Affective Infrastructure: Capitalism's Specters in the Ecovillage Findhorn Community

ABSTRACT The Ecovillage Findhorn Community (EFC) in Northeast Scotland seeks to live in harmony with nature. How the community has done this over its 60‐plus years has changed from social communalism, where residents lived in cheap caravans, to now mostly privately‐owned expensive ‘eco’ houses with green technology. Embedded in this historical‐present transition is a troubled tension of both resisting and perpetuating capitalism—the malevolent specter fueling genocide and ecocide. However, there is an ‘eco’ paradox of “cruel optimism” here, whereby paying for expensive ‘eco’ housing and green technology infrastructure to mitigate capitalism's specters inherently fuels capitalism, which created the need for ‘sustainable’ solutions in the first place. This paper attends to how EFC residents, human and other‐than‐human, grapple with capitalism's spectral entanglement with affective infrastructures.