THE ONLY ACTIVISM IS ACTIVISM
Why individualism cannot fix what individualism broke.
Growing up, there was this ad on DSTV encouraging kids to save water while brushing, for some reason I remember it word for word.
“Turning the tap off while you brush your teeth saves water. So if you do it, and you get your friends to do it, and they get their friends to do it, we could save a whole lot of water and make some fishes very happy.”
It’s fun, ‘small ways to make a big difference’, it’s environmental, except the math just doesn’t work out. And I believe there are two main reasons why. Firstly, saving water does not increase the amount of water in a meaningful way, and secondly, you aren’t the problem with the water.
Let me explain.
Saving water – unlike shown in the video – does not give back the water to the fishes. You just stop taking it. Humorously, we’re going to ignore the many steps it takes from ocean to tap, after which it can’t really go back, and some of these stages don’t depend on your individual spending of water. We’d just ignore that and imagine that if you spend less water, less water will need to be made available for your spending.
It still doesn’t work. The water that’s already taken from the fishes, is already taken from the fishes. The plastic already in the sea, is already in the sea. The children dying are already dying. I’m not saying we should keep going since it’s already happening, I’m saying we shouldn’t delude ourselves into thinking that simply stopping the process will reverse its effects.
It’s like you ruin your teeth off of candy, but you think “Guess I’ll just eat less candy,” the rot on your teeth still exists and is still spreading. You’re doing great in your refusal to continue creating the problem, but the problem has already been created, now you must do more.
You aren’t the problem with the water.
I picked the perfect time to write this essay, because it’s never been clearer how little the common man contributes to the destruction of the world – especially with a water metaphor – than right now. Data centers for machine learning consume more water than you could possibly save and google insists on feeding my every search as a prompt. So even if I brushed my teeth dry with toothpaste alone, the tiny bit of research I did to understand the use of water for this essay already far exceeded anything I could have saved.
If I went on a bike, and got my friends to go on bikes, and they got their friends to go on bikes, the world would at most take a tiny breath before Taylor Swift takes another jet ride. (Another prompt was entered just to make that joke- a regular google search would have sufficed, how do I turn this off?)
Not to mention that while I’m here wondering if my little google searches will destroy the planet, OpenAI jut recognized McKinsey & co as the top user of ChatGPT honoring them for passing 100 billion tokens.
I just graduated alongside about 1,500 people, if we all used AI for our projects, and passed a thousand tokens each, we’d have 1.5 million tokens passed. If we all asked chat ten thousand questions each, that’d be 1.5 billion tokens. Still more than 60 times less than McKinsey & co. Which dirty part do we want to play to save the planet?
To put that into perspective, because we suck at actually understanding how numbers work, the difference between one billion and one million, is roughly one billion. If you like bathe in the oceans and brush your teeth with chewing sticks, you’re not doing a dent in the work of these empires, they will melt the ice caps, then drink the water levels back down with or without your help.
I’m not saying we shouldn’t do our own part, but again the delusion that your own part is doing anything is the equivalent of furnishing your house with the most beautiful pieces of art, exquisitely comfortable couches and lighting and air conditioning and what not, forgetting that when the world is set ablaze, all of it will burn.
But here’s the thing, all this while I’ve been using ‘doing your part’ wrong, at least not how people who actually care use it. The ad presents doing your part as doing your part. Some self-contained, tiny individual action that will somehow help. Some tiny shake in your everyday life that will hopefully add up to something.
Meanwhile everyone who talks about making these changes presents it as doing your part. As in, putting your hand together – all our hands together – to actually do something. Signing petitions and talking about issues, and standing with the things we believe in. There’s no unpolitical way to live or unpolarized opinion to have.
I think it’s worth clarifying that I’m a bit of a hypocrite in this sense. I’m only patriotic and revolutionary on paper, so maybe I’m not the best person to bring this up.
Regardless, I think it’s a good first step to let go of the delusion that the world will fix itself if we keep on doing exactly what we’re doing, or we keep waiting for someone to do something. It may be a bit scarier to live like this, a bit less comfortable.
Maybe it’s easier to keep on using as much water – till you get distraught when the water stops. Maybe it feels better to use less water – till you get distraught when the water stops. Or maybe there’s a world where the water doesn’t have to stop at all.
