TRANSCRIPT: ANTONIO LÓPEZ on the Colonization of Our Attention /261
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Hello and welcome to For The Wild Podcast, I’m Ayana Young. Today I’m speaking with Antonio López.
Antonio López A democratic society really cannot survive information monopolies, you have to have diversity of opinions and diversities of worldviews.
Ayana Young Dr. Antonio López is a leading international expert bridging ecojustice with media literacy. He is a founding theorist and architect of ecomedia literacy. As a producer of dozens of youth media projects, Antonio has collaborated with the MacArthur Foundation, National Center for the Preservation of Democracy, National Rural Health Organization, and numerous First Nations across North America. He received professional training at the Center for Investigative Reporting in San Francisco, earned his BA in Peace and Conflict Studies at UC Berkeley and MA in Media Studies at the New School for Social Research. He earned a Ph.D. in Sustainability Education from Prescott College. He has written numerous academic articles, essays and four books: Mediacology: A Multicultural Approach to Media Literacy in the 21st Century, The Media Ecosystem: What Ecology Can Teach Us About Responsible Media Practice, Greening Media Education: Bridging Media Literacy with Green Cultural Citizenship, and Ecomedia Literacy: Integrating Ecology into Media Education. He is currently Chair and Associate Professor of Communications and Media Studies at John Cabot University in Rome, Italy.
Well, Antonio, thank you so much for spending time with us on For The Wild. I'm really looking forward to this conversation.
Antonio López I'm so pleased to be here. It's an honor for me. I'm a big fan of the podcast, and I'm just really honored to be on with you.
Ayana Young Thank you so much for sharing that. Well, to begin our conversation, I wonder if you could introduce the term ecomedia as it relates to our collective footprint and “mindprint.” I think our listeners will be more familiar with the environmental impacts of physical technology like cellphones and laptops, but less so with the connections between mediamaking and resource extraction. Can you elaborate on how ICT (Information and Communications Technology), and digital information, in particular, has transformed Earth?
Antonio López I'd like to start with a little context, because I think one of the problems that I've encountered over the years is that people don't associate media with the environment and I think there's some historical reasons for that. Part of it is the legacy of modernity, which views ideas and thoughts as separate from the body and I think there's a cultural tendency to think of media as somehow in the realm of thoughts and ideas, that they don't have a physicality. So the term eco media is a way of reframing how we think about media and to put it into an environmental context.
The term is something that has emerged out of some different academic fields, but over the past 10 years, there's been a coalescence around this concept of Ecomedia Studies and there's other areas of inquiry related to that, like Ecocinema Studies, Environmental Communications, and so on. So the concept of eco media encompasses two areas or two spheres. One is the environmental impact of our gadgets and the infrastructure of ICT and then the other aspect is the ecological mindprint, which I think we'll get into later. So just to start with the infrastructure, the environmental impacts of all of our gadgets and devices occur in many different stages of the production chain. You can start with the production of computer chips, which require massive amounts of energy and water. In fact, in Taiwan, which is one of the places where a lot of microchips are made, you may have heard that there's a shortage these days. There has been a drought and the government has had to make decisions about whether or not they should use water for agriculture or for chips. Thankfully, they're using it for agriculture, but that has led to a shortage and chip production.
So that's one aspect of it and then we also have to think about the media is maybe one way, one term that some theorists argue, that is, media is really an infrastructure. And for us to access our data or our entertainment, to make 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, antenna, cables, the internet is a bunch of cables, it's running all over the Earth, through the sea across the earth, I mean, it's also relays through satellites. And it's just a massive physical infrastructure, pipes, and so forth. 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. So 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, in 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. So racism is part of the way that the system is structured. So we have the extraction of conflict minerals in Central Africa for our devices and then those have to be transported in processed to countries where our gadgets are assembled, it could be in China or Mexico or Philippines, TVs and phones are made in different places and once they're manufactured, they have to be shipped all over the world. That also has a big environmental impact.
As most people know, our devices don't last forever. So at some point, when our devices are no longer working or useful, they have to be thrown away, recycled. 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 very incredibly toxic conditions to extract whatever precious metals are still there in the circuit boards, over old computers or phones. So 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. It's not invisible. It's not just floating around. Data is actually physical information that has a weight to it. Information exists on computers, and the server farms that we use to store process the information that we need to access for whether it's social media, streaming media, or whatever data that we need on our phones. Those are vast. Those computers exist in buildings and thousands and hundreds of them connected through a vast infrastructure around the Earth, and they require massive amounts of energy and mostly they're powered by fossil fuels. In fact, the data cloud produces as much CO2 as the aviation industry and it's predicted that it will increase or even double in the next twenty or thirty years.
Ayana Young I think about this a lot, especially even with this podcast and with using technology for “good” or using technology for some type of climate justice and the nuanced and contradictions within that is really important. and also challenging to metabolize and I'm so grateful that you brought up the server firms because, yeah, I mean, the terminology of cloud, it does almost represent this vapor idea that it's just this weightless information stored in this in the sky, and it's not in the sky at all. So I'm just moved and challenged and grateful to be speaking to these truths, because technology is a part of so many of our lives at this point. And it's a part of a lot of our, our activist lives and I'd be remiss to not consider these things while doing this work.
I would like to ask you a bit about the minerals and raw materials required for our technology as well, specifically their toxicity at all stages of extraction, production, and distribution, as well as the social and ecological impacts due to some of these minerals being “conflict minerals.” Can you speak to the most common elements that are essential for upholding the global ICT infrastructure?
Antonio López Yeah, so part of the problem of trying to do this kind of analysis and to be aware of the type of chemicals and minerals, etc. that are going into our gadgets, is that in some ways, you have to be like a chemist to understand it and thankfully, there are activists and organizations out there that are monitoring and keeping track of some of these things, because it's not actually easy to understand. In fact, I'll get to the minerals in a minute, but, you know, a lot of us don't know, or understand what the impact of our wireless devices are on us physicality, the, for example, the impact of electromagnetic frequencies. If you don't know whether or not EMFs cause cancer, well, there's a reason for that. And that's because just like, as in the case of the tobacco industry, the chemical industry in the fossil fuel industry, the industries that are promoting cell phone connectivity, have deliberately confused our understanding of the physical impacts of these devices on our bodies. So it's very hard for us to know. I challenge anyone to open up their phone or read the manual for the phone and try to figure it out, because they do deliberately make it very difficult to understand.
So with that said, though, I would like to talk a little bit about your question, or to respond to a question about the conflict minerals. So the primary minerals are mined, in particular, in regions, such as Central Africa, they're called rare Earth metals, and they're called rare Earth metals, because they're rare and they're not available in many places around the world. So because they're only available in particular places, the mining of these minerals can produce a lot of conflict, because the control of these mines, of course, is important for economic and political power. And I'm sure a lot of people have heard about conflict diamonds, which was popularized in some films and talked about in the media for several years. So the primary conflict minerals are tin, and tin used to solder chips and wires, tungsten which is what helps our phones vibrate, tantalum, which stores electricity and charges our phones, and then gold, which coats the wires. And then I want to add to that, another very important mineral, which increasingly is going to become in high demand is lithium because lithium is the primary ingredient of batteries, for our new electric cars, for solar power, storage, and also for the batteries of our devices. And even though lithium is more available, and more accessible in many parts of the world, in some of the areas where lithium is mined, they also generate a lot of political turmoil and conflict such as in Bolivia and Chile, which I think listeners of your podcast will be familiar with. Again, I want to put that in the context of the extractive or the extraction economy, which is we have to name it what it is. It's a neocolonial economic system and it's a continuation of the colonial system that was developed in the 18th century, it's just a continuation of that process. So these are foreign powers that are extracting the local resources to export them out for the global economy.
So those minerals are the most important ones, the primary ones, but you know if you read a bit of the literature, you'll find that, you know, in the 1960s, most products that were manufactured had at the most, 40 elements, but these days, because of chemistry, and because of advancements of engineering, and so forth, you know, there's hundreds of elements that are used to make devices. And you know, some of these, we don't even know, what happens once they reenter the environment. Because, you know, once we extract these and put them into our gadgets, of course, our phones typically have three main ingredients: metals, glass, and plastic, and plastic is a petrochemical product. You 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, in the case of e-waste recycling, you know, you, you should see images of people or videos of people doing this, there's standing over open fires, and they're just melting down these circuit boards, and this is Black fumes coming off, and they're not wearing any kind of protective gear, they're breathing all these fumes, just to melt down for a few precious metals. And these chemicals also re enter into the water supply. Again, I'm not a chemist, so I don't have a menu of ingredients to tell you everything that's been re-entering into the system. But I can assure you that in places where these are manufactured and disposed of, they are causing huge damage to watersheds and to local health.
Ayana Young There's so much food for thought in your responses. I’d now like to transition to discussing an often neglected facet of this topic which is thinking about the total carbon footprint of the Internet of Things. In Ecomedia Literacy you share “By 2030, the global cloud may consume as much electricity as the entire country of Japan. Whereas in 2007 the carbon footprint of ICTs was 1%, by 2040 it will be 14%—half the size of the entire transportation industry. As the Internet of Things comes online, the problem will only be compounded. Cisco anticipates that we will have as many as 28.5 billion networked devices online by 2022. Consider the potential energy of the gadgets and cloud infrastructure needed to keep everything connected and running.” Can you share with us the scale of our carbon footprint when it comes to the Internet of Things and how you are thinking about this in context to our general preferences in terms of needing some form of content streaming continuously in the background of our lives, whether that’s through platforms like Spotify, Netflix, Youtube, etc.?
Antonio López Yeah, so this is an interesting problem. And, since I wrote this, I've learned new things, which complicate this even more. So people are not really talking about the Internet of things so much anymore, although it's definitely becoming a part of our lives in a way that is very subtle and quiet, we're not even aware of it. And for those who don't know what the internet of things is, it's just that more and more products that we buy will have connectivity. And you may have noticed if you've gone to the store to buy a toothbrush, it's now a Bluetooth toothbrush or you know, refrigerators are connected to the internet, you know, all these kinds of things. Which, by the way, is a security nightmare, but I won't get into that. Because you can hack someone's toothbrush to get into a network, that could be a real nightmare for you. That actually sounds like a scene out of farcical science fiction written by Philip K. Dick.
So again, it's just that the scale of the vast number of devices that are being made, and of course, everything that's made is going to get thrown away. So you have to think of this also in terms of waste, and all this requires power. So I've been reading different studies, and it's not really clear what the direction is, I mean, of course, the direction is always going to be the curve going up to consume more, but in fact, where the curve is slowing down a little bit, because the machines are getting more efficient, so they consume less power. So that's a good thing. But on the other hand, you know, everyone has found out that refrigerators are more efficient, so it’s “Oh I have a more efficient refrigerator, I’ll just get a bigger one.” So it ends up consuming the same amount of power, or TVs are more efficient, but people are just getting bigger TVs. So that's one of the one problems. But a lot of companies are aware of this problem, Google, Facebook, Apple, and they are making efforts to transition to clean energy. So that's a good thing. However, that transition is still within the extractive economy. So even going into green energy and clean energy, which will be powering a lot of the servers of the future, they're still extracting resources to build those, build those technologies for the clean energy to build the windmills, to build the solar panels to get the lithium for the batteries. So even though I'm encouraged by the efforts of some of these big tech companies, to transition more to clean energy, I don't necessarily feel optimistic about a change in the way that the global economy is structured, it's still within that system of exploitation.
But one of the things going back to this research that is becoming maybe more alarming to me, that I had not known about when I first wrote this book last year, is the impact of blockchain and Bitcoin and artificial intelligence. Because all of these processes require vast amounts of power. So people may not realize that when Google or Apple or Amazon are training their software to do voice recognition or facial recognition, they have to run computers like, like warehouses full of computers, hundreds of computers, for days, 24 hours, you know, months to process all this data and information, to just do voice recognition. So all the hype around AI is I find even probably more disturbing or problematic than some of the other sort of hyped up technologies that have been promoted in the past, like the Internet of Things like now I'm thinking that AI is going to be incredibly impactful, it is incredibly impactful.
Then Bitcoin, which is another sort of revelation, the value of Bitcoin, strangely enough, is based on actually how much carbon they can burn because that's what makes it rare. That's what makes it material that's like, that's the gold of the currency, is the actual burning of energy, because the burning of energy, there's a cost. And so when people set up Bitcoin farms, people build these big factories full of servers to do these complicated mathematical processes, which create the value for Bitcoin. They go around the world where energy is cheapest. And in the case of Texas, recently, a lot of these companies, Texas, have been promoting the fact that they have cheap energy, and they're advertising themselves as a place to start Bitcoin factories. So a lot of Bitcoin farmers, I'm not sure the exact technical term ,farmer seems like a kind of ironic name, but setting up the server farms in Texas, Texas is saying, “Hey, we've got cheap energy.” And what makes it cheap is because it's fossil fuels, that's what they're burning, and that's what generates the value for Bitcoin. So also online gaming, and you mentioned streaming, streaming also has a pretty big carbon footprint. Again, I think some of these companies are trying to address this. I don't know if it will be enough, but 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 further services. So there is some positive movement, but probably not enough at this point.
Ayana Young Oh, 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-
Antonio López Yeah, and Bitcoin actually consumes, like, if you take Bitcoin as a whole, I don't have the exact statistic in front of you. But apparently, it consumes as much energy as some small countries.
Ayana Young Gosh, yeah, just thinking about all the resource extraction that goes into this is one thing, but thinking about the nature of continuous streaming, and the reality that so many of us have become dependent on constant and multiple forms of stimulation. So I’d like to ask you about desensitization in media. What have you learned about ecomedia in terms of sensory stimulation and the trajectory of the past couple of decades wherein different media outlets are constantly seeking to monopolize our attention?
Antonio López Yeah, thank you for asking that because this is a really important story that people were not really familiar with. And so let me start by saying that part of my opening statement was that people don't normally associate media with the environment. Well, another way to rethink media and to understand media in a new way, is to recognize that media start as a nerve stimulus. Just think about the information that our mind or our cognitive processes are engaging with, whether it's light or sound, these things are physical, you know, sound is touching our eardrums. And sometimes I like to joke with my students that as I'm talking to you, I'm actually touching you, because my voice is my sound waves moving through the air and actually stimulating your eardrums. And then likewise, the light that's bouncing off me stimulating the sensors in our eyes, and so all media starts off as nerve stimulation and over time, as we've become more inundated with media, that also means that our nerves have become more stimulated and more inundated.
An interesting exercise you could do is if you look at artwork from medieval Europe, you'll notice that the images are very dense, there's a lot of going on, there might be some writing, there's a lot of details and a lot of different things. And you have to spend a lot of time with it. You have to look at it for a while to see what's there. You have to, you have to read it. And you compare the experience of looking at, like medieval art or Tibetan sand mandalas or something like that to Instagram where you know, with your finger scrolling through the screen, touch, touch, touch, touch, and you know, we look at it for just a second. The trajectory from that sort of slow seeing, slow media as some people talk about, to the present moment has happened primarily in the 20th century with the advent of mass media, where increasingly as we created new reproduction technologies, whether it's recorded music, photography, film, then radio, then TV, and now of course, the internet. Every time we introduce these to our environment, our physical bodies get more stimulated.
So one exercise I like to do is show students, the first James Bond trailer of Dr. Know from like, 1962, which is about three minutes, which is fairly long, and have them watch that and then compare it with a trailer for the most recent James Bond movie, and to compare the experience of watching the first one, with the most recent, and, you know, a lot of the comments would be that the watching the Dr. Know trailer, you know, 1962 is not that long ago. They find it torturous, you know, the fight is so slow and almost painful. Whereas if you watch a more recent James Bond trailer, you'll notice there's like an edit every half a second, and it's loud, and it's fast, and it's flashing and moving so quickly. And how do we arrive at that point? Well, this idea, this concept of the creeping of desensitization, has to do with the fact that our media economy is based on attention, you know, what you pay attention to is what makes money. And there's so much competition for attention, that certain levels of nerve stimulus that we become accustomed to, and it becomes normal. And then in order for a new media product to stand out, from what is normal, it has to be more of something, it can be more violent, it could be louder, it can be faster, whatever. And that's why you start to see, basically, since the advent of film, increasingly film edits are speeding up, although, you know, I think for probably the first 30-40 years of film, they didn't speed up so much. But if you go back to the 1960s to the present, there is this increasing acceleration. So, you know, every five, six years, something has to come along, to stand out and to be the new thing to rise above what has become normal, and then that becomes normal.
So that's why, you know, artists and filmmakers, and I'm focusing mostly on film, but we could apply this to advertising and TV as well. The levels of stimulation that we're accustomed to, become normal, and we don't even pay attention to it. So this is why a lot of people now, you know, decry what the internet has done to our brains, because we're so accustomed to moving quickly and to scanning things. And to, you know, there's also been studies that show that our phones and in the screens of computers are changing the way that we process information, the way that we look at things. For example, people have a hard time focusing on the eyes, when you talk to somebody, I noticed this, like I have a hard time focusing because my eyes are becoming more accustomed to looking at screens. And it's really hard to adjust. So this issue of this increasing nerve stimulation, I think, is a direct byproduct of the political economy of media, which is based on advertising and based on attention. And the thing I would like to point out is that it doesn't have to be this way because media does not have to be for profit and doesn't have to be based on advertising. This 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. So that model funding is what became the primary model for all mass media and it's also the model for social media and you know, the current political economy of platform and surveillance capitalism. What we are experiencing now is not necessarily new.
So being aware of this problem then helps us recognize and understand that if we want to change this, and we want to address this problem, one thing we have to address is the funding model for media. So I think anyone who's concerned about this problem, I think we all should be, we also have to put our money where our mouth is, we need to support alternative media, we need to support nonprofit media, we need to and then also advocate for government regulation, to break up media monopolies, which drive this attention economy and to, to change the business model. You know, there's some people are advocating in the case of like, companies like Facebook and Google, that they get treated like utilities, like a public utility, which takes the profit motive out, and therefore would change the way that they're structured and change the kind of algorithms that they use, you know, another byproduct of this creepy cycle desensitization is the emergence of the rage economy, because the way Facebook or YouTube make money is through, I put engagement in quotes, but you know, by enraging people by getting people angry and upset, that's what drives their attention, and keeps their attention on those platforms. And so if we, if this is disturbing to people, and they want to change that, then we have to change the business model, it might be a little bit harder to change the business model of the big companies without government intervention, in fact, it would, does require government intervention. And it does seem like there's a movement of late to reform, Facebook. But I don't know the genies out of the bottle, I think that we have to really just go back to the drawing board. And rediscover and this is related to the movement of slow media, which is that people are like moving slow food, you know, to not buy prepackaged or fast food, but to cook slow meals, and to bring community back to eating and producing food. Likewise, we do that with media, and have slow media, like radio for example, community radio, making zines, some people advocate for a return to certain forms of analog media, like, I don't know, if people remember what it's like to play a record, you know, to put on the turntable, once you've read the record, cover it just sit with an album and listen to it for what it is instead of just being some kind of algorithm generated playlist that the streaming service is producing for us, but actually have to listen to something with intention, or to go to a movie theater and watch a slow movie, you know, and be with it, even though it might feel painful and difficult, because we've become so accustomed to, to speed it up. And you know, I think that there are artists that are aware of this, and it's actually even big mainstream movies.
For example, I saw Dune recently, which has elements of a sort of slow film, a slow experience of just absorbing what's going on, and not being overwhelmed by technology and explosions and special effects, although it does definitely have those elements. But yeah, so we have to retrain our senses. And, of course, this could be also addressed through certain forms of mindfulness, and, you know, meditation, being outdoors, going outside, and it takes work, you know, if you have kids, and the kids are really accustomed to the presence of gadgets. It becomes an addiction because you get this, like a dopamine rush from. I'm sure you're aware of this, that these phones are developed, they're designed like slot machines. I mean, you think, you know, you drag your finger down from the top to refresh the screen. That's, 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. And they're calibrated to give you just the right amount of stimulation of likes and feedback so that you keep coming back when you want some kind of affirmation or some kind of little sugar rush that you get when someone likes something, and it's designed that way.
So another thing that people can do if this bothers them, is you know, there's all kinds of apps now, ironically, there's an app for everything. There's an app for mindfulness, I mean, there's certain tricks you can do. You can turn off your notifications, you can delete apps from your phone. You can dumb your phone. I noticed, for example, there's kind of a trend with some young people to just have clamshell phones that have, all they do is make phone calls and do text messages. So there are some like, I think, with some younger generations, an awareness of this and a desire to get back to basics. There's also been the return of cassette tapes, which I think is funny. But I think cassette tapes also have a big environmental impact. So I don't know if that's any better.
Ayana Young Goodness, there is so much in that response. And I'm, I'm just organizing everything that you just shared in my mind and I do want to go back a moment to Google Apple, Facebook, Amazon. Gosh, I don't even know what to call them. But you write “The four biggest tech companies in the world—Google, Apple, Facebook, and Amazon —are often excluded from what people imagine as media. Consider that Alphabet (owner of Google and YouTube) earns twice as much as Disney, and that Google and Facebook account for 85% of all online ads—a quarter of all worldwide media spending. We also have to add to the mix Microsoft, IBM, Netflix, and providers like the telecom giant AT&T and cable service Comcast in the United States, who are now the owners and distributors of media content.” And, the term mainstream media is thrown around very freely, but I wonder if you could share with us the connections between these big tech companies, their stake in media content, and platform capitalism?
Antonio López Yeah, so you're right, I think people misunderstand what they mean or they mistake what they mean by the media. It also could be generational, I think, people who grew up in the era of, of traditional, or what we now call legacy broadcast media. We had a couple TV networks and a few radio networks and two newspapers and a couple of magazines. Certainly, the media landscape has transformed into much more integrated, high tech conglomeration. Some of these companies resemble the, you know, there's the two different traditional types of monopolies, we have horizontal monopolies where you own everything within that particular service, or a vertical monopoly where you own everything from production to distribution and the media companies these days have a little bit of both. What is happening is that, again, this is within the larger trends of global capitalism, which is that all industries are conglomerating. So whether you're talking about agribusiness or pharmaceuticals, or oil and gas production, or media, they're all tending towards these sort of large monopologies, and there's a certain logic to that, which is, if I'm speaking here, in the case of of media, corporate media in particular, basically, either you absorb the competition, or they do it to you. So it's very much a dog eat dog world. So the trend is continued expansion and monopolization, but what has changed a little bit over the past 20 or 30 years is, it may be that certain newspaper companies would conglomerate but they would just remain within the newspaper industry, or within radio, the radio conglomerates would expand. For example, you would have national companies that would buy up local radio stations, where you'd have national TV stations by local TV networks or TV stations. But what's happening now is that they're all becoming much more integrated. So that a company like AT&T or Comcast, which are the distributors of the internet, of the content, are also buying the content companies or someone like Apple which traditionally made devices now you know, they have iTunes and they distribute music and they have Apple TV because they're getting into the content business. So it's very hard to distinguish between, you know, what is it? What are they doing? What do they make? And this is very dangerous, of course, because a democratic society really cannot survive information monopolies, you have to have diversity of opinions and diversities of worldviews. And so, you know, there's different arguments that people make about the benefit, or the dangers of monopoly, the benefit, people would argue is that you get better service, and it's more uniform, or more powerful than the US government. I mean if they decided to, they could just block out any information that they don't want you to see, they could cancel politicians, I mean, they could do whatever they want. They're playing, there's a very fine line between playing the game of democracy and subverting it. So but then, Time Warner and Disney, the problem with those companies conglomerating is that they limit the worldviews that are available to people.
So this can be impactful, whether it's the news, or the kind of media that people are exposed to. I'll just give an example. And this is kind of an old example. But going back to after 911, when there was the build up to invade Iraq, and in the invasion of Afghanistan, it started. I don't recall ever hearing one single Afghan interviewed in corporate media, the only people that got interviewed were generals. And it wasn't an interview on whether or not we should go to war, but how do we execute the war? And these industries are so intertwined, that it's really hard to tell the difference between the board members and the shareholders of the media companies in the agribusiness and the pharmaceuticals. And actually, this is probably the most disturbing trend that people need to pay attention to. What emerged out of modernity was kind of like this is monocultural mentality, or what Vandana Shiva calls the monoculture of the mind. And so, monoculture agriculture is not much different than monoculture culture industry, you know, like the culture industry, which is a term coined by the Frankfurt School, the German Marxist in the 1930s, and 40s, who are studying mass media and fascism, talked about the tendency of capitalism to standardize culture, to turn it into a product to make it package bubble, sellable. And to sort of reduce everything to like a formula. So naturally, this business mentality is applied to both culture, food, science, and medicine, you know, it crosses all industries.
So there's kind of an interesting convergence that's happening between companies that have data, their currency data, like Facebook, data of people and personal habits and behaviors, etc. and to integrate that data with agribusiness in the chemical business. So it's kind of in the background, there's these companies that are being formulated to sort of leverage these relationships of technology and data. And Bill Gates and Microsoft are, in particular, very much into this. So this is something to keep an eye out for.
Another thing that Vandana Shiva talked about is that, you know, after fiscal space has been colonized, now they have to colonize internal space. So a lot of the critics who've talked about surveillance capitalism also talk about surveillance capitalism is also a kind of colonialism. And what they're colonizing is our attention. So we have to fracture it into more and more smaller pieces, because our attention is actually limited. It's a limited resource. We can only focus on so many things during the day. And if you fracture that even more, that's how you create value. So the behaviors of all these companies are essentially the same. They just take different forms. Going back to the theme that I think I've been talking about throughout our conversation, it goes back to the economic model of extraction, of neocolonialism, and also disposable people.
Ayana Young Something you had mentioned a few questions ago was, and now I'm forgetting the terminology but something about rage or rage economy? Yeah, there's so many different segments of the economy now it's really hard to keep track of but you mentioned wanting to discuss the relationship between fake news, climate denial and white nationalism, specifically using the term petro masculinity. So I would just love it if you could take us into this wormhole and share how the fossil fuel industry has wrought havoc on our media in an attempt to sever themselves from accountability.
Antonio López Great question, and this is one of my favorite topics. I mean, when I say favorite, of course, I don't mean it in the sense of it makes me happy. But it's something that interests me greatly. There's a term I coined, which is fake climate news and the reason I did that is we didn't talk too much about the kind of work I do, but I'm primarily a media educator, that's my background, and the field of study that I come out of originally is called media literacy. And people have probably heard a lot about media literacy in previous years, because with the advent of fake news, especially after the 2016 election, and the concerns about disinformation and misinformation and people being manipulated in social media, fake news became like a media literacy moment. But in the way that that term has been leveraged and utilized actually has been touched on in a way that benefits the technology companies, I'm going to get to the point about petro masculinity in a minute, but I'm going to arrive in a sort of a roundabout way.
So one of the trends in media literacy is this idea of responsible isolation. This is a term that comes out of neoliberalism and responsible ideation is this idea that whatever problems exist in the world, it's the individuals who have to solve them. It's so if we have this problem of fake news and disinformation, misinformation is not the responsibility of the companies, but it's the responsibility of the consumer, it's the responsibility of the user, or the audience, to discern what is fake or real, or it's the responsibility the education system to fix it. But it's not the responsibility of companies. And this is part of the larger trend of neoliberal capitalism, which is to increasingly externalize whatever problems they create, to the public, to the government, but also to individuals and this is also related to the idea of the ecological footprint calculator was developed by British Petroleum because they wanted to take responsibility away from what they're doing to the environment, and put it on the individual. So this is all by way of talking about the way that fake news has been discussed as a social and health and a cultural problem is to blame individuals for that.
Now, having described the set up this problem of fake news, I want to add the climate twist to it, which is that the fossil fuel industry historically, actually, a lot of people believe that the fossil fuel industry copied the playbook of the tobacco industry, which is to confuse and to delay the public's perception of the health dangers in order to prevent the government from regulating their industries. The chemical industries in the U.S. and tobacco industries perfected this in the 60s and 70s so that the more that confused the public about the issue, the less they're able to act on the issues. But actually, they learned all these originally from the fossil fuel industry, which a lot of people don't realize. The public relations industry actually came out of the fossil fuel industry at the turn of the century. So those techniques that were developed by the fossil fuel industry 120 years ago, were adapted by the chemical industry and adapted by the tobacco industry, but then got repurposed in the past 20-30 years. So what has been happening is that, in order to delay government intervention, to delay the public, from trying to reduce and to transform the fossil fuel use in our society, they've had to find ways to confuse the issue and to and the way they've done that, in particular, is to intervene within a specific area of the society in a culture that could be leveraged, which is the what I would refer to as the right wing media ecosystem. So it's right wing radio, it's all the various different media platforms, social media platforms, that right wingers use, and not surprisingly, the people who are conservative and lean towards sort of this right wing ideology also are closely associated with white nationalism. And white nationalism has ties to the fossil fuel industry, because again, we have to go back to the origins, colonialism is white nationalism. And the fossil fuel industry is an extractive industry that emerges through the colonial mentality, and there's a relationship historically, between white nationalism and the fossil fuel industry. So it was a natural area for them to, I don't know if infiltrate is the right word, but to leverage, because now we get to the term of petro masculinity, because if you listen to the rhetoric of fossil fuel culture, or any kind of sort of Republican or conservative, talking points about jobs and about coal mines and things like that, they're very much closely aligned to this idea of real jobs and that that's code for jobs for men, but not just any men, but white men as well.
If you think about the actual act of extraction, you know, you're drilling into the Earth, there's something that's sort of, if we're Freudian, we can say is almost sexual in a perverted way. And so, there's been a lot of interesting studies that show the relationship between sort of like the the culture of extraction and the culture of fossil fuel production, is also associated with patriarchy is associated with, in particular, white, male, working class groups. You know, I think people are probably familiar with one of the problems where extraction takes place, is that there's a epidemic of missing Native American women and of sexual violence. It's not an accident, because wherever they're extracting, sexual violence follows. So there's a close relationship between that.
So what happens on an ideological level is that in those media spaces, where science denial of climate science is being promoted, it's being promoted in the same breath as the white nationalist ideologies in patriarchy. And what they're finding is that, you know, what people's beliefs are about the environment, when people's beliefs about climate and climate science in particular, it's not whether they believe science or not, it's whether or not it aligns with their ideology. So the conservative ideology closely aligns with climate denial. It's true, it's very tribal. And that also gets exacerbated by the other problems that we talked about with social media, because of these algorithms, these algorithms promote and exacerbate these tendencies because it's within those sort of niche right wing media ecosystem where all that rage is produced. And they're, you know, lots of stories of people getting radicalized because they go on YouTube, and they watch some kind of content that makes them kind of angry and then the, the algorithm picks up on that it makes suggestions like, “Okay, now if that got you engaged, you should watch this.” What they find is that the material that they get exposed to increasingly gets more extreme and so the fossil fuel industry is well aware of this, so they’re very good at manipulating search engines so that when people are searching for things it appears a certain way, but then they deliberately fund, finance, and promote think tanks that produce the sort of the intellectual, if you want to call it that, the the the ideas that are disseminated in that right wing ecosystem. So it all gets kind of mixed up, which is unfortunate.
I think probably everything I've been saying has been pretty depressing. I 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, they're not going to promote it. YouTube and Facebook, said they will do this, but apparently, from more recent studies, I've seen, they haven't done that. But you know, these companies know where this information is coming from, and they are amplifying it, and if they know how to amplify it, you know how to turn it off. So there are solutions. But, you know, you're going up against a very well financed industry that really created public relations, it's the dark arts, they produced it, and it's so deeply infiltrated our society, that they've literally changed our culture, unfortunately.
Ayana Young Have they ever? Yeah. Well, I have this question that has been really alive for me, especially over the last year and it does seem that climate change coverage is now featured in mainstream media much more often these days, however, I think we could agree that the type of coverage is still significantly lacking. And I feel similarly about this sort of phenomenon that is happening via social media where climate change content is really being capitalized upon because it is trendy and can be used to accrue social and sometimes even financial capital. In Ecomedia Literacy you share: “The majority of environmental discourses are ambivalent because, depending on their use, they can promote an assortment of politics that range from anthropocentric to ecocentric, but they mostly support the mainstream (remember that conservationism and preservationism are considered part of the status quo). Though in some cases the aim of a discourse is to critique environmentally destructive practices, it might also be used to promote reform-oriented policies, such as conservationism, or greenwash a company’s environmental practices that are ultimately anthropocentric.” And I wonder if this is something that has come up for you in terms of how topics enter the mainstream media and how we can strive to contribute to ecomedia systems that don’t seek to dilute and profit off of these topics, but instead actually create change at the scale that it is so desperately needed?
Antonio López The title of the book is Ecomedia Literacy and my aim was to teach people the skills to be able to critically engage these kinds of discourses. So that particular passage that you read, brings to mind an example that I like to teach with, which is Chipotle, that fast food burrito chain that puts itself to the public as sort of environmentally friendly and healthy, which probably compared to McDonald's, it’s probably a little bit better than that, but they’ve put together some very clever ads. I don't know if people saw those that were online, they were like short animations and they sort of represent themselves as sort of aligning with the small farmer and they used these kinds of discourses that they're critiquing industrial agriculture. And so they sort of create this contrast of like, we are the family farm friend corporation, we aren’t one of those guys, the big evil agribusiness companies that give chemicals to their animals and all that stuff. And it may be true that Chipotle is a bit better than a normal company, but it’s a kind of greenwashing that I think hides the fact that no matter how good a company like Chipotle wants to be, they're still a fast food company. And it’s kind of similar to the problem I was talking about like, yeah we can transition to clean energy but if it’s still an extractive economy, we’re not actually changing anything. So what is going on here is what we have all these discourses, because everyone wants to appear like they’re doing something good for the environment. But they're not necessarily changing their actual practices. So we have to be really good at identifying this, a term that we're going to be hearing a lot, especially with the upcoming COP talks in Scotland is everyone wants to be net zero, but no one really knows what net zero means. And, you know, just because a company says, they’re net zero doesn't necessarily mean that they're net zero. This is going to be incredibly problematic, you know, everyone's gonna be net zero, but no one's gonna actually be net zero if you get my picture.
So we have to develop the techniques, the skills in order to analyze that, to deconstruct that. And this is very much related to going back to what I was saying earlier about the fake news, panic, you know, everyone realize, “Oh, my God, we're being inundated with all this false and misinformation, we need to teach people how to read this stuff, and how to understand it.” And I definitely value those skills, so I don't want to say that, you know, people shouldn’t learn these things. But if it just comes down to conscious consumerism, we're just still consumers, it's still the same system. And that's not what we need, we need to transform our economies and our societies to something much different. So I think we really have to be alert and on our toes with these green discourses, I think we need to train ourselves on how not only to interpret but also how to communicate in ways that are authentic, and they represent real positive change, you know, and to not be co-opted and not use the certain you know, these kind of rhetoric that corporations are using. And then they just end up absorbing our own critique, which, historically, is usually the pattern. So we want to try to avoid that.
Francesca Glaspell Thank you for listening to For The Wild podcast. The music you heard today was by Justin Crawmer, Sam Sycamore, and Marty O'Reilly and the Old Soul Orchestra. For The Wild is created by Ayana Young, Erica Ekrem, Francesca Glaspell and Julia Jackson.