17 September 2001

Last night we watched this documentary on TLC about these fucking huge machines that are used to stripmine our planet for coal. Picture a modern iron superbrontosaurus weighing in at fourteen million pounds that takes nearly eight years to construct, consumes enough electricity to power a city of 20,000, can move 320 tons of earth a minute, and has a sticker price of over 200 million dollars. These things are so large that when they move from one mine to another, rivers are rerouted and entire towns relocated to clear a path.

On one hand, I had to marvel at the scale of these things and at the colossal engineering work that must have gone into them. But I couldn’t stop thinking: we humans must be doing something horribly wrong to require destructive powers of this magnitude just to sustain our current mode of life.

Maybe Jacob and Moby are right. Maybe everything is wrong.

Boston, from the harbor, on my birthday.

Fight Club: “…picture yourself planting radishes and seed potatoes on the fifteenth green of a forgotten golf course…”

See, the thing about Fight Club that you might not have gotten from the movie is that the point of Project Mayhem was to reset the planet so that it could recover from the damage humanity has done to it. Basically, wipe out the whole societal infrastructure so that the earth would have a few hundred thousand years to grow up and over and through all the superhighways and suburban sprawl and oil refineries and shopping malls that have metastasized over the surface of human life. To cleanse the earth.

Yeah, that’s what all the soap was about.

For me, this isn’t so much about the fact that we’re transmuting our planet into an unlivable barren rock as fast as our big brains can think up new ways to suck non-renewable resources out of its crust. All of that is probably very significant and immediate and terrifying, if you can wrap your head around it. But to me, that kind of apocalypse still seems too distant and impossible to really have any emotional weight.

Paul Simon: “There’s too many holes in the crust of the earth.”

In the North End, Boston.

What bothers me is that, despite modern medical technology, vastly increased longevity, and the relative monetary wealth of even the lowest standard deviation of the first world populace, we seem to be careening towards a global minimum of beauty and joy in our lives.

Yes, you’re right, those of us who live in the rich parts of the world no longer die at 30, no longer spend 90% of our waking lives in abject terror of being eaten, and no longer suffer from cleft palates and bad eyesight our entire lives. Don’t get me wrong: these are all good things. But there’s no reason these “modern miracles” must go hand-in-hand with the dehuminization of “modern life.”

Radiohead: “A heart that’s / full up like a landfill / a job that slowly kills you / bruises that won’t heal / you look so tired and unhappy / bring down the government / they don’t, they don’t speak for us.”

The whole American petroleum culture thing has to be one of the most offensive pieces of this whole issue. It simply does not work. The average American owns a car the cost of which would easily feed nearly 100 starving people almost anywhere else on the planet for a year. And cars are expensive even by US standards; most Americans buy cars that represent at least 50% of their annual salaries.

Try to imagine if all the money and effort that goes into designing, building and maintaining the cars, roads and traffic signals that fill our cities were instead devoted to constructing an efficient public transportation system and safe and beautiful walkways and parks. Try to picture a large American city devoid of cars.

Rhett Nichols: “The world is changing too fast for introspection about what’s going on.”

Callahan tunnel.

Does anyone really want to sit eight hours a day in a windowless walled cubicle under fluorescent lights breathing carpet fibres with unblinking eyes inches from a computer monitor only to spend hours crawling home to a homogeneous subdevelopment through traffic emitting noxious deadly fumes listening to shrinkwrapped pop hits and tear through three layers of non-biodegradable packaging to get to the chemical-impregnated food products that were once blinded bleating veal calves growing into a revenue stream in pens only slightly larger than their bodies while you sit in front of three hundred channels of somnolent mass media crap?

Is this the price of an indiscriminately heightened chance of procreation and a longer lifespan? Please, say that it isn’t. Please, no.

Radiohead: “Like a pig. In a cage. On antibiotics.”

The pinnacle of Western civilization.

Of course, none of this is news. None of this is interesting. For decades, rich Westerners like myself have been saying these same things, and I have nothing new to contribute.

There is some good news, though. The internet, the web, self publishing, effectively instant and continuous communication — all this technology is empowering people more and more, giving each of us unprecedented individual expressive ability. Last Tuesday, blogger.com and similar sites were a better news source than cnn.com or any of the other big brands. I have friends who were on IRC in 1991 talking to people in Baghdad while our bombs fell around them.

And because of the net, I was able to team up with this crazy Mexican to start a company made up of developers in Australia, India, England, The Czech Republic, Finland, Spain, Italy, Estonia, Chicago, Mexico… even Canada. In many ways, life is so much richer now than it ever was in the past. Though of course, just being able to write this for you to read, I’m many times luckier than 99.999% of the globe.

But this doesn’t mean that we’re doing everything right. It doesn’t mean that we’re not on a slippery slope.