iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Replies

Jacob Bolton @jacobbolton.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

It's probably not about minerals. Wrote about Greenland, shipping lanes and the political work that all this arctic speculation is doing over at @the-breakdown.bsky.social www.break-down.org/after-the-th...

break-down.org

After the Thaw

As temperatures rise and the Arctic thaws, capital is eyeing new opportunities: for extraction, for shipping and for extending a lifeline to business as usual.

11613 0

Jacob Bolton @jacobbolton.bsky.social · 15/01/2026

basically, this

Polar shipping, much like Gulf oil in the 1970s, promises, to some, an answer to capitalism’s problem of how to secure continued surplus in the near-present, despite a future endlessly destabilized by a present-day excess that continues to trash the planet. This has a further effect: by selling us the narrative of bountiful lands soon to come, the urgency of climate action is in turn reduced in the present. This obstruction is both an assumption and an effect of these imagined futures. At global policy conferences, in the business media and across the glossy pages of ten-year masterplans, the Arctic is presented as capitalism’s backup plan—the consolation prize of a planet in ruin.

122 0