“One thing that I immediately realized about the team is how passionate they are.”
🙄
This is an ad for a for-profit, publicly traded company that claims to have the solution for plastic waste, but also holds patents for said solution. Either they’ve found the solution, in which case, they should open source that shit because we’re in a global ecological crisis, or they’re exaggerating their claims and this absolute handjob of a video is uncritically repeating every single thing that the company’s PR is feeding them, without consulting a single other person.
Plastic waste already has a solution, and it’s a political solution. We could start by nationalizing all oil companies and banning single use plastics. Instead, we invest in a “solution” that, if it works as advertised, actually entrenches a perverse incentive for more plastic waste. Were this company to become hugely successful, they would lobby heavily against any bans of single use plastics, since it would ruin them.
This is what I call a technological antisolution:
We are asked to marvel at the shiny innovations brought to us by our technological superiors, and while we wait for them to solve climate change for us [or, in this case, plastic waste], we are given strategies to cope with the stress. Climate Change is thus transformed – or perhaps reduced – from a political problem to a technological one. I propose we name these kinds of technologies Technological Antisolutions.
A Technological Antisolution is a product that attempts to replace a boring but solvable political or social problem with a much sexier technological one that won’t work. This does not mean that we should stop doing R&D. A technology that is worth pursuing can become a technological antisolution depending on its social and political context. […] Technological Antisolutions are everywhere because they allow us to continue living an untenable status quo. Their true product is not the technology itself, but the outsourcing of our social problems. They alleviate our anxiety and guilt about not being active participants in political change, and for their trouble, founders and investors are richly rewarded.
I hear a lot of what you’re saying, and I agree to a large degree. What I don’t think is so valid is what do we do with the 9 billion tons of plastic waste we already have? Reducing our need for oil with our current (bad) behavior is a start. Taking care of the mess we’ve made is also a huge win, even if it’s converted into other, longer-lasting products, and assuming it doesn’t require too much energy. Having a world where the bottom line isn’t such a big factor would also help, and I’m not sure that will change quickly enough to help us out of this mess.
Totally a puff piece, though, and I’m not optimistic is will be energy-efficient enough to work.
That’s why I say that antisolutions are context-dependent. This is being presented as the solution to plastic, not as a clean-up plan after we have banned plastic, or even while we ban plastic. The former is an antisolution, while the latter could be a responsible project. Antisolutions are dangerous because they deflate the political will necessary to actually solve the problem, not because the technology is problematic in and of itself.
I don’t think that’s a practical solution for this society. There’s definitely loads of things we change. Swapping plastic for glass, hemp plastic, etc. But plastic is kinda here to stay and capitalism isn’t letting us nationalize conglomerates any time soon,
There is nothing more impractical than destroying the only home for life as we know it. We literally have nowhere else to go. Banning single use plastics and nationalizing oil companies is so unbelievably convenient compared to the alternative.
In fact, revolutionary change is not just possible, but inevitable. It’s a question of whether we’re going to do it proactively, mitigating the harm that we’ve already done in the most just way that we can, or do it reactively. Either way, the day that enough of us wake up and decide to stop doing capitalism – and that day will come – it’ll stop, because labor wakes up every single day and makes capitalism happen.
I don’t not agree with you, but I’d be lying to you and myself if I were to pretend it was a practical solution. The optimal solution? Hell yeah! Practical? Nope.
What exactly does “practical” mean to you? To me, it’s just a manifestation of what Gramsci called “common sense” (“senso comune” in his Italian), which is itself part of what he called hegemony, or the mainstream intellectual/cultural ideas that justify the current regime. He argued that this common sense is the sort of popular philosophy that always surrounds us, which will always be uncritical of existing power, and that it’s the job of leftists to reject capitalism’s own notion of practicality because it cannot ever be practical to go up against the people who are deciding what is practical, by definition. Instead, we need to write our own version of practicality, because if we go around repeating the existing one, as you’re doing now, then we’re doing the work of entrenching it instead of opposing it.
So, for Gramsci, this feeling that you feel doesn’t mean that it can’t be done; it means that you’re suggesting something that would threaten the people in charge, because they’re the ones who get to define “practical.” It means nothing more or less.
Ugh, I hate to do this, but it’s easier for me to explain.
We live in a society whereby it’s easier to be white then it is to be black. There’s better opportunities, the law is more lenient, there’s just all around less friction.
In an ideal world, everyone would just stop being racist tomorrow and we would all live happily ever after. But when you ask about the practicality of that?
Even if we could delete racism tomorrow. What about the fact that a whole town was burned down in America in order to prevent black people having financial autonomy. The fact that black people have been disproportionally locked up for the same crimes white folk have walked away from.
It’s nice to say, hey ideal world, this would happen. But we need to look at how we get there and what the impact is.
I’m more anti-capitalist than most and everyday I wish we could put an end to it. I spoke to a landlord the other day who has over 500 properties in London and he’s trying to get more. I think about how we get to a world in which that’s not allowed to happen and what it looks like. First you need to make it so he doesn’t feel like he’s at a loss and then you have to figure out how to eradicate the current concept of wealth in a palatable way so that he can feel comfortable.
It’s all good that we say, let’s do this, but it’s how we get there. How do we topple the systems of inequality which prop up capitalism, because it’s not enough to say give up plastic and make a peace sign.
It’s all good that we say, let’s do this, but it’s how we get there. How do we topple the systems of inequality which prop up capitalism, because it’s not enough to say give up plastic and make a peace sign.
We learn and we organize. Speaking for myself, I started a worker cooperative and work in international human rights. I’m a member of many socialist organizations, some local and some international. I’ve joined more picket lines than I can count. I go to conferences, where I network with other socialists to start other projects and support each other. I’ve been part of local efforts against evictions, expanded police budgets, and so on, some of which actually won. It’s not a mystery, but it is hard, and we have to keep showing up and doing it.
Also, if I may probe, I think that your dismissive comment (“it’s not enough to say give up plastic and make a peace sign”), which clearly implies that I’m not doing anything serious, is telling. I think that you’re being defensive. Zizek (I think in “Sublime Object” but it could be in something else) notes that ideology, as he defines it, is something that we don’t see in our day to day life, but being forced to see it is a painful process, and we often respond defensively to having it challenged. Your current worldview seems to take for granted that no one (at least, no one serious) is doing anything meaningful to change the status quo, or even has a plan for how to change it, but that’s actually not true, so we end up in this strange situation where you think that saying the most superficial thing about the current state of the world is somehow explaining something to me.
If you’re actually interested in that question that you asked, and not just using it rhetorically, I have approximately ten thousand reading suggestions for you. I’ve already mentioned Gramsci and Zizek, but they can be a bit esoteric. There are also very good and very practical theorists of revolutionary change, many of which were themselves practicing revolutionaries.
I would honestly be very grateful for some book suggestions.
there’s concepts like biorefinery where we take plastic and agricultural waste and put it into a heavily modified oil refinery and out comes biochar and some chemical feedstocks (e.g. ethylene) for making new virgin-grade plastic. Depending on the design it can be more carbon efficient than carbon capture, but in general these industries use a gigantic amount of energy while producing less plastic and much less gasoline/diesel than a normal oil refinery.
