sets of ascriptive characteristics
associated with culture, such as language, foods, religion, myths, beliefs, and collective social practices.
This has, historically, been seen as the basis for concepts such as tribe, ethnicity, and nation. While these can
be commodified—witness the proliferation of ethnic restaurants in any city in the United States or the
integration of “culture” into fashion—they are not infinitely malleable. Moreover, membership in a
cultural group does not require “body labor,” that is, work put into transforming the body into a
distinct identity. By contrast, from the capitalist perspective, identity is a plastic consumer attribute, one
rooted in fear and desire. It is endlessly moldable. Not only can one purchase the accoutrements
necessary to acquire a new body identity, one must also work continuously to ensure that the identity is
visible for all to see. Consider, for example, mountain bicyclists. The UC-Santa Cruz campus, which
comprises 2,000 acres at the foot of the Santa Cruz Mountains on the central coast of California, is especially
attractive to mountain bikers. Although a few ride junkers and dress casually, the truly-committed own very
expensive bicycles and wear costly Spandex-based outfits, which they do not hesitate to display. Some
have become quite militant in defense of their “rights to ride,” moreover, and they are unremittingly hostile
to those who rely on fossil fuels or feet to get around. They also tend to emerge en masse when restrictions
on access to particular places are proposed. Specialty stores, magazines, books, and web sites all cater to
mountain bikers, and keep them well informed on what is required to stay at the cutting edge of the
sport. It takes labor, both mental and physical, to maintain this identity, and there is no dearth of
accumulation possibilities inherent in pandering to it. The returns to an individual’s investment in such an
identity is a form of social capital whose expenditure further helps to establish one as a member of an
identity group. This is a caricature—to some degree—but it characterizes any one of hundreds or
thousands of commodified identities. On the one hand, an individual invests considerable labor into
acquiring an identity that sets her off from others; on the other hand, that identity has meaning only if
there are others who also work to acquire it. (In this instance, marching to a different drum does not a
market make.) It is the creation of such identity groups that makes possible the exploitation of bodies as
sources of profit and accumulation. To put this another way—which brings us back to Soylent Green—
body labor is a simultaneous process of consumption and production, through which the production of
a certain identity requires consumption of specific goods, and through whose cultivation surplus value
can be extracted by capitalists. Note that this process has nothing whatsoever to do with subsistence;
indeed, the acquisition of such identities is generally possible only for those whose incomes are far above
subsistence levels (hence, one tends not to find such identity groups among the world’s five billion poor).
While it might be necessary for those with sufficient income to purchase a new computer every two
years and a new car every three, saturation levels are quickly reached—which is why advertisements
for such goods tend to play up identity angles: masculinity for trucks, speed for computers. You are
what you consume. And what you consume is yourself, so to speak. Soylent Green…is…YOU!
Solvency—Deconstruction Good
Deconstruction works better than all other alts
(Robert, “Are Parody and Deconstruction secretly the same thing?”, New Literary History)
This is the historical ground of possibility for my argument that, while [End Page 679] it has been applied
promiscuously to all sorts of texts, for a variety of reasons of internal logic, deconstruction works best (that is, most
intimately and creatively) with those works that defy and complicate mimetic assumptions, be they postmodern
buildings, nouveaux romans, cubist montages, or Don Quixote. Parody did not need Derrida to tell it that mimesis is
an imperfect and deeply paradoxical proposition in the complex play of presence and absence that constitutes
signification. It knows that language differs from things and defers meanings into a prolonged (potentially infinite)
play of echoes and substitutions. It has been playing with the conventions of authenticity (which make language as
representation work) for centuries. While an aggressive enough deconstructive reading can make any text tell the
story of its incapacity to escape the indeterminate play of language, 18 parody invites such reading and faces it
without unusual anxiety. From its basic moves, deconstruction frames all writing as parody in the sense that it treats
it as caught up in a tissue of echo, allusion, appropriation, and misprision. As a mode of interpretation, it violates the
broadly mimetic and expressive assumptions of "straight" writing and reads with the indirections of the "crooked."
Obviously, writing does not fall neatly into two objective categories of straight (mimetic-expressive) and crooked
(ironic); that is precisely the sort of binary opposition deconstruction teaches us to suspect, and it is more suspicious
than most.
Solvency - Tactical Media—Reappropriation

Our aff challenges both debate and societal norms by mimicking debate norms and capitalist “solutions”.
“Tactical Media” like the aff reappropriates traditional structures to voice an alternate message, raising
questions about “normal” behavior such as framing problems and solutions in terms of unfettered
consumerism.
Renzi 07. Renzi, Alessandra. University of Toronto. “Tactical Media”. 18 March 2007. Liberating Voices! <
http://www.publicsphereproject.org/patterns/> Accessed 7/24/08.
Generally, TM rely on artistic practices and "do it yourself" (DIY) media, created from readily available, relatively cheap
technology and means of communication. A tactical medium is devised according to the context where it is supposed to function.
This means that it is sensitive to the different sets of communicative genres and resources valued in a specific place, which may
vary from street theatre and banner-dropping to the internet or radio. For this reason, TM actions they are very effective and
can take on a wide variety of forms. For instance, they can mimic traditional means of information while circulating
alternative content; they can subvert the meaning of well-known cultural symbols; and, they can create new outlets for
counter-information with the help of new media.
In many cases, TM practitioners borrow from avant-garde art practices (e.g. linguistic sabotage and detournement), politics and
consumer culture to trouble commonly held beliefs about every-day life. Such techniques–also called culture jamming–
involve an appropriation of the language and discourses of their political target, which is familiar to the non-
activist audience. Therefore, the subversion of the message’s meaning pushes the audience to notice where
some strategies of domination are at work in a given discourse, raising questions about the objectivity of what
is believed to be “normal.” TM actions creatively reframe known discourses, causing the public to recognize
their limits. According to TM theorist David Garcia “classical TM, unlike agit-prop, are designed to invite discourse”
(Garcia 2006), they plant the seeds for discussion by operating a fissure in what is considered to be “objective reality,” requiring
a form of engagement to decode their message.
Solvency—Resist State—AT: Rights Kritiks

Shiv Visvanathan, senior fellow, Centre for the Study of Developing Societies, 1999
“Between Cosmology and System: The Heuristics of a Dissenting Imagination,”
http://www.ces.uc.pt/emancipa/research/en/ft/sonhos.html
The radical possibilities of a biomass as an epistemology can be easily suppressed. For example, in anthologies of
energy, biomass is categorized as a way of life, of societies outside the pale of industrialism. It is usually chapter 10
or 12 of a textbook on energy, a sidebet following the preoccupations with nuclear, oil, hydel or even wind energy. It
is seen as residual.
There is simultaneously a split in the construction of the globalization regime. Oil and nuclear are for the industrial
what biomass is for the societies of Africa and Asia that might be triaged out of history. Biomass then becomes the
discourse of the defeated, the third world and the third rate. Consider how the regime of biomass appears in the spy
thrillers that Seshadri was so fond of. Into the happy life of western industrialism appear the oil sheikhs, the OPEC
cartels and the urban guerrilla. Constructed simultaneously with the oil crisis is the wood crisis. The pictures of the
woman carrying wood, the guerrilla in the forest and the oil sheikh become the three archetypal figures of the crisis.
Yet we should not succumb to such a reading because it not only predetermines narratives but also creates pre-
emptive futures. We have to remember that the Vietnam War represents the victory and resistance of a biomass
society over an industrial high-calorie regime. Seshadri repeatedly emphasized that biomass is the conversation of
the leaf talking to its ancient friends coal and oil, establishing similarities and differences in their common
genealogy to the sun.
One must emphasize some dangers here. The first is the sheer economism of discourse and the danger of
conventional economic categories and thought. The sun is not a conventional factory. It is not too keen to subject
itself to man-made time and organization. Secondly, biomass should not be reduced to the language of scarcity and
crisis. There are shortages, there is poverty, but biomass need not be reduced to a discourse on scarcity. Nicholas
Xenos’s comments are apt in this context. In his Scarcity and Modernity (1989), Xenos observes that the European
18th century saw the invention of both the steam engine and of scarcity. Scarcity, as anthropologists have pointed
out, is seen as episodic in most societies. It signified a period of insufficiency or dearth. This remained the principal
usage until the late nineteenth century, when neoclassical economics made the scarcity postulate its foundation. The
notion of scarcity also opens up a Pandora’s box of technological fixes, where problems of biomass need
biotechnology and then the entire spectrum of biotechnology gets reduced to genetic engineering. Seshadri
explained that Biomass is a word for people. It smacks "of the ordinary and the non-mechanical. Compare the tree to
a factory, or a cow to a reactor. Like the people it is not amenable to efficiency and control in a factory sense. You
can’t boss over the science of photosynthesis."
The state thus has problems with biomass in the way it does not have with electricity. Electricity is a disciplinary
grid but biomass offers little ground for collectivization to "turn the stinking pastry of the ordinary people into a
tasty pie by trainers, educators, the masters." You can’t say Soviets+Electrification = Communism in a Biomass
society. Unless, you are a Pol Pot.
It is around biomass that the resistance to the state can come into being. Biomass reopens the debate in a
tremendous way. Firstly, energy forms like oil; nuclear or large dams are state-oriented while biomass speaks the
language of civil society. Secondly, by linking life and death in the idea of the cycle, it brackets the idea of
obsolescence, preventing it from being read as a universalizing process.
It brackets the idea of progress in its linear form by offering the multiplicity of times that democracy so desperately
needs. Biomass also recalls the idea of the commons and particularly the idea of cognitive justice. The two concepts
are closely interlinked. The idea of the commons is not just an amalgamation, a mapping of physical and natural
resources. It is also the diversity of skills required to understand, access and dwell within it. Seshadri dubbed it "a
commons of the mind." It is in this context that we must emphasize that rights often speak the economistic language
of access. Speaking a language of rights in a biomass society only leads to conceptual inflation, to a proliferation of
rights, including the rights to food, fuel, and employment without tying or connecting them at a moral or epistemic
level. The language of rights, particularly in its individualistic-economistic language, becomes partly alien to a
biomass society creating in fact the tragedy of the commons. One does not seek to abandon it but to translate it into
the language of community and cosmos.
In that sense the politics of a biomass society goes beyond the standard discourses of the French revolution, both of
the Communist Manifesto or the Rights of Man. Firstly it goes beyond the discourses of liberty and equality to an
emphasis on fraternity not merely between communities but between man and nature. But it should not be seen only
as an ecolacy of nature but of technology. It reads liberty, equality and fraternity as the first triangle of modern
politics. But it counterposes to it a second triangle of pollution, waste and obsolescence and it reads it in terms of a
community of multiple times. The notion of the cycle becomes fundamental here. As Balaji observed, "When
Seshadri introduced the centrality of food, he knew that food chains exist in cycles. Through food you can see the
interrelationship between a wide variety of complex systems. Terrestrial. Aquatic. Cosmic. A variety of cycles
interface and Doc wanted to track the process through energy."
Solvency—AT: People Will Reject Plan
The affirmation of using human’s for fuel constitutes the most effective means of challenging scientific
hegemony—the aff’s seemingly impossible demand calls into to question the dominant paradigm by exposing
the limits of the objectivity which it uses to legitimate itself.
Thomas S. Kuhn, professor emeritus of linguistics and philosophy at the Massachussetts Institute of Technology,
The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962, 3rd edition – 1996, p. 2-6
historians of science have been finding it more and more difficult to fulfil the functions
In recent years, however, a few
that the concept of development-by-accumulation assigns to them. As chroniclers of an incremental process, they
discover that additional research makes it harder, not easier, to answer questions like: When was oxygen discovered? Who
first conceived of energy conservation? Increasingly, a few of them suspect that these are simply the wrong sorts of questions to ask.
Perhaps science does not develop by the accumulation of individual discoveries and inventions. Simultaneously, these
same historians confront growing difficulties in distinguishing the "scientific" component of past observation and belief from what their
predecessors had readily labeled "error" and "superstition." The more carefully they study, say, Aristotelian dynamics, phlogistic chemistry, or
caloric thermodynamics, the more certain they feel that those once current views of nature were, as a whole, neither legs scientific nor more the
product of human idiosyncrasy than those current today. If these out-of-date beliefs are to be called myt hs, then myths can be
produced by the same sorts of methods and held for the same sorts of reasons that now lead to scientific knowledge.
If, on the other hand, they are to be called science, then science has included bodies of belief quite incompatible with
the ones we hold today. Given these alternatives, the historian must choose the latter. Out-of- date theories are not in
principle unscientific because they have been discarded. That choice, however, makes it difficult to see scientific
development as a process of accretion. The same historical research that displays the difficulties in isolating
individual inventions and discoveries gives ground for profound doubts about the cumulative process through which
these individual contributions to science were thought to have been compounded.
The result of all these doubts and difficulties is a historiographic revolution in the study of science, though one that is still in its early stages.
Gradually, and often without entirely realizing they are doing so, historians of science have begun to ask new sorts of questions and to trace
different, and often less than cumulative, developmental lines for the sciences. Rather than seeking the permanent contributions of an older
science to Our present vantage, they attempt to display the historical integrity of that science in its own time. They ask, for example, not about the
relation of Galileo's views to those of modern science, but rather about the relationship between his views and those of his group, i.e., his
teachers, contemporaries, and immediate successors in the sciences. Furthermore, they insist upon studying the opinions of that group and other
similar ones from the viewpoint-usually very different from that of modern science-that gives those opinions the maximum internal coherence
and the closest possible fit to nature. Seen through the works that result, works perhaps best exemplified in the writings of Alexandre Koyre',
science does not seem altogether the same enterprise as the one discussed by writers in the older historiographic tradition. By implication, at least,
these historical studies suggest the possibility of a new image of science. This essay aims to delineate that image by making explicit some of the
new historiography's implications.
What aspects of science will emerge to prominence in the course of this effort? First, at least in order of presentation, is the insufficiency of
methodological directives, by themselves, to dictate a unique substantive conclusion to many sorts of scientific questions, Instructed to examine
electrical or chemical phe nomena, the man who is ignorant of these fields but who knows what it is to be scientific may legitimately reach any
one of a number of incompatible conclusions. Among those legitimate possibilities, the particular conclusions he does arrive at are probably
determined by his prior experience in other fields, by the accidents of his investigation, and by his own individual makeup. What beliefs about the
stars, for example, does he bring to the study of chemistry or electricity? Which of the many conceivable experiments relevant to the new field
does he elect to perform first? And what aspects of the complex phenomenon that then results strike him as particularly relevant to an elucidation
of the nature of chemical change or of electrical affinity? For the individual, at least, and sometimes for the scientific community as well, answers
to questions like these are often essential determinants of scientific development. We shall note, for example, in Section 11 that the early
developmental stages of most sciences have been characterized by continual competition between a number of
distinct views of nature, each partially derived from, and all roughly compatible with, the dictates of scientific
observation and method. What differentiated these various schools was not one or another failure of method- they
were all "scientific"-but what we shall come to call their incommensurable ways of seeing the world and of
practicing science in it. Observation and experience can and must drastically restrict the range of admissible
scientific belief, else there would be no science. But they cannot alone determine a particular body of such belief. An
apparently arbitrary element, compounded of personal and historical accident, is always a formative ingredient of
the beliefs espoused by a given scientific community at a given time.
That element of arbitrariness does not, however, indicate that any scientific group could practice its trade without some set of received beliefs.
Nor does it make less consequential the particular constellation to which the group, at a given time, is in fact committed. Effective research
scarcely begins before a scientific community thinks it has acquired firm answers to questions like the following: What are the fundamental
entities of which the universe is composed? I-low do these interact with each other and with the senses? What questions may legitimately be
asked about such entities and what techniques employed in seeking solutions? At least in the mature sciences, answers (or full substitutes for
answers) to questions like these are firmly embedded in the educational initiation that prepares and licenses the student for professional practice.
Because that education is both rigorous and rigid, these answers come to exert a deep hold on the scientific mind. That they can do so does much
to account both for the peculiar efficiency of the normal research activity and for the direction in which it proceeds at any given time. When
examining normal science in Sections III, IV, and V, we shall want finally to describe that research as a strenuous and devoted attempt to force
nature into the conceptual boxes supplied by professional education. Simultaneously, we shall wonder whether research could proceed without
such boxes, whatever the element of arbitrariness in their historic origins and, occasionally, in their subsequent development.
Yet that element of arbitrariness is present, and it too has an important effect on scientific development, one which
will be examined in detail in Sections VI, VII, and VIII. Normal science, the activity in which most scientists
inevitably spend almost all their time, is predicated on the assumption that the scientific community knows what the
world is like. Much of the success of the enterprise derives from the community's willingness to defend that
assumption, if necessary at considerable cost. Normal science, for example, often suppresses fundamental novelties
because they are necessarily subversive of its basic commitments. Nevertheless, so long as those commitments
retain an element of the arbitrary, the very nature of normal research ensures that novelty shall not be suppressed for
very long. Sometimes a normal problem, one that ought to be solvable by known rules and procedures, resists
the reiterated onslaught of the ablest members of the group within whose competence it falls. On other
occasions a piece of equipment designed and constructed for the purpose of normal research fails to perform
in the anticipated manner, revealing an anomaly that cannot, despite repeated effort, be aligned with
professional expectation. In these and other ways besides, normal science repeatedly goes astray. And when it
does-when, that is, the profession can no longer evade anomalies that subvert the existing tradition of scientific
practice-then begin the extraordinary investigations that lead the profession at last to a new set of
commitments, a new basis for the practice of science. The extraordinary episodes in which that shift of
professional commitments occurs are the ones known in this essay as scientific revolutions. They are the
tradition-shattering complements to the tradition-bound activity of normal science.
Solvency—AT: Cooption/No Action

TURN: Plan is first step and accelerates productive policies not immersed in capitalism, as
well as other forms of concrete action.
Despite many successes, TM practices like the Yes Men impersonations have often been criticized because their short-
term interventions expose the weak points in the system but do not attempt to address them. However, TM
should not be seen or employed as an isolated form of protest but as one tool for groups to reach wider
audiences in a broader network of political struggle. In fact, even when they hijack the attention of the mass media, the
Yes Men stunts and Saint Precario do not constitute an emancipatory practice in itself. Yet, they are a great example of
how to bring topics to debate. As part of an organized campaign centred on a specific issue, such stunts can give resonance
to voices otherwise unheard, and hopefully open up some space for a dialogue between minority and majority
groups–or between minorities.
Moreover, TM practices can help make transversal connections between context-related social, cultural and
political problems, and various organized sites of resistance. For example, the Telestreet network enables different
activist groups and coalitions to use their space to support or showcase their own cause. Similarly, TM practices can be useful to
create new memes that raise awareness of unjust social conditions, as in the case of Saint Precario.
Ultimately, it is important to maintain TM’s emphasis on experimentation, collaboration and the exchange of knowledge as part
of a broader cartography of organized social struggle. For these reasons, there is a need to create more conditions where
TM exploration of new possibilities for resistance can take place. Such projects can range from media literacy
teaching to culture jamming workshops in schools, to festivals and temporary media labs where people can come together and
develop creative ways to engage in protest and critique of the systems which govern their lives from an ever-
increasing distance. Therefore
TM practices are marked by an ongoing attempt to experiment with the dynamics of media dissemination of information,
searching for the most effective way to bypass the obstacles created during the diffusion of such information, in order to reach an
audience. Thus, TM actions can help activists attract the attention of the mainstream media, as well as enable
them to convey their message in a way that is intelligible to the audience.
Solvency—AT: Reform Capitalism/Gibson-Graham

Attempts to criticize and alter specific capitalist practices have been empirically proven to
fail. Rather than attempting to re-take the political space already occupied by capital, we
must instead move towards a radical rejection of our involvement in the commodifying
capitalist system.
Empson 2001 (Erik Empson, “Anti-Capitalism with a smiley face,” Studies in Social and Political Thought, Issue
5, September 2001 <http://www.makeworlds.org/node/32>)
Although No Logo tries to balance its attack on the commercial world with the reality of production, what
tends to be missing is any connection between the ideologies of consumer society and the social needs that
are generated by the cultural reproduction of the worker. We are continuously offered sound-bite rebukes to
corporate ideology, yet the generality of conditions that have given rise to these ideational social forms are
never explored. A case in point is a section that deals with the encroachment of private interests into
education. Though usefully detailing how in the U.S. soft drink brands and computer manufacturers have
exchanged money for publicity with public bodies, Klein saturates the text with her own outrage to the
extent that the reasons behind these events receive little remark. Indeed not once does she attempt to
explain exactly why such processes should be condemned. Rather she assumes that it will be self evident to
her readership why genuine public life ought to be preserved. For what reason? The resistance against
brand-extension into education turns out to be entirely symbolic: these quasi-sacred spaces remind us that
unbranded space is possible. This might convince her coffee-shop comrades, but it will make few inroads
into shaping the politics of inner-city kids for whom Coke day is a welcome break from being taught social
obedience. Brands are not the power, yet Klein colludes with the market rhetoric to the extent that she
presents them as such. Most capital is anonymous and apart from high-street stores, much corporate
marketing is not directed at consumers at all, but at other capitalists. This goes on in a world where
corporate power and its legitimacy as the very motor behind social interchange has already been established
and entrenched. Brands do not colonize space, the social power of capital has already made this space its
own. Rather the brand fills out already colonized spaces, and herein certain companies in competition for
the same market use resources to produce a social meaning to attach to their wares. In a Marcusian vein
Klein is sensitive to the fact that this process involves the incorporation of any manner of existent cultural
discourses and their reproduction as the exclusive property of a particular commodity. Hence the
impression that capital speaks for and can satisfy our social desires coupled with the explosion of a market
for people skilled in fabrication and mystification. Most of this stinks, but it could never be the basis for a
politics. Capital itself is not tied to any particular identity; if one particular manifestation is discredited it
will simply move to a different domain, this is given by its character as a social power. The celebration of
symbolic campaigns against individual capitalists shows that Klein has bought the fetishism of the
commodity wholesale. There is however no reason why we should. As the grandfather of the critique of
capital scribbled in his notebooks so many years ago, the worker cares as much about the crappy shit he has
to make as does the capitalist himself who employs him, and who also couldn’t give a damn for the junk.
Genealogy Solvency
The affirmative is a noncentralized theoretical production that is in opposition to the theoretical unity of
scientific positivism. The insurrection of subjugated knowledges that have been disqualified by science forms
a genealogy that gives strength to critique.
Michel Foucault, deceased Frenchman, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976,
trans. David Macey, 2K3, p. 6-8
So I would say: for the last ten or fifteen years, the immense and proliferating criticizability of things, institutions, practices, and discourses; a
sort of general feeling that the ground was crumbling beneath our feet, especially in places where it seemed most familiar, most solid, and closest
[nearest] to us, to our bodies, to our everyday gestures. But alongside this crumbling and the astonishing efficacy of discontinuous, particular, and
local critiques, the facts were also revealing something that could not, perhaps, have been foreseen from the outset: what might be called the
inhibiting effect specific to totalitarian theories, or at least-what I mean is-all -encompassing and global theories. Not that all-encompassing
and global theories haven't, in fairly constant fashion, provided-and don't continue to provide tools that can be used at the local level;
Marxism and psychoanalysis are living proof that they can. But they have, I think, provided tools that can be used at the local level
only when, and this is the real point, the theoretical unity of their discourse is, so to speak, suspended, or at least cut up,
ripped up, torn to shreds, turned inside out, displaced, caricatured, dramatized, theatricalized, and so on. Or at least that the totalizing
approach always has the effect of putting the brakes on. So that, if you like, is my first point, the first characteristic of what has been happening
over the last fifteen years or so: the local character of the critique; this does not, I think, mean soft eclecticism, opportunism, or openness to any
old theoretical undertaking, nor does it mean a sort of deliberate asceticism that boils down to losing as much theoretical weight as possible. I
think that the essentially local character of the critique in fact indicates something resembling a sort of autonomous
and noncentralized theoretical production, or in other words a theoretical production that does not need a visa from
some common regime to establish its validity.
This brings us to a second feature of what has been happening for some time now. The point is this: It is what might be called "returns of
knowledge" that makes this local critique possible. What I mean by "returns of knowledge" is this: while it is true that in recent years we have
often encountered, at least at the superficial level, a whole thematic: "life, not knowledge," "the real, not erudition," "money, not books," it
appears to me that beneath this whole thematic, through it and even within it, we have seen what might be called the insurrection of
subjugated knowledges. When I say "subjugated knowledges," I mean two things. On the one hand, I am referring to historical contents that
have been buried or masked in functional coherences or formal systematizations. To put it in concrete terms if you like, it was certainly not a
semiology of life in the asylum or a sociology of delinquence that made an effective critique of the asylum or the prison possible; it really was the
appearance of historical contents. Quite simply because historical contents alone allow us to see the dividing lines in the confrontations and
struggles that functional arrangements or systematic organizations are designed to mask. Subjugated knowledges are, then, blocks of
historical knowledges that were present in the functional and systematic ensembles, but which were masked, and the
critique was able to reveal their existence by using, obviously enough, the tools of scholarship.
Second, I think subjugated knowledges should be understood as meaning, something else and , in a sense, something quite different. When I say
"subjugated knowledges" I am also referring to a whole series of knowledges that have been disqualified as
nonconceptual knowledges, as insufficiently elaborated knowledges: naive knowledges, hierarchically inferior knowledges,
knowledges that are below the required level of erudition or scientificity. And it is thanks to the reappearance of
these knowledges from below, of these unqualified or even disqualified knowledges, it is thanks to the reappearance of these knowledges:
the knowledge of the psychiatrized, the patient, the nurse, the doctor, that is parallel to, marginal to, medical knowledge, the knowledge of the
delinquent, what I would call, if you like, what people know (and this is by no means the same thing as comon knowledge or common sense but,
on the contrary, a particular knowledge, a knowledge that is local, regional, or differential, incapable of unanimity and which derives its power
solely from the fact that it is different from all the knowledges that surround it), it is the reappearance of what people know at a local level, of
these disqualified knowledges, that made the critique possible.
You might object that there is something very paradoxical about grouping together and putting into the same category of "subjugated
knowledges," on the one hand, historical, meticulous, precise, technical expertise and, on the other, these singular, local knowledges, the
it is
noncommonsensical knowledges that people have, and which have in a way been left to lie fallow, or even kept in the margins. Well, I think
the coupling together of the buried scholarly knowledge and knowledges that were disqualified by the
hierarchy of erudition and sciences that actually gave the discursive critique of the last fifteen years its essential
strength. What was at stake in both cases, in both this scholarly knowledge and these disqualified knowledges, in these two forms of
knowledge-the buried and the disqualified? A historical knowledge of struggles. Both the specialized domain of scholarship and the disqualified
knowledge people have contained the memory of combats, the very memory that had until then been confined to the margins. And so we have
the outline of what might be called a genealogy, or of multiple genealogical investigations. We have both a meticulous rediscovery of
struggles and the raw memory of fights. These genealogies are a combination of erudite knowledge and what people know. They would not
have been possible-they could not even have been attempted-were it not for one thing: the removal of the tyranny of
overall discourses, with their hierarchies and all the privileges enjoyed by theoretical vanguards. If you like, we can
give the name "genealogy" to this coupling together of scholarly erudition and local memories, which allows us to
constitute a historical knowledge of struggles and to make use of that knowledge in contemporary tactics. That can,
then, serve as a provisional definition of the genealogies I have been trying to trace with you over the last few years.
Genealogy Solvency
The genealogical approach can never be a positivism, or a search for a more accurate science. It is the
insurrection of knowledges against the centralizing effect of the institutionalization of sicentific knowledge.
The genealogy fights these power effects by reactivating local knowledges against scientific
heirarchicalization.
Michel Foucault, deceased Frenchman, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France 1975-1976,
trans. David Macey, 2K3, p. 8-11
You can see that this activity, which we can describe as genealogical, is certainly not a matter of contrasting the
abstract unity of theory with the concrete multiplicity of the facts. It is certainly not a matter of some form or other
of scientism that disqualifies speculation by contrasting it with the rigor of well-established bodies of knowledge. It
is therefore not an empiricism that runs through the genealogical project, nor does it lead to a positivism, in the
normal sense of the word. It is a way of playing local, discontinuous, disqualified, or nonlegitimized knowledges off
against the unitary theoretical instance that claims to be able to filter them, organize them into a hierarchy, organize
them in the name of a true body of knowledge, in the name of the rights of a science that is in the hands of the few.
Genealogies are therefore not positivistic returns to a form of science that is more attentive or more accurate.
Genealogies are, quite specifically, antisciences. It is not that they demand the lyrical right to be ignorant, and not that they reject
knowledge, or invoke or celebrate some immediate experience that has yet to be captured by knowledge. That is not what they are about. They
are about the insurrection of knowledges. Not so much against the contents, methods, or concepts of a science; this
is above all, primarily, an insurrection against the centralizing power-effects that are bound up with the
institutionalization and workings of any scientific discourse organized in a society such as ours. That this
institutionalization of scientific discourse is embodied in a university or, in general terms, a pedagogical apparatus, that this institutionalization of
scientific discourses is embodied in a theoretico-commercial network such as psychoanalysis, or in a political apparatus-witb everything that
implies-is largely irrelevant. Genealogy has to fight the power-effects characteristic of any discourse that is regarded as
scientific.
To put it in more specific terms, or at least in terms that might mean more to you, let me say this: you know how many people have been asking
themselves whether or not Marxism is a science for many years now, probably for more than a century. One might say that the same question has
been asked, and is still being asked, of psychoanalysis or, worse still, of the semiology of literary texts. Genealogies' or genealogists' answer to
the question "Is it a science or not?" is: "Turning Marxism, or psychoanalysis, or whatever else it is, into a science is precisely what we are
criticizing you for. And if there is one objection to be made against Marxism, it's that it might well be a science." To put it in more-if not more
sophisticated terms-[at least] milder terms, let me say this: even before we know to what extent something like Marxism or psychoanalysis is
analogous to a scientific practice in its day-to-day operations, in its rules of construction, in the concepts it uses, we should be asking the
question, asking ourselves about the aspiration to power that is inherent in the claim to being a science. The question
or questions that have to be asked are: "What types of knowledge are you trying to disqualify when you say that you
are a science? 'What speaking subject, what discursive subject, what subject of experience and knowledge are you
trying to minorize when you begin to say: 'I speak this discourse, I am speaking a scientific discourse, and I am a
scientist.' What theoretico-political vanguard are you trying to put on the throne in order to detach it from all the
massive, circulating, and discontinuous forms that knowledge can take?" And I would say: "When I see you trying to prove that
Marxism is a science, to tell the truth, I do not really see you trying to demonstrate once and for all that Marxism has a rational structure and that
its propositions are therefore the products of verification procedures. I see you, first and foremost, doing something different. I see you
connecting to Marxist discourse, and I see you assigning to those who speak that discourse the power-effects that the West has, ever since the
Middle Ages, ascribed to a science and reserved for those who speak a scientific discourse."
Compared to the attempt to inscribe knowledges in the power hierarchy typical of science, genealogy is, then, a sort
of attempt to desubjugate historical knowledges, to set them free, or in other words to enable them to oppose and
struggle against the coercion of a unitary, formal, and scientific theoretical discourse. The project of these disorderly
and tattered genealogies is to reactivate local knowledges- Deleuze would no doubt call them "minor"5-against the
scientific hierarchicalization of knowledge and its intrinsic power-effects. To put it in a nutshell: Archaeology is the method
specific to the analysis of local discursivities, and genealogy is the tactic which, once it has described these local discursivities, brings into play
the desubjugated knowledges that have been released from them. That just about sums up the overall project.
Overidentification Solvency
Real power exists in the invisible unspoken norms of society and the economy. The only
way to expose the tyranny of capitalism is through over-identification with it: frustrating
the system by exposing its obscene inner workings and causing “enlightened experts” to
critically rethink these power relations.
The field of the law is thus split into Law qua "Ego-ldeal," i.e., a symbolic order which regulates social life and
maintains social peace, and into its obscene, superegotistical inverse. As has been shown by numerous analyses from
[Mikhail] Bakhtin onwards, periodic transgressions of the public law are inherent to the social order, they
function as a condition of the latter's stability. (The mistake of Bakhtin -or, rather, of some of his followers-"- was to
present an idealized image of these "transgressions," while passing in silence over lynching parties, etc., as the crucial form of the
“carnevalesque suspense of social hierarchy.") What most deeply "holds together" a community is not so much
identification with the Law that regulates the community's "normal" everyday circuit, but rather identification
with a specific form of transgression of the Law, of the Law's suspension (in psychoanalytic terms, with a specific form
of enjoyment). Let us return to those small town white communities in the American south of the twenties, where the
reign of the official, public Law is accompanied by its shadowy double, the nightly terror of Ku Klux Klan, with its
lynching of powerless blacks: a (white) man is easily forgiven minor infractions of the Law, especially when they can
be justified by a "code of honor"; the community still recognizes him as "one of us." Yet he will be effectively
excommunicated, perceived as "not one of us," the moment he disowns the specific form of transgression that pertains to this
community-say, the moment he refuses to partake in the ritual lynching by the Klan, or even reports them to the Law
(which, of course, does not want to hear about them since they exemplify its own hidden underside). The Nazi community relied
on the same solidarity-in-guilt adduced by participation in a common transgression: it ostracized those who were not ready to
assume the dark side of the idyllic Volksgemeinschaft, the night pogroms, the beatings of political opponents - in short, all that
"everybody knew, yet did not want to speak about aloud."
It is against the background of this constitutive tension of the Law between public-written Law and superego
that one should comprehend the extraordinary critical-ideological impact of the Neue Slowenische Kunst,
especially of Laibach group. In the process of disintegration of socialism in Slovenia, they staged an aggressive
inconsistent mixture of Stalinism, Nazism, and Blut und Boden ideology. The first reaction of the enlightened
Leftist critics was to conceive of Laibach as the ironic imitation of totalitarian rituals; however, their support
of Laibach was always accompanied by an uneasy feeling: "What if they really mean it? What if they truly
identify with the totalitarian ritual?" -or, a more cunning version of it, transferring one's own doubt onto the
other: "What if Laibach overestimates their public? What if the public takes seriously what Laibach
mockingly imitates, so that Laibach actually strengthens what it purports to undermine?" This uneasy feeling
is fed on the assumption that ironic distance is automatically a subversive attitude. What if, on the contrary, the
dominant attitude of the contemporary "postideological" universe is precisely the cynical distance toward public
values? What if this distance, far from posing any threat to the system, designates the supreme form of conformism, since
the normal function of the system requires cynical distance? In this sense the strategy of Laibach appears in a new light: it
"frustrates" the system (the ruling ideology) precisely insofar as it is not its ironic imitation, but over-
identification with it - by bringing to light the obscene superego underside of the system, over-identification
suspends its efficiency. (In order to clarify the way this baring, this public staging of the obscene fantasmatic kernel of an
ideological edifice, suspends its normal functioning, let us recall a somehow homologous phenomenon in the sphere of individual
experience: each of us has some private ritual, phrase [nicknames, etc.] or gesture, used only within the most intimate circle of
closest friends or relatives; when these rituals are rendered public, their effect is necessarily one of extreme embarrassment and
shame - one has a mind to sink into the earth.)
Overidentification Solvency—Empirical
Over-identifying with capitalism solves. The plan must be understood as a
gesture that exposes the limits and contradictions of our current consumptive
habits. The YES MEN prove the effectiveness of this political strategy.
Untimely Meditations in 2008 (“fistful of zizek,” April 13, 2008,
http://untimelymediations.wordpress.com/category/resistance/)
Žižek argues that subversion must take the form of the “empty gesture,” the gesture that is offered only in
the expectation that it will be refused. For Žižek, subverting the fantasy of the false choice becomes a real act
of subversion and resistance. As he writes, “the truly subversive thing is not to disregard the explicit letter of
the Law on behalf of the underlying fantasies, but to stick to this letter against the fantasy which sustains
it” (29). That is, to resist means not to avoid the (illusion) of choice in the empty gesture, but to take it at face
value; not to deny choice (or argue that it is being denied) but to revel in choice, to exploit the opportunity (falsely) offered as a genuine moment
of agency and autonomy. “In other words,” writes Žižek, “the act of taking the empty gesture (the offer to be rejected) literally—
to treat the forced choice as a true choice—is,
perhaps, one of the ways to put into practice what Lacan calls
‘traversing the fantasy’: in accomplishing this act, the subject suspends the phantasmic frame of unwritten
rules which tell him how to choose freely—no wonder the consequences of this act are so catastrophic”.
The fantasy of the empty gesture is not the fantasy of having one’s way—if only I could accept the offer!—but rather that of the offer qua offer: it
is understood, expected that the offer will be rejected—because that is what one does. One does not say “yes” to the empty gesture without, as
Žižek demonstrates, provoking catastrophe.
I think this is a promising mode of resistance. In some ways, it echoes the work done by groups like the Yes
Men. The name here is intriguing: rather than resisting through negation (“No!”), the Yes Men have used
satire and irony to show up the hypocrisy of governments and NGOs alike. However, their actions are not done
through protesting as such, but through infiltrating these bodies and using their own logic against them. In
the link above, for example, a Yes Men operative proposes to the WTO that private ownership of labor—i.e.,
slavery—would benefit African nations in the same way that private ownership and industrialization has already benefited them. Plainly,
the plan is abhorrent, but what is abhorrent about it is not the implication of slavery qua slavery, but that
the promotion of slavery is made according to the rules of free-market capitalism; the argument of an enslaved
workforce is derived from the same logic that urges private investment in African industry and resources. In Žižek’s terms, the Yes
Men are “sticking to the letter” of the Law, but the Law in this case is flawed; the forced choice here—
privatization of all parts of production, including labor—is made under the empty gesture that no body or organization
would accept this choice because it is (ostensibly) so plainly a violation of human/humane ethics and
international standards.
Overidentification Solvency—Transference
Our affirmative activist stance allows us to act as the analyst, while
nonactivists are “analysands”, those seeking the answer to a question. As our
affirmative is not an answer, but a question in itself, the nonactivist is forced
to become an analyst himself, questioning the very roots of his consumerist
desire.
The ultimate expedient of Laibach is their deft manipulation of transference: their public (especially intellectuals) is obsessed with the "desire of
the Other" -what is Laibach's actual position, are they truly totalitarians or not?- i.e., they address Laibach with a
question and expect from them an answer, failing to notice that Laibach itself does not function as an answer but a
question. By means of the elusive character of their desire, of the indecidability as to "where they actually
stand," Laibach compels us to take up our position and decide upon our desire. Laibach here actually accomplishes the
reversal that defines the end of psychoanalytical cure. At the outset of the cure is
transference: the transferential relationship is put in force as soon as the analyst appears in
the guise of the subject supposed to know - to know the truth about the analysand's desire.
When, in the course of the psychoanalysis, the analysand complains that he doesn't know
what he wants, all this moan and groan is addressed to the analyst, with the implicit supposition
that the analyst does know it. In other words, i.e., insofar as the analyst stands for the Big
Other, the analysand's illusion lies in reducing his ignorance about his desire to an
"epistemological" incapacity: the truth about his desire already exists, it is registered
somewhere in the Big Other, one has only to bring it to light and his desiring will run
smoothly. The end of the psychoanalysis, the dissolution of transference, occurs when this
"epistemological" incapacity shifts into "ontological" impossibility: the analysand has to
experience how the Big Other also does not possess the truth about his desire, how his
desire is without guarantee, groundless, authorized only in itself. In this precise sense, the dissolution of
transference designates the moment when the arrow of the Question that the analysand pointed at the analyst turns back
toward the analysand himself: first, the analysand's (hysterical) question addressed to the
analyst supposed to possess the answer; then, the analysand is forced to acknowledge that
the analyst himself is nothing but a big Question mark addressed to the analysand. Here one can
specify Lacan's thesis that an analyst is authorized only by himself: an analysand becomes analyst upon assuming
that his desire has no support in the Other, that the authorization of his desire can only
come from himself. And insofar as this same reversal of the direction of the arrow defines drive, we could say (as Lacan does say) that
what takes place at the end of the psychoanalysis is the shift from desire to drive.
Parody Solvency
Parodies allow for covert resistance to corporate oppression– they sabotage industrial power by taking it
apart from within
Harold, Assistant Professor of Speech Communication at Seattle University, 2004 (Christine, September 1st,
“'Pranking rhetoric: "culture jamming" as media activism'”, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 21:3, 189 —
211)
Adbusters is at the forefront of an insurgent political movement known loosely as “culture jamming.” This
movement seeks to undermine the marketing rhetoric of multinational corporations, specifically through such
practices as media hoaxing, corporate sabotage, billboard “liberation,” and trademark infringement. Ad parodies,
popularized through magazines such as Adbusters and Stay Free! and countless websites, are by far the most
prevalent of culture jamming strategies. Ad parodies attempting to serve as rhetorical x-rays, revealing the “true
logic” of advertising, are a common way for so-called “subvertisers” to talk back to the multimedia spectacle of
corporate marketing. An Adbusters parody of Calvin Klein’s “heroin chic” ads of the mid-1990s, for example,
features a female model hunched over a toilet, vomiting, presumably to maintain her waifish figure. The ad tells
viewers that women are dissatisfied with their own bodies because “the beauty industry is the beast.” In another, Joe
Chemo, a cancer-ridden cartoon camel, derides the infamous Joe Camel campaign and a Tommy Hilfiger spoof
depicts his customers as sheep, wanting only to “follow the flock.” The Gap’s infamous appropriation of the
likenesses of counter-culture heroes Jack Kerouac and James Dean to sell khaki pants inspired a similar response
from the adbusting community. To the Gap’s claim that “Kerouac wore khakis,” a group of Australian subvertisers
responded with the likeness of another 20th century icon who wore khakis as well—Adolf Hitler. As such, Gap
khakis were recoded as a means not to rugged individuality but genocidal totalitarianism— the conformist impulse
writ large. Ad parodies such as these might be categorized as a strategy of rhetorical sabotage, an attempt to impede
the machinery of marketing. Adbusters’ own “culture jammer’s manifesto,” for example, declares: “We will jam the
pop-culture marketers and bring their image factory to a sudden, shuddering halt” (Lasn, 1999, p. 128). The
industrial imagery here is telling. It invokes the most traditional target of sabotage—the factory. Historically,
sabotage, or monkey-wrenching, has been a dominant oppositional response to industrial power. The word
“sabotage,” according to Merriam- Webster’s dictionary (1993), emerged in Europe around 1910, at the height of the
industrial revolution. Indeed, it is a term that is inextricably linked to industrial capitalism. The first definition of
sabotage offered in Webster’s is the “destruction of an employer’s property or the hindering of manufacturing by
discontented workers.” Webster’s explains that the word comes from “sabot,” the name for the wooden shoes worn
in many European countries in the 19th century. “Saboter,” then, meant “to clatter with sabots” or to “botch,”
presumably by throwing one’s wooden shoes into the machinery. “Sabotage” means literally to “clog” with one’s
clogs. I suggest that while the advertising sabotage articulated by Adbusters is not without some rhetorical value, it
does little to address the rhetoric of contemporary Downloaded By: [University of California Berkeley] At: 05:00 25
June 2008 Pranking Rhetoric 191 marketing—a mode of power that is quite happy to oblige subversive rhetoric and
shocking imagery. Indeed, parody and irony are the dominant motifs of many successful mass-marketing
campaigns. Through a kind of nudge-and-wink knowingness, Madison Avenue culture jammers make every effort to
subvert traditional advertising tropes—selling, as cultural critic Thomas Frank (1997) has put it, edgy brands as
tickets to the rhetorical “lynching” of consumerism. As Fredric Jameson (1991) has famously argued, the cultural
logic that accompanies this era of late capitalism is defined by a codification of the eccentric modernist styles of
resistance. For example, contemporary advertising is teeming with the language of revolution. But, as Jameson
points out, these flagrantly rebellious styles “ostentatiously deviate from a norm which then reasserts itself, in a not
necessarily unfriendly way, by a systematic mimicry of their willful eccentricities” (1991, p. 16).
Parody Solvency
Parody models the social codes of society, challenging them by pushing them to their limit.
211)
In other words, parody becomes one of many social codes—codes that are as available to the capitalist as they are to
the artist—and, as such “finds itself without vocation” (p. 16) as a rhetoric of protest in late capitalism. Further, I
want to suggest that despite its deconstructive sensibility, parody, an example of what Mikhail Bakhtin (1984) would
describe as turning the world upside down, perpetuates a commitment to rhetorical binaries—the hierarchical form it
supposedly wants to upset. The frustration expressed by Adbusters’ readers (if the magazine’s often scathing letters
section is any indication) implies that being told what is best for them is no more welcome coming from Adbusters
than it is coming from advertisers. This may be, in part, because the parodic form neglects what literary theorist
Jeffrey Nealon (1993, p. 30) calls the “crucial operation” of deconstruction, reinscribing oppositions—for example,
health/sickness or authenticity/conformity— back into a larger textual field. Hence parody, as negative critique, is
not up to the task of undermining the parodist’s own purchase on the Truth as it maintains both a hierarchy of
language and the protestor’s role as revealer. Parody derides the content of what it sees as oppressive rhetoric, but
fails to attend to its patterns. In this essay, I explore the rhetorical strategies of an alternative sort of culture jammer
—the prankster—who resists less through negating and opposing dominant rhetorics than by playfully and
provocatively folding existing cultural forms in on themselves. The prankster performs an art of rhetorical jujitsu, in
an effort to redirect the resources of commercial media toward new ends. In what follows, I first detail the
theoretical frame through which I engage the political art of culture jamming including why, specifically, the
prankster’s ethic may offer a more compelling response than parody to contemporary cultural and economic forces.
Second, in an effort to explore pranking in action I offer three contemporary case studies of radical and mainstream
efforts to hijack popular media forms: the culture jamming collective ark (pronounced “artmark”); the San
Francisco-based Biotic Baking Brigade; and the American Legacy Foundation’s INFKT Truth campaign. Finally, I
conclude by suggesting that although pranking strategies do perform the Aristotelian notion of exploiting available
means, for them to be fully imagined as rhetoric, rhetoric itself may have to be somewhat recalibrated in its role as a
mass-mediated political art. As I will discuss, although culture jamming should not be seen as a replacement for
more traditional modes of civic engagement, the playful and disruptive strategies of the prankster have much to offer
social justice movements in the so-called “post-industrial” era.
Parody Solvency
Parodies are the only hope for revolution against the state
211)
Whereas the culture jammer as saboteur opposes commercialism through revelatory rhetoric such as parody,
pranksters can be seen as comedians, as playful explorers of the commercial media landscape. In the third
essay of On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche (1989) argues that the ascetic ideal, that resentful no-saying of
the first order, “has at present only one kind of real enemy capable of harming it: the comedians of this ideal—
for they arouse mistrust of it” (p. 160). Unlike the ascetic, the comedian is not interested in revenge or
“bringing the people to consciousness” as if she can use her comedy to expose the truth or push the limits of
power until they reveal their true logic. These are the goals of the parodist, not the comedian. To reveal, one
must stand in a familiar place and know just what is behind the spectacular curtain. In contrast, the comedian is
something of a surfer with no firm, knowable ground on which to stand. Rather, she learns to navigate a force
that is already in motion and will continue to be in motion long after she has passed. Whereas parodists attempt
to change things in the name of a presupposed value, comedians diagnose a specific situation, and try
something to see what responses they can provoke. Legendary New York performance artist and media hoaxer
Joey Skaggs has been provoking people for over three decades. Since 1966, Skaggs has been putting people
on, using the news media’s own insatiable appetite for sensational images as his canvas. Skaggs says of his
work: I had concepts that I thought would make a statement. I was using the media as a medium. Rather than sticking with oil
paint, the media became my medium; I got involved with the phenomenon of the media and communication as my art. (Vale &
Juno, p. 36, emphasis mine) Skaggs’s most famous and widely disseminated “image event” (DeLuca, 1999) was
his 1976 “Cathouse for Dogs,” a phony doggie brothel in a makeshift storefront where one could supposedly
have one’s dog sexually “serviced.” To begin, Skaggs simply issued press releases and ran the following
advertisement in the Village Voice: Downloaded By: [University of California Berkeley] At: 05:00 25 June 2008 Pranking
Rhetoric 195 CATHOUSE FOR DOGS Featuring a savory selection of hot bitches. From pedigree (Fifi, the French Poodle) to
mutts (Lady the Tramp). Handler and vet on duty. Stud and photo service available. No weirdos, please. Dogs only. By
appointment. Call 254-7878. On the face of it this silly prank hardly seems the kind of thing that would garner
much reaction save from a few perverts or curious thrill-seekers. However, Skaggs’s “Cathouse for Dogs”
received more attention than even he imagined. Several New York television stations sent camera crews, the
Soho News ran a piece, and the ASPCA, the Bureau of Animal Affairs and the NYPD vice squad, as well as the
Mayor’s office, all campaigned to put Skaggs out of business.
Parody Solvency
The State is concealing the Truth from the public – our pranking is key to challenge this dangerous
information monopoly
211)
As Skaggs suggests, his strategy is not uniquely his own, the domain only of the political subversive. Rather,
he observes that unpredictable differentiation is an unavoidable effect as texts are disseminated across the
mediascape. Messages and images mutate as they migrate through the vast variety of media outlets, until
questions of source and original intent cease to matter. As he notes, governments and corporations often
sponsor disinformation campaigns, using the media to start Downloaded By: [University of California Berkeley] At: 05:00
25 June 2008 196 C. Harold rumors or deflect the public’s attention from potential scandals. Indeed, thanks to
ABC’s professional constraints, Skaggs’s cathouse for dogs remains on the record as historical “fact.” Skaggs’s
cathouse for dogs event—as well as his many others, which included a “celebrity sperm bank” and a
Thanksgiving world hunger performance piece—is noteworthy because it exemplifies pranking as a strategic
mode of engagement with commercial media and consumer culture in general. Skaggs’s project clearly
functions as a prank in its most familiar sense: a trick, a practical joke, or a mischievous act. This is a prank in
the mundane sense of tying a classmate’s shoelaces together under the desk, or short-sheeting a bed. A prank
affords the prankster a certain “gotcha!” pleasure at having pulled one over on an unsuspecting party. But,
more importantly for our purposes here, Joey Skaggs’s prank—as well as the others I will discuss shortly—
also illustrates two alternative senses of the word: (1) In Middle English, to prank was to add a stylistic
flourish as to one’s dress: to deck, or adorn as in “to dress, or deck in a gay, bright, or showy manner; to
decorate; to deck oneself out, dress oneself up.” (2) Prank can also mean a fold, or a “pleat, as in the figurative
sense of ‘wrinkle’” (Vale & Juno, 1987, preface, page not enumerated). These alternative senses of prank are
imperative for this discussion of culture jamming. In neither alternative is a prank an act of dialectical
opposition. In the first alternative sense, as in to “deck in a showy manner,” a prank is a stylistic exaggeration.
It is a kind of layering up of adornment in a conspicuous way that produces some sort of qualitative change.
Prank, in this sense, is an augmentation of dominant modes of communication that interrupts their
conventional patterns. In the second alternative sense, a prank is a wrinkle, or a fold. Like a fold, a prank can
render a qualitative change by turning and doubling a material or text. This qualitative change is produced not
through the addition of novelty, but through reconfiguration of the object itself. For analytical purposes, let us
continue to stretch and layer the meaning of prank to include a folding over of mass-mediated rhetoric.
Dominant texts are wrinkled, they are folded, they ravel and unravel as a result of these stylistic layerings. In
the case studies that follow, I will play with these alternative senses of prank—adornment and folding—in an
attempt to describe the rhetorical possibilities of media pranking. While we are playing with definitions,
however, let us consider another: I propose an alternative sense of jamming itself. Ultimately, if marketing is,
as Deleuze suggests, “now the instrument of social control” (1990, p. 181), then perhaps activists must better
learn to play and manipulate that instrument. Rather than approach jamming as simply a monkey-wrenching or
opposition to marketing rhetoric, as the activists at Adbusters might have it, perhaps activists might approach it
as well-trained musicians do music—as a familiar field on which to improvise, interpret, and experiment.
Parody Solvency
Pranking is the only way to check oppressive authority figures.

211)
That is, in order to consider pranking as rhetoric, rhetoric itself must be, well, pranked. And, here, I mean prank in
all its forms: to trick, but also to fold, and to adorn. The practices discussed in this essay—pranks, hoaxes, de
´tournements—are not explicitly persuasive, if we understand persuasion as a targeted change in meaning structures.
As I have suggested, they do not necessarily rely on that “aha!” moment when an audience becomes conscious of
some new insight. Also, their effectiveness does not depend on the ethos or charisma of a specific rhetor. Hence,
they fall outside the expectations of what conventionally qualifies as effective rhetoric. Clear arguments do often
follow pranks—as in the Biotic Baking Brigade’s critique of neo-liberal economics—but those arguments are
translations of pranks. They do not account for the power of the pranks themselves. One might even argue that such
translations dilute the rhetorical power pranks have to confuse and provoke. In other words, attaching an explicit
argument, making a prank make sense, may undermine what is unique about pranking’s signifying rhetoric in the
first place. The mass-mediated pranks and hoaxes discussed here do not oppose traditional notions of rhetoric, but
they do repattern them in interesting ways. Media pranksters undermine the proprietary authority of rhetoric by
hijacking its sanctioned venues, as does the Biotic Baking Brigade. Hoaxes challenge rhetoric’s relationship to truth
(either the art’s “misuse” as a tool for propaganda, or its “correct use” in revealing facts to audiences), because they
produce rhetorical effects that have little to do with facts or evidence, as in Joey Skaggs’s cathouse for dogs. In
general, pranking has the potential to unravel rhetoric’s continued reliance on individual auteurs (be they presidents
or protestors) because a prank’s source is often impossible to locate and, ultimately, irrelevant to its political
impacts. Traditionally, communication has largely been conceived in industrial, Fordist terms. Arguments are
systematically and rationally assembled. Messages move teleologically toward an end product—persuasion. Perhaps
the strategies of pranking and branding (its commercial counterpart) may have something to teach communication
scholars. As North America moves into an economy driven as much by Downloaded By: [University of California
Berkeley] At: 05:00 25 June 2008 208 C. Harold information and marketing as the production of tangible goods, it
becomes all the more crucial that communication scholars attend to the battles being waged over commercialization.
A basic tenet of both the marketing and prankster world is that ideas and innovations spread less like widgets
coming off an assembly line than like viruses in an ecosystem (see, for the most prominent example, Rushkoff,
1996). Indeed, viruses communicate diseases, yet they cannot be said to possess intentions nor progress
teleologically, as a factory model might imply.
Parody Solvency
Pranking inevitably protests the state

211)
Pranking—as intensification, augmentation, folding—is conceptually and practically quite different from how we
often consider rhetorics of protest. Pranking is often comedic, but not in a satirical, derisive sense that prescribes a
“correct” political position. It takes the logic of branding seriously. As the famous rallying cry of Nike CEO Phil
Knight—“Brands! Not products!”—illustrates, successful brands are not limited to a closed system of
representation. The swoosh has the capacity to signify much more than sneakers, or even products, and that is just
the way Nike wants it. Nike understands that in an age where the factory has largely been moved overseas, it is now
in the business of producing something much more profitable than sportswear: its product is seductive imagery and
the loyal consumers it attracts. As I have argued throughout, pranking repatterns commercial rhetoric less by
protesting a disciplinary mode of power (clogging the machinery of the image factory) than by strategically
augmenting and utilizing the precious resources the contemporary media ecology affords. In doing so, pranksters,
those comedians of the commercial media landscape, make manifest Michel Foucault’s (1983) observation that one
need not be sad to be militant. Rather than using political action to discredit a line of thought (as the parodist might
have it), Foucault urges us to “use political practice as an intensifier of thought, and analysis as a multiplier of the
forms and domains for the intervention of political action” (1983, p. xii).2 Culture jamming multiplies the tools of
intervention for contemporary media and consumer activists. It does so by embracing the viral character of
communication, a quality long understood by marketers. So-called “cool hunters,” for example, employ the tools of
anthropologists who engage in “diffusion research” to determine how ideas spread through cultures. These
marketers, like their anthropologist counterparts, Downloaded By: [University of California Berkeley] At: 05:00 25
June 2008 Pranking Rhetoric 209 have learned that people tend to adopt messages less in response to rational
arguments than through exposure and example (Gladwell, 1997). Activists with a prankster ethic, such as those
promoting the INFKT Truth campaign, capitalize on this capacity of ideas to multiply and disseminate like viruses.
Further, although Adbusters’ campaign to spread the Blackspot virus may still promote oppositional content, its
embrace of the viral form indicates the group’s advertising savvy. Tellingly, the magazine’s focus on advertising
parodies has waned in recent years.
Parody Solvency
Parodies benefit their models by not overpowering them

Phiddian, Lecturer in English at Flinders University of South Australia. the author of Swift's Parody, 95
Parodies stand for the things they displace, but they do not merely repeat them, as translations aspire to do,
or extend them like imitations. They displace, distort, differ, and defer. Derrida argues that différance is both
a spacing and a temporization. Parodies distance us from identification with both the model discourse and the
parodic text, setting us on a constant commuting between deconstructed and deconstructing poles/venues. We arrive
at a "true" understanding of neither text, because each constantly displaces the other. The structure of each is
made to differ from itself so that it cannot inhabit a single logical space. And each image is rendered
provisional, a temporary relation of mutual hostility and incongruence in the mind of the reader, in which the origin
and aims of the host are subverted by the other's. The intellectual structures of alchemy and its mimetic goals and
assumptions are employed for the time being as a conceptual structure for Eco's Foucault's Pendulum, even as, in the
same motion, they are being ridiculed as absurdly disconnected from the real world. The parody ironizes and
destabilizes them, but it does not obliterate them. Moreover, the real world begins disconcertingly to lose definition
in the face of hermetic relations and displacements. Just as Casaubon's, Belbo's, and Diotallevi's lives are invaded by
the "Diabolicals," so the novel is invaded by the logic of the Rosicrucian texts it parodies. This is precisely the way
Derrida suggests that the sign works in his essay on "Differance," and I would argue that parodic signs, at least,
oscillate in this way. [End Page 686]
Parody undergoes a never-ending cycle

"[Parody] is dangerous from the moment that representation claims to [End Page 688] be presence and the sign of
the thing itself. . . . The [parody] adds itself, it is a surplus, a plenitude enriching another plenitude, the fullest
measure of presence. . . . But the [parody] supplements. It adds only to replace. It intervenes or insinuates itself
in-the place-of; if it fills, it is as if one fills a void. If it represents and makes an image, it is by the anterior default
of a presence. . . . But their common function is shown in this: whether it adds or substitutes itself, the [parody] is
exterior, outside of the positivity to which it is super-added, alien to that which, in order to be replaced by it,
must be other than it." A parody brings out the possibility of its own ridicule in a text. It is the deconstruction
which is always available. It comes from the margins of a preexisting text or discourse, supplementing it
dangerously: giving it what it lacks (its own implicit critique), giving it what it deserves (a vision of its own
absurdity), and taking its place (decentering it and overcoming it). Parody enacts the impossibility of any text,
however "straight" its aspirations, managing to totalize and stabilize its own meanings. It could always be written
differently--rewritten by a parody which decenters the original and aspires to replace it. Indeed, it can still
and always be rewritten by parody, which doubles and deconstructs the tropes of authenticity on which
"straight" writing depends. Any past or future biography of Flaubert will always be deconstructively
supplemented by the gaps, paradoxes, and multiple possibilities drawn out in Flaubert's Parrot. Joseph Furphy's
Such is Life shows just how long and inconsequential a Bulletin short story would have to be if it really wanted to
represent Australian bush life accurately. After Gulliver's Travels we will never entirely trust a travel book again.
Tristram Shandy shows that the germ of its own absurdity lies more or less dormant in novelistic realism, before that
genre's great age in the nineteenth century. After the fact, Ulysses repeats the dose on the novel and attaches further
supplements to Homer and sundry other discourses. Jean Rhys's Wide Sargasso Sea gives voice to a version of the
story of Empire that Jane Eyre and Victorian Britain preferred to ignore. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus
supplements various versions of German identity, from the pure aspirations of music and theology to the pollutions
of Nazism. Parody is the parasite genre that can attach to any other, supplementing it dangerously, living off
its mimetic, expressive, or rhetorical energy, and reminding it and us that we are facing words rather than
things, rhetoric rather than pure ideas, language rather than phenomena. [End Page 689]
Parody Solvency
Parodies destroy disciplinary power and is the best form of criticism.

Parody is not serious or even polite in the face of claims to the sublime, but it is not just a joke. Indeed, it is logically
and philosophically opposed to the absolutist claims and mimetic frauds sublimity depends on. Consequently, The
Satanic Verses's intimate deconstruction of the claims of revelation (showing carefully the way these come apart in
practice and under the pressure of material facts and desires) is a critique of absolutism and the blind faith it
demands. This is a big issue that impinges on political, religious, and personal life, and the book should be defended
on those grounds rather than on the spurious proposition that it is a fiction and therefore not real. As David Lawton
has recently argued, the book blasphemes, but not against God (who has Eternity to settle the score anyway). It
blasphemes against fundamentalism and the flawed yet deathly image of perfect order and authority it must
construct so as to assert itself. Parody does important critical work here that sober critique could never hope to
achieve. It is not just Rushdie that the fatwa seeks to discipline and destroy; it is the spirit of doubt, ambiguity, and
criticism. Those of us who care about these principles have a lot more to defend than a maverick novelist.
Parody Solvency--AT: Backlash

State intervention only occurs when parody results in global movement, not when parody occurs
underground
In 1702, Daniel Defoe published what he thought was a parody of reactionary Anglican polemic in The
Shortest Way with the Dissenters. He assumed readers would find the argument that dissenters should be executed
or exiled self-defeating, and would learn to deconstruct the "high church" rhetoric as immoral, unreasonable, and
dangerous. However, most of his initial readers read the piece straight, so dissenters were outraged at what
they saw as an attack on them and high churchmen were annoyed to be told that so sensible a tract was supposed
to be a joke. Defoe was put in the stocks for sedition, protesting often and unsuccessfully that his parody had been
misread. What was meant to resonate ironically within discourse (or warring discourses) had been too readily
and naively attached to the world. 25 Literary hoaxes and causes célèbres show that parodic language is
language in play and that, for parody to work, the players and readers need to understand the rules of the
game. The Ern Malley affair illustrates how delicately poised the genre can be at a pragmatic level, and how
dependent it is on being processed through the right intertextuality by its audience.
L/ Communication
Compared to straight language (language trying to represent reality or the author's authentic opinions) parodic
language is doubled and differentiated. It operates very much like this:
Differance, the disappearance of any originary presence, is at once the condition of possibility and the condition of
impossibility of truth. At once. "At once" means that the being-present (on) in its truth, in the presence of its identity
and in the identity of its presence, is doubled as soon as it appears, as soon as it presents itself. It appears, in its
essence, as the possibility of its own [duplication. That is to say, in Platonic terms, of its own] most proper non-truth,
of its pseudo-truth reflected in the icon, the phantasm, or the simulacrum. What is is not what it is, identical and
identical to itself, unique, unless it adds to itself the possibility of being repeated as such. And its identity is
hollowed out by that addition, withdraws itself in the supplement that presents it. 31 [End Page 685]
Again, Derrida makes a far larger claim than I need for the purposes of my argument, but the essential thing here is
the image of parodic repetition both adding to and hollowing out its model. Inconvenient though it is to mimetic
and expressive ideals of representation, without the possibility of parodic repetition, there could be no
communication. Languages are systems where distortion and deferral are always available, and this parasitic
possibility is enacted most comprehensively by parody, for parodies exist in a critically deconstructive relation
to their models. The point is not that a parody simply overpowers its model, just as the erasure of différance
does not merely obliterate the concept called up. In parody, as with différance, the trope is one of oscillation
between positive and negative polarities.
***2AC Answers***
AT: Topicality Incentive

We Meet – Extend the Boyd in 1999 evidence that says offering exemptions to the estate tax
have caused behavior changes. Plan operates like a tax credit or financial incentive.
We Meet - The estate tax is currently a disincentive, plan reverses this.
Patrick Fleenor, Economist, J.D. Foster, Executive Director and ChiefEconomist at the Tax Foundation, June 1, 1994, AX
FOUNDATION BACKGROUND PAPER #9, An Analysis of the Disincentive Effects of the Estate Tax on,
www.policyandtaxationgroup.com/pdf/TaxFoundBkgd9.pdf
Whatever motivation an individual has for accumulating wealth, his willingness to do so is affected by
taxes. Perhaps the most obvious example of this is the personal income tax imposed on labor income and the returns to saving. This tax
discourages productive effort and reduces the incentive to save relative to consumption. The estate tax also discourages
productive effort and saving. The effect of the tax on saving and economic activity may vary significantly, however, depending on the
circumstances of the wealth holder. The disincentive effect of the estate tax is especially felt by entrepreneurs.
We Meet - Easing the estate tax has empirically been used as an incentive to promote
environmental issues.
Stephen J. Small, Esq. in 1997 (AN IMPORTANT ESTATE TAX INCENTIVE FOR LANDOWNERS,
http://www.privatelandownernetwork.org/plnpro/taxlaw.asp
In mid-1997, President Clinton signed into law the Taxpayer Relief Act of 1997. The commentary on that
legislation generally focused on the cut in the capital gains rate to 20%, education and retirement-saving incentives, and lower estate tax rates for
individuals and some family-owned businesses. For landowners and land trusts, however, there is more news and good news. The new
legislation also included a modified version of The American Farm and Ranch Protection Act, an important new tax incentive for
landowners. The original version of The American Farm and Ranch Protection Act was first introduced in Congress in 1990 by Senator John
Chafee and Congressman Richard Schulze. The proposal originated with the Piedmont Environmental Council (“PEC”), based in northern
Virginia. Some PEC supporters and representatives became convinced of the need for additional tax code incentives for land
protection and came up with the following simple, direct proposal for relief: land subject to a conservation easement under
Section 170(h) of the tax code should be totally exempt from estate tax. That was essentially the provision introduced
by Senator Chafee and Congressman Schulze in 1990. Over the next several years, as the federal legislative process moved forward, the proposal
became more complex and less comprehensive. However, it remains an important new incentive for private, voluntary
land conservation that landowners, their advisors, and land trusts must become familiar with.
AT: T Alternative Energy
We meet—the department of energy defines biological fuels as alternative energy

Department of Energy 2008
“Alternative Fuels and Advanced Vehicles Data Center,”
http://www.eere.energy.gov/afdc/progs/view_ind_fed.php/afdc/391/0
The following fuels are defined as alternative fuels by the Energy Policy Act (EPAct) of 1992: pure methanol,
ethanol, and other alcohols; blends of 85% or more of alcohol with gasoline; natural gas and liquid fuels
domestically produced from natural gas; liquefied petroleum gas (propane); coal-derived liquid fuels; hydrogen;
electricity; pure biodiesel (B100); fuels, other than alcohol, derived from biological materials; and P-Series fuels. In
addition, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is authorized to designate other fuels as alternative fuels, provided
that the fuel is substantially nonpetroleum, yields substantial energy security benefits, and offers substantial
environmental benefits. For more information about the alternative fuels defined by EPAct 1992 as well as DOE's
alternative fuel designation authority, visit the HYPERLINK
"http://www1.eere.energy.gov/vehiclesandfuels/epact/petition/index.html" \t "_blank" EPAct Web site. (Reference 42
HYPERLINK "http://www.gpoaccess.gov/uscode/index.html" \t "_blank" U.S. Code 13211)
AT: Kritiks—Perm Solvency

Perm solves: TM practices are critical to open space for resistance. Demonstrations such as the parody in the
1AC are the best way for the messages of activists such as the neg to actually reach their audience.
Despite many successes, TM practices like the Yes Men impersonations have often been criticized because their short-
term interventions expose the weak points in the system but do not attempt to address them. However, TM
should not be seen or employed as an isolated form of protest but as one tool for groups to reach wider
audiences in a broader network of political struggle. In fact, even when they hijack the attention of the mass media, the
Yes Men stunts and Saint Precario do not constitute an emancipatory practice in itself. Yet, they are a great example of
how to bring topics to debate. As part of an organized campaign centred on a specific issue, such stunts can give resonance
to voices otherwise unheard, and hopefully open up some space for a dialogue between minority and majority
groups–or between minorities.
Moreover, TM practices can help make transversal connections between context-related social, cultural and
political problems, and various organized sites of resistance. For example, the Telestreet network enables different
activist groups and coalitions to use their space to support or showcase their own cause. Similarly, TM practices can be useful to
create new memes that raise awareness of unjust social conditions, as in the case of Saint Precario.
Ultimately, it is important to maintain TM’s emphasis on experimentation, collaboration and the exchange of knowledge as part
of a broader cartography of organized social struggle. For these reasons, there is a need to create more conditions where
TM exploration of new possibilities for resistance can take place. Such projects can range from media literacy
teaching to culture jamming workshops in schools, to festivals and temporary media labs where people can come together and
develop creative ways to engage in protest and critique of the systems which govern their lives from an ever-
increasing distance. Therefore:
TM practices are marked by an ongoing attempt to experiment with the dynamics of media dissemination of information,
searching for the most effective way to bypass the obstacles created during the diffusion of such information, in order to reach an
audience. Thus, TM actions can help activists attract the attention of the mainstream media, as well as enable
them to convey their message in a way that is intelligible to the audience.

CNDI - TDP Affirmative

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California National Debate Institute 2008 12095192.

Observation One: The Problem

Peak Oil is coming, its try or die…literally!

In this light, we offer the following modest proposal:

Observation Two: We solve

And, dead human corpses are perfect for the job.

2) Incentive and Fairness, Policies in Support of the Transfer Tax

Incentive to Voluntarily Break Up and Distribute Large Estates

Scene One: The Almighty Dollar

Our performance has political significance—we’ll isolate four warrants

First, Interrogating the Spectacle -

Solvency – AT: Doesn’t Work

Energy Policy Link

Current governmental policy approaches towards energy redefine ecology in terms of a

Energy Policy Link

Energy Policy Link

The US is an international laughing stock when it comes to energy policy. Current

US policymakers, corrupted by politics, fail to address the issue of an acceptable energy

Energy Policy Link

Environmental Management Link

Environmental Management Link

Environmental Management Link

Environmental Neoliberalism Link—Biopower I/L

Neoliberal environmentalism reduces nature to an object of management, capturing both

Environmental Crisis Link—AT: Environment DAs

Environmental Crisis Link—AT: Environment DAs

Environmental Crisis Link—AT: Environment DAs

Commodification Link—Now Key

Necropolitics Link– Fear of Death

For Bataille, sovereignty therefore has many forms. But ultimately it

Commodified consumerism has entrenched itself in modern life as an addiction which

Globalized capitalism’s voracious quest of expansion and commodification has

Consumerism Impact—Root Cause

Consumerism Impact—Self-Oppression—Questioning Key

If people do not critically question market ideology, they will continue to

Neoliberal capitalist systems have infiltrated modern-life, eliminating individual freedoms

Capitalism seeks to destroy free consciousness in favor of a biopolitically controlled

Capitalism has commodified happiness – this commodification of human emotion is just

Modern sovereignty has manufactured “norms” for a society, in which reason

Sovereignty is the right to to designate the “enemy” for destruction. The

In Foucault's formulation of it, biopower

Code Red Overview

Solvency—Consciousness and Exposure Good

Solvency – Focus on the Body Good

Solvency - Tactical Media—Reappropriation

Solvency—Resist State—AT: Rights Kritiks

Solvency—AT: People Will Reject Plan

Solvency—AT: Cooption/No Action

Solvency—AT: Reform Capitalism/Gibson-Graham

Pranking is the only way to check oppressive authority figures.

Pranking inevitably protests the state

Parodies benefit their models by not overpowering them

Parody undergoes a never-ending cycle

Parodies destroy disciplinary power and is the best form of criticism.

Parody Solvency--AT: Backlash

AT: Topicality Incentive

AT: T Alternative Energy

We meet—the department of energy defines biological fuels as alternative energy

AT: Kritiks—Perm Solvency

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