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The independent music artist Tanerélle never felt fairly compensated for her work — a common frustration among artists who receive scant earnings from music-streaming platforms such as Spotify and Apple Music. But the "Continuum" singer felt differently once she started sharing her tracks on Even, a Web3 platform that enables artists to connect directly with their most dedicated supporters and offers fans exclusive access to artists' creative content and experiences. The service allows artists to set their own prices, and each sale results in direct access to fan-related data — such as emails, locations, numbers of purchases — and instant payouts. "It was wonderful partnering with a team who finally made me feel like my art was worth the love I pour into it," Tanerélle told Insider. "I wish it could always be like this." Headshot of Tanerélle [REMOVED] Tanerélle, an independent music artist. Orin Fleurimont The importance of direct-to-consumer offerings for music artists has never been more evident. In recent years, streaming and social-media algorithms have soured artists' attitudes toward earning royalties and trying to make a living doing what they love: Chasing pennies on saturated digital platforms can be draining, and streaming payouts constantly disappoint. Since the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic, when touring halted, cutting a significant amount of musicians' revenue, independent and signed artists alike have desperately sought new ways to monetize their work and connect with their supporters. This is where Web3 came in. Web3 is a decentralized internet powered by blockchain technology, offering music artists direct and transparent payments via smart contracts, increased control over their creative content and earnings, and ownership of their work through nonfungible tokens, which can be collected and enjoyed by their most loyal supporters. In 2021 alone, music NFT sales generated over $83 million in revenue for artists. With platforms taking miniscule fees, as low as 0%, and intermediaries virtually nonexistent — curator fees typically don't exceed 5% — the vast majority of revenue goes where it belongs: artists' pockets. However, by summer 2022, there were signs of a decline in the Web3 landscape because of regulatory uncertainty, speculative volatility, security concerns, and the lack of real-world adoption. By November, crypto winter was in full effect. While the Web3 and crypto bull markets between 2020 and 2022 may never be realized again, some Web3 platforms are finding success through a tech strategy that's helping them survive and thrive during the bear market: combining Web3 experiences with Web2 interfaces. Insider spoke with top execs at the innovative digital platforms Even, Sound.XYZ, and IYK about how their companies were transforming the music business by blending Web3 features and utilities with practical, familiar integrations that appeal to mainstream users. Even, which has been used by Tanerélle and other artists such as Omarion, Jidenna, and LaRussell, is built on the Polygon blockchain, but its marketing, branding, and front end are entirely Web2-oriented. For example, Even uses email sign-up and allows credit-card purchases. It also uses familiar terminology throughout its platform and in marketing, similar to what one would find on traditional music platforms. This fosters a seamless onboarding experience for fans and takes the burden off artists to educate them. The benefit of this hybrid approach is clear: In April, when much of the Web3 music space faced uncertainty, Even closed its $2.2 million seed round. Mag Rodriguez, the founder and CEO of Even, was determined to leverage Web2 and Web3 technologies to empower artists — especially Black and brown musicians, who often bear the brunt of exploitation in the music industry — and streamline support from their fans. Headshot of Mag Rodriguez [REMOVED] Mag Rodriguez, the founder and CEO of Even. Weston Rich "We believed in making it accessible and seamless for fans to engage," Rodriguez told Insider. He said that making Even "too Web3" by using a Web3 front end and obscure verbiage "would have been counterproductive," consequently deterring traditional artists and their fanbases. "We wanted to bridge the gap and welcome fans into a new era, while maintaining familiarity," he added. Web2-Web3 integrations are also expected to introduce a new monetization model, which the Grammy Award-winning artist and songwriter Eric Bellinger said was long overdue in the music industry. "This is going to start a wave of business owners and even consumers thinking differently," he told Insider. "There's no longer a middleman needed to take the majority of artist revenue, and we can get paid instantly. That has never been the case."

Decentralized autonomous termination contracts: also known as smart contracts, digital agreements that are stored in the blockchain and automatically execute an agreement (usually a payment) when certain conditions are met

Often poor economic conditions, discriminatory practices, misappropriation, and unscrupulous representation have led to unconscionable deals (even by music industry standards) that have left even the most prolific and successful artists destitute and indebted, or simply with no attribution, compensation, or deal.202 However, a decentralized autonomous termination right could level the negotiating playing field, neutralize the impact of predatory and discriminatory practices, remove rentseeking gatekeepers, and give Black artists a true second bite at the proverbial apple.203 With an automated, decentralized, and de-gentrified system, these artists can finally raise a proverbial fist and achieve true entrepreneurial and economic power by successfully leveraging their rights early in a creative work’s life cycle and then confidently reclaiming copyright decades later after the work has had a sufficient opportunity to prove its value and worth.204 Aspirational, but attainable via decentralized autonomous copyright termination

How Blockchain Technology can Benefit the Music Industry? Transparency One of the significant advantages of blockchain technology is the transparency it provides. With blockchain technology, all transactions are recorded and visible to everyone on the network. This means that artists, fans, and industry professionals can see exactly how much revenue is being generated from music sales, and how much of that revenue is being paid out to each party. This level of transparency can help eliminate the problem of hidden fees and opaque accounting practices that have plagued the music industry for decades. It can also help ensure that artists are paid fairly for their work and reduce the likelihood of disputes over royalties. Direct Payment Another potential benefit of blockchain technology is the ability to make direct payments to artists. With traditional payment systems, it can take months for artists to receive their royalties, and the process can be convoluted and opaque. However, with blockchain technology, artists can receive direct payments in real time, and there is no need for intermediaries to handle the payment process. This can be a significant advantage for artists, especially those who are just starting in the industry and may not have the negotiating power to demand favorable terms from record labels or other intermediaries. Smart Contracts Smart contracts are self-executing contracts with the terms of the agreement between buyer and seller being directly written into lines of code. These contracts can be programmed to automatically execute when certain conditions are met, which can significantly streamline the payment process. In the music industry, smart contracts can be used to automate the payment of royalties. For example, a smart contract could be set up to pay a certain percentage of revenue to the artist whenever their music is streamed or downloaded. This could help eliminate the need for intermediaries such as collecting societies and streamline the payment process for artists. Fan Engagement Blockchain technology can also be used to enhance fan engagement. For example, artists can use blockchain technology to issue their digital tokens or coins, which fans can purchase as a way to support the artist and gain access to exclusive content, merchandise, or concert tickets. These tokens can be traded on cryptocurrency exchanges, providing an additional revenue stream for artists and a way for fans to support their favorite artists directly. This can also help eliminate the need for intermediaries such as ticketing agencies, which often charge high fees to fans.

Blockchains, smart contracts, and non-fungible token standards can play a significant role in automating protections to ensure that all artists have actual—not theoretical—rights, especially disenfranchised creatives victimized first by powerful industry intermediaries, and then by a legal process created by the same industry insiders. Although blockchain’s first use case was to secure and record encrypted peer-to-peer Bitcoin transactions and balances, decentralization is particularly beneficial for verifying and securing data in copyright-intensive industries. Smart contract code can automate contract performance and enforcement and replace manual cpyright transfer termination processes to remove artificially formal barriers to the full enjoyment and commercial exploitation of a copyrighted work. To de-gentrify Black genius, it’s critically important to leverage decentralized and automated algorithmic processes for unbridled creativity. As unique, real-world assets, copyrights that are “tokenized” can be managed and exploited as an NFTs – with provable ownership and scarcity. Creatives could realize increased opportunities for liquidity (as unique assets tends to be more illiquid) and access to global markets. In light of the historical imbalance of copyright ownership and monetization noted herein, these nascent technologies present new opportunities to level the playing field for all artists.

The war game scenario conducted by a Washington think tank began with a sudden failure at three Taiwanese semiconductor foundries that make high-end computer chips used in such items as smartphones, automobiles and military equipment. The halt in production raised questions of whether a cyberattack by Beijing was responsible — touching off an international crisis between China and the United States that the researchers said could grind the global economy to a halt and incite a military confrontation. The war game and study by the Center for a New American Security, which is set to be released on Thursday, illustrate how dependent the world is on Taiwanese computer chips — and how that dependence could draw the United States and China into various kinds of conflict. The report comes as Congress has put new energy into bills to increase domestic production of semiconductors in the United States. Diversifying the global supply chain for computer chips is a key recommendation in the report. Last week, President Biden urged Congress to pass those bills and promised he would work to bring production of semiconductor chips back to the United States. “Today we barely produce 10 percent of the computer chips, despite being the leader in chip design and research,” Mr. Biden said. “And we don’t have the ability to make the most advanced chips now — right now. But today, 75 percent of production takes place in East Asia. Ninety percent of the most advanced chips are made in Taiwan. China is doing everything it can to take over the global market so they can try to outcompete the rest of us and have a lot of applications — including military applications.” Even if Congress approves new government investments in America’s microchip production capacities, matching Taiwanese expertise is years away, if it is even possible, the report’s authors say. The United States is already more dependent on Taiwan’s high-end microchips than it was on Middle Eastern oil in decades past, the report said. China, the war game predicts, could use economic coercion, cyberoperations and hybrid tactics to try to seize or harm Taiwan’s semiconductor industry — and the United States must become better able to identify and counter Chinese tactics that could threaten the microchip supply. War games like this one involve current and former officials, academics and other experts sitting around a table playing various roles. After an initial scenario is presented, the teams take turns making strategic decisions. Such exercises are supposed to yield insights about how different players would act, and lay plain what sort of moves each group might make. Becca Wasser, who helped design and lead the scenario, said that while many war games were conducted to study China, most focused on conventional military threats, giving short shrift to the many ways China could exert pressure on Taiwan. And countering those pressure points could be difficult, especially if the United States and Taiwan were at odds over the best strategy. In the scenario, the U.S. team presumed the Taiwan team would go along with its strategies to counter China. But Taiwan’s interest sometimes led it to cross-purposes. For example, when the United States wanted to bring semiconductor engineers to the safety of America, Taiwan resisted, worried about a brain drain. “Whatever the United States tried to do by itself in the game really fell flat,” Ms. Wasser said. “We have seen a variety of examples of that in real life.” As a result, multilateral responses and global efforts to build resiliency in the supply chain for computer chips are most likely the best strategy, the report said. Taiwan has relied on its dominance of the microchip industry for its defense. The “silicon shield” theory argued that because its semiconductor industry is so important to Chinese manufacturing and the United States consumer economy, actions that threaten its foundries would be too risky. Martijn Rasser, a co-author of the study and a former C.I.A. analyst, said it was crucial for the international community to convince Taiwan that its shield strategy needed to be internationalized. “The long-term play has to be a geographic dispersal of those capabilities out of Taiwan in exchange for enhanced security guarantees for the island,” he said. The Biden administration has made clear that in the case of Ukraine, while the United States would economically punish Russia for any invasion, it would not commit troops to fight alongside Kyiv to stop any intervention by Moscow. The longstanding American policy toward Taiwan calls for shoring up its defenses and practicing strategic ambiguity over whether Washington would militarily intervene in a conflict over the island. But Taiwan and its semiconductors are far more important to America’s economy than Ukraine is — meaning it would very likely be far more difficult for the United States to stay out of a conflict involving Taiwan.

The supply-chain crisis was terrible in 2021, but we didn't know just how bad. It was actually a five-days-from-emergency kind of bad. A new report from the Department of Commerce released Tuesday found that the typical inventory of semiconductor chips fell from 40 days in 2019 to less than five days in 2021. Some key industries were especially strapped. That had a big impact, particularly for automakers, consumer electronics, LED lights, and even wind turbine producers. The global auto industry, for example, lost about $210 billion in revenues in 2021 thanks to the global chip shortage that forced companies to scale back production. What's more, the chip shortage also drove up inflation because both new and used cars got so expensive, as automakers need chips to make new vehicles. The price of new cars and trucks in December was up a shocking 11.8% year-over-year. Tuesday's report is based on responses from more than 150 companies that responded to a Request for Information that Commerce sent in September, asking for information about inventories, demand, and delivery dynamics from anyone involved in the semiconductor supply chain. “That means if a COVID outbreak, a natural disaster, or political instability disrupts a foreign semiconductor facility for even just a few weeks, it has the potential [to] shut down a manufacturing facility in the U.S., putting American workers and their families at risk,” Commerce said Tuesday. The data also showed that not only were companies operating with very lean inventories, but demand for chips last year was at least 20% higher than 2019. Industry experts expect the chip shortage to continue into 2022.

While CHIPS is very popular on both sides of the aisle, it may not relieve current shortages as intended. It takes many years to build a physical semiconductor production facility, so by the time CHIPS became law and it funds were spent on building production facilities in the United States, the COVID-19-induced global semiconductor shortage would be over. Moreover, the semiconductor industry, like many other capital-intensive industries, is cyclical in nature because it is logistically difficult and expensive for manufacturing facilities to rapidly increase production to meet sudden surges in demand. It is thus best for market mechanisms, not government intervention, to address these issues. The private sector is already making its own investments (with no federal funding) that are far larger than the $52 billion funding in CHIPS. Intel has announced plans to invest $20 billion into two semiconductor factories in Ohio.[3] TSMC, a Taiwanese company and one of the largest producers of semiconductors, has announced plans to spend $12 billion on a new production facility in Arizona.[4] Micron will spend $150 billion over the next 10 years to build new production facilities in the United States.[5] Samsung has also announced plans to invest $17 billion in a new production facility in the United States. These private-sector projects alone would invest nearly $200 billion , and all were announced before CHIPS. The $52 billion in CHIPS spending is an arguably unnecessary intervention, which would benefit a largely healthy semiconductor industry.[6] Funding for Reassuring Supply Chains: More Ineffective and Wasteful Spending A major difference between the two bills is that America COMPETES would create a new Supply Chain Resilience Program (SCRP) that would cost $45 billion for FYs 2022-2027. Through SCRP, America COMPETES would engage in a more aggressive industrial policy than USICA. The SCRP would provide grants, loans, and loan guarantees to U.S. entities that engage in certain “eligible activities.” These activities include but are not limited to “the manufacturing of a critical good or industrial equipment in the United States, the commercialization, adoption, or use of manufacturing technology by domestic manufacturers. . . the purchase . . . or retooling of industrial equipment for use in the United States,” or even “the relocation of manufacturing facilities related to the production of a critical good into the United States.” The term “critical good” has been generally defined as any item whose absence would threaten national or economic security. A supply chain is a sequence of transactions that results in the final assembly and delivery of a good or service, and it can be short, long, simple, complex, quick, or time-consuming. Firms pick the combination to deliver the best value proposition they can. It is therefore already in the private sector’s interests to solve supply chain issues or shortcomings as firms add value and make money in such endeavors. The SCRP, like CHIPS, would most likely be a broad and unnecessary expense without the intended impact. Research Funding A major difference between the two bills is how they prioritize research funding. USICA would allocate most of its research funding to the National Science Foundation (NSF). The NSF is an independent agency that provides federal funding through grants and loans primarily for basic research that focuses on testing and improving fundamental scientific knowledge and theory. USICA would also create a new technology directorate within the NSF that would instead focus on applied research. House lawmakers disagreed with these USICA provisions, arguing they would hamper the NSF’s ability to focus on its primary mission of basic research. Hence, America COMPETES mainly allocates its funding for research through the Department of Energy to create new R&D programs including but not limited to “basic energy sciences, artificial photosynthesis, electricity storage, biological systems science and climate and environment science, applied mathematics, computational science.” America COMPETES does create a new directorate at the NSF called the Directorate for Science and Engineering Solutions, but it would be smaller and receive less funding compared to the new technology directorate ordered by USICA. Nevertheless, both bills would increase the federal government’s role in dictating private-industry research initiatives. Omnibus Bill: Countering China Means Many Different Things Countering China means different things to different constituencies. Any anti-China bill, like American COMPETES and USICA, will inevitably become an omnibus bill as legislators seek to prioritize proposals, both effective and not, that are popular with or helpful to their constituents. Therefore, both bills contain a wide-ranging set of provisions that vary tremendously in focus and impact. Both bills renew the Generalized System of Preferences (GSP) but for different time spans. GSP reduces or eliminates duties and tariffs for certain imports from low-income countries. USICA would renew GSP until January 1, 2027, whereas America COMPETES would renew GSP until January 1, 2024. U.S. importers lost relief from tariffs and had to resume paying duties and tariffs when GSP expired at the end of 2020. Importers of GSP products would be retroactively refunded for these amounts paid and would no longer be required to pay duties and tariffs on GSP imports until expiration in2024 or 2027, depending on which date is included in the final bill. Both bills order the creation and implementation of a national strategy to increase public investment, lending, and trade abroad, focusing mainly on Latin America, the Caribbean, Taiwan, Africa, and Southeast Asia. These areas have already received large amounts of Chinese investment. Notably, both bills also ban the sale of shark fins and order new studies of coral reefs. Disagreement on Climate Provisions A major difference between America COMPETES and USICA is the level of bipartisan support for these bills. Although the legislative process for USICA was anything but smooth, USICA still passed in the Senate by a final vote of 68-32, meaning 19 Republicans joined Democrats in voting for passage of the bill. There is less bipartisan support for America COMPETES, as Republicans have criticized House leadership for not considering their input when crafting the bill. House Republicans specifically oppose the provision that would authorize $8 billion in contributions to the Green Climate Fund—a United Nations program that finances clean energy projects—which they have criticized as unaccountable and ineffective in its mission and a waste of taxpayer money. While this division may not be an issue for passage of the bill in the House—Democrats would only need a simple majority—this disagreement will inevitably reappear when the House and Senate reconcile America COMPETES and USICA. Conclusion America COMPETES and USICA would represent a dramatic expansion in the federal government’s role in the technology industry. Both bills would engage in industrial policy by dedicating billions of dollars to subsidizing R&D and manufacturing of key tech projects. The bills demonstrate that both sides of the aisle are willing to employ industrial policy to further certain domestic and foreign policy goals. Unfortunately, the federal government is both far slower and less adept than private industry at responding to market demands. As such, this exercise in industrial policy is likely to simply shift billions of taxpayer dollars to already profitable industries without realizing much economic gain.

America’s 78-year-old president, Joe Biden, might not seem like the world’s most tech savvy leader. But some of his administration’s biggest policies have focused on a small but fundamentally important technology: the semiconductor. Known more prosaically as “computer chips”, semiconductors power technology of all types from vast data centers to the simplest consumer electronics. In the age of the Internet of Things, almost every electrical device has a semiconductor inside. And as societies gather and process more data, it is chips that provide the computing power on which we rely. The Biden administration is thinking about chips in part because of a semiconductor shortage caused by the economic dislocations of COVID-19. Car factories worldwide have been delayed or stopped because crucial semiconductors are on back order. But today’s semiconductor shortage will eventually pass. The bigger issue is geopolitical, as China invests heavily in chip technology, seeking to upgrade its economy and its military. The United States, which has historically dominated chip design and production, is fixated on retaining its leading role. Backed by bipartisan majorities in Congress, the Biden administration wants to use financial incentives to bolster Americas chip industry. The first chips emerged out of the Cold War arms race. The first computers to use chips on a large scale guided the Apollo space spacecraft and the Minuteman ballistic missile. In the last two decades, though, the semiconductor industry has thought mostly about technology and business efficiency, not politics. Supply chains have become more global than ever. A typical advanced chip is designed by people in the US, UK, or Israel; fabricated in Taiwan or South Korea using machines made in the US, Japan, the Netherlands, and Germany; and then tested in packaged in Malaysia or Singapore. It is hard to think of a product that is more globalized. Now China wants to become a major player in chips. Beijing has poured tens of billions of dollars of state funds into its chip industry to domesticate advanced technology. Today China cannot produce advanced chips. Its production of moderately advanced chips relies on foreign technology. But China has set the goal of self-reliance in semiconductors. Its track record of rapid economic growth and its manufacturing prowess means this goal should be taken seriously. Moreover, China realizes that its reliance on foreign chip technology is a fundamental vulnerability. Over the past few years, the US has restricted the transfer of advanced chips to several dozen Chinese firms that bolster China’s foreign policy, most notably Huawei but also more specialized military producers. There’s no way to produce an advanced semiconductor today without using US software and manufacturing equipment, so facilities in countries like Taiwan and South Korea have cut off Huawei. Even some of China’s own fabrication facilities have reportedly stopped selling to Huawei, to ensure they can continue accessing crucial American equipment. A digital cold war isn’t something to be avoided; it is reality. Yet like in the original Cold War, when Europe bought Soviet gas and the USSR used IBM computer software, the policy options today are not simply “do nothing” or “completely decoupling.” China will continue to rely on the global chip supply chain for the foreseeable future, and the US will permit the sales of most semiconductors to China. But decisions that used to be made purely on business grounds now inevitably involve calculations about geopolitics, too. Attention is focusing on “chokepoint” technologies that are crucial to chip production but are produced by only one or two countries. The United States today can control multiple chokepoints, including design software and production equipment; China controls none. Other countries will insist they want to stay neutral. They have every incentive to say this, but in reality each major country is jockeying for its position in the supply chain. All players fear Beijing’s state subsidies and the risk of intellectual property theft. South Korea, Europe, and Japan have all announced major new government spending on their chip industries to bolster existing firms. Controlling a chokepoint isn’t only economically valuable—it also provides countries with newfound geopolitical influence, a useful bargaining chip in relations with Washington and Beijing. Amid this global competition for leverage in the semiconductor industry, the Biden administration is trying to catch up. The US government is re-learning how to think strategically about semiconductors after two decades of mostly ignoring the industry. Facing the global politicization of semiconductor supply chains and state subsidies from other chip producers, Washington has concluded it has no choice but to device an industrial policy strategy to support semiconductors. The Biden administration’s strategy is threefold. First, it wants to use existing chokepoints to secure important objectives (e.g., impair Huawei's 5G rollout globally) without overusing them in a way that limits these chokepoints' future efficacy. This requires more subtle communication with allies than the Trump administration’s tactic of twitter diplomacy. Second, the Biden administration wants to coordinate multilateral controls with allies over semiconductor chokepoints. Countries like the Netherlands, Germany, Japan, and South Korea all produce advanced manufacturing equipment or could potentially produce it soon. Multilateral export controls would be less leaky than unilateral US restrictions. Multilateralism sounds nice. Is it possible? Getting buy in from South Korea is difficult given that country’s economic dependence on Beijing. Support from Germany, meanwhile, requires Berlin to think clearly about geopolitics, something that the German elite is hard-wired not to do. Companies in all countries howl when told their sales to China will be restricted, though off the record many semiconductor executives admit they understand what is at stake. America’s chip industry would much rather have the third leg of the Biden administration’s strategy, a major government spending program to back the construction of fabrication facilities and R&D. Congress looks likely to pass up to $50 billion in subsidies, a sizeable sum, though far smaller than the hundreds of billions that some Chinese sources speak of. There is a real risk that too much of this sum supports established chipmakers rather than small startups. As countries jostle for position in semiconductor supply chains, government funds will only be one variable among several. More important, in the end, will be the companies that build the innovative technologies and disruptive business models that define the industry in the future.

Damian Carrington, August 1 2022, “Climate endgame: risk of human extinction ‘dangerously underexplored’,” The Guardian, https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/aug/01/climate-endgame-risk-human-extinction-scientists-global-heating-catastrophe

The risk of global societal collapse or human extinction has been “dangerously underexplored”, climate scientists have warned in an analysis. They call such a catastrophe the “climate endgame”. Though it had a small chance of occurring, given the uncertainties in future emissions and the climate system, cataclysmic scenarios could not be ruled out, they said. “Facing a future of accelerating climate change while blind to worst-case scenarios is naive risk management at best and fatally foolish at worst,” the scientists said, adding that there were “ample reasons” to suspect global heating could result in an apocalyptic disaster. The international team of experts argue the world needs to start preparing for the possibility of the climate endgame. “Analysing the mechanisms for these extreme consequences could help galvanise action, improve resilience, and inform policy,” they said. Explorations in the 1980s of the nuclear winter that would follow a nuclear war spurred public concern and disarmament efforts, the researchers said. The analysis proposes a research agenda, including what they call the “four horsemen” of the climate endgame: famine, extreme weather, war and disease. They also called for the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to produce a special report on the issue. The IPCC report on the impacts of just 1.5C of heating drove a “groundswell of public concern”, they said. “There are plenty of reasons to believe climate change could become catastrophic, even at modest levels of warming,” said Dr Luke Kemp at the University of Cambridge’s Centre for the Study of Existential Risk, who led the analysis. “Climate change has played a role in every mass extinction event. It has helped fell empires and shaped history. “Paths to disaster are not limited to the direct impacts of high temperatures, such as extreme weather events. Knock-on effects such as financial crises, conflict and new disease outbreaks could trigger other calamities.” The analysis is published in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and was reviewed by a dozen scientists. It argues that the consequences of global heating beyond 3C have been underexamined, with few quantitative estimates of the total impacts. “We know least about the scenarios that matter most,” Kemp said. A thorough risk assessment would consider how risks spread, interacted and amplified, but had not been attempted, the scientists said. “Yet this is how risk unfolds in the real world,” they said. “For example, a cyclone destroys electrical infrastructure, leaving a population vulnerable to an ensuing deadly heatwave.” The Covid pandemic underlined the need to examine rare but high-impact global risks, they added. Particularly concerning are tipping points, where a small rise in global temperature results in a big change in the climate, such as huge carbon emissions from an Amazon rainforest suffering major droughts and fires. Tipping points could trigger others in a cascade and some remained little studied, they said, such as the abrupt loss of stratocumulus cloud decks that could cause an additional 8C of global warming. The researchers warn that climate breakdown could exacerbate or trigger other catastrophic risks, such as international wars or infectious disease pandemics, and worsen existing vulnerabilities such as poverty, crop failures and lack of water. The analysis suggests superpowers may one day fight over geoengineering plans to reflect sunlight or the right to emit carbon. “There is a striking overlap between currently vulnerable states and future areas of extreme warming,” the scientists said. “If current political fragility does not improve significantly in the coming decades, then a belt of instability with potentially serious ramifications could occur.” There were further good reasons to be concerned about the potential of a global climate catastrophe, the scientists said: “There are warnings from history. Climate change has played a role in the collapse or transformation of numerous previous societies and in each of the five mass extinction events in Earth’s history.” New modelling in the analysis shows that extreme heat – defined as an annual average temperature of more than 29C – could affect 2 billion people by 2070 if carbon emissions continue.

That the world is engaged in a profound transition in the way we use energy is undeniable. The era of carbon-intensive energy derived from the burning of fossil fuels is coming to an end, and a cleaner, more reliable energy future based on renewables like wind and solar will be the new normal. How long this change will take is, however, still a matter of fierce debate. But a new report from the World Economic Forum’s Global Future Council on Energy, offers compelling evidence that stakeholders in the global energy system —which means all of us—must prepare for change urgently, because it is coming fast. The report, principally authored by Kingsmill Bond of Carbon Tracker, Angus McCrone of Bloomberg NEF, and myself, examines a key question: will the energy transition be gradual or rapid? A gradual transition means that oil, gas, and coal remain the dominant energy sources even as renewable energy supply increases at a steady but linear rate. And it means that there is growth in energy demand for fossil fuels—with demand for fossil fuels not reaching its peak for a generation or more—allowing the traditional businesses of energy sector incumbents to continue to flourish. In this transition scenario, we miss the climate change goals of the Paris Agreement, but the global energy sector doesn’t face the near-term prospect of wrenching change. A rapid transition, on the other hand, means that renewables like wind and solar quickly start to supplant fossil fuels as their supply increases at an exponential rate, following the familiar S-curve growth pattern of new technologies like personal computers and mobile phones. It means that renewables supply all the net growth in global electricity demand, displacing oil, gas, and coal —with demand for fossil fuels peaking in the 2020s —and thus seriously disrupting the traditional businesses of the energy sector incumbents. In the rapid transition scenario, the energy sector will face massive change, but humanity has a chance of achieving the goals of the Paris Agreement to limit climate change to well below 2 degrees. The question of the timing of the energy transition is a critical one: either the tipping point is right before our eyes in the decade to come, or it is far into the future, beyond the planning horizon of most companies.

Today, as part of the Investing in America tour, the Biden-Harris Administration announced that the U.S. Department of Commerce and GlobalWafers America, LLC and MEMC LLC (“MEMC”), subsidiaries of GlobalWafers Co., Ltd. (“GlobalWafers”), have signed a non-binding preliminary memorandum of terms (PMT) to provide up to $400 million in proposed direct funding under the CHIPS and Science Act to help onshore critical semiconductor wafer production and advance U.S. technology leadership. President Biden signed the bipartisan CHIPS and Science Act, a key component of his Investing in America agenda, to usher in a new era of semiconductor manufacturing in the United States, bringing with it a revitalized domestic supply chain, good-paying jobs, and investments in the industries of the future. The proposed CHIPS investment would support the construction of new wafer manufacturing facilities and the creation of 1,700 construction jobs and 880 manufacturing jobs. This proposed investment will support projects with total capital expenditures of approximately $4 billion across both states. “President Biden is restoring our leadership in the entire semiconductor supply chain – from materials to manufacturing, to R&D. With this proposed investment, GlobalWafers will play a crucial role in bolstering America’s semiconductor supply chain by providing a domestic source of silicon wafers that are the backbone of advanced chips,” said U.S. Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo. “As a result of this proposed investment, the Biden-Harris Administration is helping to secure our supply chains, which will create over 2,000 jobs across Texas and Missouri and ultimately lowering costs and improving economic and national security for Americans.” “President Biden is taking historic action to bring semiconductor manufacturing back in the United States,” said Arati Prabhakar, Assistant to the President for Science and Technology and Director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. “The semiconductor wafers that will come from today’s announcement will be the foundation for the complex chips we need to compete in the global economy. We’re bolstering our national security, advancing our clean energy transition, and creating good jobs that support families in Texas and Missouri.”

1AC Campbell ‘23[Law School Professor and Director of the Intellectual Property Law Program at the University of Maryland Carey School of Law “Debugging the Trademark Laws: The Lanham Act and Counterfeit Microelectronics,” 31 TEX. INTELL. PROP. L.J. 211 (2023). Hein Online. Accessed via University of Michigan //DH]

C. Counterfeiting is a Lucrative Proposition Numerous explanations for the counterfeit electronics problem have been discussed. Profit has long been identified as the "primary incentive" for the sale of counterfeit parts.83 The internet and the rise of e-commerce platforms has made counterfeiting even more lucrative; "production costs are low, millions of potential customers are available online, transactions are convenient, and listing on well-branded e-commerce platforms provides an air of legitimacy."84 In addition, when the sellers of counterfeit goods are in another country, as is often the case, they are largely outside the jurisdiction of criminal prosecution by U.S. law enforcement and may be immune from civil liability to private parties. 85 Thus, the perceived risk is low.86 Further, the supply chain disruptions and chip shortages caused by the Covid-19 pandemic have only intensified the problem. Counterfeiters have "stepped up their game to swindle enterprises in dire need of the critical components."87 Reputable firms in need of chips have been enticed to order hard-to-find parts from risky sources, and they have received shipments that are improperly packaged, defective, or even nonoperational.88 According to the Wall Street Journal, "[t]he global chip shortage has created a gold mine for bad actors."8 9 Counterfeit semiconductors, including diodes, are being incorporated into mobile phones, tablets, and other privately used electronic devices, creating risks for consumers.90 Long manufacturing lead times for semiconductor chips have increased the willingness of distributors to go to the open market to obtain parts for customers in order to prevent manufacturing lines from sitting idle. 91 Government contractors and the DoD present a particularly attractive-and oftentimes willing-market for counterfeiters, largely due to the obsolescence of necessary replacement parts. 92 Unlike commercial products such as cellphones and laptop computers, defense systems are typically designed for long lifecycles. 93 Production of the parts contained in those systems will be discontinued when it is no longer cost-effective for the manufacturer, usually long before the systems themselves are taken out of service, leading to diminishing manufacturing sources and material shortages (DMSMS) issues. 94 When production ends, parts may no longer be available from the original component manufacturer, an authorized aftermarket manufacturer, or an authorized distributor. 95 If sufficient end-of-life purchases were not made, 96 the DoD and defense contractors may be forced to purchase replacement parts from outside the authorized supply chain, including from brokers and independent distributors. 97 The DoD estimated that as much as 15% of all spare and replacement parts for military electronics are determined to be counterfeit. 98 The military's emphasis on using the lowest cost suppliers rather than focusing on the quality of parts obtained is another contributing factor. 99 Economic gain is not the sole motive for dealing in counterfeit electronics. As noted above, malicious counterfeits are making their way into the supply chain. 100 As an increasing number of devices are connected to the Internet of Things (IoT), "the potential for extensive economic and health and safety losses due to deliberately corrupted components increases by orders of magnitude. 101

In The Ethics of Opting Out: Queer Theory’s Defiant Subjects, which was released in the spring of 2017, I put pressure on these theories on several levels, of which I’ll merely mention one, namely that I think that something essential gets lost in translation when American queer theorists appropriate 20th-century French critiques of the so-called humanist subject. It is true that Lacan, Foucault, and Deleuze and Guattari were all highly critical of the notion of the sovereign, autonomous, and agentic subject that we have inherited from Western philosophy in part because they, like earlier thinkers such as Adorno and Levinas, saw the connection between this subject and violence; they understood that this subject’s quest for selfmastery was linked to its quest to master the world, and that the results were disastrous, ranging from slavery and colonialism to Nazi Germany. However, I do not think that continental theorists, generally speaking, sought to destroy the subject as such. Instead, they were interested in what subjectivity might look like after the collapse of the arrogant humanist subject. They wanted to destabilize this subject, to undermine its sovereignty, challenge its autonomy, and dilute its agency. Yes, there was much talk about the subversion of the subject, desubjectivation, and even, in the case of Deleuze and Guattari, of pulverizing the subject. But, ultimately, there was also an idealistic reaching for an alternative, for a subjectivity that would be less sure of itself and therefore more capacious, creative, and open to otherness. Undoubtedly, some of this idealism persists in even the most negative of queer theories in the sense that their negativity usually contains utopian longings. However, I think that queer theory’s flagella tion of the sovereign, autonomous, and agentic subject is by now so ritualistic, undertaken in such a habitual manner, that it has become too predictable to be genuinely critical. I of course understand why it is happening. Particularly now that we are watching President Trump and his corporate allies parade on the political stage, it is easy to recognize the figure of the white-straight-masculinist, self-contained, self-satisfied, and self-confident subject that posthumanist theorists have criticized for decades. But I think that a distinction needs to be drawn between the Trumps of the world and the vast majority of the world’s population. In other words, I think that the call to annihilate (q uq) “the subject” misfires when it is indiscriminate, for when it is generalized, it becomes aimed at individuals who have never come anywhere near to approximating the sovereign subject. That is, it seems to me that the last thing that those who have been dispossessed by social inequalities such as homophobia, sexism, racism, poverty, or neocolonialism need is further dispossession; self-annihilation cannot possibly be a goal for those who already feel annihilated by structural violence, who already lead precarious lives. Likewise, I have a hard time imagining that those who have experienced various forms of Halberstamian failure, for instance those who are unemployed or cutting themselves, view these experiences as sexy forms of political rebellion. Halberstam’s queer art of failure is arguably written from the perspective of those who have already succeeded. Likewise, queer theory’s calls for self-annihilation assume that there is a self to annihilate to begin with. Against this backdrop, Darieck Scott’s Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination is an important corrective.

In constructing their arguments, Dolan and Muñoz both turn to philosopher Ernst Bloch's account of the 'anticipatory illumination' of art to theorise 'never finished gestures towards a potentially better future' (Dolan 2005: 8) that might help us to 'combat the force of political pessimism' (Muñoz 2009: 4). Variously translated as 'ontological anticipation' and 'pre-appearance', this concept expresses Bloch's belief 'that it is somehow possible to experience a kind of foreglow of future possibilities' (Geoghegan 2008: 37) in a manner which is both objective and open. Bloch's account of hope, in other words, evades the traps of both wishful thinking and leaden pragmatism to figure a realism which is not constrained by what has come before. In elaborating this idea, Muñoz draws on Agamben's extended exploration of potentiality as something which is 'present but not actually existing in the present tense' having instead the quality of ‘a trace or potential that exists or lingers after a performance' (Muñoz 2009: 99). For Agamben, potentiality 'conserves' itself even after an event is actualised: it is not 'used up' by any given iteration but extends beyond itself, much as thinking does not exhaust thought (see Cooke 2005: 184). Accordingly, reading for potentiality involves 'scouting for a "not here" or "not now" in the performance that suggests a futurity' (Muñoz 2009: 99) – that is, a willingness to look beyond what is most immediately present in favour of that which signals what might be in the future. A difficulty with this account is how Muñoz's emphasis on 'not here' and 'not now' and Dolan's insistence on transience as a condition of performative efficacy may serve to constrain recognition of what might be accomplished – and sustained – in the present, while effacing how potentiality's persistent trace may itself constitute the ongoing existence of different worlds beyond hegemonic order. Such an account lends itself to a worldview in which ruling conditions are given to be so overwhelmingly dominant as to make alternatives in the here and now an impossibility. Whatever we might glimpse as 'extra to the everyday transaction of heteronormative capitalism' (Muñoz 2009: 22) cannot be grasped in the everyday without falling into the trap of complacency, reinforcing hegemonic terms for being or investing in neoliberalism's promise of a 'better future' as grounds for privation and sacrifice in the present. This tendency is more sharply articulated in Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004) where the susceptibility of queerness to normalisation through the logic of reproductive futurity becomes an inevitability and in which, as Michael Snediker observes, the ubiquity of 'always' and ‘every' in Edelman's argument would seem to make the world 'so irrevocably one thing that response to the world would amount to one thing' (Snediker 2009: 24). Are futurity and the possibilities of the here and now unthinkable except on these narrow terms? Might the potentiality of performance - and the 'certain surplus' that is for Muñoz peculiar to queer performance - indicate something other than or, crucially, as well as a vanishing over the horizon? In response, my readings of performance in this final chapter are informed by what Lloyd Pratt identifies in his analysis of novelist Eudora Welty as a 'condition of radical present-tenseness that subordinates to the future and the past, and which favors a committed attention to what is most clearly now' (2011: 200). Grounded in a close reading of the instant as it unfolds, such a stance is ‘neither unduly grim and retrospective nor jolly and hopeful without cause' but instead involves ‘a form of immanent particularity, which opens onto nothing other than the truth of the present' (Pratt 2011: 200). Beginning with Deborah Pearson's The Future Show, Ivana Müller's 60 Minutes of Opportunism and Duncan Macmillan's Every Brilliant Thing – each of which address the uncertain relationship between past, present and future - I consider how performance might elaborate an understanding of optimism's potentiality as a state of being and not-being, and doing and not-doing. While each work narrates an attachment to the possibility of a future, they also describe how the labour of making oneself present to and for others through performance involves a paradoxical vanishing act wherein optimism registers as an equivocal if not deeply ambivalent attachment to futurity. Structured by attempts to imagine the future in its relation to a persistent present, each of these works elaborates how the figure of the optimist might embody a critique of the conditions in which we find ourselves without reserving the possibility of alternatives to another where and another when. Such a critique does not privilege hope over hopelessness but draws attention to how the potential of what Robyn Wiegman describes as 'small worlds of sustenance that cultivate a different present and future' (2014: 11) involves the attempt to be present in the present, for the present. In the second part of the chapter I explore three further performances - FK Alexander's (I Could Go On Singing) Over The Rainbow, Rosana Cade's Walking:Holding and Nando Messias' The Sissy's Progress - as works which elaborate how the optimist's insistence on the here and now does not model heroic resilience but instead invokes vulnerability as the means by which an ethics of interpersonal relations might be forged apart from neoliberalism's preference for responsible future-oriented and ultimately paranoid prediction. Such an ethics centred on our constitutive exposure to one another – is not straightforwardly affirmative, and invites recognition of the contingent qualities of any claim on the future as a remedy to deleterious uncertainty, or social injustice. Characterised by an attentiveness to the possibilities and consequences of life lived beyond its most normative parameters, it articulates a politics which understands that the world as we know it can be different because other worlds already exist.

Alexander and Rhodes, Kopelson, and Waite’s observations about composition can be similarly attached to her big sister, rhetoric. That is, much like queer composition exists in an impossible relation to crystalized pedagogical norms, the rhetorical work of queers queering queerly similarly limits its attachments through resisting, by default, the often unnamed and dematerialized “normative.” And while I certainly do not discount the importance of resisting dangerously oppressive institutions and practices, what I find impossible about queer rhetoric is the discursive cage in which it has locked itself. For example, Anthony Slagle demands, “Any queer framework must pose critical questions that help us to understand the role of difference in the construction of messages” (131). In “Queer Rhetoric and the Pleasures of the Archive,” Alexander and Rhodes suggest, “Queer rhetoric names a constellation of discursive practices that emerge at different times for different groups in order to articulate resistance to regimes of sexualized normalization.” More recently, William P. Banks, Matthew B. Cox, and Caroline Dadas offer this definition: Queer rhetorics begin with the assumption that critique—the calling out of language as language—represents an initial and important destabilization of meaning, not to prevent meaning or to pretend that meaning cannot be made but to ask why this meaning at this time and under these circumstances: these are fundamentally rhetorical questions. (11) What do we do after we pose our “critical questions?” Who is responsible for identifying the “regimes of sexual normalization?” How do bodies survive beyond the hearing and feeling and experiencing of not violent languaging but the destabilization of reality which follows? Is there a there there beyond the resistance of the there that is said to be there? Much like queer theory—the formalized, interdisciplinary academic pursuit—queer rhetorics have bonded themselves so stringently to antinormative resistance vis-à-vis the discursive impulse that their actionability is dulled to inaction. And we know this. Across their oeuvre, Alexander and Rhodes acknowledge that scholarship in queer rhetoric, composition, literacy, etc. “remains relatively sparse and under-read” (“Impossible” 178; “Queer Rhetoric”). Looking at the discursive limitations in both academic and activist rhetorics, Erin Rand confirms the danger of fetishizing resistance and antinormativity: “Clutching resistance too tightly, we are in jeopardy of foreclosing the queerness that inhabits agency as its founding condition” (169). Nevertheless, such foreclosures are apparent through the still marginalized rhetorical scholarship that approaches queer. There is, of course, a further complication. Queer theory struggled, for the past two decades, between the antisocial/antirelational thesis and relational queer utopianism. The back and forth between scholars such as Lee Edelman, the posterchild of antisocial queer theory, and José Esteban Muñoz, queer of color ancestor, is so legendary and well-documented that a rehearsal of their debates seems superfluous. But, for those keeping score, Muñoz and the relational queer utopians won that war. The complication for queer rhetorics, however, is that so much of the work we do as queer rhetoricians is still dominated by the discursive tenets of the antisocial thesis that our invocation of Muñoz, other queer and feminist of color theorists, or any scholar challenging pessimistic critique becomes dematerialized. An issue, therefore, arises not because rhetoricians ignore relational queer utopianism—since Cruising Utopia’s 2009 publication, for example, queer rhetorics scholarship very rarely does not invoke Muñoz’s encouragement to think of queerness as horizon … not yet here— but that we leave the work of the then and there for another time and for someone else (often communities of color) … not yet here. Scholars like Karma R. Chávez and Eujung Kim, among others, warn us that aiming critique solely toward our pasts and action solely toward our futures collapses the much-needed material work of the present. Even so, many of us in queer rhetorics and queer studies, writ large, (yes, I’m including myself in this collective) continuously fall into paranoid readings that allow loud proclamations against, against, against normative structures without trying to (or perhaps knowing how to) turn our words into action. We, by nature of our pessimistic orientations, drown in critique. Thus, queer is an impossible subject for rhetoric precisely because of the ways we currently dematerialize and discursively limit both “queer” and “rhetoric” through pessimistic/paranoid scholarship. From this charge, let me suggest three supporting claims and, more importantly, corresponding questions for further inquiry. First, “queer” and “rhetoric,” in their historic and current formations, demonstrate different desires and are desired differently. Queer, as mentioned above and explained further below, is so tied up in discourses of antinormativity that nearly every political project can be deemed insignificantly queer if strategic essentialism or non-apparent disidentifications are engaged for communal advancement. Rhetoric, as the art of persuasion, is always about the work of normalization. Even radically progressive rhetorics rely on the power of normalization as a goal of persuasion insofar as any persuasive intention is the intention to make practices acceptable and common among communities. What might happen if we refuse, in the tradition of radical Black feminism, the binary of normative/antinormative (read: rhetoric/queer)? Second, “queer” and “rhetoric” are both de-materialized by discursive traditions of critique/criticism and a “hermeneutics of suspicion.” Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick famously outlines the paranoid tendencies of queer reading, and her observations can (should!) be mapped onto contemporary rhetorical criticism. Sedgwick—and those who continue her project suggest that the revelation of violent knowledges does not necessarily demand action on the part of the person to whom violence is revealed: “What is the basis for assuming that it will surprise or disturb, never mind motivate, anyone to learn that a given social manifestation is artificial, self-contradictory, imitative, phantasmatic, or even violent?” (141). Even when attempting to engage in the generative work of affect and relational queer utopianism, we too often find ourselves raging against the normative. In expending our energies on being against, against, against, queer rhetoricians are left with tepid gestures toward complex radical potentialities. What becomes possible if we reconsider material-discursive structures when attending to the rhetorical affects of queer? Third, queer (and most definitely its uptake in rhetoric/composition/literacy/etc.) remains enamored of the addressing/redressing/exploding the subject–object divide of Western liberalism. Tragically, this is another example of the us falling into either/or/and the most obvious trap, the second most obvious trap, or the third most obvious trap. Either we, like good poststructuralists, aim to identify and destroy the autonomous, liberal subject, or we ignore the subject to fetishize the proper objects of critique, or we completely overcorrect to the point of preserving the queer subject and their objects as articulated through neoliberal identity politics, neocolonial sovereignties, and state-granted rights. Sometimes we attempt all three. Is it possible to create a subjectless/objectless critique without engaging the predictable “bad habits” of critical theory?

There are varied articulations of what I am referring to as queer pessimism, but perhaps the best known of these is Lee Edelman’s queer negativity, as formulated in his 2004 book, No Future. 2 I will narrow my discussion of queer pessimisms to Edelman’s work because it best demonstrates the conceptual move that I will critique (and offer an alternative to) in this article: Edelman frames hope and refusal as mutually exclusive options that negate one another’s potency. Political hope, in his view, is always complicit with reproductive futurity and its violence. Refusal, on the other hand, is the hallmark of queer negativity, which is rendered the unintelligible outside of political discourse and imagination. In the following section, I will briefly lay out his argument and take up existing critiques among queer and feminist theorists who argue that, first, Edelman’s work presumes a white, male queer subject and, second, it is not useful or relevant for women, nonbinary people, and trans people of color. I build upon these critiques by arguing that these limitations are linked to Edelman’s perpetuation of a misleading binary between hope and refusal, which forecloses the radical possibilities for queer feminist theory and practice 2 The title of this section borrows a phrase from page 5 of Edelman’s No Future (2004). that their co-constitution opens up—possibilities that I explore in my engagement with Hartman’s work. Edelman argues that every intelligibly political movement today is structured by the teleological valuation of the future (and especially future generations) as the foundation and aim of politics—epitomized by the figure of “the Child.” The Child does not refer to literal children but is rather a symbol of possibility, futurity, and innocence that affirms and authenticates a given social order. This merely symbolic status and function of the Child in political discourse is evidenced by the fact that actual children are so often sacrificed in the name of the Child (Edelman 2022b, 100). As I write in November 2023, we are bearing witness to this sacrificial logic, as the Israeli state (with support from the US government) slaughters Palestinian children in the name of the future of Israel and its children—justifications that have been augmented with falsified claims (corroborated and then disavowed by US President Joe Biden) about Hamas beheading Israeli infants (Al Jazeera 2023).3 As Edelman points out, the centrality of the figure of the Child is not limited to fascist or conservative politics but also structures so-called progressive politics of the Left. Highlighting the stubborn persistence of this figure, Edelman points out the irony of pro-abortion campaigns that mirror their anti-abortion opponents by advocating on behalf of “our children—for our daughters and our sons” (2004, 3). This example, a rare moment in No Future where reproductive futurism encounters the discourse of reproductive rights, is used as evidence for Eelman’s argument that no matter the specific content of one’s politics, the logic of reproductive futurism persists. This leads to the opening insight of No Future: our contemporary political imagination is constituted such that it is impossible to take up a position that negates the centrality of the Child without being rendered unintelligible as political at all.4 To refuse the logic of reproductive futurism, to refuse to be on the side fighting for the children, is to occupy a position radically outside the politically imaginable and intelligible—and it is this space, which politics renders unthinkable, that Edelman proposes queerness occupies (3). For him, queerness names the antisocial opposition to the mandate of reproductive futurism—it is the social order’s death drive (3). K of Edelman Though Muñoz’s critique focuses primarily on whiteness, it is important to note that Edelman’s queer subject is also implicitly male. Despite a potentially fruitful alliance between queer and feminist refusals of reproductive futurism and its weaponization of the figure of the Child as a means of social control (especially for those with the capacity for pregnancy and birth), the possibility of co-conspiring in No Future falls short. Edelman’s account of reproductive futurity is decidedly monolithic; focused on the abstract and structural level of analysis, he does not carefully parse the disparate forms it takes and the ways it is deployed when it comes to those deemed, by normative default, “would-be” fathers or mothers. Instead, he speaks broadly of “parents,” and in his discussion of parental love, they are always presumed to be heterosexual (53, 59). The conspicuous absence of race, sex, and gender is intentional, as indicated in an endnote that expresses Edelman’s “refusal” to engage in what he dismisses as “identity politics” and his insistence that, despite the fact that most of his examples in No Future are men, his figuration of the queer “has no privileged relation to any sex or sexuality” (2004, 165). My training in feminist philosophy has made me deeply suspicious of any claim to conceptual neutrality; it is far too often in my discipline that abstract universality quietly smuggles in particularity (read: masculine subjectivity). But perhaps most telling and relevant to the context of this article is that Edelman suggests that while it’s possible that there could be a female sinthomosexual, the female characters from the film and literary sources he engages “are determined by socially legible desires—typically in the form of obsessive ‘love’—rather than by the refusal of sociality and desire,” so they are less useful for his argument (165). In the same breath that he declares further consideration of gendered differences “valuable” (for someone else to consider), he dismisses the relevance of sex and gender for an analysis of reproductive futurism and, at the same time, uncritically circulates a stereotypical binary wherein women are associated with love (and reproduction) rather than refusal (and negation), which for Edelman is epitomized by the male queer (165). While Edelman dismisses considerations of race, sex, and gender as irrelevant or even counter to his project, any robust and actionable account of reproductive futurism needs to do the work of carefully attending to lived experience. Reproductive futurism is not homogenous in its application or its effects; understanding how to refuse it requires attending to its complexity with care. As Penelope Deutscher has pointed out, what Edelman presents as reproductive futurism’s overvaluation of parenthood is an overgeneralization; racialized women (often fetishized as “figures of surplus pregnancy, of welfare benefit abuse or other kinds of irresponsibility”) are routinely devalued as parents/mothers (Deutscher 2017, 50). The long and ongoing history of forced sterilization of Black, Indigenous, and Latina women in the United States plainly evidences this. While this may not be in conflict with the heart of Edelman’s analysis, his account lacks important nuance—nuance that can be (and has been) offered by decolonial feminist scholarship.5 In failing to attend to the complexities of reproductive futurism as it is experienced by flesh-and-blood people rather than merely fictive and fetishized characters, he forecloses careful thinking about the forms of refusal most able to counter its logic and effects.

Early in its history, one of the founders of the Women’s Motorcycle Contingent coined the phrase “Dykes on Bikes.”68 The term became used in the press and in popular LGBTQ+ culture to refer to the group.69 In 2003, the group formally voted to change its name to the San Francisco Dykes on Bikes Women’s Motorcycle Contingent (“SFDOBWMC”).70 The “Dykes on Bikes” name was not only recognizable and catchy,71 but reflected the group’s purpose of promoting lesbian civil rights and resisting harmful stereotypes about the LGBTQ+ community.72 Like many organizations, SFDOBWMC applied to register its new name as a trademark with the PTO. 73 It had been used in commerce for at least two decades by this point and was widely recognized by the media and LGBTQ+ community in the Bay Area, which should have made for fairly standard approval of the trademark DYKES ON BIKES.74 But the use of the term “dyke” sparked controversy—it was an LGBTQ+ slur, even if used in a reaffirming way.75 This trademark launched a decade-long legal battle. The PTO examiner denied SFDOBWMC’s application because the proposed mark was derogatory towards lesbians and therefore unregistrable under Section 2(a).76 In response, SFDOBWMC’s legal counsel wrote a letter explaining how, while originally pejorative, the term “dyke” had become, by 2003, an accepted term of pride and identification for women within the LGBTQ+ community, and should be federally registerable as a trademark.77 In support of its argument, SFDOBWMC attached twelve documents illustrating how the term “dyke” was now used in an affirming sense by the LGBTQ+ community.78 Nonetheless, the PTO made its Section 2(a) refusal final, finding that some women still found the term derogatory.79 Historian Joan Nestle observed, “I cannot imagine a more ironic twist of thinking than to judge this reclaimed badge of honor as insulting to the very community who has created its power.”80 SFDOBWMC’s counsel then produced over three hundred pages of evidence and testimony from twenty-six experts showing that the mark was not disparaging.81 When the PTO relented and the mark was finally published for opposition in 2006, it was opposed by Michael McDermott, a resident of San Francisco, on the basis that the SFDOBWMC was carrying out an “Anti Male Hate Riot.”82 The Trademark Trial and Appeal Board (“TTAB”) rejected McDermott’s claim, holding that he failed to show that any other men would find the mark disparaging towards them and that he lacked standing for a lesbian disparagement-related claim because he was not a lesbian.83 The Federal Circuit upheld the TTAB’s decision.84 Shortly thereafter, the PTO finally registered SFDOBWMC’s DYKES ON BIKES trademark on October 30, 2007.85 The matter seemed to be settled once and for all in 2008—five years after SFDOBWMC had first applied to register its mark with the PTO—when the Supreme Court declined to grant certiorari to McDermott.86 The SFDOBWMC finally had their trademark registration and had achieved a symbolic victory for the LGBTQ+ community. But the legal challenges to the DYKES ON BIKES trademark were not yet over. In 2015, SFDOBWMC submitted another trademark application to the PTO—this time for its logo, a triangle with the letters “W,” “M,” and “C” in each corner and a gear design in the middle containing the words “Dykes on Bikes.”87 Like with SFDOBWMC’s wordmark application, the PTO rejected the new application on the basis that the proposed trademark disparaged lesbians.88 In response, SFDOBWMC filed hundreds of pages of evidence in opposition, including the history of the DYKES ON BIKES wordmark (which, of course, had eventually been registered by the PTO notwithstanding Section 2(a)) and new evidence showing how the term “dyke” was not being used derogatorily.89 For the first time, the SFDOBWMC also argued that the disparagement bar under Section 2(a) was unconstitutional, as the Federal Circuit had recently held in a case known as In re Simon Shiao Tam. 90 Nonetheless, the PTO rejected the SFDOBWMC’s arguments and affirmed the denial.91 Contemporaneously, the Tam case SFDOBWMC had referenced was now pending before the Supreme Court.92 The SFDOBWMC filed an amicus curiae brief in support of Tam, arguing that Section 2(a)’s disparaging bar unconstitutionally restricted political speech and was applied arbitrarily, citing its own trademark registration odyssey in support. 93 In 2017, the Supreme Court agreed with Tam and the SFDOBWMC, holding that Section 2(a)’s bar on the registration of disparaging trademarks was unconstitutional under the First Amendment.94 Following the decision in Tam, the PTO finally registered the DYKES ON BIKES logo, fourteen years after the SFDOBWMC first applied to register its wordmark.95 The DYKES ON BIKES saga demonstrated the extraordinary lengths to which LGBTQ+ individuals had to go to obtain federal trademark registration. The Section 2(a) bars on disparaging and immoral or scandalous marks could serve as bars on registering LGBTQ+ marks in general, as, for many, LGBTQ+ culture is synonymous with sex and therefore per se scandalous.96 Moreover, as mentioned above, LGBTQ+ persons have to create their own symbols and sources of identity,97 so these bars can be especially harmful to the LGBTQ+ community as they prevent registration of building blocks of LGBTQ+ identity.98 The removal of those bars, therefore, could have a significant impact on the LGBTQ+ community

Rather, the constraints imposed by patent performativity must form the basis for their own reform. Here we turn back to Judith Butler, who shows how the constraints of performative social norms may be turned to resist those same norms. In the context of performative gender, Butler famously offers the example of the [transgender]transvestite, who performs gender transgressively.214 “Drag” performances, according to Butler, appropriate the norms of gender, playing them against themselves to rework the possibilities of gender.215 Such observations point the way to parallel reworking of the social tropes associated with patenting and innovation. Transgressive re-orientation of patent isolation, elitism, hierarchy, dominance, extraction, and exclusivity might similarly expose the performance of inventorship to re-interpretation and open new possibilities for enacting innovation. To be sure, Butler cautions that, at least in the case of gender, enactment remains compelled, constrained, and effectively mandatory.216 Gender is a characteristic on which societies force individuals to take some stance. Even those who adopt non-binary or gender fluid performances must do so with reference to the concept of gender, and to the dominance of masculine or feminine norms. Society is perhaps less exercised with regard to inventorship than it is with regard to gender–one need not necessarily engage with innovation, although it should be noted that the failure to do so in effect takes a stand regarding innovation, by making a choice not to be defined as an inventor. But once the individual actively engages with the role of inventor, the reference points are constrained and largely fixed. The inventor must, for example, by definition be a person of extraordinary skill in the art, because if the invention could be developed by one of ordinary skill, it is by definition unpatentable. The choice to be an ordinary inventor is not currently accommodated within patent enactment. Thus, we cannot expect that the defining tropes of patent enactment can be avoided, but Butler’s analysis suggests that they can be subverted. Performative constraints may be repurposed to mark out a space for greater diversity. We see indications in recent scholarship of how patents might be “queered” in this fashion. Some commentators have begun to question the assumption that the promotion of technical progress is always beneficial.217 Others have challenged the notion of “progress” itself, asking whether innovation may be defined differently than the extractive purposes of current patent policy.218 In the copyright context, Severine Dusollier has similarly argued that intellectual property should be re-imagined as a set of inclusive, rather than exclusive rights.219 Geertrui van Overwalle has explicitly attempted to operationalize such inclusive rights for the patent system, outlining a system for inclusive, rather than exclusive patents.220 Such glimmers of resistance to the existing enactment of patents indicate the potential for defining more inclusive performances of inventorship and innovation.

This is not to suggest that queer creators, or that queer creativity, are necessarily oppositional to market forces. Rather, some queer creators work within the logic of the market to subvert or transform it in more nuanced ways. For example, RuPaul—an internationally famous drag queen—based their career on emulating and eventually stepping in for cisgender female models.138 RuPaul’s Drag Race, a successful reality television show hosted by RuPaul in which contestants compete to become “America’s Next Drag Superstar,” started out as a spinoff of Tyra Banks’s “America’s Next Top Model”139 but has now, arguably, matched or exceeded its global cultural influence. RuPaul’s Drag Race launched the successful careers of dozens of queer creators.140 The show can be seen as an example of strategic commodification and supplantation—creating a commercially successful product and bringing greater visibility to queer voices through the machinery of the market, while arguably shifting the politics around it.141

In a similar vein, it should also be noted that queer resistance to IP does not equate to a categorical rejection of proprietary entitlements in creative works, IP law, or resistance to artists who benefit from (and often rigorously pursue) IP rights. The picture, as is often the case, is nuanced. Indeed, some queer creators exercise their IP rights; many in the queer community admire or worship artists who pursue their IP rights (and even actively support them), and, as this Article itself demonstrates, many queer communities and creative spaces maintain clear proprietary norms around intellectual creations.

In summary, his application of social death is used as a reason why Black life cannot be oriented at any level of meaningful production within society. While Wilderson is correct that the material labor and symbolic currency born out of Blackness will always be consumed by whiteness, his conclusion is paradoxical at some level. If humanism is the grammar by which civil society determines the register of subjectivity, why then is that matrix appropriate in determining the state of Black life, if Black life is inherently the position of what is incommunicable? If social death theory’s application is one that concludes an impossibility of meaningful Black productivity, then Afro-Pessimism becomes nothing but a body of literature that echoes the same sentiments as those who would understand Black life as a state of nothingness in plain racist terms. Understanding Black ontology should definitely involve an understanding of the social deadness of the Black subject in relation to society, but it should not be used as the standard to measure internal liberation. The distinction here is important because too often Afro-Pessimists scholars like Wilderson conceptualize Black resistance as a singular orientation toward society. Indeed their work is important to understand the manner in which society operates upon Black subjects, but it is insufficient to describe an ethic that allows for the pursuit of meaning within Blackness itself. In this regard, scholars should understand Black resistance as occurring on two different levels: the ontological and the intra-ontological. The distinction being made is between the ontological state of Blackness as determined outside of humanity proper versus the life within the ontological state of Blackness as understood through social death. If social death is the state of the Black, what then speaks to the state of the Black amongst Blacks? It would be a mistake on the part of any scholar to concern themselves with one and not the other. This paper uses the term intra-ontology in reference to the varying ontologies within social death. This is the Black among Blacks. These are those spaces within Blackness that only the Black can ever understand or occupy. Though they exist outside of the production of the human (within the category of social death), there are Black affektual politics that have been with the slave since the ship. These are the emotional and spiritual ontologies within Blackness that connected slaves of different lands, languages, and religions into one community. Black intra-ontology can never achieve the plane of recognition because it can only be understood within Blackness, which by definition is the position of social death, but those affektual spirits and emotions ought not be neglected. Social death should guide Black resistance strategy in understanding the position of the Black within civil society, but it speaks not to the arrangement of Black intra-ontological questions. If this is measured by social death it only produces a cycle of endless internal psychic violence because the Black would only be met with the discovery of a violent reality of its existence through affirmations of social death. Intra-ontological resistance must not be a question of how the world understands Blackness, because the position of the slave is one that cannot be articulated in terms of hegemony. If it is so that the Black inherently experiences the world through a different ontological register, then measures of Black liberation cannot be articulated through the lens of humanist grammars. Jared Sexton, the Director of the African-American Studies School of Humanities at the University of California-Irvine, is another leading scholar in Afro-pessimism. He explains that there is indeed social life that exists within social death. There are many that condemn the invocation of social death as overly pessimistic, but “this acceptance or affirmation is active; it is a willing or willingness, in other words, to pay whatever social costs accrue to being black, to inhabiting blackness, to living a black social life under the shadow of social death. This is not an accommodation to the dictates of the antiblack world” (Sexton 2010). This is to say that it is indeed possible to both affirm the state of social death and actively pursue the social life that exists within Blackness. This is not the typical critique of social death, but rather it is a necessary specification of the social life within social death that Sexton speaks. Social death is adequate in terms of measuring the ontological state of the human versus the Black, but a different rubric is required in mapping social life within social death. One such rubric is fleshly politics. This concepts derives from the plantation in regards to the manner in which slaves would temporarily reclaim and weaponize their bodies as a site of political protest against their state of enslavement. Fleshy politics is an example of an appropriate rubric for measuring liberation within intra-ontological politics because these bodily resistances surely did not change the physical state of enslavement, but it did immeasurable good for the mental and psychological state of those in the master’s cage. Alternate orientations to the flesh “excavates the social (after)life of these categories: it represents racializing assemblages of subjection that can never annihilate the lines of flight, freedom dreams, practices of liberation, and possibilities of other worlds” (Weheliye 2014). In contrast to Wilderson’s line of flight away from bodily coding, it is important to reclaim the atrocity of the flesh as a means of agency within capture through the remapping of whiteness. The enslaved female flesh was the site of great violence, but there is a false “dichotomy between the material/political and the personal, in large measure [because even though the] body, so deeply personal, is also a political arena. Their work has demonstrated the extent to which women's bodies were unique sites of domination under slavery” (Camp 2002). Though the body was in the possession of the slave master, the enslaved found personal meaning in its temporary recapture in fleshliness which satisfied an innate desire for selfhood. The illegality of using the flesh as a site of pleasure became a political counter-investment. While conventional Afro-Pessimist would argue that this personal orientation does nothing in terms of the ontological position within Blackness, the personal victory the enslaved experiences as a result of that temporary reclamation is meaningful in both psychological and emotional terms. This is important because if there is never room for personal liberation, and Black resistance is only understood in terms of material questions within civil society, it reproduces the same sacrificial logic that social death explains. Resistance strategies that only take meaning in notions of full agency are recipes for failure because these only measure Black liberation on the register of civil society which can never grapple with the inherent confine in which Black life exists.