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Welcome to the Anthropocene, that planetary tempo in which all the metabolic rhythms of the world start dancing to crazy new tunes Sure, you can join the Heideggerians and blame western metaphysics for all this You could put it down to Walter Benjamin’s angel of history Or, perhaps it is time to find some new characters to talk about, and new objects of thought Maybe critical writing could get its head out of the cloudy superstructures and think again about this base and vulgar world The problem with the traditional humanist disdain for science and technology is that it is now a line of thought pursued most vigorously again by reactionaries and fascists If you want to accept the reality of climate change, that most awkward rift in the planet’s metabolism, then that means accepting the science on which it is based Accepting the science, it turns out, means relying on a particular kind of infrastructure that produces it   Perhaps it is time then to turn to a kind of critical theory that was particularly interested in infrastructures, in technologies, and in sciences For example: let’s talk about Alexander Bogdanov Lenin’s rival for the leadership of the Bolshevik party, he was an early theorist of the biosphere, and founder of Proletkult, the movement for worker’s knowledge Let’s talk about Andrey Platonov, the finest product of Proletkult, who gave up writing during the Russian Civil War to become an engineer and fight famine in the countryside Those seem to me the kinds of writers we might have need of again   Platonov worked on four kinds of infrastructure: the railways, electricity, irrigation, and the rather more subtle but pervasive one of standards, when he worked on weights and measures He gives a vivid description of the struggle to build up infrastructure in his story ‘The Motherland of Electricity’ Set in 1921, it follows a young engineer, ‘haunted by the task of the struggle against ruin’, who is summoned to a remote village by a rather poetic communiqué from the secretary of the village soviet The land is parched, the peasants are