Terrible Futures Are Not Inevitable
Terrible Futures Are Not Inevitable
On laundry pods, Tesla crashes, and engineering with abundance.
As an engineering educator, my job is to teach people how to solve problems. One major problem I run up against, however, is that as a culture, our imaginations have been severely limited under capitalism, and so have our problem-solving approaches.
Every engineer needs to operate within some constraints—how much you need to be able to produce, your available budget, the square footage of stolen Indigenous land you’re able to build within, etc. But sometimes these constraints are very imposed on us not by our budgets, but by our imaginations. Why build some fancy device to “help” people with disabilities, when what they really need is a society that treats them better? Why grow food to turn it into biofuel when we can reduce our society’s dependence on fuels altogether? Why pay to address the side effects of homelessness when we can just give people homes (and it would be cheaper)? Also, why do WE get to decide that the land should be used to build a production facility?
This is what neoliberal capitalism is all about: we can’t actually fix society unless we can somehow make a profit from it. There has to be a new, sellable product developed, or there has to be a marketably-eco-friendly way to further ever-expanding consumption habits. Life under capitalism: the ultimate engineering constraint.
My job as a STEM scholar-activist is to reconcile traditional problem-solving with an abundance mindset—the opposite of a scarcity mindset—to get engineers to dream bigger about what kinds of societies they can help create.
For one short case study on what capitalism does to your brain, I want to turn to my latest video essay on laundry detergent pods. Short version: I made a video about how products like Tide Pods or Dropps are wrapped in polyvinyl alcohol (PVA), a substance that I worked with a lot during my PhD program, which it turns out probably doesn’t biodegrade as Proctor & Gamble wants us to believe. In my video, I applied my chemical engineering know-how to provide alternatives to these products (such as laundry powder) and why they’re better for the planet. However, the main thing I wanted to get across in the video was that if you need to use Tide Pods because they’re the only thing available in your area due to food apartheid (the preferred term to “food desert” since these scenarios are constructed by human systems, not natural systems) or because of a disability, skin condition, or whatever your needs are, that’s totally fine; the real problem is that big corporations are polluting the planet, not individual actors trying to survive under the dying world they created, and so we shouldn’t shame people for their purchases. If you can afford to, you should shop/act sustainably for sure, but I’m not about to shame disabled people or low-income people for doing what they need to do to survive.
The response to this video was incredible, and it currently sits at nearly 100,000 views!! However, some came way from the video with the wrong message, with hundreds of people asking me “so what’s the best detergent I should buy in my particular situation?” (To be fair, the really anti-capitalist stuff started about 5 minutes into a video which was uploaded to a platform where the average video length is 15 seconds. Naturally, some people scrolled away before the requisite anti-capitalist rant.)
I’m always happy to educate people on engineering principles (which is good considering it’s my literal job), but I think it says a lot about how deeply neoliberal, consumerist thinking has drilled into our brains: no matter how much we point out that corporations are killing the planet, most people will still focus on their individual purchasing habits rather than the larger problem. This makes some sense: our individual actions give us a sense of control in a dying world. But we can’t lose sight of who’s killing the world in the first place.
I, again, don’t want to blame individual Americans for this; corporations have put a LOT of effort into shifting the onus of fixing climate change onto the individual consumer. Remember that infamous TV ad of the “Indigenous” man crying in response to plastic pollution? Not only was that ad playing into “noble savage” anti-Indigenous stereotypes, and not only was that an Italian-American man posing as Indigenous, but the ad was paid for by the plastic packaging industry, including Coca-Cola, specifically to make us think that pollution was a problem within the morality of the individual consumer, rather than the beverage and plastic industries that chose to serve us our food and beverage products in single-use plastic containers. Another example is the Carbon Footprint, an idea concocted by the marketing pros at BP Oil to get people to blame themselves for climate change rather than literal oil giants, who knew since at least the 70s that they were totally killing the planet.
News flash: propaganda works! As much as possible, I’d like to use my platform—and my classroom—to showcase ways that we can take part in collective action to stop big corporations and save the planet. Expanding our collective imagination is my holy mission on this planet. In fact, this coming semester, I’m teaching a course all about polymer processing & sustainability where I plan to do just that; subscribe to this newsletter if you want to hear more about my reading list for this class!
Let’s look at another way capitalism breaks people’s brains: Elon Musk Reply Guys. I’m honestly sick of talking about Elon’s Musk, but he’s become an inescapable black hole of doom for anyone who cares about labor rights, digital technology, social media, and manufacturing. (Which, hey, I care about ALL those things!)
Specifically, I want to discuss Tesla car crashes, and how people respond to them. Time after time, we see news of Tesla’s poor design choices, including but not limited to instances where Tesla’s poor autopilot design results in car crashes.
In my mind, a normal person’s response to this might be, “How terrible! We really shouldn’t let these autopilot-driven vehicles on the road, at least not until the technology is much further developed.” My personal position goes a bit farther—I don’t think we shouldn’t have any autopilot cars on the road, ever—but that’s just me, and you’re more than welcome to disagree.
And yet, whenever these videos get shared on a wide platform, Musk fans flock to defend their tech daddy’s killer cars. Many even blame the human drivers, and point out statistics about the frequency of human car accidents (ignoring how Tesla cars are disproportionately more likely to crash).
Let’s break down this line of thinking for a moment. To the average person, every human car accident is obviously terrible, but given that human beings are flawed, it’s essentially a statistical certainty that crashes will happen. Meanwhile, every crash from a self-driving car feels preventable; every failure Tesla’s of the autopilot system is not (necessarily) the fault of each independent human driver, but the fault of a small team of engineers at Tesla (and, if you’re so inclined, Elon Musk himself for promoting his cars with this feature). Put another way, for every 1,000 human car accidents, ~1,000 independent actors are to blame, but for every 1,000 Tesla accidents, one single company is to blame for all of them combined. QED, fuck that one company.
However, to the capitalist, the reason to use self-driving cars is not to avoid accidents, it’s merely to reduce them; the cars don’t have to be perfect, they only have to result in fewer crashes than would be made by humans. To the capitalist, human accidents are inevitable, but so are computer-driven accidents, and these are morally equal. Making a big deal about Tesla crashes when humans crash all the time, then, is “alarmist”.
This makes me uncomfy, and I know it makes a lot of others uncomfy too. This mentality of “the machine doesn’t have to be perfect, it just has to be better/cheaper than humans” stretches all the way back to the industrial revolution, the first time industrial machines were first being implemented in factory settings, endangering the livelihoods of millions of workers. The term “luddite” is used now by tech bros to insult those who resist the “inevitability” of new technology making certain types of work “obsolete”. But the original Luddites were the radical leftists of their time, fighting for their livelihoods against capitalists who would instantly sell them for a machine if it saved them money. Machines weren’t evil, companies were, for threatening their incomes in a world where income means food.
“Inevitable” is an interesting word to use when talking about the future. When talking about anything from AI art to brain microchips to automation, tech bros will often say things like, “this is the future whether you like it or not, so you better get on board or get left in the dust”. But are these things inevitable by some law of nature, or are they only inevitable under a system which prioritizes capital over human life? Is it our “destiny” to put microchips into our brains to make us into better workers for a greedy boss so we can pay our digital landlords? Or should automation be something that frees us from such an exploitative system, allowing us to create a future where we’re free to pursue the arts, higher knowledge, and a deeper relationship with nature? (Side note: Hopefully I’ve primed you with enough pro-Indigenous buzzwords to get you thinking of how white men have previously used the term “destiny” to force their ideologies onto the world.)
Maybe in a world where everyone had their food, housing, and other physical needs met (either via mutual aid, UBI, or some other system), I would be okay with AI art and other jobs being outsourced to machines. Maybe in a world where public transportation were robust and only a few people needed to use highways, I would be okay with replacing every car with an Amazon warehouse-style system of autonomous vehicles working in perfect synchronicity. But we currently still live in this world, so I’m gonna keep railing against dangerous technology every chance I get.
As is now commonplace on the hellsite that is Twitter, the main story (“Tesla cars crash a lot”) has spun off into a second story (“Elon Musk, who now owns Twitter and claims to care about free speech, is currently suppressing speech about how Tesla cars crash a lot”). All the more reason to be as loud as possible about our distaste for billionaires and harmful tech! Speaking of which…
I want better for humanity. I definitely want better for my students. I think engineering is inseparable from social justice, and that means getting students to ask better, deeper questions about how they can design technology that will help the world. In a recent That Dang Dad video (about positive masculinity, which is also worth the watch), he pointed out that helping people doesn’t mean giving them “a bigger piece of the pie”, thus taking away from others. It means baking more pies. When we operate from a scarcity mindset, we all end up getting hurt. In the terms of many trans activists and poets before me, We Want It All.
Currently Reading
Speaking of disability justice, here’s Alice Wong’s 2022 Year in Review!
This window to another realm of the Internet, where edginess reigns supreme. The emptiness of Internet nihilism’s philosophy of randomness is palpable.
Once again, fuck cultural appropriation. Gwen Stefani has returned to say something extremely edgy for views, and the end result is that Asian Americans will get hurt. Brilliant stuff, but nothing new from her.
My friend Evelyn just turned me onto a new Substack from Jessica DeFino, which proposes radical new views on beauty.
JD: Youth feels like another artifice of shame. Anti-aging marketing pushes the idea of ‘looking like yourself again,’ which you say suggests that the current you is somehow not the real you. The beauty industry tends to claim the ‘real’ you is young – usually in one’s early twenties. Why do you think that is?
CC: Under sexist social norms, women are valued for their looks, not for their achievements. It is idealizing the point in a woman's life when she is less experienced, less wise, less competent, less powerful. It also provides women with something constantly to be worried about, in the sense that the aging process is something that takes up a lot of our time, a lot of mental energy, and a lot of our actual material resources – time spent in the salon covering up grey hair, time spent at the mirror covering up wrinkles, time spent in the gym, time that could be spent on other things.
Watch History
Mia Cole has done it again in this epic video essay about why TikTok is terrible. (Don’t forget about my podcast episode on the same subject!)
Rowan Ellis on the problems with demanding celebrities come out as queer (*cough cough Gaylors cough cough*).
Bops, Vibes, & Jams
Plains, the supergroup comprised of Waxahatchee and Jess Williamson, is an incredibly country/folk collab! I DARE you to listen to “Problem With It” and not enjoy it.
I am very much hoping for a new Jessie Ware album in 2023 🤞🏻
One of my followers turned me onto the new Lupe Fiasco album, and I’m glad they did!
Action Items
Don’t forget about these three items from a few days ago!
And now, your weekly Koko.
That’s all for now! See you next week with more sweet, sweet content.
In solidarity,
-Anna