#94: Plastic Beach
First, the housekeeping: This newsletter has moved over to Substack so you may notice some subtle formatting changes. If this went to your spam folder, well, you’re probably not reading it at all, so I don’t know what to tell you. To everyone else, hi again. Changes to digital formats or interfaces, however slight, are often momentarily jarring, but then we get used to them, just like we’ll get used to plastic being a natural part of the earth, a topic explored in this review of Underland, Robert Macfarlane’s book about subterranean geology. A new kind of stone, “plastiglomerate,” is starting to appear in landforms all over the world as plastic washes onto shores, melts, and mixes with sand before congealing into a synthetic mineral that takes its permanent place in nature. “Plastiglomerate will be deposited into top-level strata, plasticizing the landscape itself.” Likely to last well beyond the span of any human lifetime, these manmade materials will eventually stop being synthetic, becoming just another part of the earth.
When pondering the distant future, it’s interesting to imagine what kinds of life forms would thrive in a post-apocalyptic or even post-human world. Such a species would probably see all of the garbage and environmental wreckage we’ve left behind as not just natural, but useful or even beautiful. After all, these creatures would have evolved and adapted to benefit from conditions that their ancestors couldn’t survive. Perhaps they’d make jewelry out of the plastiglomerate we left for them, and they might look at the grotesque side effects of our presence here—the fatbergs and oceanic trash gyres—as fascinating organic phenomena, the way we marvel at termite mounds or beaver dams. John Cheever, writing in 1960, made a list of the most unwelcome elements of modernity—polluted rivers, oil derricks, and automobile dumps—before declaring, “These are not, as they might seem to be, the ruins of our civilization but are the temporary encampments and outposts of the civilization that we—you and I—shall build.”
Maybe, to a more advanced civilization, our trash and ruins would just be invisible, the way so much of what we call nature is invisible to us. The concept of nature, in a sense, is a way to describe or categorize what is outside the scope of human agency or immediate understanding, and that scope is always shifting, frequently in unintended directions. As the human-built world becomes impossibly complex, forces we had once harnessed are escaping the pen and being reclaimed by nature, in the sense that we can only navigate (or surf) them, not control them. Kevin Slavin, in this excellent 2011 talk about algorithms, concludes by observing that our landscape has always been the product of an uneasy collaboration between humans and nature, but now algorithms are a third coevolutionary force, one we’ll have to understand as a kind of nature too. Maybe, like the plastic melted into the earth’s geological strata, the algorithms we’ve unleashed will outlive us as well, and fascinate our successors.
Reads:
A collaboration between Amazon and a local police department in Colorado that led to a futile sting operation targeting package thieves. A good example of how the surveillance that technology enables isn’t just top-down, but peer-to-peer. See also: Neighbors using drones to shoot fireworks at an unruly street party.
“Flaring” is what happens to natural gas in Texas when there’s not enough pipeline capacity to transport it: The well operators just burn the gas to get rid of it. Another strange market failure under late capitalism (the article is paywalled but Matt Levine has a good summary here).
Watching your favorite spots close and disappear isn’t just a meatspace problem: Hangars Liquides, a legendary cyberpunk city in Second Life, is set to be deleted at the end of this month because the digital rent is too damn high. There’s an Indiegogo campaign to save it by paying for the servers to keep it running.