Solarpunk technology

"One thing that I immediately realized about the team is how passionate they are."

🙄

This is an ad for a for-profit, publicly traded company that claims to have the solution for plastic waste, but also holds patents for said solution. Either they've found the solution, in which case, they should open source that shit because we're in a global ecological crisis, or they're exaggerating their claims and this absolute handjob of a video is uncritically repeating every single thing that the company's PR is feeding them, without consulting a single other person.

Plastic waste already has a solution, and it's a political solution. We could start by nationalizing all oil companies and banning single use plastics. Instead, we invest in a "solution" that, if it works as advertised, actually entrenches a perverse incentive for more plastic waste. Were this company to become hugely successful, they would lobby heavily against any bans of single use plastics, since it would ruin them.

This is what I call a technological antisolution:

We are asked to marvel at the shiny innovations brought to us by our technological superiors, and while we wait for them to solve climate change for us [or, in this case, plastic waste], we are given strategies to cope with the stress. Climate Change is thus transformed – or perhaps reduced – from a political problem to a technological one. I propose we name these kinds of technologies Technological Antisolutions.

A Technological Antisolution is a product that attempts to replace a boring but solvable political or social problem with a much sexier technological one that won’t work. This does not mean that we should stop doing R&D. A technology that is worth pursuing can become a technological antisolution depending on its social and political context. [...] Technological Antisolutions are everywhere because they allow us to continue living an untenable status quo. Their true product is not the technology itself, but the outsourcing of our social problems. They alleviate our anxiety and guilt about not being active participants in political change, and for their trouble, founders and investors are richly rewarded.