Conversation

Replying to
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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Replying to
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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Right, this is my intuition as well. The thing is, at each stage, you can look at what that stage has to do, and then all the different ways we could do it, each with different energy costs and waste outputs. And then engineer the whole supply chains to do things less stupidly.
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