Alien oil
Jed from The Spouter discusses the agency of fossil fuels, cybernetic environmentalism, and living with the death of the world
It’s a cruel trick of our times that we humans are so wedded to something as dangerous as oil. In its various forms the toxic black stuff powers our cars and airplanes, heats our homes, paves our roads, greases machine parts, kills off agricultural pests, and gives form and function to countless consumer goods. If at some point today you’ve started up your car, put on clothes, turned up your thermostat, taken a shower, retrieved ice from the freezer, sealed up leftovers, or utilized any of the hundreds of disposable products in your home, you have likely used oil or a product derived from its refining and distillation. Or maybe we’ve got that all backwards — maybe it’s oil that’s using us. Perhaps oil’s ubiquity suggests the cunning of a fully sentient predator that ingratiates itself with its prey even as it kills.
This idea — that oil is a sentient foe of humanity — has an interesting genealogy, growing out of esoteric cybernetics and the work of Iranian author Reza Negarestani, whose theory-horror novel Cyclonopedia is so dense with references to Middle Eastern history, Zoroastrian cults, demonology, and sacred geometry that it may require multiple advanced degrees to comprehend. More recently, the concept has become the lodestar for Substack project The Spouter, which uses Cyclonopedia as a jumping-off point to explore the far-reaching influence of petroleum and the fossil fuel industry in the long 20th century. In The Spouter’s essays oil interests subsume and control politics, high priest Fritz Haber unleashes chemical warfare onto the world at Ypres, and liquefied natural gas precipitates war between Ukraine and Russia. The message: we humans are no longer in the driver’s seat of history, and probably haven’t been for some time; fossil fuels and their corporate collaborators are.
Jed, the writer behind The Spouter, was kind enough to take my questions and a transcript of our conversation appears below.
VERY STRANGE DAYS: How do you frame or define sentience in your writings?
JED: The idea that oil is sentient is just a subset of the idea that everything is sentient, which is a very old idea. It’s been referred to as panpsychism or more commonly throughout human history as animism. It’s basically the idea that the stuff that makes us conscious is not fundamentally different from material in general, that there’s only one type of material and consciousness is made out of it. It’s definitely an idea that I came to before reading Cyclonopedia because I lived in India for a couple years and studied Hinduism. And in Hinduism it makes perfect sense to worship a river, to believe that a goddess is literally inside the rock that’s in front of you.
This also has a tradition in Western philosophy and it’s having a real renaissance right now in academia in this field that is increasingly trendy and popular — environmental humanities. Most of those philosophers go back to Spinoza and of course Bruno Latour is a key figure for them. The idea is not to collapse everything down into a single category and say there’s only one type of stuff but rather to acknowledge that everything sits on the same spectrum. Bruno Latour used the word “actancy,” which means that all objects, by virtue of being objects, have some ability to act in the world. Even if it’s purely cause and effect — something acts on them and they cause a consequence. Objects do things in the world. The people who disagree with this, the dualists — who in environmental humanities are sort of embodied by Andreas Malm, because he’s had the most success in writing about climate — say there really are two fundamentally different things here — one thing that has agency and intention, and another thing that doesn’t have agency and intention.
To me, that obscures more than it illuminates. It doesn’t quite matter to me whether there’s intention behind an action. What matters is the action itself. But coming from a Hindu perspective I am very open to the idea that materials do embody some conscious spirit. That’s an idea that’s been with humanity so long that I don’t think it should be easily dismissed.
XSD: You write that oil should be viewed as something that wants to be used, wants to get out, wants to be excavated, and is working, in a way, to establish itself at the center of the global economy.
J: Part of the project is motivated by really liking Cyclonopedia and wanting more people to engage with these ideas. But I’m also very annoyed by the state of discourse around climate change. In mainstream discourse there are two camps — a denialist camp and a very scientific camp that exists only to counter the denialism. And in that project of countering the denialism they have had to really emphasize that climate change is caused by humans, that it’s anthropogenic climate change. But it’s not caused by humans. It’s caused by fossil fuels. So they’re creating a deep equivalency where to be human is to burn fossil fuels when obviously for most of human history we haven’t been doing that. So I want to separate out fossil fuels and look at them as a thing that can have actancy and agency in themselves that’s separate from humanity. And in doing that I think we get a clearer picture of what’s really going on and what’s truly responsible for climate change.
The reason I like Cyclonopedia and what it has to offer so much is because it allows us to use myth and legend and make these things into metaphor and use figures that are outside scientistic lingo and discourse to describe oil. Cyclonopedia sort of goes back to Lovecraft, and all of Lovecraft’s monsters emerge from within the Earth. They’re very alien to humanity but they’re not coming from some other planet. They’re ancient forces that have been buried. And that’s literally true in the case of fossil fuels, that’s a description of what they are. It’s an entire biosphere from millions and millions of years ago and the energy locked in the carbon bonds has been suppressed by time and is now emerging from within. I think it makes sense for us to see this force as an enemy of humanity, that what it wants is fundamentally opposed to our interests. And therefore it is as close to evil as we can get without accepting an absolutist moralistic framework. If we want to simply define evil as something that goes against the interests of humanity and all species of animal and plant that’s alive today, then I think you can categorize oil as evil. And you can only properly do that when you realize the actancy or the agency or the sentience of oil.
XSD: Can you give us a little background on Cyclonopedia and Reza Negarestani? Because clearly this book made a very strong impression on you.
J: Reza Negarestani grew up in Shiraz, Iran, in the ‘80s and ‘90s, during the Iran-Iraq War. And I think his childhood and teenage years were really defined by that experience of war. Afterwards he moved to Tehran, and that’s where he got access to the internet. And on the internet he was exposed to the CCRU, the Cybernetic Culture Research Unit. And that group consisted of figures like Mark Fisher and Nick Land — they’re the two most notable figures to emerge from that scene — but it was a very active intellectual scene online. And it was focused around object-oriented ontology, or speculative ontology, that had these touchpoints of Lovecraft and object sentience. So young Negarestani fell in love with philosophy in general and was active on those CCRU boards. I think his position in Iran gave him some distance from the core doings of the CCRU. I wouldn’t associate him too closely, for example, with Nick Land, because Nick Land obviously took a horrible right turn that nobody approves of. But he was in that scene and Cyclonopedia was a collection of his notes and notebooks from those years.
It took him four or fives years to get it published. And during that time, for whatever reason, he shifted into a more — I don’t want to say mainstream, but maybe a more acceptable philosophical tradition of liberalism and moved to America. I met him when he passed through New York City. By that point he was completely uninterested in talking about Cyclonopedia. I think he really sees it as a juvenile effort that’s a little bit embarrassing. But I think it’s beautiful and baffling and wonderful and one of those very rare books where you can spend two hours on one page and really get something out of it. That’s not what everyone’s looking for in a book. But I like books like that. As a writer one of my interests is in finding the useful ideas that occur in books like that and trying to explain them to a broader audience that doesn’t want to be totally baffled and upset and confused by the reading experience.
XSD: It’s not really possible to sum up a book like Cyclonopedia but can you talk about the ideas from it that resonated most with you?
J: One of the ideas that was important among the CCRU thinkers was “hyperstition,” which is writing something into reality, creating reality by writing it. That’s really where object sentience comes from. He doesn’t have to spend a long time, as I do, trying to justify the idea of sentient oil. He’s able to take these ideas and explore the implications while leaning on this “what if” framework. There’s an implicit “what if” that’s never stated — what if oil is sentient, taking that as a starting point.
I think one of the easiest ways to explain the plot is to look at some of the fictional characters that dominate the book. One of them is Colonel West, who is an American Army colonel who goes rogue and takes his unit out into the desert and finds a cult of Druj. Druj is the Zoroastrian demoness who represents rot. She’s the being that occupies a corpse after the soul has left it and begins the process of decomposition. And in this discovery West becomes kind of a cult leader in his unit.
I think what Negarestani is doing in those parts of the book is trying to excavate the links between oil and war. And when you look at the post-9/11 War on Terror, he understood that when you look at it from the point of view of oil or a sentient Middle East, there really aren’t two sides to a war. There are two sides who are fighting but they’re both fighting for the war, to create war. I think he sees Islam through that lens of militarism, of complicity with Western war machines. I think that’s part of the reason he immigrated to America, as sort of a reaction to the Islamist regime in Iran. And that’s why he doesn’t use Islamic figures in the mythology of oil. He uses Zoroastrian or Hindu or even pre-Islamic figures but he stays away from using Islam in anything but a political context.
There’s another character, a fictional scholar of ancient Persia named Hamid Parsani. And he’s interested in excavating the Middle East as a site of the birth of monotheism, and the links between monotheism and the desert.
It’s probably better to give up now because the book is so dense you could spend all day just teasing out some of these ideas.
XSD: One of the ideas in the book that I’ll raise, and maybe you can spin off of, is the connection between Western militarism and Islamist insurgency. Cyclonopedia makes the point that both of these two factions are laboring toward the same thing even if they don’t realize it. The West is fighting in the Middle East to secure oil, and through burning oil we’re going to seriously degrade and destroy the Earth. But the jihadis want some version of that too, because they think wars fought over oil will bring about the end times and usher in an Islamic utopia. So they want to end the world so it can be reborn.
J: It’s in the dialectic of those two approaches to oil that maybe we can start to guess at its true intentions. This is where Negarestani goes into the tellurian omega. Oil is fundamentally solar power, photosynthetic power that’s been captured and buried. So perhaps what oil wants is to regain that unity with the Sun, to recreate a solar empire. When he says “tellurian omega” he literally means the end of the Earth. And we do actually know how the Earth itself will end. It won’t be through climate change. It’ll be the Sun expanding as it dies and enveloping the planet — that’s the tellurian omega. And what oil is creating now today is a small imagining of that or moving the Earth toward that by raising the temperature and setting the Earth on fire.
And that aligns with the goals of capitalism. Capitalism moves in a straight line, instead of in cycles, and when you move in a straight line you’re moving toward some end. It’s finite. And there’s that apocalyptic sensibility in Islam and in all monotheistic religions. I think you can really see it in American evangelicalism where they support Israel in an effort to bring about the end times. They’re striving toward this apocalypse and actively seeking to bring it about.
An interesting text to put in dialogue with this is J.G. Ballard’s novel The Drowned World, which completely accurately predicted global warming and how it would unfold well before anyone was aware of it. For him, the ancient ecosystems that are captured in oil, the ecosystems of the Carboniferous period from millions of years ago, were reemerging to recreate the climate of the world in which they existed. So they’re recreating the climate from that time. And if you look at the consequences of climate change, that’s what it will be. The Earth at that time was warmer, it had much higher oceans, it was dominated by wetlands. And that’s the ecological condition we’re moving towards as a result of our burning of fossil fuels. There’s an intentionality there, of the hatred that a geological epoch feels towards what replaced it, driving it.
XSD: Has Negarestani written anything since Cyclonopedia? I just wonder if you’ve kept up with him and how his thinking has evolved over time.
J: I have tried. As you can tell from Cyclonopedia he is an incredibly brilliant person who loves complexity. His writings are never easy to understand. He’s published a lot of papers and one book since Cyclonopedia and he’s got a para-academic institution for philosophy that he runs. His second book in some ways is the opposite of Cyclonopedia. It’s going back to Kant and philosophers of that era to understand what’s special about human consciousness and human subjectivity. Really flipping these things on their head and placing human consciousness on the top of some hierarchy that I think is very compatible with a liberal understanding of the world. Because of that I’m pretty uninterested in it. I’m not a liberal. I think it makes sense given his life story that he would come to embrace this type of American liberalism because it’s in opposition to the regime in Tehran. I totally respect that. I’m much happier that he became a liberal than what Nick Land became.
XSD: You touched on this a bit already but can you talk more about the specific name you’ve applied to oil, coal, and gas, and the way you’ve used the concept of jinn to understand and grapple with fossil fuels.
J: In the Koran it says that jinn are to fire as we are to earth. In some sense we are composed of earth, we contain elements of the Earth, and whatever relationship we have to the Earth, jinn have to fire. All Muslims believe in jinn, and they are seen as more numerous than us and as diverse. There are good and bad jinn. And they inhabit the same realm as us. They don’t live in heaven or hell, they live here on Earth. They can choose to make themselves seen. They can directly influence the world we live in.
When I learned all of this about jinn I was struck by how perfectly it parallels oil, as a being of fire, as a being that is not human but able to influence human politics. I was chatting with one of the hosts of Subliminal Jihad, Khalid, and he recommended this book Knot of the Soul by Stefania Pandolfo. She spent a lot of time with this imam in Morocco who treats people with what we would call a mental illness with a Koranic cure for madness. Jinn are very closely associated with madness in the Koran and in Islamic tradition. The words come from the same root in Arabic.
This imam in Pandolfo’s book talks about how there’s two types of mental illness. There’s the type where the jinn directly possesses you, which we in the West would probably recognize as psychosis or schizophrenia, where you’re losing touch with reality. And then there’s another type of madness that is caused by a machine fueled by the jinn, and when the imam says “fueled” he uses the word benzin. And Pandolfo is careful to clarify he uses that word. I wondered why and I found out that in the Koran, when they’re trying to convey the idea of fuel, they use a different word, waqūd. The Koran says the fires of hell are fueled by waqūd, not benzin. Benzin has a clear connotation of being a petrochemical, of being an oil. The imam is identifying that these are mental illnesses that are caused by a machine that’s fueled by petrochemicals. He’s really speaking of the Western war capitalist machine that he’s identifying as causing problems in his community that we would recognize as mood disorders, like depression, anxiety, and others, conditions of modern life. Given that context the jinn of fuel are benzin al-jinn — benzin meaning not the specific petrochemical benzene but a word that encompasses petrochemicals. So benzin al-jinni would be the jinn that live in oil or are dissolved in oil.
XSD: Your writings also touch on your disillusionment with environmentalism. You say environmentalism has failed as a movement. I certainly wouldn’t dispute that but can you explain a bit why you feel that way?
J: Environmentalism in its current intellectual form I feel began with Rachel Carson and Silent Spring. This created a very real populist movement that included workers and all types of Americans who mobilized against this idea of pollution, this sense that we were releasing chemicals into the environment that challenged the purity of the Earth, of Mother Nature, and that were literally causing us ill. And that environmentalist movement was the most successful phase of modern environmentalism. The 10 years after that brought on the Clean Air Act and the Clean Water Act. There was a real cohesion of vision between the workers, the unions, and the environmentalists. I think the ruling class, represented by the people who run Shell, in this case, saw this as a real challenge to their power and something they were going to have to respond to.
These people were steeped in this worldview of cybernetics. Cybernetics is the science of control. Cybernetics believes that we live in a series of complex systems in which one factor is countered by another factor, one dynamic is countered by another dynamic. And if you can control the inputs, you can control the system. In this case the system is the discourse around environmental harm that they wanted to control. I think they really put effort into controlling the discourse to keep it within the allowable realm. These were people who were motivated strongly by anticommunist ideology. The last thing they wanted to see develop was a communist movement that had an ecological sensibility. And I believe they were very interested in controlling both sides of the debate.
Very obviously they were controlling the side that today we’d call denialism. This is the side that says none of this is real and none of our actions are causing any harm. But I think we would be foolish to believe their actions end there. They have invested in the counter to the denialism, which is liberal scientific environmentalism. I think you can see this clearly if you look at James Lovelock, who is an incredibly influential figure in environmentalism.
When I first put out my sentient oil stuff, a guy wrote to me and said, “This is just like James Lovelock’s Gaia theory. You would love Gaia. You should get into this.” And I looked at the Gaia theory books and what I found was not a philosophy that the Earth is alive and sentient, but rather a cybernetic vision of ecology where Earth is a complex system that is held in a condition of stasis or stability by natural factors. I think the cyberneticists and especially the environmentalist cyberneticists embodied by Lovelock believed fundamentally that the Earth is a complex system that is capable of maintaining that stasis, almost without regard for what we do to it.
On the parapolitical left we’re always looking for connections with intelligence agencies, and we don’t have to look that far with Lovelock. He was a member of MI5. For his entire adult life he was working for intelligence. And he was also working for oil companies such as Shell. Shell sponsored the work out of which grew the Gaia idea. There’s very explicit connections here, I’m not making paranoiac or far-fetched connections between Lovelock and the ruling class. And from that collaboration came the cybernetic idea that the system will maintain stability up until a certain point where the change that you’re causing in the environment overwhelms the counteracting natural factors, pushing things into chaos.
That brings you to The Limits to Growth, which was an incredibly influential text in environmentalism. It was sponsored by the Rockefeller Foundation and published by the Club of Rome. They used early computer models to model out the economy and basically said, this line on this graph will go up until it encounters some place where it runs out of material, it encounters some limit. The Limits to Growth people were not saying we should stop before we get to the limit. They were saying the system will naturally stop when it reaches its limit, so we don’t have to worry about it until it reaches its limit. I find this to be an incredibly pernicious idea. If you compare it to Rachel Carson’s vision based in pollution, it’s obvious that a lot of pollution is bad, and a little bit of pollution is still bad, it’s just a little less bad. Whereas the Limits framing lets the companies do whatever they want up until a limit that is enforceable not by government or popular demand but by nature, that we will run out of material and we’ll have to stop.
XSD: And this connects somewhat to the idea of the scarcity of oil, or maybe the manufactured perception that oil is scarce, which I think is a pretty common viewpoint, that we’re going to run out one day and we’d better figure out how to prepare for that.
J: The scarcity of oil is a myth. Oil has always been prolific. It doesn’t occur in many places geologically but where it does the reservoirs of oil are incredibly vast and they’re not going to run out. If it was going to run out we could hope that it will run out before climate change gets bad enough to kill us all, but it’s not going to. And this has always been a problem within the oil industry, how to make money off of a product that is so plentiful. The laws of supply and demand would dictate that oil would be even cheaper than the cost of extraction because there’s so much of it. So oil companies in general have been very interested since the beginning of the industry in creating a discourse of scarcity.
That was really driven home in 1973 with the quote-unquote oil shock, which happens two years after the publication of The Limits to Growth, and it created a sense that oil is a scarce resource, and therefore they can charge more money for it because it is scarce. Of course the scarcity in 1973 was created by a political situation that I believe was manipulated behind the scenes by the oil companies. OPEC embargoed the sale of oil to the United State. OPEC is said to be the association of oil-producing states which is helmed by Saudi Arabia, but at the time all of Saudi Arabia’s oil was being pumped by Aramco, which was an American company associated with Chevron. There were literally Americans in the room when OPEC decided to do the oil embargo, and not only in the room but in a position of influence over OPEC. To me that reframes how we look at the oil shock, that this is something they wanted to happen, and they wanted it to happen to create this circumstance of scarcity that would echo and reinforce the Limits to Growth thesis.
And I think ever since then the environmentalist movement has been explicitly coopted by big foundations that are funded by corporate money. It’s not a secret to anybody. It’s not even interesting for parapolitical researchers to look into because it’s so obvious to everybody. To me, this is what happens when you let the ruling class define their own ideology in the absence of communism or Marxism. Had communism in America not already been destroyed by the Cold War before environmentalism got started I think we would have had a very different environmentalist movement that would have had a better chance of checking corporate power. But we had what we had.
XSD: The way you talk about it reminds me of the late ‘90s and early 2000s, when environmental activists took a real radical turn and were burning down McMansions and sabotaging pipelines. There was a parallel to the War on Terror, this George W. Bush-driven war on “green terror.” It always struck me as a very underexamined little chapter. They were using the same counterinsurgency techniques and laws they developed to fight al-Qaeda against people who were trying to stop logging operations in the forest. And I think it shows that when they perceive a real threat all the niceties go away and they bring out the big guns.
J: It is an interesting period but I think that it’s important to be careful about endorsing too much of that type of environmentalism as the alternative to liberal environmentalism. When the FBI wants to infiltrate and disrupt a movement, what does it do? It sends agents in there to do violence because those instances of violence create an excuse to bring state repression to bear. You always have an agent provocateur saying, “Hey guys, let’s go blow up a pipeline. Let’s go blow up something.”
Andreas Malm obviously wrote a book [How to Blow Up a Pipeline] but didn’t do it. I can’t believe that you could write a book advocating blowing up an oil pipeline and not feel like you have some obligation to do the propaganda of the deed and go out and do it. What a hypocrite.
To me the radical version of environmentalism is not rogue isolated instances of sabotage but rather class-conscious organization of the workers to build a political force that is powerful enough to counter the power of the ruling class. And that’s never been there in environmentalism. So I feel comfortable saying, absolutely, fuck the environmentalists. I’m very concerned about global warming and ecological harm but the environmentalists have, at every turn, been either completely useless or worse.
XSD: So you wouldn’t look at Extinction Rebellion and any of these groups that have popped up within the last 10 or so years as productive or a good development?
J: Look at who funds the Extinction Rebellion. It’s Leah Hunt-Hendrix, who is literally an heir to the H.L. Hunt oil fortune of East Texas. Yeah, okay, great, this heiress has liberal values, but can a movement that’s funded like that truly create change that challenges the fundamental assumptions of the capitalist system? I don’t know. Maybe not.
XSD: I saw one interview where you describe yourself as a climate doomer. Do you still feel that way?
J: I do still feel that way and the reason is because of the defeat of communism. To the extent that I’m not a doomer it’s because China still exists and is communist. I think that in order to do something about climate change you need really organized government control over the economy, which we don’t have. We have economic control over government. So to me the environmentalist battle was lost before it even began because it was lost in the early days of the Cold War. They stamped out American communism, which used to be a very viable and active movement with the potential to organize workers and create a political counterweight to corporate culture. So to me our fate was sealed by the Cold War, which is before anyone even really knew about climate change. I’m a doomer because the wrong side won the Cold War.
XSD: You keep hearing that we’re in the middle of this mental crisis, especially for younger people. There seems to be this civilizational malaise or depression hanging over a lot of young people. And I think the popular liberal answer is, we need expanded healthcare, we need expanded resources, more doctors, a better app on your phone. That may or may not be true but I think it misses that there’s a lot of legitimate reasons to feel awful about the world today. Not to the point where you need to let it derail your life, but I think young people are responding to the degradation of the planet and I don’t feel like that’s ever really properly addressed. I wonder if you have any take on that.
J: Martin Luther King said something like — I’m paraphrasing — is it really well-adjusted to be well-adjusted to an unjust society? And I think that’s what’s going on. I think with this generation we’re starting the sacrifice generations, the generations that are going to live with the consequences of what happened in the 20th century. They’re absolutely right to be depressed.
If there was a true leftist party that could organize and channel that anger, that would be a political alternative, but there’s not, so what we’re left with is this mental health crisis.
I work in mental health books, publishing books on psychology. And I’ve tried a million times to do a climate psychology book but there’s nothing to do because there’s no answer. Psychology doesn’t have an answer to what to do when you’re reacting to a real problem. CBT, for example, will help you dismiss intrusive thoughts that aren’t true, like “I’m worthless” or “I suck at this.” Those may be fundamentally untrue, so psychological tools like CBT can help you stop giving power to those thoughts. But when it comes to the oncoming state of constant catastrophe there’s really nothing that can be offered.
XSD: There’s almost a Mark Fisher element to it, where you have so much focus on apocalypse and the end times. And that’s really become a stand-in for saying, we want the end of the system not the end of the world, but we don’t know how to express that we want the end of the system because we don’t know what would come after it.
J: It’s important to challenge this notion that the end is coming soon. No, we are living in the midst of the death of the world. This is it. It will continue to progressively get worse but this is what it looks like.
XSD: Can you talk a bit about the book you’re working on in connection with all this?
J: I want it to be a narrative history of the late 19th century but mostly the 20th century from the point of view of the oil industry and oil itself if possible. Oil is so inhuman and incomprehensible that we can’t pretend to know what it’s thinking so I can’t tell it literally from its point of view. But the idea is to look more specifically at the role of oil in parapolitics or deep politics, this hidden, covert story of how this world was created. I don’t know when that will be ready. It won’t be for many years. A part of me I doesn’t want it to be ready, because then what am I going to work on? I like having that project.