The Environments and Lifestyles of an Exterminist Future

Marie Mastrobattista (Drexel University)

This is the darkest of the futures imagined by Frase. The exterminist scenario depicts a world of hyperinequality in which the wealthy elite separate themselves from the superfluous, poor masses, and move from policies of repression to genocidal extermination. Frase discusses how automation and mechanization can ease moral discomfort of extermination, and the projects in this presentation examine this possibility in detail. It is a future that makes 3rd world scarcity and violence a reality for everyone because resources and energy are too scarce to allow everyone a high standard of living. The privileged elite retreat to secure enclaves and the “superfluous masses” are repressed and ultimately exterminated. Frase builds this scenario from contemporary conditions and technologies such as remote warfare involving drone strikes, and Ruth Wilson Gilmore’s analysis of the U.S. incarceration system that effectively eliminates large numbers of people from society. These conditions, intensified by dwindling resources and the detachment of the socio-economic elite, lead to an extreme, but all too imaginable future. This presentation makes vivid the unhinged possibilities of growing inequality and asks us to consider if there aren’t better options forward.