No One Is Infrastructure
https://nume.ca/blog/no-one-is-infrastructure
Antinatalism asks whether the act of creating a life can be answerable, in advance, to the subject it brings into existence. No One Is Infrastructure places alongside that question a diagnosis of relations in which subjects of experience—beings who can feel, suffer, want or fear—are positioned as support for projects not genuinely answerable to their good and standing. The essay develops two related but distinct moral structures: unauthorizable creation, in which an initiating act creates a subject without any prior subject to whom that act could answer; and infrastructuralization, in which a subject is organized as property, supply, reproductive capacity, labour, administratively legible material or expendable means. Its central distinction is between a subject's welfare and a subject's standing: better treatment within a relation may mitigate harm without altering its orientation toward another's project, and goods or endorsement arising within a created life do not by themselves repair the absence of originating answerability. Within the answerability framework the essay adopts, the remaining antinatalist dispute is whether independent justifications — impersonal value, permissible risk, or agent-relative reasons — can override the originating objection, since downstream goods cannot. Institutional pronatalism and breeding-based animal agriculture emerge as convergence cases in which creation lacking prior answerability is joined to organization for use. Labour under survival pressure, state legibility, gendered care and political violence appear as further sites where the same diagnostic question recurs. Distinguishing fiduciary care for existing dependent subjects from the reciprocal public justification required of institutions, the essay argues that a politics against infrastructuralization must not reproduce it by manufacturing victims for liberatory ends. It offers not a doctrine or synthesis, but a recurring question: who is being asked to carry a world they did not choose?
#Antinatalism #Vegan #Anarchism #Feminism
