Apologize to the future

Text by Anna Burai
TRIGGER WARNING [Suicide]

Heat less for the sake of the climate, ride your bike and just don’t fly short flights - but have you ever thought about foregoing children for the sake of the climate? Activist, cult leader and artist Chris Korda has been campaigning for this for almost 30 years. Now she looks back at the tragedy of human error.

Almost 20 years ago, Chris Korda stood with her cult followers at the Democratic Party Convention in New York and, with a fake press card around her neck, handed out small, hand-sized, square stickers with the inscription “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself”. Striking, controversial and wonderfully unorthodox – standard fare for the environmental activist and her group. Don’t have children to relieve the burden on the planet and to save humanity from the great climate catastrophe. “Thou shalt not procreate” – in German “You shall not procreate” – becomes the cornerstone of the antinatalist sect “The Church of Euthanasia”, which she founded in 1992. Together with the US religious community, Korda repeatedly stood on the streets of America throughout the 1990s and 2000s with rolls of black posters bearing white inscriptions with slogans such as “Save the Planet, Kill Yourself” or “Eat a Queer Fetus for Jesus,” graced. In 1995, members were guests of the teased talk show star Jerry Springer in front of around nine million Americans in the lovingly titled episode “I want to Join a Suicide Cult.”

In her temporary apartment in Berlin-Wedding, between brown cardboard boxes filled with documents and “stuff” flown in from New York as well as a complex mixer-computer setup, the American-born woman sits on the couch in the living room. The neighborhood and the apartment are surprisingly quiet. Chris Korda still looks the same as he did 30 years ago: the signature bob hairstyle (this time it’s an azure wig) and a short leopard-print spaghetti-strap dress - just a little older and, like her apartment, a little quieter. The mixing board takes up as much space in this room as it did metaphorically in her artistic sheep - a lot.

In her music career, as in her protests, Korda manages the balancing act between Dada and activism. Her album “Six Billion Humans Can’t Be Wrong” was primarily intended to criticize and provoke: “A lot of my earlier output was very ironic and very sarcastic,” says the musician looking back. “The lyrics consisted of phrases like ‘buy, buy, consume more, be happy’ and so on. It has certain childish, punkish qualities. The first album ’Six Billion Humans Can’t Be Wrong’ is full of that. ‘Eat, eat, eat, eat, flesh, flesh, flesh, flesh’ - the way it uses words is very punk.” As easy as the lyrics are to laugh at, the subject matter is deadly serious: If we don’t act now, there is a threat of absolute climate catastrophe.

That was 1999. Over the past 30 years of Korda’s activity, she has seen her fears become reality: “We predicted that climate change would become a driving force and completely change human civilization. That’s what happened. We predicted that the population would continue to grow, and it is. CO2 would continually accumulate in the atmosphere and it has,” she explains. “None of this was particularly difficult to predict. I don’t have a crystal ball. I am not Nostradamus. I just read the scientific sources and everything was there. It’s been under our noses the whole time.”

Antinatalism as a solution to climate change must be critically examined. Philosophy is accused of being strongly anchored in so-called “eugenics”. Eugenics is a concept that describes the selective breeding of humans according to racist, sexist or ableist ideas of an “optimized society”. Antinatalists like Korda, on the other hand, distance themselves from this and call for a completely voluntary decision not to have children. “Eugenicists try to increase the proportion of their DNA in the gene pool, while my followers eliminate their DNA from the gene pool. That’s why my work is the opposite of eugenics,” says Korda. “Preventing a potentially infinite line of offspring is the most effective way to demonstrate one’s contribution to the ideology of limiting population growth.” She refers to a 2017 Environmental Research Letters article: A US family that chooses to Having one fewer child would achieve the same emissions reductions as 684 young people choosing to recycle comprehensively for the rest of their lives.

But how can antinatalist principles be established throughout society, worldwide, without discrimination? The activist is reaching her limits: “During my lifetime, the human population has more than doubled – from three billion to eight billion. It reached six billion in time for the release of my album Six Billion Humans Can,t Be Wrong in 1999. Since then the population has grown by a third, forcing me to prepare the same album for its re-release in 2021 with “Eight Billion Humans Can’t Be Wrong,” she explains. “Obviously, so far I have not succeeded in preventing the destruction of our future, but that was not my primary goal.” She wanted to raise awareness of overpopulation and mass extinction. “I advocate non-generation because this is the only ethical stance in a severely overpopulated world.” The effectiveness behind their activism is secondary. Instead, there should be government and financial initiatives to motivate the population to reduce the population on a voluntary basis. “The state should make abortion possible and give every person the opportunity to end their own life painlessly. But these are fantasies in today’s political climate. I’m an artist anyway, not a politician,” says Korda. “What matters to me is being on the right side of history. My ideas spread more and more on their own, and that is the true measure of their value. My movement will be remembered not for its pragmatism, but for its righteousness.”

During her career, the activist received sharp criticism for many actions. The music video for her 2002 song “I Like To Watch” featured footage of the September 11 terrorist attacks collaged with pornography. Between 2009 and 2019 she paused her music career, disappeared from the DJ tables in clubs and devoted herself to new artistic interests. “I have reached a standstill with my electronic music for various reasons. I have reached a standstill with the church. Things are no longer progressing as well as before. And things have changed. September 11th changed everything. We couldn’t wander the streets with crazy banners and have plastic fetus barbecues in parks. You could forget that. Suddenly there were new laws that prevented us from doing something like that again.” In 2019 and 2020 she reappeared in the music scene with her records “Akoko Ajeji” and “Polymeter”. “Akoko Ajeji” is probably the first album of all time to be based on complex polymeters and is so technically demanding that the artist quickly programmed her own MIDI sequencer because the commercial software couldn’t keep up with Korda’s demands.

“As a child, I had a strange gift for machines,” she says. “I was able to fix my family’s toaster with just my touch. It was almost like a spiritual healer laying on his hands. I could just feel it.” At university, Chris Korda would encounter her very first computer. Here an almost magical synergy arose between her and the machine – and her environment. “This process was wonderful for me because computer science and engineering exposed me to people whose lives revolve around facts,” she says. She noted that you have to play by the rules of the universe. “People think they make the rules. I’m here to say they don’t.” From this insight, Korda developed her talk “A Thin Layer of Oily Rock.” Because according to Korda, humanity is currently on its way to extinction until nothing remains but a layer of geological rock. “If the global temperature increases by four degrees Celsius, humanity will no longer be there. We would become a thin layer of oily stone and it would all be in vain.” That is the basic problem that she repeatedly comes across in conversation and why she is misunderstood. It’s not the planet that’s in danger: it’s us. “Science says that if we continue to behave as if there are no boundaries in a finite environment, then the environment will simply adapt in a way to make life possible - without us, but life on Earth would continue”, she explains. “Bacteria will be around long after us and a new species will emulate humanity’s process. This will be great. Fantastic! A planet made of giant squirrels. The squirrels will be the winners. But that makes it a tragedy again. It’s a tragedy because we were probably the only interesting thing on the planet.”

For the activist, it is not the human being that needs to be protected. It is the collected human knowledge, mathematics, architecture, art. “What is human existence? I mean, human existence is the sum of all the things we have created.” Preserving it is an essential task, no question. And despite this, or perhaps precisely because of this, there is such a paralyzing sense of personal responsibility that most people avoid in everyday life - whether consciously or unconsciously. “Escapism is everywhere among us. People cannot accept the reality and that is that we are nothing more than animals. We have a finite lifespan. And most of us die sooner than we would like. We leave things incomplete. We were unable to build a civilization because we thought we could become immortal. “We created a civilization by enabling a stable society so that information could persist,” says Korda, criticizing a God complex among the elite. To understand: Since 2021, numerous billionaires, including Jef Bezos, have been investing in immortality research, such as in the “Altos Labs” research center. “It is a one-way journey for all of us. Each of us has a unique experience of it – a little bubble of awareness and perception. And then over time the contours of that bubble wear down and wear away. One day you look like a beautiful, wilted flower and then you’re just gone.”

“Apologize to the Future” will be published in 2020. Compared to “Six Billion Humans Can’t Be Wrong” or “I Like To Watch”, the album is surprisingly well-behaved by Korda’s standards. It no longer seems like a call for change. It becomes the manifesto of a disaster prophecy come true. “I describe the world as it will most likely be in the future. But I don’t describe it from my perspective, but from the perspective of the people of this future. They will look back on us and – one can be damned – won’t remember us particularly fondly. Why would they? We destroyed their planet. We made life unbearable for them,” says Korda. “I tell that to every person who has children. I tell them they better work on their apology. The list of things they need to apologize for is long.”

What motivates Korda to continue fighting this fight at the age of 61? In a personal letter that she published alongside the album “Passion for Numbers,” she writes: “Compassion is the ultimate meta-skill that stands above all else.” Caring in the face of suffering is the most important human skill. “You cannot sympathize without suffering. A person who is not compassionate is insensitive. Insensitive to joy, insensitive to curiosity, insensitive to everything, like a piece of wood,” she declares. “The Dalai Lama probably said it best: The true measure of being is the depth of suffering and the depth of joy. So it can be said that humans are by far the most excellent instrument of suffering that has evolved on Earth. We suffer more than anything and that is why we create poetry. That’s why we have all these tragedies like Shakespeare or the ancient Greek plays. They embody the depth of human suffering.”

Today, both their sect and Korda’s sheep have found new popularity again, especially in Europe. “People are more willing to listen to us these days because they know we were right,” Korda says. “But the cards are on the table. We’ve wasted our time telling ourselves that everything will be okay and that scientific advances will save the day. And now we’re left with no options left. The only thing we can do is drastically reduce our consumption of fossil carbon.” She looks at the boxes in the living room and remembers: “There is a fantastic film from the seventies called ’Network,’” she begins. “There’s a scene in it where a crazy newscaster tries to encourage people to stick their heads out of New York windows and scream, ‘I’m fucking mad and I can’t take this anymore!’ and people are pursuing it because it’s the TV generation. So everyone starts sticking their heads out the window and screaming. It has a liberating effect on them. I feel like this is the state we should be in. People should shout out the window, ‘I’m fucking angry and I can’t take it anymore. I want to know the truth. I want something to finally be done about all this.’ And if enough people insisted on it, then maybe something would happen. I can’t say for sure, but it’s very, very difficult for me to remain optimistic at the moment.”

The preceding is a translation. The original language is here.