Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Once you’ve pushed a system to its tipping point, you’ve removed all brakes. No exit. As one 500-page report recently put it, climate tipping points “pose some of the gravest threats faced by humanity.” Crossing one, the report goes on, “will severely damage our planet’s life-support systems and threaten the stability of our societies.” 

— Sandra Upson / “The Hole in the Map of the World” / Wired

Masked now, I bend & bend to the vine:
I bend & salvage what I can.

— Tess Taylor / “Green Tomatoes in Fire Season”

Fascinatingly, Bernays — who invented the ‘public relations’ industry — was the nephew of Sigmund Freud, and he realized that the ideas underlying psychotherapy could be turned into very lucrative retail therapy if he could connect people’s deepest desires to the latest products on sale. In the 1920s he convinced women (on behalf of the American Tobacco Corporation) that cigarettes were their torches of freedom’, while persuading the nation (on behalf of the Beech-Nut Packing Company’s pork department) that bacon and eggs were the ‘hearty’ all-American breakfast. He certainly knew the power of this advertising. ‘We are governed, our minds are molded, our tastes formed, our ideas suggested, largely by men we have never heard of,’ he wrote. ‘It is they who pull the wires which control the public mind.’

— Kate Raworth / “Towards 1.5°C Lifestyles” / The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

I am not the “I”
in my poems. “I”
is the net I try to pull me in with.

— Tori Derricotte / “Speculations about ‘I’”

There is no such thing as shark-infested waters, in the same way that there is no such thing as a child-infested school. You cannot infest your own home. But if we could reorient the sentiment—and direct it, for instance, toward those humans whose vested interests lie in persuading us to acquiesce in the living world’s destruction—we would fare better. Beware an ExxonMobil-infested State Department; beware a fossil-fuel-infested politics. These are dark times, and there are many things to fear. But none of them are found swimming under a vast sky as the waters around us warm and empty.

— Katherine Rundell / “Beware of Sharkless Waters” / The New Yorker

I ate fondue and pretended it was my hand
controlling the blob in lava lamps.

— Alison Pelegrin / “Self-Portrait as 70s Childhood”

The advertising industry rapidly grew and soon embedded consumerism as an aspirational way of life. As the media theorist John Berger put it in his 1972 book, Ways of Seeing, ‘publicity is not merely an assembly of competing messages: it is a language in itself which is always being used to make the same general proposal. it proposes to each of us that we transform ourselves, and our lives, by buying something more.’

— Kate Raworth / “Towards 1.5°C Lifestyles” / The Climate Book: The Facts and the Solutions

What I’m Listening To:

Servile, surveilled
Dumbed down, curtailed
Screengrabbed, downranked
Untagged, debanked
Nothing to hide, nothing to fear
No one to censor, no one to smear
The revolution’s been authorised
The future privatised
The consensus created, reality curated

— The The / “Cognitive Dissident”