Teilnahme über Zoom möglich. Anmeldung an Anja Kamrath akamrathprotect me ?!uni-bremenprotect me ?!.de bis zum 25.01. 12 Uhr.
Abstract:
In promoting Mars colonization, SpaceX founder Elon Musk utilizes marketing strategies that tap into a number of powerful and culturally resonant other-worldly apocalyptic Christian-inflected themes. The fusion of marketing techniques, such as “manufactured urgency” and “perceived obsolescence,” with both doomsday and “manifest destiny” colonial rhetoric, fuels a grim self-fulfilling prophecy of earth’s demise. Both Musk’s personal statements and SpaceX’s official marketing materials deftly evoke earth’s obsolescence as humanity’s home, deploying such methods as “scarcity marketing,” “exploding offers,” “time-limit emphasis,” and even, in the case of rocketeering, a literal countdown clock. The message of earth’s disposability, combined with utopic visions of a promised libertarian terraformed paradise, where an “elect” will achieve salvation, activate troubling dynamics that legitimize siphoning off earth’s remaining fragile resources in order to feed the fantasies and corporate interests of a technocratic billionaire elite. The goal of this talk is to dissect the religio-cultural resonances of otherworldly escape in Mars colonization marketing, their implications for the planet’s most vulnerable populations, and to urge public media/civic moral interventions into what are grossly misleading and troubling narratives.
Bio:
Sarah McFarland Taylor is the award-winning author of Green Sisters: A Spiritual Ecology (Harvard University, 2008) and Ecopiety: Green Media and the Dilemma of Environmental Virtue (NYU, 2019). She is the co-editor with Eric Mazur of Religion & Outer Space (Routledge, 2023), and with Mara Einstein, she has co-edited Selling the Sacred: Religion and Marketing from Crossfit to QAnon (Routledge, 2024). An Associate Professor of Religious Studies, American Studies, and Environmental Policy and Culture at Northwestern University, she specializes in the study of media, religion, environment, climate change, and public moral engagement.
