Awareness and nervous systems are part of the environment. Just as you can pollute a river with plastic poison, you can pollute a consciousness with self-destructive memes and ideas. What you choose to focus on, what you choose to work towards, what you choose to articulate, is not abstract. It is as real as you are. If we begin to respect our nervous systems, our awareness, our consciousness, the same way we’re asking everyone to respect a pond or a stream or the planet, we may actually reveal to ourselves a high leverage point for changing the way humankind interacts with its planet.
On why real-life interactions have enduring value:
[Facebook] serves the interests of corporate capital and advertising. If I see you on the street, and we have a conversation about something and look into each others’ eyes, that’s not monitored. It can’t be tracked for keywords. It can’t be advertised over. We’re not using any airtime or cell contracts. We can’t be distracted with other things on the screen at the same time. It’s not contextualized under a certain brand or some official group of interactions. It’s much less controlled.
On “sustainable” corporations:
I resent environmental programs that lay the blame and responsibility back on the consumer or the worker. Look at Walmart when they got Adam Werbach to head green initiatives. If Walmart wants to go green, they should stop buying cheap plastic shit from the Chinese and contributing to disposable consumer culture. Instead, what they did at Walmart was they said, “OK, we’re creating carpools for our workers and encouraging them to take shorter showers.” So you’re going to make your workers live more environmentally friendly lives? You’re putting the burden and the inconvenience and the behavioral change on those workers rather than the corporation itself? Fuck you. I’m told I’ve got to take a shorter shower when the factory up the street is dumping more water than my entire town combined consumes in a year?
On getting caught up in personal change and footprint rather than political action:
We do better to disempower Walmart by developing local industries to which we can shorten the supply chain supplying us with our food and goods. If we change our behaviors so we’re thinking less of ourselves as consumers, we’re becoming satisfied and enriched by doing things with each other rather than buying things at the mall. [We do better when] we live in a society where having one barbecue at the end of the block that everybody uses is actually more gratifying than everyone having their own barbecue in some competitive suburban nightmare. That’s when you start to see the types of changes that we need.
How’d the present get so tense? By Darby Minow Smith