Notices by Jonathan Schofield (urlyman@mastodon.social)

Just been hearing first hand from a Romanian about the TikTok-fuelled shit show in Romania’s elections, and the batshit candidate it has sprung
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2024/nov/27/romanian-regulator-tiktok-suspended-cyber-interference-election-georgescu

It’s called #blackFriday because it makes us stare into the bottomless abyss of nihilistic consumerism that’s steadily rasping away life on Earth, right?

5/9
…“And, also acknowledging… whereas in history we could:

- perhaps ignore it with distance – it was happening in another part of the world, you know, damage was happening somewhere else

- or we could externalise it through the fact that the damage was relatively small relative to the absorption capacity of the planet

- or it was asymmetrically held in power – so even if violence was proximate it could be held in [check].

All those three trajectories are broken and now it’s feedbacking…

4/9
…“So why I say it like this is the first horizon is say carbon, but actually there are *many* other issues before it – you know, food crisis, soil crisis – and happening after it – ecological systems collapse.

There’s a whole bunch of externalities and extractionism that are now feedbacking together.

And it’s really important to see these as symptoms not the true cause.

The true cause is the nature of how we relate to the planet and how we theorise value and how we’ve externalised that…

6/9
…“And it manifests in very simple formats.

It manifests between the value of a can of Cola and a sustainable apple.

A sustainable apple makes you healthier, makes the soil healthier if it’s grown well, actually is fundamentally regenerative to your outcomes – your health and wellbeing and everything else.

A can of Cola, frankly is extractive, it makes you addicted to sugar, it’s not good for your health, it’s not good for the environment. Yet we price both those virtually the same…

3/9
…“We’ve now reached a scale of impact where the externalisation and the extractionism is so sufficiently large that – to use Daniel Schmachtenberger’s point – they are now setting off feedback cycles of self-termination. Where effectively climate change, climate breakdown effects, where we are putting so much carbon into the air that it has a feedback effect…

2/9
…“both those situations are sufficiently under-priced that at the moment when – you know, three, four, five hundred, a thousand years ago – our impact was relatively marginal, because there were so few of us and the externalisation was relatively small, that was perhaps tolerable and could be absorbed into the biosystem…

1/9
…“Climate breakdown is merely a symptom of a much deeper problem, and the depth of the problem is that we are operating a model, our economy, the way we create value, largely rooted in extractionism – extracting things from the Earth – or externalising – polluting, and putting pollution into the common goods.

And…

…Following this post is a lightly edited transcription of what Indy Johar said over the course of 9 minutes in an interview with Sarah Wilson at https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/indy-johar-the-starkest-collapse-prognosis-ive-heard/id1548626341?i=1000677521024

Here’s a one sentence summary:

“We’ve all collectively been living a lie where all the goods that we’ve got are effectively creating greater harm than the value.”

…but we’re so indoctrinated with bullshit economics that has been entirely blind to this predicament, that perhaps the only way we can shake that off is to have the polycrisis rub our faces in shit.

But, let’s at least try to be better in the way that Indy Johar has clarified…

We’re probably in this weird space for the rest of our lives where what’s good for the economy is bad for the biosphere and therefore, slightly longer term, bad for the economy and people.

Conversely, what’s bad for the economy is often bad for people but usually less bad for the biosphere and therefore paradoxically less bad for people too.

And as we fk up the biosphere more and more the lag between short and longer term outcomes will converge

https://mastodon.scot/@kim_harding/113548662240865649

Fuck scaling to match Twitter.
Scale is the problem

Missed opportunities:

The UK has ~30 million dwellings.

I read a while back that the average cost of fully retrofitting a UK home with insulation, heat pump and solar is of the order of £20k.

If that’s right the cost of retrofitting every UK home is in the region of £600 bn.

Funnily enough, that’s roughly the investment gap since 2008 relative to the level that Nicholas Stern said should be invested in decarbonisation.

And instead Labour are investing £0.9 bn per year in CCS

#climateDiary

So many people are really algorithmically addled

…Convenience:

Us humans under capitalism are really astonishingly bad at considering and weighing downstream effects.

If something is convenient – ie it brings us something easily – we’re all in, even if it brings us a world of pain later.

Which is a round about way of me acknowledging a new appreciation for the semantics within the film title

“An Inconvenient Truth”

…With hindsight I realise that I was algorithmically addled until about 15 months ago when I started investing in properly being here.

Mastodon’s greatest gift to digital culture is as a window for people to deprogramme themselves from being constantly manipulated. But it seems a conundrum that those with the greatest need of that are not here

…The general vibe of capitalism is increasingly the expectation that one can get substantially something for relatively nothing

@ekis Ha! What’s ‘special’ about the ‘special’ relationship is shale oil

@rgarner prescience is a thankless gift

@aral

This might be the stupidest sentence I read today, but it’s not 9am yet.

It’s by Keir Starmer:

“Both artificial intelligence and the creative industries – which include news media – are central to this government’s driving mission on economic growth.”
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/28/keir-starmer-journalism-lifeblood-british-democracy-labour