I wrote about the recent revival of Russian cosmism by the techno-futurist intellectual dabblers of Silicon Valley, for Tank Magazine. To read the whole piece, go here.
Russian cosmism, it seems, is having its moment. In Paris I recently met a friend who edits a certain glossy magazine devoted to “men’s style and culture”. He told me his editorial team had just closed a special issue on the topic. That’s strange, I said, I’m writing about Russian cosmism right now for Tank. “Well,” he replied contentedly, “we beat you to it.”
What is going on here? Why are even the glossies getting in on the action?
The eminent Russian-German art historian Boris Groys has done much to resurrect this lost current of thought, and was a key participant and organiser of the exhibit, Art Without Death: Russian Cosmism, hosted by the Haus der Kulturen der Welt in Berlin in autumn 2017. Arts-publishing and curatorial platform e-flux has also devoted considerable attention to the topic, including its publication in 2016 of a translation of an article by the Russian critic Marina Simakova, in which she identified cosmism as being “extremely attractive to supporters of various ideological views”, and “the site of an impending war”. As early as January 2017, cosmism was also being invoked as a harbinger and prophecy of ideas that would become popular in early 21st-century Silicon Valley. On the tech website Digital Trends, Douglas Rushkoff wrote that such things as algorithms, automated processes, and artificial intelligence that suppose our cognitive abilities may “be blamed on the Russians. No, not Putin and the oligarchs, but a little-known line of early 20th-century Russian occult philosophers called the cosmists”.
As is typical in writing on Russia, anything that happened much before the early 20th century, or at least before the rumblings of revolution began in the 19th century, is considered mere prehistory. But in order to appreciate the context of cosmism’s emergence, we need to pay attention to the longue durée, and to understand what first set the Russian imagination, and indeed the Russian will, on its course towards a brave future of automation, space travel, Sputnik, nuclear missiles, Twitter bots and other weapons of mass destruction...
To read more, click here.
