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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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 2: all this is why I increasingly prefer the terraforming frame. Wrote a paywalled post on this recently that Strelka magazine has reposted open. strelkamag.com/en/article/the
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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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Most of the supply chain and production stuff is also about energy, right? Like, if we separate all our ecological concrrns into kilowatt-based concerns and tonnage-based concerns, does the conversation get more sensible?
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Best as I understand, energy and materials are about 50-50, but depends how you count energy in making materials. might have a better sense.
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My hunch about a lot of our present food and product anxieties, is that we don't know how much effort and processes go into commonplace items.
We just buy them, but have no idea what's behind. It may be natural, it may be a sham, we know nothing. And we can believe anything.


