But abandoning the comfort that comes with displacing damage into distant landscapes also means reckoning with the convenient poetry of magic dust and the idea that there is anything unique or rare about an age fueled by colonialist fictions and extractive regimes. If anything about this age is rare, perhaps it is the possibility that our fraught networked systems have finally reached such a unique point, with their environmental and social consequences so visibly intertwined, that they have become impossible to ignore.

Accepting this at face value it seems we must say: the more things change, the more they stay the same.