Today’s newspapers offer a feast of anxiety. A quick overview:
- Russia/Ukraine war – many, many countries are proposing to stop purchasing petroleum exports from Russia. The US is proposing to start buying oil from Venezuela to replace the Russian oil they’d been buying, to try to avoid an energy price shock.
- The bits of tires that get worn away as vehicles drive around are “micro plastics” or even “nano plastics” and when that sticky black dust gets washed off the streets and sidewalks and buildings and trees, it goes into rivers and lakes and the oceans and then the creatures that live in the water get sick and die.
- Shell — the petroleum company — today apologized for saying, yesterday, that money was important and so they were going to keep buying Russian oil.
- Russia, since a bunch of big tech companies are refusing to do business with them, are thinking of legalizing software piracy.
This is a kind of radical idea. It’s impractical. Consider it an aspirational stretch goal. What if we didn’t burn fossil fuel? What if, instead of traveling around in vehicles with tires, we more or less stayed put? What if stuff moved by rail and the last mile was janky carts with wooden wheels? What if, instead of subscribing to software as a service, you just paid your money up front and then you owned it, like a book? What if it was obnoxious to go online, so you only did it once a day?
Capitalist corporations are garbage. They are anti-life. They are embodiments of neural nets with selection criteria that do not include human welfare. What if all the humans said, “It’s actually okay for a corporation to die, if it means a human gets to live.”
What if, when faced with the option to do something horrible for ourselves or for others, we just…didn’t?