Blaming individuals for communal problems is idiotic. It only turns people away from your cause. We've been trying to shame individuals into saving the planet for like 50 years with things like litterbug campaigns and it hasn't worked yet. Why? Because it's not an individual problem! The sources of the problem are corporate and political and that's where they must be solved. Shaming people just makes them feel angry and defeated, and angry defeated people don't make good political choices.
I don't usually do call out posts, but this one really pissed me off.
It's so self-defeating. And so elitist. "Look at all this digital garbage," he posts, somehow exempting his own digital garbage. "If only people would stop with their terrible cat pics, we could surely save the planet."
Delete half the internet and the remaining half will still be 90% crap. What's the alternative? Who do we put in charge of deciding what's valuable enough to be stored? You, Gerry?
@fraying and once you see this in one place, you see it everywhere. You go to the supermarket and everything is triple wrapped in plastic, but the onus is placed on the consumer to reduce plastic waste by going without a bag to carry it all in.
@peterbutler We CAN fix things ourselves, but not with individual buying choices. We have to vote for politicians that share our values. And if there aren't any, then we need to become them.
There's no way out of this that isn't getting involved in politics. We can't consume our way out of it. Limiting everyone to consumers is how we got into this mess - it won't get us out.
@fraying This reminds me of this article I read a while ago about people's usage of tech and social media:
"You could say that it's my responsibility to exert self-control when it comes to digital usage, but that's not acknowledging that there's a thousand people on the other side of the screen whose job is to break down whatever responsibility I can maintain"
Yes, and the drinking water thing is particularly silly. The overwhelming majority of water, even treated, potable water, never goes into our bodies. We use far more for industry, agriculture, lawns, bathing, dishes, and so forth than we drink.
That data centers are starting to use a little is not nearly as shocking as this person is trying to make out.
The truth is we’re all in it together. Corporations are sleaze but they design their crap for us and we keep buying it. Cheap, amusing garbage we’ll pay for. Social programs, health and education we won’t. By we I mean most people. I blame marketing more than any other single force: the route by which corporations best pander to and reward selfishness, narcissism and greed.
Even here in this thread no individual wants to own any of it. We want anyone else to solve the problem but us.
It’s a good piece. A contemporary analogue is the banning of plastic bags by grocery stores from which one can only buy stuff wrapped in blankets of single-use plastic. But marketing has trained us to enjoy and appreciate the ‘convenience’ - so much so that we as individuals refuse to give up that convenience so long as our own little neighbourhood worlds remain relatively unaffected by our choices. We have a huge role in all this: we simply refuse to see or accept it.
I’m only going on what I see all around me. The people who want and are ready to accept the consequences of change - like you and me perhaps - are vastly outnumbered.
@fraying yes, and I'd also advocate for administering a mild electric shock to the person who decides to put auto-playing videos on a site, that then follow you as a scroll. Page bloat won't help us.
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