Portfoilio #7

Both Zane Griffin’s presentation and Miriam Posner’s “See No Evil” instilled a real sense of discomfort in me. They both provided an insane amount of insight to the horribly corrupt and often ignored aspects of energy, extraction, and global capitalism. Griffin’s diagram of the “little black box” is applicable to many people’s ways of thinking or rather lack of thinking. We understand so many items at face value, like our smart phones, but give no thought to any of the workings happening behind the scenes. So much suffers at the hands of consumers and capitalist corporations because of the misinformation and secretive nature of things like labor exploitation and environmental depletion.

We are in a uniquely relative situation to these topics at the moment because of the COVID-19 pandemic. Supply and demand has been thrown off balance in every respect, and workers are scrambling to satiate consumers that want to stock up on items that have always been readily available. Even in this crisis, grocery store employees and deliverymen and women are showing up to work every day to make sure that toilet paper is on their shelves and hand sanitizer is being delivered to your doorstep. Despite those efforts, people will still find a way to be upset about a package delivery that takes longer than their usual next-day shipping. Unfortunately, I feel like laborers will be further exploited and the environment will suffer more after the pandemic because of this imbalance in supply and demand. The world wasn’t prepared for this crisis, so how will they prepare themselves for the next global emergency?