Unsustainable sustainability

A few days ago, I read an article about AI chat bots that suggested we should use less words and non-essentials like “please” or “thank you” so we can help to ameliorate the problem of the huge amounts of water and/or energy the data centers consume. This made think about some other ecological behaviors that look all good until we compare them to the not so ecological ones that dwarf them. In this case, OK, you go all minimalist, functional, transactional with your AI. At the same time, you have all those people generating IA slop for fun or profit, having NSFW chats (creating more pics and videos), and spending long—and affordable—therapy sessions with their bots. Guilty of the last two.

For ecological, practical, or economical reasons, some people pat on their backs for commuting on their bicycles. Then we have all those tourists going everywhere by car or plane. Almost everywhere in the world, there are races of any kind of vehicles, or pilots training for them. You feel so environmental conscious for taking your own bag when buying groceries, but busy people get their daily lunch or whatever they need on a convenient plastic bag from the shop; along with the disposable forks, spoons, cups and dishes. We also have the generous donation of used clothes that no one needs anymore, just to renew the wardrobe.

Recycling is tricky. Products made with reused or recycled materials, like…, footwear made with tires or handmade beautiful things made with would-have-been-garbage this or that, probably you won’t see them in your nearest mall. All that paper and plastic stuff you are dully separating may not get a second life. For example, the cute “Save our planet” sign that your children make with flashy colors, glitter and glued decorations on a cardboard, that shit cannot be recycled; neither the greasy pizza box, the notebook with photos, the laminated folders, those books with shiny covers… Plastic may be worse. So what? Am I saying “screw it, let’s don’t do it anymore!? NO! I’d say keep doing it, but do it well. But my point is aligned with what I’m trying to convey here: something is not working, or something worse is working better.

You’ll may not like to hear this, but art could be one of the most not-ecological things in the world. Let’s start with colors, the chemicals needed to make them, and the fact that “painting” is just smearing those chemicals on something. You may want to say: so we should “paint it black”, live in a gray monotony, full dystopian? Well, about that, here in Japan we well have monochrome packaging in our potato chips soon, but for other kind of non-ecological reasons (war related naphtha shortage). Anyway, that’s another aspect of the thing I’m trying to talk about: we treat this world somehow in the same way we treat or bodies—if you get what I mean. I love series and movies, while I try not to be aware of the waste is created in making them, storage them and streaming them.

Could it be that, for now, this is the only way things can be? Which is to say: the way the economy is. Sustainability has its principles, but economy has its own ones to, and they are powerful: monopolize and deplete. This is the part where some people begin to rant about the rich. Nope, economy—as I’m “profiling” it now—motivates pretty much all of our endeavors. Influencers try to monopolize views by depleting trends. Aaand…, I’ll stop trying to monopolize your attention by depleting topics that may be already depleted. So, bye!