Turner, Environment, Oil, & AI
"All my means and methods are sane: my purpose is mad." - Captain Ahab, Moby Dick
I came across a speech Ted Turner gave at Brown University in 1993. It reminded me how much I liked Turner, maybe the most important American political figure in my life, and that's not damning with faint praise. He never held elected office, which hopefully allows us all to expand our understanding of just what politics is.
As I previously wrote, I respected Turner for his views on abolishing nuclear weapons, again, not just Iranian, but American nuclear weapons. However, I respected him just as much for his environmentalism. He was a great environmentalist.
Turner’s environmentalism came from his conservation concerns, conservation is the most radical environmentalism. In the end, all environmentalism is about the conservation of Homo sapiens, keeping this small planet habitable for this curious, too clever by half species it evolved.
In his speech, Turner gave what remains an essential and radical understanding to meet this challenge. He says of Americans and industrialism,
“We just use more. We use more of everything. The American Dream was(is) to have as big a house as you could, as big a car as you could. Status was important."
"You were (are) what you drove. You were where you lived. You were what you consumed. On top of that, we were told the more you consumed was good for business. If you buy stuff, that gave a job to someone in Detroit or somewhere else, and that’s absolutely true, it does.”
He notes twenty years before, with the first Oil Shock of 1973, “as far as I was concerned, that was the beginning of the questioning of everything, of the materialism and high consumption and the American way of life. The first time I really questioned it.”
His father billboard business, where he worked, always did a lot of utility advertising. The billboards were always about “use more gas and electricity.” Then with the Oil Shock, the utilities told him to pull those down and put up “use less gas and less electricity.” That got him thinking.
I suppose the biggest thing I respected about Ted Turner is he could think, as we all can but don't do enough, and he could learn, again, as we all can and don't do enough.
Turner adds, “I don’t worry about the future of the planet, I worry about the future of the human species and we are now forced in the first time in history for humanity to do it together.”
He ends with the suggestion we treat each other with “dignity, respect, and friendliness,” maybe the most radical notion in this era of grifters, infinite greed, and militarism.
Unfortunately, outside a few, it was only for a brief moment America questioned the ethos of more. It continued unabated. I recently wrote, Desecrating the Production Fetish, which goes into much greater detail on this topic.
Three decades after Turner’s speech, five decades after the first Oil Shock, and now two months into the most recent, the "ethos of more" remains firmly entrenched. Even worse, it's become the dominant value of information technologies. Anyone who spends even a minute on the internet can tell you more ain’t necessarily better.
Most disturbing, the latest generation of compute marketed as AI looks to build massive data centers across the landscape using ever more energy, ever more water, producing ever more oceans of information junk, and all the while claim this is inevitable progress. Even worse, more and more suggestions appear urging adoption of this latest generation of compute marketed as AI for ever more things.
Understand one thing, compute's current architecture is not democratic. It will not produce democracy. It will put more and more power in the grasp of a handful of corporations, whose only ethos is infinite greed and a limitless lust for power on a finite planet.
Below, Eastern Kentucky's Dr. Collier offers a great example of this growing idiocy, our Tech Lord's "malicious optimism"– (five stars for Angela). I highly recommend watching with Ted Turner’s speech.