Applied Paraspace

You Live Inside A Science Fiction Video Game

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)

The climate scare is the natural child of scientific consensus, as mass panic is the inevitable product of any mob rule system. There is no amount of physical evidence that can falsify computer-generated cosmic horror or stay the credentialed throng. The climate change media event is not powered by empirical science, it’s a paraspatial construct, existing in a heightened, overloading and estranging, science fictional space.

A paraspace is a virtual or artificial realm that is coextensive with the physical world. William Gibson's “cyberspace,” for instance, is a consensual hallucination, a datascape abstracted from a multitude of computer networks, experienced daily by billions of users. It's a place where information takes on a spatial, tangible form, allowing for experiences (crisis and resolution) beyond the physical, outside the realm of human cognition. And this is exactly how model-based climate catastrophism operates.

The parallel spaces of SF stage the breakdown of language, rationality, and subjectivity. A dislocation of the subject (character and reader) is represented by a movement (physical and textual) through an excruciatingly technological, radically decentered, and rhetorically exaggerated space.

—Terminal Identity: The Virtual Subject in Postmodern Science Fiction, (Bukatman 1993)

2001: A Space Odyssey (1968)