Good morning!
Welcome to Digestable, your mouthful of things happening in the world.
Today’s ferments:
Divesting from fossil fuels is fine. Being a thorn in the side of the machine is also fine.
But that’s it: in both The Matrix (1999) and How to Blow Up a Pipeline (2023), two movies I’ve seen recently, characters brush off these half measures in favor of the real thing. They reject the terms, and demand new ones.
(Spoilers ahead. If you haven’t seen either of these movies, here’s your reminder to do that!)
Now that we know the Wachowskis, who directed The Matrix, are both trans, it’s easy to read the film as a trans allegory. The basic idea of the matrix (the thing in the movie, and also the movie) is that humans are used as batteries to power an artificially intelligent complex on a burned out Earth. Human consciousness is lulled into irrelevance by its distraction with the matrix: a computer simulation of the ‘real life’ 90s.
Then there’s the famous red pill/blue pill scene, where Neo, our main character, has to choose between remaining blissfully ignorant, or taking the life-changing alternate route to knowing what the matrix really is.
There are so many metaphors here, one of which is acknowledging and accepting transness. Maybe it’s easier to hide, but yields a shallower experience of being alive. Living in public may be more dangerous, but at least you can choose to fight the real fight. Lift your head from the matrix’s ooze and see for yourself who you, and others, really are. These days, the red pill is scarier than ever, but that doesn’t make the blue pill any less bitter.
Neo takes the red pill, and embarks on the effort to defeat the AI overlords, who take the form of a bazillion infinitely replicating scary white guys with sunglasses. Neo’s asset, which sets him apart from most in the matrix, is his mental capacity to hold both its reality and unreality. When he asks a fellow resister why dying while in the matrix also means your real physical body dies, they explain: “your mind makes it real.”
People still joke, 20+ years later, about ~what if~ we’re just in the matrix, and nothing is real. This seems unlikely, but points to the staggering reality of our being lied to by powerful entities in ways so drastic that no one and nothing is left un-implicated.
Take for example the longtime knowledge of the fossil fuel industry that extracting and burning oil and gas would threaten human survival, or the claims that we have a ‘strong economy’ amid historic inequality. Or that you’re worthless unless you produce labor. The rules that make our world are not real; they’re made up. When we fall into the trap of believing them, we get stuck in the matrix.
Right when it seems that all is lost, Neo stands up from a beating by the replicating evil men. They fire a wall of bullets at him. He looks them in the eyes and says, no.
The bullets stop. He plucks one out of the air, and the others fall to the ground. We see through Neo’s eyes the rippling green code of the matrix, flowing through the men, the building, the air. His ability to see the deception for what it really is—just an illusion in his head—gives him the power to overcome it.
The How to Blow Up a Pipeline crew does the same, but in the Texan desert. This motley crew of folks motivated by a full slate of reasons to hate the fossil fuel industry gathers to cause damage to critical infrastructure because they see through the matrix of distractions: divestment, recycling, lackluster climate pledges, whatever.
They are careful and human; they make mistakes, get in arguments, and also work together in a way that transcends the rules of how we’re supposed to get along in a time riddled with identity politics. It’s also put the FBI on high alert, perhaps because of its articulation of homemade bomb-building.
But even more dangerous to the Powers That Be is the tremendous collaboration between people who are often told to avoid each other, rather than work together. The vast majority of us stand only to benefit from destroying the fossil fuel industry, but decades of successful messaging on their part has obscured this truth.
Instead of accepting this long-peddled narrative about fossil fuels and freedom, or independence, or [insert American value], the Pipeline crew elects for something else: they say no, and light the fuse on their homemade explosives.
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
I was at a social science history conference last week in Gothenburg, where one of the talks was about women as mediators of energy transitions. For example: from gas heat to electric refrigeration or from telephone switchboard operators to rotary dials. The importance of this history, as explained by panelist Ruth Sandwell, is that stories of energy transition have often focused on the men with the social and financial capital to invent and popularize technologies, Thomas Edison, James Watt etc. But the stories of women and the domestic labor that actually brought these technologies and energy regimes into people’s homes and lives are equally as important.
Key to these histories is, Abigail Harrison Moore’s research into women’s decorating advice in the end of the 19th century, particularly the 1881 book The Art of Decoration by professional decorator and advice writer Mary Eliza Haweis. Moore shows how Haweis portrayed electric light as an exciting technology but one that needed to be treated with care. The angle and shading of an electric bulb had to be treated carefully so as to not wash out the faces of a room’s occupants or unintentionally draw attention to less attractive physical features. The coloring of a room’s walls and its furniture would have to be adjusted, moving away from greens and blues that electric light would make too vibrant and toward warmer and lighter tones.
Moore’s characterisation of Haweis shows women to be the masters of the domestic space, carefully designing and curating each new technology and addition to provide the best aesthetic and economic impact. To this end, Moore provided an anecdote from the time where a woman’s husband attempted to scold her after looking at the bill for a grocery expense and the woman responded by showing him exactly how much money she was saving the household by her careful management of the home’s lighting, heating, and other energy use.
This all had me thinking about another energy transition almost 100 years later which triggered its own architectural and design movement. The rise of the automobile in the United States profoundly changed domestic architecture and no architect was more invested in that coupling than Frank Lloyd Wright. Wright, and many of his 20th century colleagues like Le Corbusier, sought to completely rethink the home from a purposeful design perspective. Wright wanted to create homes and neighborhoods like the Hudson Valley’s Usonia that integrated automobile energy seamlessly into its design and Corbusier sought to strip domestic architecture down to its raw functional elements, reinventing it as “a machine for living in.”
I admire the work of both of these architects and love walking through their quirky design-fetish spaces, but after hearing about the research of Moore and her colleagues, I couldn’t shake the idea that this midcentury home revolution was some sort of masculine reclamation of domestic space.
Corbusier’s minimalist and functionalist design is gorgeous, but the meticulous stripped-back design makes it an impossible space for a family to really make their own. Wright’s Usonia homes are elegant and verdant, but it’s telling that most of their current owners have had to renovate them to expand their miniscule kitchens.
Even further, these 20th century architects were going beyond the building itself and planning entire communities and cities. Wright’s homes are reliant on the winding roads of his automobile-centric suburbs and Corbusier’s green cities used electrification to centralize almost all energy consumption, from transportation, to heating, and lighting.
Looking at these two histories of domestic energy transition: the woman-to-woman networks of the late 19th century and the masculine architectural reclamation of the home in the 20th century, I wonder how we can find a new model for our current domestic energy transition. What does a queer home look like energetically? Can we collectivize resources and integrate power grids while still leaving room for aesthetic individuality and more casual peer-to-peer (or queer-to-queer) knowledge sharing?
Personally, my queer dream dwelling has a functionalist kitchen big enough to eat in with all of our friends. There’s a bus or tram nearby with free fares and bike racks. The front room has well-insulated windows that let in lots of natural light and open up on sunny days so I can wave to you across the way.