026
DecaDe.
zero
USELESS 10 - ZERO
the
zero
Stacey Steers, Phantom Canyon Film Still (The Kiss), 2002-2006, Courtesy of Clamp Art
the World trade center was completed in 1973, and when tower 2 was finished,
it became the mirror of tower 1, thus making the monoliths into icons for the copy,
words :
the clone, the replay of the event that had already occurred,
Barry Vacker
images :
the arrival at a destination already reached.
Stacey Steers
Courtesy of Clamp Art
the twin towers were like binary digits,
2000, yet the Millennium
So, here we are, ten years
Clock at the Centre
the ones turned on,
into the new millennium,
Pompidou had been the first which would be recorded as
t
o
w
e
r
i
n
g
m
o
noliths waiting for
seeking to make sense of the
clock of the countdown.
“00” at 00 : 00 : 00 between
the countdown to
decade of “the naughts,”
The Clock was born in 1980 December 31, 1999, and
those years following 2000.
after a Le Monde cover
January 1, 2000. It was
ling the voids of cybersground zero.
027
THE CULTURAL
MEANING OF
ZERO
Though zero is
often associated with a lack
or a nothing, the cultural
meaning of zero is powerful
and paradoxical.
Zero is the
first number in the real
world, the nothingness
from which we begin
counting all things real
and imaginary. Zero is the
starting point for counting
up and the end point for
countdowns. Zero ends the
countdowns for rockets to
the starry skies, and ground
zero is the detonation point
for rockets with atomic
bombs. The idea of zero
as signaling nothingness
or countdown is why it is
usually associated with
destruction and apocalypse.
Zero is one of two
numbers in the binary system of the virtual world. 1
is the number for “on” and
0 is the number for “off,”
or, understood another way,
one equals representation
and zero equals nonrepresentation—ones and zeros,
being and nothingness,
existential conditions for
the information age.
When a zero
appears at the end of a
calendar year, such as 2010,
it serves a powerful symbol
demarking the passage of
years, measured in decades.
When three zeros appear,
as in 2000, it is a symbol of
the passage of centuries,
measured in millennia.
It is at such
moments that the zeros
suggest not only ends and
apocalypses, but also beginnings and singularities,
the possibilities of transformations yet to be realized.
The three zeros of the year
2000 signaled the starting
point or the singularity, the
moment of nothingness
between positive and
negative, yesterday and
tomorrow, countdown
and blastoff. But, blast
off into what kind of
tomorrow ?
1980
THE
COUNTDOWN
TO 2000
By 1999, there
were many clocks around
the world counting down to
story about the thousand
weeks before the year
2000. Designed by Richard
Rogers and Renzo Piano,
the Centre Pompidou is
famed for having all its
guts and skeleton—vents,
ducts, wiring, escalators,
and support structures—
located on the exterior, an
expression of pure efficiency and functionalism
meant to provide complete
artistic freedom in the use
of interior space. If the
sheer functionalism of the
Centre Pompidou signaled
the completion of the modern architectural project,
then the Millennium Clock
suggested the exhaustion of
the modern utopian project.
For the existential
nihilist Jean Baudrillard,
the Millennium Clock
suggested that modernity
was running down, or out of
time, becoming entropic in
the exhaustion of all future
possibilities—the project of
modernity had become the
“final illusion of history,”
for its vision of perpetual
progress and industrial
technology no longer existed as utopian models of the
future in the West. As the
end of the millennium approached, the ticking only
seemed to accelerate, with
the zeros increasing on the
left side of the Clocks and
eventually cascading in the
final minutes and seconds to
all zeros. There was climax
and completion in the
zeros, heralding not only
the end of the millennium,
but perhaps the end of the
future, at least “the future”
as we once imagined it.
1999
THE
DOUBLE ZEROS
OF Y2K
As the Millennium
Clocks were ticking toward
zero, a pair of zeros
appeared on the digital
horizon, the two zeros
known as Y2K.
The Y2K problem
was born of the need to
conserve scarce and expensive computer space during
the 1950s, when calendar
years were recorded by
the last two numbers—for
example, “57” instead of
“1957.” Many experts feared that computers would
not properly recognize the
arrival of the year 2000,
thought that computers
would record 2000 as “00”
and conclude that the
new year was 1900, thus
crashing computers and
effecting a technological
apocalypse in the media and
energy networks around
the world. Businesses and
governments enlisted programmers to “correct” the
code, combining to spend
an estimated $300–600
billion around the world.
Though there were some
minor glitches, the corrections apparently worked,
for the computer networks
did not crash at 00 : 00 : 00
on January 1, 2000.
The double zeros
suggested a double-coding
for Y2K, the nonevent that
masked real events. The
technological apocalypse
was avoided with Y2K, thus
masking the virtual apocalypse, where the territories
of “reality” retreat beyond
the proliferating maps of
postmodern media—the
hyperreality of image and
information, clones and copies, replicas and reproduct
THE ZERO
UNIVERSE OF
THE MATRIX
The virtual
apocalypse is the subject of
The Matrix (1999), which
depicted yet another war
with the future, that hyperreal tomorrow existentially
defined by the number zero.
In the beginning
of the film, the title—THE
MATRIX—emerges from
the glowing green numbers
cascading down a screen.
More columns of cascading
numbers follow. Slowly
zooming in on a single
digit—0—moviegoers were
propelled through the zero,
through the vanishing
point, into a mediated
realm of nothingness, the
virtuality of “the matrix.”
Amidst all the gun battles,
martial art moves, and
counterfeit rebellion,
The Matrix depicts the
existential conditions of
the information age, an
ever-accelerating journey
into hyperreality, into the
zero, the nothingness.
But, this journey into “nothingness”
should not be surprising.
If media are extensions of
consciousness and perception (Marshall McLuhan)
and consciousness is a
nothingness for perceiving all things (Jean-Paul
Sartre), then indeed media
technologies are electronic
nothingnesses which we are
filling with representations
of the world. We are all fil-
pace with copies of the
world, the world of being
and nothingness now coded
in one and zeros. Humans
are no longer the center of
the cosmic universe, but we
have created a substitute
universe in cyberspace, a
virtual universe where we
are the center sitting at
our computers. Isn’t that
the meaning of Facebook,
Myspace, and Youtube ?
GETTING BACK
TO ZERO IN
FIGHT CLUB
“Everything’s a
copy of a copy of a copy,”
laments Jack, the corporate drone in Fight Club.
Directed by David Fincher,
Fight Club offered another
end-of-the-millennium apocalypse, with Tyler Durden
(Jack’s alter ego) leading a
violent rebellion against the
consumers and copies, the
citizens of the modern and
postmodern futures.
The film opened
with Durden holding a
gun in the mouth of Jack,
accompanied by the following prophetic lines from
Durden : “Three minutes.
This is it : ground zero.” The
film then flashes back to
tell story of the rebellion,
which began with brutal
fistfights among gangs of
GQ men in an underground
network of “fight clubs.”
The movement expanded
its scope and ambition to include detonating corporate
sculpture and destroying
the skyscrapers of credit
card companies, all in the
effort to fully erase credit
card debt, to get us to go
“back to zero.”
Eventually, we
learn that Durden was
seeking a return to the
premodern world, an agrarian-oriented hunter-gatherer society where people
were attired in all-leather
clothes and grew food
amidst abandoned skyscrapers and superhighways.
Attired in anti-fashion
fashions, Tyler Durden
was a hipster terrorist, an
urban Unabomber, not
theorizing in the forest and
mail-bombing scientists,
but acting on a much larger
scale in the metropolis and
bombing skyscrapers. In the
conclusion to the film, we
return to “ground zero” to
witness the implosion and
collapse of several towering
skyscrapers in cinematic
imagery that was strikingly
similar to the collapse of the
Twin Towers two years later
at Ground Zero in New
York City.
2000
THE
MILLENNIUM
EXPERIENCE AT
0° L
Though computers
did not crash in 2000, the
future itself seems to have
crashed, which was the
very condition on display
at the “Millennium
Experience” inside the
Millennium Dome.
Functioning like
a synthesis of world’s
fair and theme park, the
Millennium Experience
opened on December
31, 1999, and closed
on December 31, 2000.
Promotional literature described the zones as
“windows to the future,”
with the Millennium Dome
being “the most forwardlooking place in the world
to celebrate the year 2000
and our voyage into the
next thousand years.” The
largest dome in the world,
the Millennium Dome was
intended to be an architectural icon for celebrating
the new millennium,
symbolically situated on
the Greenwich Peninsula at
0° longitude on the prime
meridian, which functions
as the beginning and end
point in the standardization
of world time.
Inside the Millennium Dome was the
Millennium Experience, a
series of “zones” designed
to be educational and entertaining, each dedicated to
some aspect of the human
condition at the millennium. The most popular
zone was the Body, where
visitors walked inside a
giant human body (the size
of the Statue of Liberty)
that featured a pumping
heart, brain activities, and
other bodily functions. The
Mind depicted the functions and neural networks
of the brain. The Home
Planet offered a multimedia
presentation about nature
around the world, with an
exterior made of TV screens
showing various images
of nature. Other zones included Work, Play, Money,
Faith, Learning, and
Journey (transportation),
each experienced much like
a theme park attraction.
THE ZERO ZERO DECADE
0
USELESS 10 - ZERO
These are the years in which
the number of the year was
preceded by double zeros.
If we are looking for philosophical meaning in the
decade of the naughts,
then perhaps we should
look at the “zero,” that
number that stands for
naught and nothing…
and so much more.
Remember all those
“Millennium Clocks” counting down toward the year
2000 ? It seems every major
metropolis had at least
one Clock counting down
toward all zeros that would
signal the arrival of the year
2000, the end of one millennium and the beginning of a
new millennium.
During the 1950s
and 1960s, the year 2000
was often associated with
the arrival of “the future,”
the new “world of tomorrow” filled with utopian
possibilities for art and
culture, science and technology, humanity and secular
society. Yet as humanity
approached the millennium, there was a declining
confidence in the future,
even a fear of the future,
more often envisioned as
the site for dystopia and the
coming apocalypse. Born in
an era of glowing technological confidence, the
twentieth century ended in
an age of growing technological skepticism, caused by
fears of various apocalypses,
from nuclear war to global
warming to worldwide
computer crashes to asteroids from outer space. For
many, it seemed difficult
to imagine an optimistic
technological or cosmic
future—the future would
be the time of Planet of the
Apes, THX 1138, Soylent
Green, Mad Max, Blade
Runner, The Terminator,
Armageddon, The Matrix,
and many others, all making
it no surprise that the end
of the millennium provided
Fight Club. These dystopian
visions have only been
reinforced by the debacles
of this decade of naughts,
which concludes with the
warning that the cosmos
will wipe us out in 2012.
So, there is
something is surely awry
in the theory and practice
of the future. Beginning in
the 1990s and a decade into
the new millennium, there
here has been a strangely
recurring theme of zero
involving art, science, and
technology, in many forms,
from film to physics to
architecture, all seeming
to say something about the
fate of the world in the third
millennium.
028
if the Second law of thermodynamics and superstring theory are correct, then the ultimate
trajectory of the universe is from infinite energy and density
toward zero energy and zero density.
What can be made
of this future displayed at
0° L ? Looking much like the
internet, the networks of
the Mind were mapped and
the “windows to the future”
opened on a Disney-like
vision of tomorrow. Not
surprisingly, the Planet was
a multimedia experience.
After the Millennium
Experience closed, the exhibits and everything inside
were dismantled and sold
via an auction—a fire sale
of “the future.” By the end
of 2001, the Millennium
Dome was an empty cavern,
containing nothing more
than dust and debris.
If the Millennium
Dome was about the
future, then it seems we
have entered a disposable
future, or an empty future,
or perhaps a future dead on
arrival. Perhaps this future
is suggested by the fate of
the Body, for which there
were no bidders, apparently
because the giant human
form was too unwieldy or
just plain useless. After
being dismembered, the
Body was buried in a nearby
hole. The only full-time
resident of the Dome is
already dead, the Body now
decaying in its graveyard.
The Body entered the future
at 0° and was buried shortly
after at 0°, at the beginning
and end of world time.
USELESS 10 - ZERO
THE ZERO ZERO DECADE
2001
GROUND ZERO
IN NEW YORK
CITY
The Twin Towers
made their debut in a model
of New York City at the
1964 New York World’s
Fair, which was dedicated to
celebrating the “future” of
the space and information
ages. Originally conceived
as a vertical world’s fair, the
Twin Towers were the first
skyscrapers wired for global
telecommunications.
The World Trade
Center was completed in
1973, and when Tower 2
was finished, it became the
mirror of Tower 1, thus
making the monoliths
into icons for the copy,
the clone, the replay of
the event that had already
occurred, the arrival at a
destination already reached.
The Twin Towers were like
binary digits, the ones turned on, towering monoliths
waiting for the countdown
to Ground Zero. The people
killed in the collapse of
the Twin Towers were
disintegrated and buried at
a zero, not unlike the Body
dismembered and buried at
0° L near the Millennium
Dome. Conceived like
world’s fairs to celebrate
the future, the Millennium
Dome and the Twin Towers
both met unexpected fates
—burials at two zeros, two
funerals for a new future,
now apparently dead on
arrival. This was the future
anticipated in the ground
zero of Fight Club.
2002
THE ZERO
UNIVERSE OF
NAQOYQATSI
In Naqoyqatsi
(2002), the third film of the
“Qatsi” trilogy, Godfrey
Reggio echoed The Matrix
and Paul Virilio’s post-9/11
critique, Ground Zero
(2002), which theorized
that reality had perhaps
tipped “once and for all
into electronic nothingness.” After the title
—NAQOYQATSI— is
shown on the screen, a
burst of stars accelerates
toward us, expanding in
all directions like the big
bang universe. A zero
emerges from around the
four sides of the screen
and then recedes into the
vanishing point, while the
stars accelerate ever faster.
The zero reemerges from
behind the expanding stars,
accompanied by a horizontal stream of ones and zeros
that dissolve into exploding
stars. The remainder of
the documentary offered
a poetic meditation on the
spectacle of mediated and
hyperreal society, from
celebrity to surveillance to
genetics to sports to warfare
to globalization. Though it
does not directly reference
9/11, Naqoyqatsi cinematically expresses the post9/11 cultural zeitgeist of
America, while suggesting
America and the West faces
a kind of critical void and
cosmic vertigo in the wake
of ground zero.
2003
GROUND ZERO
IN LAS VEGAS
In the 2003 book
Zeropolis, Bruce Begout
theorized Las Vegas as the
zero metropolis, the city of
nothingness and illusion,
emptiness and nonexistence, evisceration and exploitation. While the idea of
a “Zeropolis” is insightful
and provocative, there is
more happening in Las
Vegas than mere gambling
and empty aesthetics.
Las Vegas is a microcosm of the fully mediated world extending around
the planet and throughout
global culture. As Jean
Baudrillard explained, it
is by being seen as imaginary that Disneyland and
Las Vegas save the reality
principle—functioning as
covers for the fact that the
“real world” of the modern
metropolis is no longer
fully real or authentic.
Disneyland and Las Vegas
embody all the complexities of the postmodern
hyperreal, where the real
and fictional are no longer
dualities but are digitized
and cloned in an endless
series of reprogramming
and reproduction.
The events at
Ground Zero in New York
were strangely anticipated
in Las Vegas, at the hotel
“New York-New York.” As
with the Twin Towers, the
hotel New York-New York
signaled the double, the clone, the copy, the rise of the
hyperreal. Opened in 1997,
New York-New York is a
vast simulation of various
New York City icons—with
a skyscraper skyline that
features a half-size Statue
of Liberty, forty-seven-story
Empire State Building,
Chrysler Building, Seagram
Building, Grand Central
Station, three-hundredfoot-long Brooklyn Bridge,
and many others. Within
New York–New York, tourists can dine in Greenwich
Village or stroll along Times
Square and Broadway.
However, visitors have never been able to view or visit
the World Trade Center,
for the Twin Towers were
not included in the skyline
of New York–New York.
Like a map prophesying the
absence of territories, the
future of New York City
was presaged in the Xerox
of New York–New York.
Capitol of the hyperreal, Las Vegas is where
reproduction becomes
reality, the map of yesterday
that preceded the territory
of tomorrow.
2004
ZERO-BRANES
AND ZERO
CURVATURE IN
STRING THEORY
In his 2004
bestseller, The Fabric of the
Cosmos, physicist Brian
Greene explained string
theory and state of the art
theories about the physical
nature of the universe.
String theory posits that the
smallest constituents of the
universe are not particles of
matter but loops of energy,
in the form of submicroscopic strings, which are linked
together like a complex
web or membrane. The
smallest of these loops are
called “zero-branes,” and,
like strings on a guitar,
the loops of energy vibrate
to generate the matter of
the universe. Though not
yet empirically verified,
the equations suggest the
strings make up a sprawling
cosmic fabric upon
which exists the matter
of the universe.
Since the big bang,
the universe has been
expanding in all directions,
with the galaxies hurtling
away from each other
with increasing velocity.
Propelling the universe
apart are the expanding
voids in between the
galaxies, voids powered by
the mysterious force of dark
energy. These expanding
voids are apparently spreading the universe toward a
final state of zero density
and “zero curvature,” or
toward a flat universe that
will eventually disappear
beyond all horizons. Greene
likens the shape of the
universe to a flat-screen
TV and a hologram on a
plastic card, where reality exists on a thin surface
illuminated to reveal “the
holographic illusions of
daily life.” If the Second
Law of Thermodynamics
and superstring theory are
correct, then the ultimate
trajectory of the universe
is from infinite energy and
density toward zero energy
and zero density.
2005
COKE ZERO
Offering the promise of zero energy and zero
density, Coke Zero may
be the ultimate soft drink,
the cosmic soft drink for a
string theory universe.
Introduced in 2005,
Coke Zero’s “zero formula”
contains zero calories, zero
carbohydrates, zero sugar,
zero protein—apparently
meaning that the drink
offers nothing to increase
energy and nothing to
increase the density of body
fat, though apparently it
still contains caffeine for
a quick hit. From Coke to
Diet Coke to Coke Zero,
the trajectory of the original
Coca-Cola is to disappear,
to have its flavor simulated
and function emptied, to
reach its vanishing point on
the horizons of the global
marketplace. Like a copy of
a copy of a copy, Coke Zero
is the soft-drink simulacrum. Once promoted as
“the real thing,” Coca-Cola
has cloned a near-nothing,
marketed as nothing, a zero,
in Coke Zero. Other Coca
Coal brands have followed
suit, such as Sprite Zero
and Powerade Zero.
Coke Zero is also
a global brand with subtle
meaning. Many of modernity’s ideals and secular
values—freedom, science,
enlightenment, equality,
progress, etc. —have lost
authority and authenticity as universal values,
precisely as globalization
has swept around the
world, offering an explosion of personal lifestyles
and group identities in a
fragmented global village.
Coca-Cola and Facebook
are representative of the
global brands and global
media supplanting universal secular philosophy,
where universality is emptied of intellectual content
and then replaced by a
proliferation of copies and
reproductions as vacuous
symbols of a shared destiny.
Remnants of universal philosophy are now stamped
as the tribal tattoos for the
global village, where the
global logos is replaced by
the logos of global brands.
GROUND ZERO
IN NEW
ORLEANS
Hurricane Katrina
effected another “ground
zero” in an American metropolis. The global village
gazed upon the horrific
images—the Superdome
and skyscrapers towered
above a swamp, survivors
stranded on highway
overpasses and rooftops,
and much of the citizenry
reduced to hunter-gatherer status, all while the
utterly corrupt government
illustrated its ignorance and
incompetence. In one sense,
this ground zero was a
test run for the effects of
global warming ; in another
sense, it is a test pattern
for American hubris
and ignorance.
Hurricane Katrina
fulfilled the apocalyptic
prophecies of The Weather
Channel. In January, 2006,
The Weather Channel
launched the series It Could
Happen Tomorrow, which
focused on possible weather
or geological apocalypses
that could hit American
cities. The first scheduled
episode of It Could Happen
Tomorrow was about a
Category 5 hurricane hitting New Orleans ! Storm
surge overwhelmed the
levees, thousands of people
were drowned, and skyscra-
pers were flooded amidst
an urban swamp. As the
show was being produced,
in summer 2005, Hurricane
Katrina struck New
Orleans, and the episode
was withheld from
public broadcast until
summer 2006.
Planners have
known that a Category
5 hurricane would flood
New Orleans, with
catastrophic results, yet
the necessary upgrade of
the levees was not made
by the Army Corps of
Engineers, Louisiana, or
the city of New Orleans.
Plus, the wetlands south
of the city were allowed to
steadily erode, reducing the
natural hurricane buffer
for the city. Meanwhile,
New Orleans erected the
Superdome in 1975 and
pursued the postmodern
economies of tourism,
sports, and media
spectacles.
Between 2001 and
2005, two of America’s
largest architectural
structures—The Twin
Towers and the Superdome
(both completed in the
1970s)—were destroyed or
severely damaged, suggesting a massive cultural
reversal. The terrorists blew
holes in the Twin Towers
while Hurricane Katrina
blew holes in the roof of
the Superdome and the
levees of New Orleans, the
ground zeros of the apocalypse. This is the Fight Club
future, where the postmodern future is engulfed by
the premodern past and
media spectacle encounters
intelligent design.
2006
NYC AS A ZERO
On the five-year
anniversary of September
11th, the New York Times
published a special section
called “Broken Ground :
The Hole in the City’s
Heart.” On the first page
was a circular photograph
of New York City with
Ground Zero at the center
of the image and the rest of
the city and world warping
away toward the vanishing
points. Wittingly or unwittingly, the New York Times
depicted New York City
as a zero, for what else is
a circle with a hole in it
—especially a hole called
Ground Zero—but the
site and symbol for nothingness and some kind of
singularity ?
As evidenced
by the remainder of the
decade since 9/11, some
of the zeros have intuited
029
2008
GLOBAL ZERO
NUCLEAR
DISARMAMENT
• zero job creation,
with a decline in private-sector employment, marking
the first decade on record in
which that happened.
• zero economic
gains for the typical family,
with median household
income (adjusted for inflation) lower than 1999.
• zero gains for homeowners, with housing prices (adjusted for inflation)
now roughly back to where
they were at the beginning
of the decade.
• zero gains for
stocks, even without taking
inflation into account.
Krugman blames
this mess on the hubris
and misguided “economic
triumphalism” that reigns
within the business and
political establishments
of America. To wrap up
the decade of the aughts,
Krugman suggests we “bid
a not at all fond farewell to
the Big Zero—the decade in
which we achieved nothing
and learned nothing.”
POPULATION
ZERO
At the end of the
decade, the end of the world
remains a popular theme,
featuring a blockbuster film
based on zero evidence and
a hit TV series starring
CARBON ZERO
zero people.
TOMORROW
Population zero,
life after people, the end of
In the book and film
humanity—these are the
An Inconvenient Truth, Al
scenarios depicted in 2012,
Gore offered a warning and
Roland Emmerich’s maga plan to prevent the next
num opus, and Life After
ecological ground zero.
People : The Series, which
Gore argues that humanity
is airing on The History
faces the moment of singuChannel. The TV series is
larity for confronting global
based on Life After People :
warming, which can only
Population Zero, which aired
be reversed by a carbon zero
on The History Channel in
tomorrow. Here the zero
2008. Not to be outdone,
is the singularity, the
National Geographic
endpoint for fossil fuel conChannel countered with
sumption and the starting
Aftermath : Population Zero.
point for a most optimistic
In the clever TV
ecological future.
shows, special effects are
Accompanying
used to depict what would
carbon zero tomorrow are
happen on Earth if humans
other ecological zeros :
instantaneously vanished
“Zero Footprint” (consufrom the planet, while
mer waste) and “Zero
our technological systems
Emissions” (cars). There is
remained. Within seconds,
also “Zero Water,” a brand
cars crash ; within minutes,
of water filter which is supplanes drop from the sky.
posedly provides “perfect”
Within hours, the unattenpurified drinking water.
ded power grid shuts down ;
within three days, nuclear
plants melt down and the
entire planet is shrouded in
dark at night. Within ten
years, roads crack and cover
2009
over with weeds as nature
THE ECONOMIC begins to green the cities.
2007
ZERO
Within two hundred years,
CARBON ZERO
many skyscrapers and bridOR GLOBAL
In a New York
ges begin to collapse because
ZERO
Times op-ed (December 27,
of rust and decay ; Paris be2009) about the state of
comes a marsh, Manhattan
In the year folthe American economy,
becomes a forest, and deserlowing An Inconvenient
Nobel Prize-winning
tification overtakes Las
Truth, the zero appeared
economist Paul Krugman
Vegas. Within one thousand
on a global scale, hovering
labeled the decade the
years, the Eiffel Tower and
above the clouds against a
“Big Zero.” According to
Statue of Liberty collapse,
blue sky. On both sides of
Krugman, it was a decade of : falling beneath the green
In 2008, one hundred international leaders
convened in Paris to launch
the “Global Zero” campaign
to combat the all-too-real
threats of nuclear proliferation and nuclear terrorism.
The Global Zero campaign
includes plans for deep
reductions in the arsenals
of Russia and the United
States, to be accompanied
by negotiations among the
nuclear powers to eliminate
all nuclear weapons. The
leaders spanned political
lines and included President
Dmitry Medvedev of Russia
and President Barack
Obama of the United States,
who both have declared
their support for “a nuclear
free world.” The next Global
Zero meeting is set for 2010.
Seven decades after
Hiroshima, five decades
after the Cuban Missile
Crisis, and a decade after
9/11, we can only hope that
one zero counters another,
where the next ground zero
is prevented by Global Zero.
canopy. Within twenty-five
to one hundred thousand
years, the next ice age sends
glaciers grinding across
the collapsed cities, erasing
any last remnants of the
human species. On Earth,
all traces of humanity will
have reached the vanishing
point, the zero condition for
human civilization.
In a billion years,
the only trace of human
existence will not be on
Earth, but on the moon,
where the items from
the moon landings will
still be intact, along with
the four-billion-year-old
craters. And, the Voyager
space probes will be gliding
through the cosmic voids.
At least Voyager will
avoid the fate of humanity
in 2012, the film whose plot
reflects pseudo-science and
human ignorance among
those who buy into the
astrology of Mayan prophecies. In 2012, that planet
once known as Spaceship
Earth, that planet filled
with passengers, yet missing
its pilot and instruction
manual, is now envisioned
as a planet destroyed by the
alignments of the cosmos.
The Cold War and
its nuclear ground zero has
been replaced by the Terror
War and its new ground
zero, which is an intellectual
ground zero. This is the war
that America and the West
seem clueless on how to win.
The Terror War is rooted in
two wars, the war between
two tribes of imperialist
fundamentalists, Christians
and Islamists, who are both
at war with the perceived
ills of modernity and
postmodernity and seek to
reverse culture in reasserting their deities as guides
for destinies on Earth. This
war cannot be won with new
military strategy, new
technology, or more relativism and toleration. The
Terror War can only be won
the same way the Cold War
was won, by providing
a better model living on
planet Earth, a model that
provides spiritual meaning
for secular living in the
modern world.
THE ZERO
DECADE
So, here we are at
the end of discussing “the
zero zero decade.”
A decade into the
new millennium and many
people are preoccupied with
the end of the world and
end of the universe, from Al
Gore to Roland Emmerich,
fundamentalists to scientists, The History Channel
to The National Geographic
Channel. It seems humans
can imagine the end of the
world, but not an end to the
things that might cause the
end of the world—like war,
exploitation, ignorance,
superstition, willful delusion, and imaginary deities.
Science and technology
have hurtled into the new
millennium, but it seems
human culture and ideology
is lagging far behind.
The patterns of
zeros are more than a clever
conceit or millennial numerology, for the zeros not only
suggest dangerous cultural
and intellectual trajectories,
but also signal the moments
of singularity for negative
or positive cultural transformations. Many of the zeros
suggest the entropy and exhaustion of modernity, that
global culture shaped by the
once-utopian trajectories
of science and technology.
Yet, some zeros suggest
opportunities for the future,
exemplified by the carbon
zero tomorrow and Global
Zero nuclear disarmament
campaign.
Perhaps the most
profound effect of modernity was to remove humans
from the center of the
universe, to place us in our
true location as passengers
on Spaceship Earth, floating
in a cosmos of hundreds of
billions of galaxies, each
with hundreds of billions of
stars. Most humans dread
or deny facing these cosmic
conditions, which is a key
reason they turn to religions
and fundamentalisms with
never-ending offers of deities that promise destinies
in the heavens. Until artists,
philosophers, and cosmologists show what the big bang
and the fate of the universe
means for humanity’s raison
d’etre and joie de vivre,
there will always be a void in
meaning for secular society
on Spaceship Earth.
Cultural theory is
confronting the zero conditions—ends, exhaustions,
reversals, nothingnesses,
voids, and singularities.
The year 2000 and the first
decade of the millennium
arrived, but the future seems
to be crashing into the world
of yesterday. A decade into
the millennium, it is ground
zero for theory.
THE ZERO ZERO DECADE
this zero was a capitol S,
spelling out SOS, the famed
letters signaling distress or
emergency. The zero was the
centerpiece of the logo for
Live Earth, the 2007 global
“concerts for a climate in
crisis.” Upon arriving at the
Live Earth Web site, visitors
viewed each S disappearing
behind the O, the center
of which was black. Beside
the O were the words “Live
Earth” and if one scrolled
over the two words, “Live
Earth” disappeared against
the black background,
leaving only the O, the
circle that became a zero,
signaling countdown to the
ecological apocalypse or
blastoff for a carbon zero
tomorrow.
Adapted from Barry Vacker’s book,
Zero Conditions (Theory Vortex 2008).
www.barryvacker.net
www.clampart.com
USELESS 10 - ZERO
Ibid.
America’s own ideological
and existential crisis.
America faced a ground zero
and the resulting singularity
has only amplified America’s
hubris and ignorance. After
all, Oliver Stone’s World
Trade Center (2006) was
a cultural lobotomy in
the guise of a meaningful
action film, offering zero
explanation for why the
Twin Towers existed or were
destroyed.
And, what has
America done since 9/11 ?
America’s political leaders
passed the PATRIOT Act,
attacked Afghanistan and
Iraq, tortured prisoners,
betrayed the Constitution,
flouted the Geneva
Convention, watched a hurricane drown New Orleans,
further bureaucratized
the health care industry,
considered zero interest
rates for the Fed, and bailed
out incompetent bankers on
Wall Street, even though the
economy tanked and stock
market values are below the
levels reached in 2000.
To top it off,
government debt exceeded
the digits on The National
Debt Clock in Times Square
and America now has a longterm debt moving toward
100 trillion dollars, or 1
followed by fourteen zeros !