The first guest of the Winter ’25 lineup of the HistCon Speaker Series will be joining us next week! Dan Zimmer will give his talk “From Left/Right to Up/Down: Technological Transcendence, Ecological Collapse, and a New Polarity in Politics” on Monday, January 27th, at 1pm in Hum 1 Rm 210.

If you are unable to make it in person, you can register to attend virtually via the Zoom at this link.

About From Left/Right to Up/Down:
Recent years have seen a growing number renounce the anthropocentrism of the modern Left/Right political spectrum to champion nothing less than the cause of Life itself. This talk charts how the totality of Life became a source of political concern and maps the consequences. It traces the beginning of these developments back to mid-20th century cybernetics before proceeding to show how the environmental crises of the 1970s split the servants of Life into competing camps: one wing striving to ensure that human beings do not overstep Life’s planetary boundaries and the other seeking to use artificial intelligence to free Life from all earthly limits to growth. The talk introduces an Up/Down dichotomy as a heuristic tool to help observers better parse this growing opposition. It concludes by warning that the growing struggle between Life’s partisans may come to resemble less the human-scale conflicts of Western political modernity than a new war of religion.

Dan Zimmer is a political theorist who studies the planet-scale application of human power, with a transdisciplinary focus on nuclear weapons, global warming, and artificial intelligence (AI). He received a doctorate in political science from the Government Department of Cornell University and has since studied contemporary issues in climate science and AI with STS scholar Paul Edwards as a postdoctoral researcher at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. He now works as a lecturer in the Stanford Civic, Liberal, and Global Education Program and is currently completing a book manuscript that traces the emergence of the human species as a political object from Aristotle to the atom bomb to the Anthropocene.

This talk is co-sponsored by Humanities in the Age of Artificial Intelligence & The Humanities Institute.