memes

My boomer uncle was complaining about how my generation doesn't care about climate change with his mouth filled with food that he spit all over the other food.

So much of the '90s/'00s was this promise of gradual economic reform and transition to a newer, greener, more bountiful post-scarcity future. And... it just never arrived.

We refused to quit our addiction to fossil fuels, and even financed these enormous propaganda smears aimed at anyone who would so much as suggest that wind or solar or hydro or geothermal or nuclear were viable alternatives to burning rocks and dinosaur jizz. We refused to urbanize in a material way, instead clinging to wider highways connecting increasingly remote suburbs with unapproachable housing costs. We refused to digitize, clinging to office commutes, and junk mail overflowing mailboxes and tons, and tons of plastic disposable trash piling up in landfills long after any of this added economic value.

All the promises of the 70s/80s Sci-Fi and subsequent Tech Guy Messiahs failed to emerge. Meanwhile, the real modernization has been bigger and bigger scams. Hyperloops that never get built. Cryptocurrencies that go bankrupt at an escalating clip. Digital Phantasms intended to fill the holes in our lives created by poverty and alienation. Landlords and airlines and schools and employers cartelizing to more efficiently raise our rents and lower our wages. Existence as an increasingly overpriced a la carte service that never seems able to deliver.

We are the generation that got grifted. Decade after decade of false promises and rug pulls and vaporware. Who could live through all that and not feel a bit of doom in their bones?

Our generation doesn't care? Of course we do, that's why we :vote: for...

Well, at least we don't complain uselessly whenever anybody protests climate change in any meaningful way, right? Right?

Oh it'll sustain life, even human life, in 100 years. It'll just be life full of escalating humanitarian crises.

It's 500-1000 years from now when shit would get civilization-ending bad, even if emissions 100% stop by 2100. A mass extinction that could take humanity with it.

But life would still exist. Just not humans or 90% of other species. Earth would "reboot" under a higher-CO2 status quo and life would evolve to fill empty niches in that status quo. Species that can handle consistently warmer temperatures, more acidic oceans, more extreme weather, and climatic zones moving to different parts of the planet.

A lot will depend on what we can achieve during this time of change and impending doom, in balancing what is already sacrificed but still trying to hang on to what is left.