Cover art for the sound art concept album MARSIFICATION: a tale of planetary grief created as part of the spread of the neologism.
Language as a critical arena of struggle
Effective campaigns and social movements don’t just react to to the realities imposed upon us, we also fight to change it: to normalize new ideas, transform structural relationships and create new social realities. So language is often an important area of struggle, battling over the meaning of words, challenging their misuse and even creating new language in the form of neologisms.
Here’s an update on a little project I’ve been involved in for a few years around the neologism MARSIFICATION which was created as an intervention to challenge techno-salvationist narratives.
Techno-fix narratives are at play in many different sectors
A little background: Over the years I’ve done various narrative strategy projects to support campaigns challenging dangerous deployments of new, untested technologies being pushed on an unsuspecting population mainly by unscrupulous corporations. Many of these have sparked large-scale and in some cases global resistance movements challenging things like genetically modified food and organisms (GMOs), synthetic biology, nanotech, killer robots and a huge growing fight currently: exposing polluters’ fake climate tech.
Over and over again I’ve seen different versions of the same basic techno-fix frame derail pressure for transformative and system change solutions (body cams on cops anyone?) When techno-fixes have been successfully fought off it is often because movements won the race to frame public awareness like food justice movements framing Monsanto’s GMO sterile seeds as “terminator seeds” which helped block their deployment.
Mocking the ultimate techno-fix: replacing Earth with Mars
So a few years back collaborating with the participatory art project the Bureau of Linguistical Reality, I helped coin the word MARSIFICATION (verb tense is MARSIFY) to critique the whole Mars-will-save-us narrative that is being pushed by a number of tech-billionaires. The term picked up steam recently through various media attention and then New Scientist named it as one of their words of the year for 2023 and then it got into wikipedia.
We created the word to help activists specifically name how fantasies of turning Mars into Earth are distracting us from the fact global capitalism is rapidly turning Earth into Mars. Here’s some of the definitions:
Marsification: The various cultural, political and economic processes through which techno-salvationist fantasies divert our attention from the dominant global economic system’s erosion of Earth’s capacity to support life.
We also want to show how all these techno-fixes are rooted in the same flawed and oppressive worldview. My favorite definition, which I can imagine activists using to fight almost any elite techno-fix is:
Marsify: To attempt to solve a problem in the most statistically unlikely and unselfconsciously grandiose way possible.
One potentially powerful rhetorical strategy to challenge bad ideas by linking them with the most extreme version of the misguided idea. Since the current fantasy that Mars could somehow become a replacement Earth is so transparently ridiculous, it can hold up a mirror to discredit a lot of the more normal-sounding techno-fix proposals. Polluters selling phony “offsets” so they can keep polluting? Creating a massive whole new global industrial complex to suck carbon out of the air, ship it around on pipelines and dispose of it (somewhere…?) all so fossil fuel companies can keep profiting from destroying our atmosphere? Those are not only unjust and dangerous proposals, they are also wildly unrealistic terrible ideas that won’t even work. So let’s call them out as polluters trying to “marsify” climate policy.
Exposing the ongoing legacy of colonial worldviews
In addition to mocking some of the crazy billionaire techno-fixes Marsification draws attention to the deeper historic roots that the obsession with Mars colonization reflects. A second definition of the word is:
Marsification: The expansion of colonial fantasy beyond the atmosphere of the Earth.
Many of the drivers of our current planetary crisis have their roots in the worldviews spread through force by European colonialism: Unlimited expansion, human exceptionalism, seeing complex interdependent natural systems as just resources etc. It seems reasonable to assume that since space extractivism is largely a continuation of the same underlying logic it will have basically the same few winners and many losers. Just like historic colonialism primarily benefited European elites I’d suggest colonialism in space – Jeff Bezos mining asteroids or the U.S. and China carving up the moon – isn’t really in most people’s interests. Already most of the ongoing extraction & “economic growth” is merely increasing corporate profits NOT meeting human needs and generally not increasing collective well-being. Expanding into space isn’t going to change those core power dynamics.
And now MARSIFICATION the sound art concept album!?
The latest development in this neologism journey towards influencing discourse is two artists (one of them who co-created the word with me) have released an amazing audio art concept album called Marsification: A tale of planetary grief. It is basically a love letter to the Earth and a fun, artistic critique of “astro-colonialism” ranging from details about zero gravity pooping to an homage track to Gil Scott-Heron called “Whitey Out on Mars.” I had a very limited advisory role on the album so can take zero credit for its awesomeness but I am a huge fan. I highly recommend checking it out. You can access it from their adorable album website or any of the main streaming platforms. If you like it please share the album because it has zero promotion behind it and it deserves a wider audience. Plus it’s another exciting way the concept of marsification is moving in the culture and inspiring more critique of the most absurd techo-fix narrative of them all.
So if marsification/marsify is useful to your work please take the word and use it. Experiment with it. Spread it. Who knows what powerful, creative, strategic ways folks might put this word and concept to use. And really shouldn’t we all be trolling Elon Musk these days?