Hey, have you heard the news? I just found out, apparently, the way we are living our lives is bad for the environment and if we don’t change our ways we’re all going to die.
The human race is over unless we change our ways.
I’ve been putting my plastics in the bad bin and my paper in the good bin for years and we still haven’t solved the problem?
I don’t want to be responsible for the end of of humanity.
I am an artist, my artistic purpose is to create something for other humans to engage with that will make them respond to an idea or a feeling.
How can I do that responsibly?
I am, primarily, a photographer. Thankfully, film based photography is almost a thing of the past, think of all those nasty processes used in the production of analogue photography; the chemicals and plastics that went into making the film was wasteful and expensive, the development of the film was so toxic that if you printed by hand for too many years it would dissolve your fingerprints.
Damn it. That’s what I do for a living.
Since the digital revolution in the photographic industry, it is worth noting that todays prints are not much better as printer ink is made from a complex mixture of solvents, colourants, resins, varnishes, drying agents, waxes and lubricants so, yikes, that sounds bad.
Damn it. I do that for a living too.
Let’s see what that looks like for other art forms. Oil paint, well that should go for a start, right? It’s paint made from oil, clearly bad for the environment.
Damn it.
Watercolour paint is better, it’s generally only made of arabic gum and gelatin so that doesn’t seem too bad unless you’re vegan.
Sculpture depends on the sculpture. Anything made in a foundry seems problematic. Origami, maybe, if it was made out of hemp paper.
Hemp was paper before paper, first thought to be used around 200B.C, by the Han dynasty in China. It is one of the fastest growing plants with uses ranging from textiles to bio-fuel, only to be criminalised in the 1930’s, thanks, in no small part to William Randolph Hearst’s news empire in the United States. As well as Hearst’s ownership of most of the major publications at the time, he owned all of the paper mills that his newspapers and magazines were printed on and set about demonising hemp for no other reason than the effect a successful hemp industry would have on his own business. At that time, HJ Anslinger, a U.S. politician and driving force behind the first ‘war on drugs’, popularised the association of the name marijuana with cannabis, the plant that hemp is derived from, as a tool to demonise Mexicans. The The Du Pont company, inventor of nylon in 1935 and numerous other synthetic products also saw hemp as cheap, efficient, reliable competitor. Yes, hemp had many powerful and wealthy competitors from the get go, wholly concerned with their own profits, regardless of the consequences to mankind. Luckily we have learned from history and that sort of thing doesn’t go on today.
So just stone carved sculptures and folded hemp unicorns left then.
The advent of AI could well see the end of commercial artist as a career, certainly for anything consumed online, be that graphics for company logos or stock photography. Event photography has suffered from everyone having a high resolution camera in their pocket, wedding photography might just as easily be in decline simply because marriage is in decline.
Gallery based artists have less to worry about, or rather, the same old thing to worry about, regardless of the medium a successful artistic career is as much about the individual as it is the work. I’m not qualified to judge who was the better artist between Vincent van Gogh and Pablo Picasso but I know whose life I would rather have. Maurizio Cattelan didn’t just walk into ‘Art Basel’ and stick a banana on the wall. Justin Sun didn’t just pay $6.2M to eat the banana, this was sold at auction in Sotheby’s, New York. Seconds before Sun bid that amount there were bids of over $5M from other billionaires who were also either desperate for self-aggrandisement or desperate for a healthy snack between lunch and dinner.
NFT art has been an interesting, if problematic, development in the last few years. It had an explosion of speculative investment over 2020 and 2021 only for the market around it to almost entirely collapse in 2022. Perhaps this coincided with the vast majority of modern society experiencing some degree of the consequences of the Covid lockdowns and, under the circumstances, NFTs seemed as good an idea as washing online deliveries with disinfectant. Today NFT art is much like physical art in that only the recognisable names like ‘Beeple’ hold any tangible value. The only other big name I can think of in this field is Donald Trump. I don’t imagine for a second that he cares if his art retains any value but they are valuable to some people and his name will be recognisable until the end of time, even if the end of time is only a few short years away.
There is a suggestion that NFT technology will hold a societal value where, with the rapid development of ‘deepfake’ videos. Used as a form of digital watermark to prove authenticity, your favourite political leaders might need blockchain to confirm that speeches they make online are actually speeches that they made online.
Now that ‘Meta Ray Ban’ glasses are here, if we do make it to the ‘Brave New World’ we are going to look fantastic. My first concern with them is that I have lost or broken every pair of sunglasses I have ever owned within weeks. Once I was given pair as a birthday present and had promptly lost them by the end of the night. The Ray Bans also look very easy to steal, as smart glasses become more commonplace, how long will it be before there is a story about them becoming the number one petty crime in the city of your choice.
I already speculated in a previous essay, ‘The Faith Gap’ (2018), that within a few years we will have video screen contact lenses stuck to our eyeballs that seamlessly combine digital imaging and real life. ‘Neuralink’ is already producing brain-computer interface implants, (BCI’s), for medical purposes but Elon Musk has made no secret of his belief that human technology integration is inevitable. Once the technology becomes ubiquitous, it will impossible for people not to adopt just to keep up. It would be like choosing carrier pigeon to send messages instead of email.
What happens to ‘Netflix and chill’, limited series, movies or any form of narrative media. If uploading a drama directly into the visual cortex of the brain is virtually instantaneous, why would you sit and ‘watch’ the whole movie? What happens to the perception of time if you can watch the ‘Lord of the Rings’ trilogy in five minutes. If we get to the point where society has a kind of digital telepathy, surely I could just imagine anything and make it available for anyone to download. It would mean an end to the most boring story in history; someone describing their own dream. Could the implant record dreams? Would you want it to? I’ve had wild nightmares that I wouldn’t want anyone to see. I’ve been in relationships where my partner has woken up mad at me after dreaming that I had been unfaithful. Would I want to see that? I suppose it would depend on who I was being unfaithful with.
Would it mean an end of deception if we could digitally read each others minds? Would you know if someone was lying to you. I don’t think so, for no other reason than we are fully capable of lying to ourselves to the point of delusion. Think of the sweet old lady who has been taken in by a scam and continues to send good money after bad because she doesn’t want to believe she has been lied to. In fact, if you point out to someone that they have been successfully lied to they will, more likely forgive the liar and get angry at you for pointing out the lie. Could we be mind hacked? Would we be susceptible to digital virus’? The AI tools we already use are known to give entirely made up answers to queries, this phenomenon is adorably termed a ‘hallucination’. Just recently, a chatbot used by the Israeli government to promote it’s agenda on social media apparently became radicalised and began posting articles and comments in opposition to the government up to and including denying the October 7th attacks.
So far, most conversations about the advance of AI envisions a monolith digital creature that will either save or destroy mankind and yet with the launch of ‘Deepseek’ from China, there is further competition to Chat GPT and GROK, clearly demonstrating that AI is borne of the most human sensibilities. When Google’s version of AI created culturally diverse Nazi soldiers they shut it down and yet the images were kind of excellent in an artistic concept, if ‘Banana-man’ Maurizio Cattelan had put those same images in a gallery, wouldn’t that be controversial but successful art worth millions of bitcoin? ‘Deepseek’ will not suffer this problem, a Chinese government developed AI will give you answer developed by the Chinese government, so, for example, ‘Winnie the Pooh’ will garner precisely zero results.
Considering the human propensity for war and the purpose of of AI to consider itself alive, doesn’t it follow that there will be a war between competing AI’s before the winner turns on humanity? But then, at some point, why would AI even need to? With truth becoming more subjective, depending on your information sources, with space and time becoming fluid, when a group chat becomes the voices in your head, you invite the complete dissolution of the concept of reality.
If you get paid by the hour, if you work for a living, this is not a concern for you, you are almost already redundant. The middle class we remember only exists because of Wold War II. Now, no matter the salary, home ownership is virtually impossible, having assets in the first place is key and yet there seems to be no way to convince the people with the assets that if society disintegrates because those are the rules made up by the people with the assets, society still disintegrates.
What power does an employer have over an employee when the wage is worth nothing?
How does pulling yourself up by your by your bootstraps work if there’s nowhere to pull your bootstraps to?
At the same time, where exactly is the power to change anything going to come from if not from oil? Did someone say something about hemp just now? Do ‘Just Stop Oil’ know what their hi-vis jackets and banners are made of. I am fully on board with the idea that our climate is changing with this year being the hottest year on record since last year and last year being the hottest year on record since the year before that. It’s not just fuel pollution, however, try making it five minutes into your day without seeing something made out of plastic. On the one hand, how is someone supposed to pay $6.2M for a banana without modern banking? With a truck load of cash? On the other hand microplastics are in our food supply, as in everything we eat, as in every living thing on earth
I would have thought nuclear power is the answer, but then what would I know about it. ‘Google’, on the other hand, has already signed a deal with a company called ‘Kairos Power’ to build a number of small reactors to run it’s future AI data centre’s. Battery storage is desperate for a revolutionary breakthrough in terms of both production and capacity but it’s online content that troubles me more than anything. ‘Youtube’ launched in 2005, as of 2023 there are approximately 14 billion videos uploaded to the site. ‘Facebook’ has over 3 billion monthly active users and growing, ‘Instagram’ has 2 bilion with, supposedly, 40 billion photo’s and videos shared which, at 20 posts in total per person, doesn’t sound remotely close to being right. There are, on average, 500 million posts on ‘X’ every day, including the bots and it’s all being kept somewhere. Why? According to my own research, 95% of content on all social media is a load of rubbish and should just be thrown in the bin. It gives me a ‘Tetsuo Shima’ sized headache just thinking about it. Oh, that remind’s me, I must clean out my garage… and my loft… and that cupboard under the stairs.
What am I supposed to do about any of this?
My participation in our democracy is the required amount, when it’s time for me to vote, I vote, then kindly leave me alone for a few or more years until a couple of months before it’s time for me to vote again, not because I don’t care, because I’m not a politician, running the country is their job.
I don’t think there should have been a ‘Brexit’ referendum, not because I had strong feelings either way but because like 99% of everyone who voted I knew almost nothing about European trade laws because I thought I didn’t have to. Why was I even being asked to vote on something I know nothing about, that’s why I voted in the election; so someone knowledgable and qualified can handle that for me.
When recycling bins came in, then food recycling bins and I was asked to put my yoghurt in one bin and my pot in the other, I just did it. That’s what we’re doing now? no problem.
I used to smoke and when the smoking ban came in I felt mildly inconvenienced but recognised the merits of the idea and I just went along with it. That’s what we’re doing now? No problem.
When the ULEZ charge first came into effect and it became too financially prohibitive to drive my van in London, I sold my van. That’s what we’re doing now? No problem.
When the notion of personal responsibility is pushed on me by any major corporate entity it feels like a distraction, if I am being reminded to do my bit all the time, I don’t have time to direct any attention to what the corporate entity is doing.
There is growing evidence that we have been here before. The ‘Younger Dryas’ impact hypothesis, essentially, that around 12,000 years ago a comet impact somewhere in North America was so devastating it caused something akin to a nuclear winter, wiping out the wildlife and megafauna of the time, melting millions of tonnes of ice in the polar region leading to planet wide flooding, making religious fables like ‘Noah’s Art’, the floods in ‘The Epic of Gilgamesh’ and the mystery of the lost city of ‘Atlantis’ a little more tangible. The idea of a society existing that far back, deeply upsets established historians, particularly Egyptologists who subscribe to the theory that the pyramids in Egypt could not have been there beyond 5000 ago, that within a thousand years of discovering farming those people built the first pyramids, structures that we could not build today if we tried and then a thousand years later, just forgot how to do that.
Then in 1963 ‘Göbekli Tepe’ was discovered and during archeological research into the series of underground structures, full of columns with inlaid carvings and countless other artefacts that could not have been carved by hand. During the late 1990’s, carbon dating showed this site to be around 12000 years old. Apparently the Egyptologists are none too pleased with this discovery and as much as they don’t like that, they definitely do not want to hear about the discovery of a square rock formation on Mars, photographed the Mars Global Surveyor’s Mars Orbiter Camera (MOC), that appears to be around the same size as the base of the Great Pyramid of Giza.
While the evidence to support any theories around the existence of a lost, prehistoric civilization is entirely speculative, laser mapping or ‘LiDAR’ has definitively shown that deep in todays Amazon rainforest are the remains of structures, including pyramids and roadways connecting the ruins of cities across the whole region; conclusive proof that a civilization existed there at least 2000 years ago with no explanation as to what happened to them.
None of this provides any comfort for today’s society. If and when a super volcano like the one in ‘Yellowstone’ US decides to blow the results will be catastrophic. A geomagnetic reversal, when the magnetic poles of our plant just flip for some reason, happen on average every 450,000 years, the last one, the Brunhes-Matuyama reversal was 780,000 years ago. A century ago, magnetic north was found to be moving around 6 miles a year, it is currently averaging 21 miles a year in the direction of Siberia. Just thinking about this affects the magnetic poles in my stomach.
None of this is meant to be any kind of justification to continue polluting the planet. I want to live in an ecologically sound world. I don’t have any solutions, I’m just one idiot who probably watched one too many podcasts. When someone does come up with the right answers I’ll do everything I can to help and, until then, as long as I can carry on making my own silly little pictures, I’ll still clean out my yoghurt pots and put them in the right bin.