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Welcome to Digestable, your thrice-weekly mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
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Well, here we are on late Tuesday afternoon, just popping in for an unconventional publication featuring these sweet seals and a Second Look.
(via)
The Second Look
Half-baked cultural criticism from Gabriel Coleman.
Happy(?) COP26 everyone. Today I want to talk about a book I read a few weeks ago: A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor, the second novel by YouTuber, environmentalist, and general internet person Hank Green. ...Endeavor is about a world in crisis. After the events of Green’s first novel, An Absolutely Remarkable Thing, where an alien robot named Carl tasks humanity with solving a series of puzzles experienced in a species-wide shared dream, humanity is suffering from a crisis of planetwide post-first-contact ennui. People are continually dropping out of the job market and the global economy is slowly shrinking. It’s one of those books that was written before the pandemic but speaks miraculously to the global anxiety and disillusionment of the past two years. ...Endeavor is also one of the smartest pieces of YA fiction I’ve ever read. The world of the novel weaves cellular metabolism, cryptocurrency, online social dynamics, and computational probability together into a system of alien-technology/magic that is unique and surprising while only barely stretching the rules of our own reality. The issue with such an intricately woven and reality-tethered fictional world is that the author’s blind-spots and omissions stand out in sharp contrast if you know where to look.
A bit of background on Hank Green: Hank and his brother John started their YouTube channel Vlogbrothers in 2007 and rose to internet notoriety through their daily exchange of four minute video messages. During this time Hank was a sort of environmental entrepreneur, founding the news site EcoGeek on the intersection of technology and environment. Since the success of Vlogbrothers, Hank has founded numerous internet enterprises, both alone and with his brother and other partners, including educational resources SciShow and CrashCourse, charity event Project For Awesome, annual YouTube conference VidCon, record label and retail company DFTBA Records, and several podcasts and YouTube channels. Hank’s internet persona isn’t that of a business mogul but the internet’s geeky uncle: a go-to resource for science educators and well-meaning millennials whose video monologues often push and pull between climate anxiety and technological optimism.
Knowing how much Hank thinks and cares about climate, I wanted to read A Beautifully Foolish Endeavor’s central crisis through a climate lens but the few times climate is specifically addressed are irrelevant to the plot and somehow off-putting. The first meaningful mention of the climate crisis is in a tone-setting news clipping that describes how COP talks were halted after leaked documents revealed that US and EU representatives had received gifts from the Chinese solar industry. Not sure why this would be a big deal when the oil industry’s habit of paying nations to send fossil folks to COP negotiating tables while simultaneously pulling strings in the nations themselves has never stopped talks before But Okay.
The other mention of climate in the book uses the crisis an example of why it's important to understand the complexities of a problem, with a character explaining that “if we just stopped burning fossil fuels right now, a bunch of people would die of cold or heat or hunger.” Again OKAY sure this is something to consider but it’s being compensated for with fairly simple tools in places like Ireland and anyway why would you just offhandly say “here’s we can’t immediately stop burning fossil fuels?” What purpose does that serve? Frankly, the way climate is discussed (and not discussed) in the book doesn’t sound like it was written for someone who cares about climate as deeply as Hank does.
The way the economy shows up in the novel is another story. We come to know the central crisis of the novel through an almost exclusively macroeconomic viewpoint. The fearful news clippings peppered throughout the book are filled with talk of recession, corporate default, shrinking job markets, and empty luxury apartments. The economic crisis reaches a tipping point when Big Bad tech company Altus (basically Facebook-I-mean-Meta) creates a revolutionary and super-popular VR platform with its own unregulatable cryptocurrency. Suddenly everyone is buying up Altacoin and this privately owned cryptocurrency is at risk of superseding the actual economy which is very bad because economy good.
I swear the novel is really compelling and interesting but the fact that the primary conflict boils down to “guys we gotta work together to save the free market economy!!” is a cop out (COP out?). Hank Green isn’t ignorant of the environmental entanglements of economic growth, the fact that the Altacoin cryptocurrency is mined by human brains plugged into the company’s VR is an interesting nod to the fossil-dependance of crypto-mining but its too vague to actually say anything. The book vilifies cryptocurrency because its used to create a monopoly but the actual economy is unquestionably seen as an indicator and creator of wellbeing, despite the fact that its exchange-based value system and necessity for endless exponential growth has been based on a supposedly infinite supply of oil to be burned since the 1944 Bretton-Woods agreement. ...Endeavor shows an intimate awareness of the connectedness of energy and money, even seeming to subtly acknowledge the connection of fossil energy to economic crises: Carl, the robot-alien sent to save humanity from destroying ourselves, first became sentient on our planet on January 5, 1979 in the midst of the ‘79 oil crisis when the idea of peak oil loomed in the public imagination and threatened the global economy’s oil underpinning. But despite the complex beautiful construction of the novel, the economy is glossed over as good and the climate is just another crisis.
The disillusionment I felt reading this book made me want to look back at Hank’s climate content to see if he’s quite the advocate I thought he was and I came across some eye-narrowing stuff. First, in the description for the Vlogbrothers video “How We Fix the Climate,” published last August, Hank writes “we have already decoupled economic growth from the emission of greenhouse gasses which, frankly, was unthinkable just a couple decades ago.” The video, which is very good, explains different methods of tackling greenhouse emissions like carbon taxes, cap and trade, and regulations. I guess these could be considered efforts to decarbonize the economy but any way you slice it, the economy isn’t decoupled from fossil energy. Not even close. I also rewatched the 2018 video “Hank Chats About Climate Change,” which contains the following [lightly edited for clarity]:
People like to say “20 companies are responsible for 75% of the carbon emissions.” That’s the dumbest thing to get mad about. If you’re mad about anything in that conversation it’s that consolidation of power has gone to the point where there are very few large companies now because they’ve all bought each other but don’t be like “it’s all their fault.” No! We buy the stuff. We buy the cows, cars, oil, and heat that they make. People are like, “they’re trying to distract us by making it all about us but it’s really all about--” No! You can make a case for point source regulation because they’re the ultimate source. Then they will have to create renewable energy and the cost of that will be passed onto the consumer. But this is a global economy, we all participate in it and the advantages we get from carbon emissions are great, they’re things that you like.”
Hank goes on in this section of the video to talk about how Republicans support big business because they may own big businesses or have constituents that own or work for big businesses and “believe in the work that they do” and how he thinks cheaper natural gas due to fracking is kind of a good thing because it emits less CO2 when burned and can be turned on and off as needed unlike coal plants which are on 24/7. I want to give Hank the benefit of doubt here because it this was published in 2018 and the global climate conversation has come a long way in the past three years but just to be safe I also want to drop the entire Drilled season Amy Westervelt did about how natural gas is a “Bridge To Nowhere” and how fracking has never operated at a profit in case anyone wants to read/listen further.
There’s a part towards the end of ...Endeavor where Andy Skampt, the most Hank-y of the novel’s characters talks, about his conflicted feelings regarding the villainous VR platform Altus:
“If two billion people spent money to buy Altus, then what would an Altus with two billion shareholders really look like? What could we make if we took this power and used it to try something completely new and open that no one controlled and everyone shared. …as much as I knew Altus was a fucking unprecendentedly evil disaster, I also didn’t want to, like, stop using it. And not just because I was addicted, but because it was amazing! …Everyone who invested in Altus did it because they saw the potential to remake the human experience. What if that value was used to increase equality instead of just to make a profit? What would we become? That was too valuable a tool to just destroy.”
These feelings map easily onto Hank’s thoughts on the internet, especially platforms like YouTube which he, John, and so many other people have used to “decrease world suck and increase world awesome.” They could just as easily map onto the economy. Hank is an internet business mogul with a network of LLCs under his name that have done a lot of good things and made him a lot of money. Maybe Hank even feels this conflict about fossil energy, considering his regular references to its byproducts being “the things you like.”
In the novel, Andy Skampt helps bring about Altus’s downfall but he isn’t the one to pull the plug and still misses it after it's gone. Hank Green has done a lot to educate and engage people on climate change, but I’m not convinced he really wants to build the future that this crisis demands. In alien-robot-monkey Carl’s perspective, “humanity has to keep accelerating simply to support itself. ...Pandemics, climate change, bigotry, inequality … you have to dodge them, but you cannot stop, and you cannot slow down.” All due respect to Carl, but in my perspective, climate change is not an obstacle to dodge but a wall we’re hurtling towards. At this point we can’t just pump the brakes, we have to cut the fuel lines.
{Hank if you’re out there I love you please read Carbon Democracy the world will be better for it.}