Conversation

This is coming up repeatedly. People’s intuitions on recycling, reuse, circularity, and carbon are repeatedly off, but not because they’re stupid. Our intuitions are bad when two things collide: a narrow rationally overweighted metric and a lot of lifecycle invisibility.
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But if you sort of roughly equally weight many considerations: litter, ocean trash, decomposition, recycling, carbon, water use, and yes aesthetics and general reinforcement of desired shift towards lower consumption lifestyles, cotton totes might do better.
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When we have to make decisions about highly hidden things — the typical person will only grok the most immediately visible 10% of salient aspects of something like beverage cups or shopping bags — we tend to express our uncertainty/ignorance through rough/unfinished aesthetics.
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This is not always the case. In dealing with hospital-grade sanitation needs, most of us trust the aesthetic projected by plastics and disposables and would worry if we saw too much cloth or reused equipment. There, we appreciate the overwhelming consideration — infection.
At one point, a very Trumpie character, Lalloo Yadav, with a son-of-soil persona, became Railway Minister and mandated that a return to kulhars because “tradition.” Initially, I like many others, was like “Yes!” Turns out sentiment and shallow aesthetics had misled us.
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Kulhars are *awful* for the environment. They are made with quality agricultural top-soil. They devastate farmland. The unglazed look makes you think you could just crush them back to soil. It *looks* recyclable. NO. The firing is irreversible chemistry. This is basically glass!
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Similar analysis applies to many things. Think glass soda bottles are better than coated paper cups? Breakage rates and energy costs in reusing often kill the advantage. And don’t even get me started on *metal* bottles (I’m looking at you Bay Area).
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But despite all this, I think the intuition to match expressed aesthetics to felt certainties is sound and a good general human tendency. We just need to sometimes actually do the math and actually figure out how much carbon matters vs microplastic waste.
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We are not used to regimes where one consideration overwhelms others. We are rightly suspicious of the high-modernist monocultural look of solving for extremes. “Natural” aesthetics reflect a default assumption of an illegible set of considerations in a “natural” proportions.
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But sometimes we DO get it. We get that jet turbine blades need to be made of nickel-titanium alloy, not artisanal wood. There was a Simpsons joke about “when atoms were split by hand” showing a worker splitting an atom with hammer and chisel.
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The hard thing about decarbonizing is there are no visceral signs of the extremity of the regimes we are in. Boarding a jet is otoh is an extreme experience. Nobody is NOT excited about their first flight. You’re getting into a metal tube that will fly at 500mph/30k ft!
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Similarly surgery is extreme. You’ll be administered a drug that will send you into a deeper unconscious mode than sleep and somebody will CUT into you. Of course you’ll accept environments swathed in unnatural looking plastics! You’re going into an unnatural world!
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Your everyday environment is no less extreme tha a high-end surgery facility or the inside of an airplane. Any “natural” look in your environment has been engineered in, like faux-wood paneling in first class airplane seats. It’s not some holdout/remnant of a more natural past.
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In general, we talk about the UI/UX of technological modernity in primitivist terms because we have chosen to package it with primitivist aesthetics because it is… psychologically comforting. And so we deeply misunderstand the world and complain about packaging dissonances.
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Literal packaging is barely a couple of percentage points of carbon impact in consumption. Something like 90% is embodied carbon in the good itself, and the rest is transport/logistics. You’d think complaints would be in that proportion, no?
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Of course not! Environmentally motivated complaining has the reverse priorities. Not-too-wild guess: 60% complaints are about packaging, 30% about shipping distance, 10% about the production. So we want wildly inefficiently produced “local” goods packaged in organic cotton. Uh.
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The situation is even worse in energy. People being conscientious about turning lights off but not realizing the order of magnitude higher impact of heating/cooling decisions. Or water. We flush poop with drinking water.
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But again I don’t really blame normies. This is the result of half a century of industrial design systematically throwing a garden-of-eden naturalist UI over an increasingly high-tech world, and pandering to hypocritically naturalist Veblen-leisure-class aesthetic comfort.
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In a way, the modernist design era from roughly Bauhaus to stuff like Googie had a certain artistic honesty to it. The packaging reflected the world being packaged accurately so our instincts would be better calibrated.
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This might have prevented some disasters. Like take added sugar/food pyramid. In this case a bad extreme regime that served the ag lobby rather than public health. The ridiculously unnatural looking foods of the 1950s (why was everything jell-o?) cued the nature of the food.
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By the 80s/90s, a more “natural” food aesthetic began taking over. Brown bread! Brown rice! Pure juice! No artificial colors! But the underlying extremist food chemistry didn’t really shift. Still hasn’t. Maybe jell-o and strange colors is the way to go. At least it’s WYSIWYG.
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This is partly why I dislike trad larping, unless you go full Amish. There’s a certain honesty to that even though it can’t work at 8 billion scale. Being Amish is a low-population density privilege. As a model for the world, it demands deep depopulation, not just degrowth.
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But again I stress that there is something really valuable about the human tendency to express felt uncertainties with aesthetics. The “deep” solution is to go beyond replacing organic cotton with carbon-neutral plastic, to connecting lifestyles to the true nature of the world.
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The garden of eden UI/UX for civilization is now a deep danger to our sanity. We miss the invisible 90% of the important things and misread the 10% we do see because of false contexts.
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Footnote: there’s a whole other side I haven’t even touched on, the waste stream. Most people are wildly miscalibrated on what we send to landfills. Eg: vast amounts of construction and yard waste matter more than whatever you think is worst in your kitchen trash.
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Footnote 3: We sometimes say “vote with your dollars” and act like consumption is democratic, and shaping consumer attitudes is as important for economics as shaping voting attitudes is for politics. It isn’t. Dollars aren’t votes. Most dollars aren’t consumer dollars but b2b…
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… you don’t even *see* the bulk of background consumption that enables your foreground consumption. Sustainability is basically a dictatorship-reform problem because most of the decisions are way upstream of consumer dollar votes…
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…which makes getting the UI/UX right all the more important. You can’t use actual votes to get politicians to properly regulate backend activity if you really think you’re living in some garden of eden rather than a simulacrum…
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It’s a bit like trying to influence internet protocol design based on your understanding of paper manufacturing (actually, handmade local paper manufacturing) because computers use a document metaphor. We don’t do that because the document metaphor isn’t real enough to fool us.
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