Akinchan
I am yet to meet a person who watched Interstellar and didn’t like it. It is my favorite movie. And the docking scene is my all-time favorite piece of cinema. But over the years with all the numerous re-watchings of Interstellar, there is another scene I have found that hits me deep.
Our protagonist Cooper lives with his family on a planet Earth, but it does not look like the same planet Earth. There is dust everywhere, crops have failed, and the human race struggles for survival. The scene is where Cooper and Donald are sitting on the outside porch and Donald starts talking about what went wrong on Earth and what brought about this downfall.
“When I was a kid, it seemed like they made something new every day. Some gadget or idea, like every day was Christmas. But six billion people, just imagine that. And every last one of them trying to have it all.”
At first, the scene seemed like just another scene showing us about what went wrong. But on careful inspection it also shows us when it went wrong. “6 billion people”; the population of the earth when it went wrong. Earth’s population of six billion was in the late 1990s. The decade I was born in. And the dialogue accurately depicts the world I have grown up in.
As a millennial, I have seen the world change drastically over the past 2 decades. When I was a small child, we had landline telephones, and calls on these were expensive so warranted judicious use. Internet was a luxury that came at low speed and in small packets. Then I saw the rise of mobile phones happen in a decade. Then ushered in the era of high-speed Internet and smartphones. From that dial-up internet to this juncture of omnipresent high-speed internet the world is no more the same place.
Buying things has become a task of just a few touches. Or with Alexa, placing your orders on just a voice command, it is not even a task of a few touches now. Social media which started as a medium of connecting with people has become a medium of influencing people. It is a tool used by some to fan the desires that never existed within us.
Spinning the Web
There is this Instagram page I follow. It gives updates on cool things to buy online. Most of the products marketed on this page are cool gadgets/devices that I didn’t know existed. And most of these devices are something that I didn’t know I require until I see them here.
One day there was this sneaker cleaner being advertised on the page.
https://www.instagram.com/reel/CpxOCCOjuXw/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link
The first voice of my tech-friendly alter ego says to me in my head “What an ingenious device”. The second Apollonian voice of sanity tells me “Wait, what?” A device that generates ozone to clean shoes. And the makers expect me to buy it.
Or take an example of this automatic Pan stirrer.
I did not know I needed an automatic pan stirrer until I saw it. All my life problems have been solved in one fell swoop. I don’t need to do the tedious labor of stirring my Maggi while I am overcooking it. But wait let me order a fitness band first to count the number of steps I walked throughout the day while an automatic pan stirrer was stirring my Maggi.
Who said that only spiders spin the web? We humans have been doing it for the past few decades, creating a complicated world of desires where we cannot even distinguish between needs and wants.
Disaster Inc.
These products are not that big a problem anyway. The problem is the marriage of Capitalism and Corporations. In Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari argues about how corporations are just imagined realities. They don’t really exist except on a piece of paper and in our common imaginations. These corporations have gone berserk because our common imaginations are letting them go berserk.
Each year they will launch a new smartphone or a smartwatch. Just making minor improvements over the last iterations. They will add an extra camera, maybe throw in a few extra GB of RAM, and increase the screen size by half an inch or so. And then brand it as an absolutely new piece of technology without which our life would be incomplete.
But it takes two to tango. Buyers are not buyers anymore. They are fans. Apple fan, Samsung fan, Tesla Fan. So when a new product is launched this fan will throw the old one to replace it. In the midst, nobody wants to be a fan of Earth Inc.
Showing off a new Apple device has become more important than exercising restraint and trying to use an older device a year more. We buy things not because we need them. We buy them because we can and there is a corporation that wants us to exercise our purchasing power.
There are a dozen smartphone companies in the market, each manufacturing their own version of devices they think are better than the others (all with similar parts within). Then they compete with each other in the marketing space to sell us the idea that how their smartphone is the only thing we need.
Here is a video that summarizes it all beautifully.
The Solution
“If everyone consumed resources at the US level, you will need another four or five Earths.” — Paul Ehrlich
But we have only this earth. And the solution lies in simplicity. Age-old values of minimalism, non-possession, and modesty are not being discussed anymore. Our world of corporations and social media encourages profligacy. We talk about climate change, global warming, and the impending sea level rise. And we talk about the big steps needed to revert the ongoing disaster. We make a shift to electric versions of vehicles. We install solar panels on the top of our houses. But are we even questioning where is that battery in an EV car coming from? And is anybody even talking about the need to limit such mass production?
Dr. Jorge Majfud says that “Trying to reduce environmental pollution without reducing consumerism is like combatting drug trafficking without reducing the drug addiction.”
It needs to stop. Exercise restrain now or the fictional earth the movie Interstellar depicts will be a reality soon. 40 years down the line, someone from my generation will be the Donald wondering how consumerism took us all down.
“The world has enough for everyone’s needs, but not everyone’s greed,” Mahatma Gandhi
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