Technology is the new plastic

Those of you who are old enough to remember the film The Graduate no doubt remember this iconic scene. Our hero, Benjamin Braddock (Dustin Hoffman), is at his graduation party when an old friend of his parents pulls him aside and offers some sage advice about his future.

“Plastics” became a meme before memes were even invented. In the film, the advice was meant as an ironic commentary – what smart young person in the groovy late 1960s would want to devote their life to plastics? New Yorker essayist John Seabrook wrote this in 2010:

In the film, “plastics” is understood to mean a cheap, sterile, ugly, and meaningless way of life, boring almost by definition—the embodiment of everything about the values of the older generation that seems repugnant to young Benjamin. Plastics! What a joke! How uncool!

Turns out the old dude was right. The future was plastics. And now, plastics are f**king everywhere – in the cars we drive, the beds we lay on, the clothing we wear, the phones we’re tethered to, the packaging of almost every product, and (unfortunately) the food we eat. Plastics are now inside nearly everything, including the cells of our bodies.

Plastics started out as a revolutionary new material, a shining example of how science can transform nature to create amazing new things. And now they’re polluting the planet and our bodies. Thanks, old dude at the grad party.

By now you may be wondering, Did I subscribe to the right newsletter? Why is Dan going on about plastics when he should be scaring the shit out of us by talking about AI? Has he finally lost what’s left of his mind? 

Here’s the point: We are now in the ‘plastics era’ of technology. It’s inescapable, it’s not good for us, and we collectively need to figure out how to use less of it. 

The Plastic Oh-No! Band 

To be fair, there are positive uses of plastic. Heart valves, for example. Those cool-looking Dyson vacuum cleaners. These adorable squeezable capybara lamps.

Plastic makes our cars lighter, more fuel efficient, and less deadly in a crash. (Unless a Cybertruck plows into you – then it’s ‘Hasta la vista, baby’.) So there are good reasons why it is f**king everywhere, including the cells of our bodies.

But plastics are also an enormous profit center, generating more than $630 billion in revenues each year for the petrochemical industry. And like cigarettes and oil, they’ve been accompanied by  decades of self-serving bullshit and outright lies from industry-adjacent organizations, like the knobs at the Competitive Enterprise Institute:

The biggest lie is about recycling. You think the plastic you’ve carefully separated from your other trash and put into a blue curbside container is actually being remade into something useful? More than 90 percent of it goes into landfill (and the oceans, and our cells).

Where is that old dude from the party? I’d like to punch him in the face.

Digitalis toxicity

Likewise, digital technology has its beneficial uses. (You wouldn’t be reading this newsletter now if not for it. [1]) It has employed millions of humans [2], while also creating obscene amounts of wealth for a handful of individuals. It allows us to operate successful one-person businesses, connect with like-minded people on the other side of the planet, and access vast reservoirs of knowledge 24/7/365. The Internet is the ultimate winner of trivia contests and settler of barroom arguments. 

It also allows me to open a web browser and look at cool shite like this:

But, as with plastics, we’ve been sold a bill of goods by megacorps with vested interests in keeping us busy using their cool tech stuff. Like: All of the world’s information will be available at our fingertips (assuming you can separate it from all the disinformation at our fingertips.) Or, social media will help bring humanity together (hah!). Or, “Your privacy is important to us.” (As if.)  

The dark side is pretty dark. The algorithms know more about us than our mothers ever did. Hundreds of millions of servers sucking down gigawatts of electricity is not good for the planet. Technology enables surveillance on a scale unimaginable at any previous time in history, and we are on the brink of having a government with no ethical boundaries against using it for that purpose. And it has created the Broligarchy, a tiny handful of (mostly) men who wield enormous power without really having done much to earn it, besides being in the right place at the right time. 

This is the question that now runs through my mind: If Al Gore had to do it all over again, would he still create the Internet? [3]

My so-called digital life

I’ve spent the last year trying to reduce my plastics footprint. It hasn’t been easy, and I haven’t done a great job of it, but I do use far fewer plastic products than I did two years ago. It’s a start.

My point here is to suggest that you treat digital technology – the Web, social media platforms, and most especially your phone – like plastic. Use less of it. Try to reduce your footprint and find analog alternatives to the digital things you do each day.

What that will look like, I can’t tell you. Personally, I ditched Amazon last month, for Broligarch-related reasons. I abandoned Twitter a year+ ago, and Facebook long before that, but I still use Instagram and Threads (so far). I am trying to wean myself from these things. It’s a process.

I’m not ready to go full Unabomber just yet. But check back with me in a year and I might feel differently.

What can you do to shrink your digital footprint? Offer up suggestions in the comments or email me: [email protected].

[1] Whether you find this newsletter particularly useful is another story. Your mileage may vary.

[2] Including yours truly. I’ve spent my entire career writing about tech. It’s me; I’m the problem.

[3] That’s a joke. I know Al did not create the Internet; it was Vint Cerf and 10,000,000,000 monkeys with keyboards.