Review of Bruno Latour, Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime . Cambridge: Polity Press, 2017. 140 pages.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Down to Earth: Politics in the New Climatic Regime, is Latour's analysis of the many political problems of today, including mass migration and worldwide inequality, all while the issue of climate change hangs in the global communities' political and intellectual atmosphere exacerbating these phenomena.Coming in at a short 106 pages of text, Latour argues that it is not adherence to "the facts" or bigoted ideologies that is the central political problem of our time, but that the vision of a common world has been abandoned-hence the explosion of inequalities, mass migration, and climate change denial all corresponding to the era known as "deregulation," "globalization," or "neoliberalism."Modernization, argues Latour, has been abandoned, and what the global community has entered is the "New Climatic Regime."Latour touches upon many themes in this compact book: migration, class warfare, populism, climate change denial, the shortcomings of modernization, the concept of Nature, and more.One of Latour's political contributions from Down to Earth is his attempt of a new division replacing the political left and right.As Latour writes, Do we continue to nourish dreams of escaping, or do we start seeking a territory that we and our children can inhabit?Either we deny the existence of the problem, or else we look for a place to land.From now on, this is what divides us all, much more than our positions on the right or the left side of the political spectrum.( 5)In other words, politics and how we organize our political institutions, according to Latour, is now centered on the question of whether we direct our attention down to earth or if we ignore the problems and attempt to escape them-either by gated communities, climate denial, Teslas in space, stricter borders, or more concentrated wealth.The ethos of being down to earth connects with Latour's other political creation, what he calls the Terrestrial.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".