The Gift of Death: Decelerationist Politics from the Seventies Until Today

Billionaires and tech moguls are promising us a high-tech, accelerated future of space exploration, transhumanism and immortality. But can this actually save our world from political and climate collapse?

As our world teeters on the edge of a number of crises both social and environmental, billionaires and tech moguls are putting their faith in technological fixes and espousing post-human fantasies of immortality and planetary exploration as a way to save humanity. But can the high-tech panaceas and space opera futures they promise to a moneyed few deliver anything other than fantasy and denial?

In The Gift of Death, Anthony Galluzzo fights back against these high-tech dystopian futures of transhumanism, accelerationism, and long-termism, arguing instead for a degrowth politics that shuns unlimited expansion and the new interplanetary frontier, and re-roots humans in the limited, finite and natural world in which we exist. If we are to build a better world for all, he argues, it will be done here on Earth, not in the spaceship of a billionaire.

In doing so, Galluzzo unearths a hidden history of degrowth politics in a wide range of cultural works from the 1970s to the present day, exploring novels such as Riddley Walker, The Dispossessed, Ecotopia, and The Trouble on Triton alongside films like Solaris and Penda’s Fen. Drawing on neo-Luddite and neo-romantic thought, including eco-feminism and alternative technology, death acceptance and eco-phenomenology, he argues that any meaningful response to the perils of our age requires an acceptance of our earthly limits and a reorientation of our politics toward a romantic, low-tech and low impact engagement with our own creatureliness.