And I hate spoilers.
It’s been a weird movie month
I quite enjoyed Only Lovers Left Alive, a cozy little vampire movie starring Tom Hiddleston and Tilda Swinton. Surprisingly scientific. And I found it hilarious that the vampires think we’re the villains. They blame us for screwing up the ecosystem.
And then last week I saw this.
Now, everyone knows that Margot Robbie is funny, but Christian Bale rarely does comedy. I can’t really think of one after American Psycho.
I’m not a movie reviewer, but I’d happily discuss either below.
Coincidentally, that same week I got into a discussion on a thread at the Lunar Awards about how sci-fi uses science. Usually, it’s just name-dropping for the coolness factor, like when Tom Hiddleston’s character in OLLA has a power outage in his off-grid lair and has to go outside to fix Tesla’s atmospheric electricity extractor (oooo, Tesla). I spent four years trying to engage SF writers with some real science and history in a column we called PlotBot at The Intergalactic Medicine Show, before that online magazine folded its fictional tents in 2019.
Why is that a coincidence and not a nom sequitur? Because one of those columns (Feb 2019) mentioned Smedley Darlington Butler, the most decorated Marine in American history, who inspired Robert DeNiro’s character in Amsterdam. There’s also a pulptastic graphic novel, by David Talbot and Spain Rodriguez, which tells the story of how General Butler was approached by a shadowy cabal of “businessmen” to lead an army of hobo veterans to Washington in hopes of intimidating FDR out of office.
The movie Amsterdam puts a layer of Hollywood gloss over the story, including not one but two love stories. There’s also some pedantic voiceovers, just in case the audience has missed some element of the plot.
I assume my readers are bright, curious, and engaged people. I sprinkle links liberally throughout all my online writing. I figure when somebody else said something well — perhaps better than I could — why not take advantage of that? Spread the love? My first blog, for the VSI podcast, originally at Podbean, had Google Analytics enabled (which was overwhelming in its level of detail), but since then I’ve never tracked how many of those links people looked at. I didn’t really care, since I wasn’t trying to optimize ad revenue.
Here at Substack (which reports those stats automatically for every post), the answer appears to be none, or occasionally one. Only one time since May has the same reader clicked more than one link in a single issue of the newsletter. I don’t report this to be a creepy surveillance capitalist, but out of curiosity. I expect students to skim the readings, if they look at them at all. With them, less is definitely more. And perhaps free subscribers are similarly just looking for that one most interesting thing, the one they can use to get a laugh at their next cocktail party.
Well, have I got a factoid for you.
Continuing the ‘Rich People Suck’ Theme
According to a paper published in the journal PLOS Climate, 40% of US climate emissions come from the top 10% of household incomes. In other words, income inequality is also emissions inequality. We already knew that at the country level, but this brings it down to the level of individual households.
The trick here is that “household” doesn’t just mean the McMansion, the second McMansion, the HumVee, and the yacht. It includes all the income-generating investments in fossil fuels and other emissions-generating industries. How they came to that conclusion is pretty technical, but it involved gathering data on the supply chains of industry sectors and sorting out their emissions.
The upside of their argument is that rich people are a leverage point. If we, the little people, can convince them to divest themselves of fossil fuels, the way college students pressured their universities to do, that will have a large impact. From their conclusion:
A consumer-facing approach assumes individual consumers have the knowledge, financial resources, and agency to shift spending and the power to alter corporate decision making on the GHG intensity of their supply chain and operations.
which is pretty obviously untrue at the individual level. In groups, working together, maybe a different story . . .
An alternative income or shareholder facing carbon tax puts pressure on executives and large shareholders (i.e. those with the most economic and corporate power) to act in their own self-interest and decarbonize their supply chain and operations in order to reduce taxes on their compensation and investments. Recent work has calculated that a climate inspired wealth tax could indeed be an effective tool to raise revenue for adaptation and mitigation efforts.
Of course,
any such proposals would likely face significant pushback from the economically advantaged households who dominate policymaking.
which just so happens to be the subject of a story I’m currently working on, sort of a sequel to the one I wrote this summer for an upcoming British anthology on the future of learning.
I’ll let you know when that anthology comes out.
Calculations Are Not Experiments
So sure, carbon taxes on the rich would be effective, it we could get them passed.
But there’s another, more direct way, mentioned in Episode 4 of the currently streaming PBS series Hacking Your Mind, titled “The Wings of Angels.”
During college we regularly mocked the concept in poetic form,
Peer pressure, peer pressure —
Do it or you’re not cool!
but the science is solid.
The guy describing the door-tag experiment in the video clip is Robert Cialdini, who named the concept “social proof.” It’s just one of many examples of how our decision-making is influenced by those we consider our peers. Mythologically, Americans hate authority (supposedly we’re all rebels at heart). After a hundred years of artists banging on authority, it seems that our morality has in fact shifted on that issue, at least in terms of how we write about it (which, if you watch the PBS series, you will realize may have little relation to our actual behavior).
(We’re also writing much more about climate in general, by the way.)
Much of the series is about how businesses and politicians routinely use mind hacking tricks to get the populace to go along with their policies. But there are more of us than there are of them, so theoretically there should be a practical way to reverse that flow of moral authority.
And just so you know, I’m going to keep over-using links, because I am a nerd and it makes me happy.
For instance, Brian Klaas has an excellent new post here on Why the Russian Coup Failed, written in June but which I just found this morning on Notes. It does not rely on Hollywood plot logic (plucky eccentric friend group always wins) but on hundreds of interviews and a lot of structural historical thinking.
Coup plotters usually fly blind. And that means that every important decision, once the coup is in motion, is made with deeply flawed information, as though you’re trying to drive down a highway with snow covering your windshield, just hoping for the best. Sometimes, it works out. But most of the time, you crash and burn.
And for no other reason than sheer perversity, here’s one more link, to The Sample, an AI newsletter recommendation service.
Thanks for reading!
I love links, as well. ♥️