Capitalist eschatology: Immediacy, investment, ideology

Other conference contribution, 2022

This paper presents some preliminary ideas on how to study the place of eschatology in the contemporary economy, focusing specifically on space-colonizing ambitions of US entrepreneurs such as Elon Musk. Such a study may focus on three problematics, relating to immediacy, investment, and ideology. The study of what one may call “capitalist eschatology” involves interrogating the making of alternative futures, by situating imaginaries of humanity becoming a multiplanetary species in the present realities of political economy. The authors combine STS and ethnographic method with a history of technology perspective, in order to study both the present and the long roots of the sociotechnical and economic practices and imaginaries that make up such a “eschatology”.