Global Dialogues

I have long been seduced by the sleek lines of spaceships and the promise of interstellar travel. As a child of science fiction, I grew up mesmerized by the spectacle of energy—thrusters flaring, galaxies conquered, time compressed into velocity. But over time, I began to wonder what powered these dreams. Graeme Macdonald’s “Improbability Drives” gave language to that unease with his concept of the “petroleum unconscious”—how even post-carbon futures in science fiction are haunted by oil’s logic. These stories sustain but a fantasy of unending expansion—of surplus, speed, and conquest. Even solar-powered ships often follow petroaesthetics, turning stars into the next oilfields.

This raised a harder question for me: we have sustainable development goals, but sustainability of what? Too often, it’s not the Earth that’s being sustained, but a way of life built on extraction—disguised as progress, repeated across planets.

Such a question echoed louder when I found Cara Daggett’s “The Birth of Energy.” She showed me that the modern idea of energy itself is a political invention. Thermodynamics, once a science of entropy and decline, was retooled under capitalism to mean endless productivity. Suddenly, to be alive meant to be efficient. Rest was disorder. I saw myself as a machine, trained to be “on” 24/7, to metabolize food into labor, to treat exhaustion as failure. And now, generative AI joins this lineage, promising frictionless creativity, instant outputs—a world where thought itself is automated. But beneath its shimmer lies the same imperative: to produce more, faster, without pause. Sustainability, as sold to us, often means sustaining that very logic—of humans stretched to their limit in service of a world that cannot stop.

Then came Jalal Al-e-Ahmad, an under-cited yet brilliant scholar in my “Thinkers of the Global South“ course with Dr. Firat Oruc. In “Occidentosis,” he wrote of a spiritual disease—an uncritical devotion to Western machines, imported not just into economies but into minds. His words struck close to home: growing up, machines in our house—microwaves, fridges, generators—were spoken of with reverence. They didn’t just change our lives; they reordered our sense of what modernity should be. Like Macdonald, Al-e-Ahmad showed me how the promise of technology often obscures what’s really being preserved: not equity, but a violent way of life, one that relies on people and the planet being sacrificed to keep going. Machines become the modern God promising salvation, and silence becomes our allegiance in return.

And yet, as Daggett reminds me, there is another path: “de-growth,” not just as policy, but as ethic. Entropy, she writes, is not laziness. It’s life asserting its limits. I began to see my tiredness not as failure, but as resistance. I began to dream of rest not as a sneaky after-effect of burnout, but as open justice.

I write now not to condemn technology, but to witness my slow break from its domination. To tell you that I’m learning to love the slowness, the limits, the rest. That I no longer want to burn endlessly across galaxies. That I want to stay, here, in the frail, precarious beauty of this Earth. To tend to its wounds, to unlearn the language of conquest, and to imagine—gently—what it would mean to begin again from care.

Tuan Nguyen (SFS '27) is a junior in the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University in Qatar.