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00:00:30.000Hello and welcome to For the Wild podcast. I'm Ayanna Young. Today I'm speaking with Antonio
00:00:39.160Lopez. A democratic society really cannot survive information monopolies. You have to have diversity
00:00:46.400of opinions and diversities of worldviews. Dr. Antonio Lopez is a leading international expert
00:00:54.360bridging eco-justice with media literacy. He is a founding theorist and architect of eco-media
00:01:00.660literacy. As a producer of dozens of youth media projects, Antonio has collaborated with the
00:01:07.160MacArthur Foundation, National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, National Rural Health
00:01:13.140Organization, and numerous First Nations across North America. He received professional training
00:01:19.560at the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, earned his B.A. in Peace and Conflict
00:01:25.160Studies at UC Berkeley, an M.A. in Media Studies at New School for Social Research. He earned a
00:01:32.040Ph.D. in Sustainability Education from Prescott College. He has written numerous academic articles,
00:01:38.440essays, and four books, Media Ecology, a Multicultural Approach to Media Literacy in the
00:01:44.56021st century, the media ecosystem, what ecology can teach us about responsible media practice,
00:01:52.100greening media education, bridging media literacy with green cultural citizenship,
00:01:57.760and eco-media literacy, integrating ecology into media education. He is currently chair
00:02:04.060and associate professor of communications and media studies at John Cabot University in Rome,
00:02:10.420Italy. Well, Antonio, thank you so much for spending time with us on For the Wild. I'm
00:02:18.180really looking forward to this conversation. I'm so pleased to be here. It's an honor for me.
00:02:23.980I'm a big fan of the podcast, and I'm just really honored to be on with you.
00:02:30.340Thank you so much for sharing that. Well, to begin our conversation, I wonder if you could
00:02:37.960introduce the term eco-media as it relates to our collective footprint and mind print.
00:02:45.400And I think our listeners will be more familiar with the environmental impacts of physical
00:02:50.980technology like cell phones and laptops, but less so with the connections between media
00:02:59.340So I'd love if you could elaborate on how ICT, or the information and communications
00:03:05.140technology, and digital information in particular, has transformed Earth?
00:03:11.600I'd like to start with a little context, because I think one of the problems that I've encountered
00:03:17.140over the years is that people don't associate media with the environment. And I think there's
00:03:24.460some historical reasons for that. Part of it is the legacy of modernity, which views ideas and
00:03:31.380thoughts as separate from the body, and I think there's a cultural tendency to think of media as
00:03:36.540somehow in the realm of thoughts and ideas, that they don't have a physicality. So the term
00:03:42.300eco-media is a way of reframing how we think about media and to put it into an environmental context.
00:03:49.860The term is something that has emerged out of some different academic fields, but over the
00:03:56.980past 10 years, there's been a coalescence around this concept of eco-media studies. And there's
00:04:04.020other areas of inquiry related to that, like eco-cinema studies, environmental communication,
00:04:09.220and so on. So the concept of eco-media encompasses two areas or two spheres. One is the environmental
00:04:19.680impact of our gadgets and the infrastructure of ICT. And then the other aspect is the
00:04:27.680ecological mindprint, which I think we'll get into later. So just to start with the infrastructure,
00:04:35.260the environmental impacts of all of our gadgets and devices occur in many different stages of
00:04:42.500the production chain. You can start with the production of computer chips, which require
00:04:48.340massive amounts of energy and water. And in fact, they're in Taiwan, which is one of the places
00:04:55.260where a lot of microchips are made. And you may have heard that there's a shortage these days.
00:05:00.380There has been a drought and the government has had to make decisions about whether or not they
00:05:05.420should use water for agriculture or for chips. Thankfully, they're using it for agriculture,
00:05:10.040but that has led to a shortage in chip production. So that's one aspect of it.
00:05:15.360And then we also have to think about the media is maybe one way, one term that some theorists argue is that media is really an infrastructure.
00:05:27.080And for us to access our data, our entertainment, to make our phone calls, any aspect of media, whether it's for personal communication or mass consumption and information, it requires a massive physical footprint, an infrastructure, a global infrastructure of satellites, of antenna, of cables.
00:05:55.580The internet is a bunch of cables. It's running all over the earth, through the sea, across the earth. I mean, then there's also relays through satellites, and it's just a massive physical infrastructure, pipes, and so forth.
00:06:09.840And then there's the manufacture of the actual computers and the gadgets and what those resources require. And like the entire system that most listeners are probably familiar with, the global capitalist system, it's embedded in a system of extraction and a system of disposable populations.
00:06:32.360So in other words, a lot of the resources that we need for our media, whether it's energy to extract fossil fuels for the energy to run our system, or if it's for mining, like such as conflict minerals in Central Africa, that system is justified through a general position of disposable populations.
00:06:55.880In other words, that most of the places where the extraction occurs, occurs in low-income regions of the world, in parts of the world where people don't have political or economic representation.
00:07:09.180So racism is part of the way that the system is structured.
00:07:14.540So we have the extraction of conflict minerals, let's say, in Central Africa for our devices.
00:07:19.920And then those have to be transported and processed to countries where our gadgets are assembled.
00:07:27.140It could be in China or Mexico or Philippines.
00:07:32.260TVs and phones are made in different places.
00:07:37.120And once they're manufactured, they have to be shipped all over the world.
00:07:40.580And that also has a big environmental impact.
00:07:43.960And as most people know, our devices are not, they don't last forever. So at some point when our devices are no longer working or useful, they have to be thrown away, recycled.
00:07:57.600And if they are recycled, they are sent to countries to be further processed by low-income populations, such as places in Ghana or India or China or Bangladesh, where people work in incredibly toxic conditions to extract whatever precious metals are still there in the circuit boards of our old computers or phones.
00:08:21.240So that generally describes the overall environmental impact of the way our devices are manufactured. But there's one other aspect which people don't really realize, which is the misleading metaphor of the data cloud, because data is not like vapor in the air.
00:08:41.280it's not invisible it's not just floating around data is actually physical information has a weight
00:08:46.680to it information exists on computers and the server farms that we use to store process the
00:08:56.580information that we need to access for whether it's social media streaming media or whatever
00:09:02.100data that we need on our phones, those computers exist in buildings and the thousands and hundreds
00:09:14.620of them connected through a vast infrastructure around the earth. And they require massive
00:09:19.520amounts of energy and mostly they're powered by fossil fuels. In fact, the data cloud produces as
00:09:26.880much co2 as the aviation industry and it's predicted that it will increase or even double
00:09:33.020in the next 20 or 30 years i think about this a lot especially even with this podcast and with
00:09:43.620using technology for quote good or using technology for some type of
00:09:49.360of climate justice and the the nuanced and contradictions within that is really important
00:10:00.120and also challenging to metabolize and I'm so grateful that you brought up the server farms
00:10:08.600because yeah I mean all this cloud I mean the terminology of cloud it does almost represent
00:10:15.300this vapor idea that it's just this weightless information stored in this in the sky and it's
00:10:23.480not in the sky at all so I'm just moved and challenged and grateful to be speaking to these
00:10:33.220truths because technology is a part of so many of our lives at this point and it's a part of a lot
00:10:40.240of our our activist lives and I'd be remiss to not consider these things while doing this work
00:10:47.880and yeah I would like to ask a bit more about the material of the minerals and the raw materials
00:10:54.300required for our technology you know you spoke to the toxicity but I I would love to even hear
00:11:00.440more about the toxicity at all stages of extraction production distribution the social
00:11:06.960ecological impacts, more details on that due to some of these minerals also being conflict
00:11:11.960minerals. So could you speak to the most common elements that are essential for upholding the
00:11:17.700global ICT infrastructure? Yeah. So part of the problem of trying to do this kind of analysis and
00:11:26.380to be aware of the type of chemicals and minerals, et cetera, that are going into our gadgets is that
00:11:34.000in some ways you have to be like a chemist to understand it and thankfully there are activists
00:11:40.440and organizations out there that are monitoring and keeping track of some of these things because
00:11:45.180it's not actually easy to understand in fact i'll get to the minerals in a minute but you know a lot
00:11:52.120of us don't know or understand what the impact of our wireless devices are devices are on our
00:12:00.020physicality uh the for example the impact of electromagnetic frequencies and if you um don't
00:12:08.980know whether or not emfs cause cancer well there's a reason for that and that's because
00:12:14.020just like as in the case of the tobacco industry the chemical industry and the fossil fuel industry
00:12:20.340the the industries that are promoting cell phone connectivity uh have deliberately confused
00:12:29.280our understanding of the physical impacts of these devices on our bodies so it's very hard
00:12:38.380for us to know and you know i challenge anyone to open up their phone or read their read the
00:12:44.000manual for the phone and try to figure it out because it's they do deliberately make it very
00:12:48.640difficult to understand so with that said though i would like to talk a little bit about your
00:12:53.640question or to respond to your question about the conflict minerals so the the primary minerals
00:13:00.620that are mined in particular in regions um such as central africa they're called rare earth metals
00:13:09.660and they're called rare earth metals because they're rare and they're not available in many
00:13:14.620places around the world so because they're only available in particular places the the um the
00:13:21.760mining of these minerals can produce a lot of conflict because the control of these mines of
00:13:27.420course is important for economic and political power and i'm sure a lot of people have heard
00:13:34.080about conflict diamonds which was popularized in some films and talked about in the media for
00:13:39.920several years so the primary conflict minerals are tin and tin is used to solder chips and wires
00:13:49.220is tungsten, which is what helps our phones vibrate, tantalum, which stores electricity
00:13:56.540and charges our phones, and then gold, which coats the wires. And then I want to add to that
00:14:02.600another very important mineral, which increasingly is going to become in high demand is lithium,
00:14:10.600because lithium is the primary ingredient of batteries for our new electric cars and for
00:14:16.620solar power storage and also for the batteries of our devices and even though lithium is more
00:14:26.680available and more accessible in many parts of the world in some of the areas where lithium is
00:14:33.740mined they also generate a lot of political turmoil and conflict such as in Bolivia and Chile
00:14:38.800which i think listeners of your podcast will be familiar with and um but again i want to put that
00:14:49.180in the context of the extractive or the extraction economy which is uh we have to name it what it is
00:14:55.440it's a neo-colonial economic system and it's a continuation of the the colonial system that
00:15:03.460was developed in the 19th century well we can go back even further than that but you know
00:15:08.380was predominantly spreading across the world in the 19th century 17th century 18th century excuse0.84
00:15:15.860me and it's a just a continuation of that process so these are foreign powers that are extracting
00:15:24.000the local resources to export them out for the global economy so those minerals are the the
00:15:34.020most important ones the primary ones but you know you can if you read a bit of the literature you'll
00:15:40.420find that you know in the 1960s most products that were manufactured had at the most 40 elements
00:15:49.220but these days because of chemistry and because of advancements of engineering and so forth you
00:15:57.100know these there's hundreds of of elements that are used to make or devices and you know some of
00:16:04.520these we don't even know what happens once they re-enter to the environment because you know once
00:16:11.240we extract these and put them into our our gadgets and of course our gadgets a phone is typically
00:16:16.780has three main ingredients it has metals glass and plastic and plastic is a petrochemical product
00:16:25.280You know, all of these things, once they reenter the environment, have a toxic impact, whether it's when they melt down circuit boards to re-extract the metal in the case of e-waste recycling.
00:16:38.200you know you you should see images of people or videos of people doing this they're standing over
00:16:44.500open fires and they're just melting down these circuit boards and there's these black fumes
00:16:49.460coming off and they're not wearing any kind of protective gear they're breathing all these fumes
00:16:52.860just to melt down for a few precious um ounces of metal and these chemicals also re-enter into
00:17:01.000the water supply and some of these um again i'm not a chemist so i can't you know i don't have a
00:17:08.000I don't have a menu of ingredients to tell you everything that's been re-entering into
00:17:12.140the system, but I can assure you that in places where these are manufactured and disposed
00:17:19.360of, they are causing huge damage to watersheds and to local health.
00:17:27.780Wow, there's so much food for thought in your responses.
00:17:32.160Well, I'd like to transition to discussing an often neglected facet of this topic, which
00:17:37.600is thinking about the total carbon footprint of the internet of things in eco-media literacy you
00:17:45.360share quote by 2030 the global cloud may consume as much electricity as the entire country of japan
00:17:53.200whereas in 2007 the carbon footprint of icts was one percent by 2040 it will be 14 percent
00:18:03.980half the size of the entire transportation industry. As the internet of things comes
00:18:10.080online, the problem will only be compounded. Cisco anticipates that we will have as many as
00:18:17.24028.5 billion networked devices online by 2022. Consider the potential energy of the gadgets
00:18:25.820and cloud infrastructure needed to keep everything connected and running, end quote.
00:18:30.440so i'm just wondering yeah if you could share with us the scale of our carbon footprint when
00:18:41.080it comes to the internet of things and how you're thinking about this in context to our general
00:18:46.240preferences in terms of you know needing some form of content streaming continuously in the
00:18:52.740background of our lives whether that's through platforms like spotify netflix youtube you know
00:18:59.640the list goes on and on yeah so this is an interesting problem and um and since i wrote this
00:19:08.600i've learned new things which complicate this even more so people not people are not really
00:19:17.180talking about the internet of things so much anymore although it's definitely becoming a part
00:19:22.780of our lives in a way that is very subtle and quiet we're not even aware of it and for those
00:19:28.460who don't know what the internet of things is it's just that more and more products that we buy
00:19:35.000will have connectivity and you may have noticed if you've gone to the store to buy like you know
00:19:41.000a toothbrush it's now a bluetooth toothbrush or you know refrigerators are connected to the
00:19:46.100internet you know all these kind of things which by the way is a security nightmare but i won't
00:19:50.580get into that because then you can hack someone's toothbrush to get into your network that could be
00:19:55.840a real nightmare for you. But that actually sounds like a scene out of like a farcical science
00:20:03.320fiction written by Philip K. Dick. But in any case, yeah. So again, it's just the scale of
00:20:10.820the vast number of devices that are being made. And of course, everything that's made is going
00:20:16.100to get thrown away. So you have to think of this also in terms of waste. And all this requires
00:20:22.180power and the thing is that the issue of power and and servers is slightly complicated by and
00:20:32.460so i've been reading different studies and it's not really clear what the direction is i mean of
00:20:37.480course it's the direction is always going to be the curve going up to consume more but in fact
00:20:43.360where the the curve is slowing down a little bit because the machines are getting more efficient
00:20:48.820so they consume less power so that's that's a good thing um but on the other hand you know you
00:20:55.080you get you you've everyone has found out that refrigerators are more efficient but so oh i have
00:21:01.960a more efficient refrigerator i'll just get a bigger one and so it ends up consuming the same
00:21:06.140amount of power or our tvs are more efficient but people are just getting more bigger tvs so that's
00:21:11.280one of the one problem but um a lot of companies are aware of this problem google facebook apple
00:21:19.620and they are making efforts to transition to clean energy so that's a good thing however
00:21:26.620uh that transition is still within the extractive economy so even going into green energy and clean
00:21:37.780energy which will be powering a lot of the servers of the future they're still extracting
00:21:43.100resources to build those uh build those technologies to for the clean energy to build
00:21:49.880the windmills to build the solar panels to get the lithium for the batteries so um even though
00:21:57.320i'm encouraged by the the efforts of some of these big tech companies to transition more to clean
00:22:03.740energy, I don't necessarily feel optimistic about a change in the way that the global economy is
00:22:10.740structured. It's still within that system of exploitation. But one of the things going back to
00:22:17.220this research that is becoming maybe more alarming to me that I had not known about when I first,
00:22:24.560when I wrote this book last year is the impact of blockchain and Bitcoin and artificial intelligence
00:22:34.420because all of these processes require vast amounts of power so people may not realize that
00:22:42.780when Google or Apple are training or Amazon are training their software to do voice recognition
00:22:50.940or facial recognition they have to run computers like uh like warehouses full of computers hundreds
00:22:57.920of computers for days 24 hours you know months to process all this data and information
00:23:05.340to just do voice recognition so all the hype around ai is i find even probably more disturbing
00:23:13.860or problematic than some of the other sort of hyped up technologies that have been promoted
00:23:19.780in the past like the internet of things like now i'm thinking that ai is going to be incredibly
00:23:25.520impactful it is incredibly impactful so and then bitcoin which is another sort of revelation
00:23:32.940that the the value of bitcoin strangely enough is based on actually how much carbon they can burn
00:23:40.680because that's that's what makes it rare that's what makes it material that's like that's the gold
00:23:46.120of the currency is the actual burning of energy because the burning of energy
00:23:50.740there's a cost and so when people set up bitcoin farms they you know there's people send build
00:24:00.380these big factories with full of servers to do these complicated math mathematical processes
00:24:07.600which create the value for the bitcoin um they go around the world where energy is cheapest
00:24:14.960and in the case of uh texas recently a lot of these companies texas has been promoting the
00:24:22.600fact that they have cheap energy and they're advertising themselves as a place to start
00:24:27.740bitcoin factories so a lot of bitcoin farmers i'm not sure the exact technical term farmer seems
00:24:34.560like a kind of ironic name but uh setting up their server farms in texas texas is saying hey we've
00:24:40.980got cheap energy and what makes it cheap is because it's fossil fuels that's what they're
00:24:46.060burning and that's the value that or that's what generates the value for bitcoin so um also online
00:24:54.620gaming and yeah you mentioned streaming streaming also um has a pretty big carbon footprint again
00:25:03.240i think some of these companies are trying to address this uh i don't know if it'll be enough
00:25:07.800But it's certainly something that we should be concerned about. And, you know, thankfully, there are organizations that are putting pressure on companies like Netflix and Facebook to transition into clean energy for their services. So there is some positive movement, but probably not enough at this point.
00:25:30.780Oh, my goodness, this is just so deeply sinister. This is really a twisted nightmare. Just hearing more about Bitcoin. I mean, I knew it wasn't great, but holy moly, this is.
00:25:47.060Yeah, and Bitcoin actually consumes, like if you take Bitcoin as a whole, I don't have the exact statistic in front of me, but apparently it consumes as much energy as some small countries.
00:26:00.780There's nothing I can change in the world
00:27:04.340gosh yeah just thinking about all the resource extraction
00:27:21.660that goes into this is one thing but thinking about the nature of continuous streaming
00:27:28.500and the reality that so many of us have become dependent on constant and multiple forms of
00:27:35.160stimulation. So I'd like to ask you about desensitization in media and what you have
00:27:43.280learned about eco-media in terms of sensory stimulation and the trajectory of the past
00:27:49.700couple of decades where in different media outlets are constantly seeking to monopolize our attention.
00:27:55.740Yeah, thank you for asking that, because this is a really important story that people are not really familiar with.
00:28:03.380And so let me start by saying that part of my opening statement was that people don't normally associate media with the environment.
00:28:12.620Well, another way to rethink media and to understand media in a new way is to recognize that media start as nerve stimulus.
00:28:23.420that i mean just think about the information that our mind or the our cognitive processes
00:28:31.640are engaging with whether it's light or sound these things are physical you know sound is a
00:28:38.380is touching our eardrums and sometimes i like to joke with my students that you know well i'm as
00:28:45.220i'm talking to you i'm actually touching you because my voice is my sound waves are moving
00:28:50.460through the air and actually stimulating their eardrums. And then likewise, the light that's
00:28:55.140bouncing off me, stimulating the sensors in their eyes. And so all media starts off as nerve
00:29:02.760stimulation. And over time, as we've become more inundated with media, that also means that our
00:29:12.040nerves have become more stimulated and more inundated. And an interesting exercise you could
00:29:19.000do is if you look at artwork from like medieval europe you'll notice that the the the images are
00:29:25.040very dense there's a lot of going on there might be some writing there's a lot of details there's
00:29:30.020a lot of different things and you have to spend a lot of time with it you have to look at it for
00:29:34.960for a while to see what's there you have to you have to read it and you compare that the experience
00:29:41.400of looking at like medieval art with uh or let's say tibetan sun mandala something like that
00:29:47.720to instagram where you're just you know with your fingers scrolling through the screen
00:29:52.280touch touch touch touch and you know we look at it for just a second the trajectory from that sort
00:29:58.060of slow seeing slow um slow media as some people talk about to the present moment has um happens
00:30:07.740primarily you know in the 20th century with the advent of mass media where increasingly as we
00:30:13.720created new reproduction technologies, whether it's recorded music, photography, film, then radio,
00:30:21.240then TV, and now, of course, the internet. Every time we introduce these to our environment,
00:30:30.900our physical bodies get more stimulated. So one exercise I like to do is show students
00:30:41.220the first james bond trailer of dr no from like 1962 which is about three minutes which is fairly
00:30:48.920long and have them watch that and then compare it with a trailer for the most recent james bond
00:30:55.260movie and to compare the experience of watching the first one with the most recent and you know
00:31:02.960a lot of the comments would be that the watching the first dr no trailer and you know 1962 is not
00:31:09.980that long ago um they find it torturous you know they find it's so slow and almost painful whereas
00:31:17.800if you watch like a more recent james bond trailer you'll notice it isn't like an edit every half a
00:31:23.120second and this is loud and it's fast and it's flashing and moving so quickly and how did we
00:31:32.100arrived to that point well the the this idea this concept of the creeping cycle cycle of
00:31:39.140desensitization has to do with the fact that our media economy is based on attention you know what
00:31:46.720you pay attention to is what makes money and you there's so much competition for our attention
00:31:52.260that certain levels of nerve stimulus that we we become accustomed to and it becomes normal and
00:31:59.360then in order for a new media product to stand out from what is normal it has to be more of
00:32:07.420something it could be more violent it could be louder it could be faster whatever and that's
00:32:12.820why you start to see basically since uh the advent of film increasingly um film at its speeding up
00:32:22.380although you know i think for the probably the first 30 40 years of film they didn't speed up
00:32:27.960so much but if you go back to the 1960s to the present there's this increasing acceleration so
00:32:34.380you know every five six years something has to come along to stand out and to be the new thing
00:32:39.900to raise above what has become normal and then that becomes normal and then something comes
00:32:45.140along and then as that becomes normal so that's why you know uh artists and filmmakers and i'm
00:32:53.620focusing mostly on film but we could apply this to advertising and tv as well the the levels of
00:33:00.400stimulation that we're become accustomed to we it becomes normal and we we don't even pay attention
00:33:07.040to it so this is why a lot of people now um you know decry what the internet has done to our brains
00:33:12.580because we're we're so accustomed to to moving quickly and to scanning things and to um you know
00:33:20.240there's also been studies that show that uh our phones and and and the and screens of computers
00:33:28.160are changing the way that we process information the way that we look at things for example what
00:33:35.060people have hard time focusing on on the eyes when they talk to somebody i notice this like
00:33:40.920i have a hard time focusing on someone because my eyes are being more accustomed to looking at
00:33:47.580screens and it's really hard to adjust so this this issue of this increasing nerve stimulation
00:33:56.040i think is a direct byproduct of the political economy of media which is based on advertising
00:34:03.320and based on attention and the thing i would like to point out is that it doesn't have to be this
00:34:10.120way because media does not have to be for for profit it doesn't have to be based on advertising
00:34:15.780This is a particular model that emerged in the 19th century, basically because it came out of newspapers in New York who were competing against each other, and they realized that if advertising could subsidize the cost of newspaper production, they could sell a newspaper for less, and they therefore could sell more newspapers.
00:34:38.780So that model funding is what became the primary model for all mass media, and it's also the model for social media and the current political economy of platform and surveillance capitalism.
00:34:55.520This is what we're experiencing now is not necessarily new.
00:34:59.200It's just a more evolved model of something that emerged from newspapers in the 19th century.
00:35:04.280so being aware of this problem then helps us recognize and understand that if we want to
00:35:11.700change this and we want to address this problem one thing we have to address is the funding model
00:35:17.260for media so i think anyone who's concerned about this problem and i think we all should be
00:35:24.660we also have to put our money where our mouth is we need to support alternative media we need to
00:35:32.260support non-profit media we need to um and then also advocate for government regulation to break
00:35:39.180up media monopolies uh which drive this attention economy and to to change the business model uh you
00:35:48.080know there's some people are advocating in the case of like companies like facebook and google
00:35:52.780that they get treated like utilities like a public utility which takes the profit motive out
00:35:58.920and therefore would change the way that they're structured and change the kind of algorithms that
00:36:03.780they use to that also you know another byproduct of this creeping cycle of desensitization
00:36:10.200is the emergence of the the rage economy because what what the way facebook or youtube make money
00:36:17.620is through i put engagement in quotes but they you know by enraging people by getting people
00:36:24.240angry and upset that's what drives their attention and keeps their attention on those platforms
00:36:30.220and so if we if this is disturbing to people and they want to change that then we have to change
00:36:35.440the the business model you know it might be a little bit harder to change the business model
00:36:40.580of the big companies without government intervention in fact it would does require
00:36:44.480government intervention and it does seem like there's movement of late to reform facebook
00:36:52.500but i don't know the genie's out of the bottle i i think that we have to really just go back to
00:36:59.980the drawing board and rediscover and this is uh related to the movement of slow media which is
00:37:07.060that people are like the movement of slow food you know to to not buy a pre-packaged or fast food but
00:37:15.520to cook slow meals and to bring community back to eating and producing food likewise we do that
00:37:23.480with media and have slow media like radio for example community radio but making zines some
00:37:31.700people advocate for a return to certain forms of analog media like I don't know if people remember
00:37:40.300what it's like to play a record you know to put on the turntable and to read the record cover
00:37:44.600or just sit with an album and listen to it for what it is
00:37:47.620instead of just being some kind of algorithm-generated playlist
00:37:52.400that the streaming service is producing for us,
00:37:55.520but actually have to listen to something with intention
00:37:58.160or to go to a movie theater and watch a slow movie and be with it,
00:38:04.580even though it might feel painful and difficult
00:38:08.820because we've become so accustomed to speed it up.
00:38:12.040and you know i think that there are artists that are aware of this and there's actually even big
00:38:16.420mainstream movies for example i saw dune the recent dune production has elements of of sort
00:38:24.160of slow film slow experience of just absorbing what's going on and not being overwhelmed by
00:38:31.220technology and explosions and special effects although it does definitely have those elements
00:38:37.500But yeah, so we have to retrain our senses. And of course, this could be also addressed through certain forms of mindfulness and meditation, but being outdoors, going outside, and it takes work.
00:38:54.380You know, if you have kids and the kids are really accustomed to these kind of like always on presence of gadgets, it becomes an addiction because you get like a dopamine rush from, and that's, I'm sure you're aware of this, that these phones are developed, they're designed like slot machines.
00:39:18.180I mean, you think, you know, you drag your finger down from the top to refresh the screen. That's like a slot machine. That was on purpose. I mean, that was designed exactly using the manuals that were used to design slot machines.
00:39:31.560so and they're calibrated to give you just the right amount of stimulation of likes and
00:39:38.480feedback so that you keep coming back that you want to you want some kind of affirmation or
00:39:43.360some kind of um little sugar rush that you get when someone likes something
00:39:48.880and it's designed that way so another thing that people can do if this bothers them um is you know
00:39:56.520there's all kinds of apps now ironically there's an app for everything there's an app for
00:40:01.000mindfulness there's an app for um i mean there's there's certain tricks you can do you can like
00:40:06.660turn off your notifications you can delete apps from your phone you can dumb your phone i noticed
00:40:13.500for example there's kind of a trend with some young people to just have clamshell phones that
00:40:17.980have all they do is make phone calls and do text messages so there are some like i think with some
00:40:23.840younger generations an awareness of this and a desire to get back to basics i mean also the
00:40:29.660there's been the return of cassette tapes, which I think is funny, but I think cassette tapes also
00:40:34.580have a big environmental impact. So I don't know if that's any better. Oh goodness. There was so
00:40:40.100much in that response and I'm, I'm just, um, yeah, organizing everything that you just shared in my
00:40:47.700mind and i i do want to go back a moment to the google apple facebook amazon um gosh i don't even
00:41:00.860know what to call them but you write google's on yeah yeah google's on and you write quote
00:41:07.920the fourth biggest tech companies in the world google apple facebook and amazon are often excluded
00:41:14.980from what people imagine as media. Consider that Alphabet, owner of Google and YouTube,
00:41:21.740earns twice as much as Disney, and that Google and Facebook account for 85% of all online ads,
00:41:29.280a quarter of all worldwide media spending. We also have to add to the mix Microsoft, IBM,
00:41:36.480Netflix, and providers like the telecom giant AT&T and cable service Comcast in the United States,
00:41:43.960who are now the owners and distributors of media content end quote so the term mainstream media
00:41:53.400is thrown around very freely but i wonder if you could share with us the connections between
00:42:00.520these big tech companies their stake in media content and platform capitalism
00:42:06.760yeah so you're right that I think people misunderstand what they mean or they misstate
00:42:15.660what they mean by media it's also could be generational I think people who grew up in
00:42:22.140the era of of traditional or what we call now legacy broadcast media we had a couple
00:42:27.300tv networks and a few radio networks and two newspapers and a couple magazines and
00:42:36.760Certainly, the media landscape has transformed into a much more integrated, high-tech conglomeration.
00:42:45.580Some of these companies resemble the two different traditional types of monopolies.
00:42:52.600We have horizontal monopolies, where you own everything within that particular service, or a vertical monopoly, where you own everything from production to distribution.
00:43:04.760And the media companies these days have a little bit of both. And what is happening is that, again, this is within the larger trends of global capitalism, which is that all industries are conglomerating.
00:43:20.760conglomerating. So whether you're talking about agribusiness or pharmaceuticals or oil and gas
00:43:30.540production or media, they're all tending towards these sort of large behemoths, these monopolized.
00:43:38.240And there's a certain logic to that, which is, I'm speaking here in the case of media,
00:43:45.780corporate media in particular basically either you absorb and gobble up the competition or they
00:43:53.880do it to you so it's a it's very much a dog-eat-dog world so um the the trend is continued
00:44:01.580expansion and monopolization but what has changed a little bit over the past 20 or 30 years is
00:44:08.460it may be that you know certain newspaper companies would conglomerate so but they would
00:44:14.740just remain within the newspaper industry or within radio the the radio um conglomerates
00:44:22.260would expand for example you would have national companies that would buy up local radio stations
00:44:27.660or you'd have national tv stations buy up local tv networks or tv stations but what's happening now
00:44:36.120is that they're all becoming much more integrated so that a company like at&t or comcast which are
00:44:43.080of the distributors of the internet and of the content are also buying the content companies
00:44:48.920or someone like apple which traditionally made devices now you know they have itunes so they
00:44:54.980they sell distribute music and they have apple tv because they're getting into the content business
00:45:02.260so it's very hard to distinguish between you know what is it what what are they doing what
00:45:08.020to the make. And this is very dangerous, of course, because you don't want to be
00:45:13.760a democratic society really cannot survive information monopolies. You have to have
00:45:18.860diversity of opinions and diversities of worldviews. And so, you know, there's different
00:45:25.360arguments that people make about the benefit or the dangers of monopoly. The benefit people would
00:45:31.340argue is that you get better service and it's more uniform or more powerful than u.s government
00:45:38.660i mean they could you know if if if they decided to they could just block out any information
00:45:45.860that they don't want you to see they could they could cancel politicians i mean they could do
00:45:50.700whatever they want they they're they're playing there's a very fine line between playing the game
00:45:55.860of democracy and subverting it so but then time warner and disney the problem with those
00:46:04.840companies conglomerating is that they limit the the the world views that are available to people
00:46:12.120so this can have be impactful whether it's the news or um the kind of media that people are
00:46:21.880exposed to i'll just give an example and this is kind of an old example but going back to
00:46:27.720after 9-11 when there was the build-up to invade iraq and and the invasion to afghanistan had
00:46:35.620started i don't recall ever hearing one single afghani interviewed in corporate media the only
00:46:43.180people that got interviewed were were generals and it wasn't an interview on whether or not we
00:46:47.600should go to war but how do we execute the war and these industries are so intertwined
00:46:54.420that it's really hard to tell the difference between the board members and the stock and
00:47:00.040the shareholders of the media companies and the agribusiness and and the pharmaceuticals and
00:47:06.860actually this is probably the most disturbing trend that people need to pay attention to
00:47:11.240what emerged out of modernity was kind of like this this monocultural mentality or what
00:47:18.020vandana shiva calls the monoculture of the mind and so monoculture agriculture is not much different
00:47:25.640than monoculture culture industry you know like the the culture industry which is a term coined by
00:47:31.940the frankfurt school the german marxist in the 1930s and 40s who were studying mass media and
00:47:38.320fascism talked about the tendency of capitalism to standardize culture to turn into a product to
00:47:45.660to make it packageable and sellable and to sort of reduce everything to like a formula
00:47:52.640so naturally this business mentality is applied to both culture but food and science and medicine
00:48:00.840you know it crosses all industries so there's kind of an interesting convergence um that's
00:48:09.580happening between companies that have data their currencies data like facebook the data people
00:48:16.060data of people and personal habits and behaviors etc and to integrate that data with
00:48:23.600um agribusiness and the chemical business um and so it's kind of in the background there's
00:48:32.000these companies and that are being formulated to sort of leverage these relationships of
00:48:38.020technology and data and um bill gates and microsoft is in in particular very much into this
00:48:47.020so um this is something to keep an eye out for so we're kind of and another thing that
00:48:52.700vandana shiva it talked about um that you know after physical space has been colonized now they
00:49:00.200have to colonize internal space so a lot of the critics who've talked about surveillance capitalism
00:49:05.720also talk about surveillance capital capitalism is is also a kind of colonialism and what they're
00:49:13.800colonizing is our attention so and they have to fracture it into more and more and smaller pieces
00:49:20.220because our attention is actually limited it's a limited resource we can only focus on so many
00:49:25.500things during the day and if you fracture that even more that's how you extract people you know
00:49:31.640that's that's that creates value so the the behaviors of all these companies are essentially
00:49:38.440the same they just take different forms going back to the theme that i think i've been talking
00:49:43.280about throughout our conversation is it goes back to the the economical model of extraction
00:49:50.300of neocolonialism and also disposable people
00:50:44.500Something you had mentioned a few questions ago was,
00:51:10.880and now I'm forgetting the terminology,
00:51:12.960but something about rage or the rage economy the rage economy yeah there's so many different
00:51:21.900segments of the economy now it's really hard to keep track of but you mentioned wanting to
00:51:30.740discuss the relationship between fake news climate denial and white nationalism specifically using
00:51:37.840the term petromasculinity. So I would just love if you could take us into this wormhole and share
00:51:45.000how the fossil fuel industry has wrought havoc on our media in an attempt to sever themselves
00:51:51.000from accountability. Great question. And this is one of my favorite topics. I mean, when I say
00:51:57.460favorite, of course, I don't mean it in the sense of it makes me happy. But it's something that
00:52:03.320interests me greatly and there's a term I coined which is fake climate news and the reason I did
00:52:11.340that is we didn't talk so much about the kind of work I do but I'm primarily a media educator
00:52:18.460that's my background and the the field of study that I come out of originally is called media
00:52:26.420literacy and in the people probably have heard a lot about media literacy in previous years
00:52:33.800because with the advent of fake news especially after the 2016 election and the concerns about
00:52:39.260disinformation and misinformation and and people being manipulated in social media
00:52:43.940fake news became like a media literacy moment but in in the way that that term has been
00:52:51.860leveraged and utilized actually has been done so in a way that benefits the technology companies
00:52:59.540i'm going to get i'm going to get to the point about um petrol masculinity in a minute but i'm
00:53:07.560going to arrive to it a sort of a roundabout way so one of the trends in media literacy is this idea
00:53:14.260of uh responsibilization this is a term that comes out of neoliberalism and responsibilization
00:53:22.280is this idea that whatever problems exist in the world it's it's the individuals have to solve them
00:53:28.180it's so if we have this problem of fake news and disinformation misinformation it's not the
00:53:33.940responsibility of the companies but it's the responsibility of the consumer it's responsibility
00:53:38.260of the user or the audience to discern what is fake or real or it's the responsibility of the
00:53:44.620education system to fix it but it's not the responsibility of the companies and this is part
00:53:49.000of the larger trend of neoliberal capitalism which is to increasingly externalize whatever
00:53:55.360problems they create to the public to the government but also to individuals and say
00:54:00.420this is also related to the idea of the ecological footprint calculator was developed by
00:54:05.120british british petroleum because they wanted to take responsibility away from what they're doing
00:54:09.580to the environment and put it on the individual so this is all by way of talking about the way
00:54:15.640that fake news has been discussed as a social and a health and a cultural problem has been to blame
00:54:24.560individuals for that now having described and set up this problem fake news i want to add the the
00:54:33.420The climate twist to it, which is that the fossil fuel industry, historically, actually, a lot of people say that, believe that it was, that the fossil fuel industry has copied the playbook of the tobacco industry, which is to confuse and to delay public's perception of the health dangers in order to prevent the government from regulating their industries.
00:54:57.260um the chemical industries and the tobacco industries perfected this in the 60s and 70s
00:55:04.860so that the more they confuse the public about the issue the less they're able to act on
00:55:09.740the issues but actually they learned all these originally from the fossil fuel industry which
00:55:15.900a lot of people don't realize uh the the public relations industry actually came out of the
00:55:22.140fossil fuel industry at the turn of the century so those techniques that were developed by the
00:55:27.160fossil fuel industry 120 years ago, were adapted by the chemical industry and adapted by the
00:55:35.140tobacco industry, but then got repurposed in the past 20, 30 years. So what has been happening
00:55:41.820is that in order to delay government intervention, to delay the public from trying to reduce and to
00:55:51.200transform the fossil fuel use in our society, they've had to find ways to confuse the issue
00:56:01.080and the way they've done that in particular is to intervene within a specific area of the society
00:56:09.660and the culture that could be leveraged, which is what I would refer to as the right-wing media
00:56:16.020ecosystem so it's it's right-wing radio it's um all the various different media platforms social
00:56:24.540media platforms that uh right-wingers use and not surprisingly the people who are conservative
00:56:31.620and lean towards sort of this right-wing ideology also are closely associated with
00:56:36.800white nationalism and white nationalism has ties to the fossil fuel industry because again we have
00:56:44.100to go back to the origins colonialism is white nationalism and fossil fuel industry is an
00:56:50.540extractive industry that emerges through uh the colonial mentality and there is a relationship
00:56:59.100historically between white nationalism and the fossil fuel industry and so it was a natural area
00:57:08.000for them to um to i don't know if infiltrates the right word but to leverage because there's
00:57:15.060um now we get to the term of petrol petrol masculinity that if you if you listen to the
00:57:21.540rhetoric of um of fossil fuel um culture or uh any kind of sort of republican or conservative
00:57:31.840talking points about uh jobs and about coal mines and things like that they're they're very much
00:57:38.780closely aligned to this idea of of real jobs and and that that's code for jobs for men but not just
00:57:45.940any men but white men as well and if you think about the actual act of extraction there there is
00:57:51.660it's you know you're drilling into the earth there's a it's something that's um sort of if
00:57:58.340we were Freudian, we could say is almost sexual in a perverted way. And so there's been a lot of
00:58:07.220interesting studies that showed the relationship between sort of like the culture of extraction,
00:58:12.820the culture of fossil fuel production is also associated with patriarchy, it's associated with
00:58:20.540in particular, white, male, working class groups.
00:58:25.620And, you know, I think people are probably familiar with one of the problems0.73
00:58:30.420where extraction takes place is that there's an epidemic of missing Native American women
00:58:43.620It's not an accident because wherever they're extracting, sexual violence follows.
00:58:48.480So there's a close relationship between that.
00:58:50.540So what happens on an ideological level is that in those media spaces where denial of climate science is being promoted, it's being promoted in the same breath as the white nationalist ideologies in patriarchy.
00:59:06.360and what what they're finding is that you know what people's beliefs are about the environment
00:59:12.580what people's beliefs about climate and climate science in particular it's not whether they
00:59:17.500believe science or not it's whether or not it aligns with their ideology so the conservative
00:59:21.680ideology closely aligns with climate denial it's try it's very tribal and that also gets
00:59:29.580exacerbated by the other problems that we talked about with social media because of these algorithms
00:59:35.740these algorithms um promote and exacerbate these tendencies because it's within those sort of
00:59:44.240niche right-wing media ecosystem where all that rage is produced and there are you know lots of
00:59:50.880stories of people getting radicalized because they go on youtube and they watch some kind of
00:59:55.460content that makes them kind of angry and then the algorithm picks up on that and makes suggestions
01:00:01.580like okay now if you if that was got you engaged now you should watch this and what they find is
01:00:07.580that that that material that they get exposed to increasingly gets more extreme and so the oil or
01:00:14.980the fossil fuel industry is well aware of this and so they're very good at manipulating search
01:00:21.040engines they're very good at manipulating the way that their message appears first when when people
01:00:29.360are searching for things, but then they deliberately fund, finance, and promote think
01:00:37.440tanks that produce the sort of the intellectual, if you want to call it that, the ideas that
01:00:43.820are disseminated in that right-wing ecosystem.
01:00:48.040So it all gets kind of mixed up, which is unfortunate.
01:00:52.680Now, one thing I will say that something, I think probably everything I've been saying
01:00:58.360I have some good news, which is that Google recognizes this problem and has recently, as in like a few weeks ago, vowed to purge climate disinformation from their platforms and from the search engines, that they're not going to promote it, and also on YouTube.
01:01:17.000facebook said they would do this but apparently from more recent studies i've seen they haven't
01:01:24.220done that but you know these companies know where this information is coming from and they are
01:01:29.700amplifying it and if they know how to amplify it they know how to turn it off so there are
01:01:37.500solutions but you know it's you're going up against a very well-financed industry that really
01:01:45.720created public relations they they're they're it's the dark arts they produced it and it's so
01:01:53.100deeply infiltrated our society that um they've literally changed our culture unfortunately
01:02:00.320have they ever yeah well i have this question that has been really alive for me especially
01:02:14.460over the last year. And it does seem that climate change coverage is now featured in mainstream
01:02:22.460media much more often these days. However, I think we could agree that the type of coverage is still
01:02:30.620significantly lacking. And I feel similarly about this sort of phenomenon that is happening via
01:02:37.800social media where climate change content is really being capitalized upon because it's trendy
01:02:43.900and it can be used to accrue social and sometimes even financial capital.
01:02:50.940In eco-media literacy, you share, quote,
01:02:53.680the majority of environmental discourses are ambivalent because, depending on their use,
01:02:59.480they can promote an assortment of politics that range from anthropocentric to ecocentric,
01:03:06.160but they mostly support the mainstream.
01:03:08.180Remember that conservatism and preservationism are considered part of the status quo.
01:03:15.800Though in some cases, the aim of a discourse is to critique environmentally destructive practices,
01:03:21.900it might also be used to promote reform-oriented policies,
01:03:25.600such as conservatism or greenwash a company's environmental practices that are ultimately anthropocentric.