Juggling Dynamite

Before eight am this morning, my phone recorded three separate fraudulent messages from companies claiming that our credit card had unauthorized transactions and that tax authorities are coming to arrest us soon if we don’t call back.

If it feels like a fraud, deceit and manipulation, are widespread business models today, that is because they are.  Meanwhile, a new UK study joins many others in finding an “explosion” in anxiety over the past decade, with the financial crash, austerity, Brexit, climate change and social media blamed for massive rises in the condition.

To understand more about how companies are selling our personal info, trust and attention as their product while designing technology to fuel addictive behaviour, it is helpful to watch the new Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma; here is a direct video link to the trailer.

The designers won’t let their own children and themselves use what they have made for the rest of us.  The documentary talks about things we can do to fight back.

As always, we don’t have to be helpless pawns, but we do have to be thinking, self-disciplined individuals.

In the first of this three-part series, we dive into the history of democracy, its birth and the United States’ unique take on this form of government. The episode takes a look at some uniquely American challenges that limit American democracy such as hyperpartisanship, negative partisanship, institutional constraints (gerrymandering, the Electoral College, voter registration) and more.  Here is a direct video link.

Even for those who are ‘woke’ on the truth about plastics, trying to avoid them in modern life is virtually impossible. Once we allow ourselves to understand that 90% of the plastic produced globally is not recycled but ends up as increasingly toxic waste all around us, thinking people see an urgency to insist on bans and producer responsibility without further delay.

Turns out that the recycling myth has been actively cultivated by plastic producers–oil companies–as a way to keep us mindlessly consuming. This is much more broadly devastating than cigarette companies knowingly misleading the public about the harm inflicted by their products.

To help meet its growth targets, big oil is unabashedly investing in yet another false advertising campaign to make the public believe that the plastics we toss in bins are recycled.  A new investigative report from NPR and PBS Frontline finds that oil cos have been actively working to convince us of this lie since the 1970s even as our health, environment and water systems continue to absorb the toxic costs of producing their profits.

Recycling plastics can be done but picking it up, sorting it out and melting it down is expensive and plastic degrades each time it is reused, so the truth is that it can’t be reused more than once or twice.  What’s more, doing so runs counter to present producer incentives.

The oil industry makes more than $400 billion a year making plastic, and as demand for oil for cars and trucks declines, the industry is telling shareholders that future profits will increasingly come from plastic.  See How Big Oil Misled the Public into thinking Plastics Would be Recycled:

“..if the job is to sell as much oil as you possibly can, any amount of recycled plastic is competition.

“You know, they were not interested in putting any real money or effort into recycling because they wanted to sell virgin material,” Thomas says. “Nobody that is producing a virgin product wants something to come along that is going to replace it. Produce more virgin material — that’s their business.”

And they are. Analysts now expect plastic production to triple by 2050.”