On delivery, disaster, and dependency
Hello friends,
I hope February has been treating you kindly.
I’ve been thinking a lot during the pandemic about how some of the services we’ve become dependent on — like Amazon, UberEats, and Instacart — are undermining the communities we live in and hope to return to in the post-pandemic AfterWorld.
Ordering online (and tipping generously!) feels like the responsible thing vis-a-vis the virus, especially as some governments continue their dawdling, doe-eyed, pro-COVID policies amid the various variants of concern.
But online delivery also carries a larger systemic impact seen in shuttered retail, abysmal work conditions, and the cyclonic hoovering of wealth out of our credit cards and communities and into the hands of our oligarchical tech overlords (I, for one, do not welcome our “new gilded age”).
There’s something tragic, disempowering, and perverse in all this — a dependency that promises safety, security, and convenience served on the backs of those afforded less privilege to enjoy the same things, while degrading and diminishing our communities and our souls a little more every day, undermining the very resilience we should be reinforcing.
As we rely on Amazon to get through the pandemic, we may emerge only to find that there is nothing but Amazon left.
In this sense, our terms and conditions with Jeff Bezos, whose extreme wealth seems to have ballooned proportionally as relief cheques and savings accounts have flowed to Amazon HQ, feel much like a Faustian bargain — one of many that we must escape to chart a truly sustainable path and overcome our overlapping crises.
There’s a theme here, echoed in the bad-faith self-delusions of Republican ‘luminaries’, the true embodiment of the meaning-less postmodernist ‘threat’ they contrive to find elsewhere, donning their straightest death-cult clown faces to tell us that up is down, that Texas’ self-inflicted climate catastrophe means we should burn more fossil fuels and take less regulatory action, that truth is an exercise in repetitive shamelessness and authoritarian force.
“Whatever else”, they say, “let us deepen the dependency. Your eyes and ears and body and community may tell you it is death, but don’t believe them. Ours is the righteous path. Destroy the liveable biosphere to pwn the libs. Resilience is for cu*ks.”
“Trump forever”, they feverishly proclaim, until Miami falls into the sea, until ‘decadent’ Hollywood is consumed by perennial firestorms, until infrastructure fails, until there are no more fish for our plates or for the birds or for themselves, until global agricultural capacity is washed and dried away.
“Trump forever”, their ecstatic cry from parched and starving lips, the apocalyptic fantasies of anti-government and religious extremists finally realized as public institutions collapse beneath the weight of planetary crisis.
Is that too grim?
Maybe I’m getting carried away.
(I don’t really think so. I … just thought I should say something).
But we must break these death-dealing dependencies and the manic political grip of those that fetishize them.
I certainly don’t have all the answers, but I do know that part of this is simply attitudinal — a cultural orientation that says “survive today in ways that strengthen tomorrow.”
Look always for those opportunities and create them where they don’t exist.
Distrust deeply the motives of those who claim virtue and authority after getting us into this mess. And demand far, far better from government and business leaders.
Because Building Back Better cannot be made the atomized responsibility of individual consumer-citizens.
I don’t want to have to calculate my ‘resilience footprint’ or some such nonsense.
I don’t want to feel guilty every time I order food.
I want better choices.
I want reciprocity.
I want systemic change.
That’s it for this week, but I’ll leave you with a few easy calls to action:
Check out this climate-friendlier search engine, Ecosia!
To my surprise and delight, it seems that this tree-planting Google alternative is not bullshit. I tend to be cynical, but this episode of How To Save A Planet won me over for now.
Give it a listen for more details or visit Ecosia.org.
Check out these alternatives to Amazon (including an easy browser plug-in) to help keep business diversity alive in your community.
Share this article with a lawyer in your life! I hope you’ll forgive the self-promotion, but I was pretty proud of the piece — “3 Reasons Why Lawyers Should Engage With Climate Change”.
Lawyers have an important role to play in building a more resilient society and confronting climate risks in particular, and my co-author Meredith and I set out the “why” in a way that I hope legal professionals will find compelling.
Thank you so much for reading!
Take care — and I’ll be in touch.
A.