Bizarre. Apparently asking providers to cut off some AI or crypto shit ain’t possible. No, instead you gotta pointlessly ask individual consumers to delete a few mails, as if that made any kind of difference.
Never forget: You as an individual have a responsibility to eat less meat, use less plastic, avoid buying products made by unethical companies, save water and power.
Businesses are just trying to make money, why are you being mean to them?
/s
That’s a many-edged sword.
If people tell you, “you can do better” simply as a tactic to shift blame, it’s disingenuous. However, individuals going, as much as possible, plant-based and car-/flight-free and in general consuming less, those still are very good and even necessary steps towards ensuring survival of the species. Those steps also provide a degree of credible moral standing to those individuals on those topics. And we won’t ever get to system change either if there isn’t a critical mass of individuals who change their behavior, thus proving system change is possible.
E.g., the fact that plant milk is a thing now and every supermarket carries at least three varieties and brands now, is because consumers changed their behavior as much as it is about Alpro and Oatly marketing and lobbying.
To a degree, production currently is always decoupled from consumption right now. Somehow, we allow ourselves to landfill 30%+ of the new clothes that are produced worldwide currently. Same for food. Flights need to be 80% full to be individually profitable, but airlines will not simply discontinue a unprofitable route right away, because that would endanger their landing rights at the affected airports. Meta and the Google and Amazon will still start construction on new AI-focused data centers and force AI responses down your throat, because that is the future they already sold to their investors and AI is a loss leader right now anyway. Somehow, there’s also this class of antisocial rich assholes that emit hundreds of times more than you do and whose behavior can torpedo any kind of climate action.
And all of that you can’t affect much from the pure consumer angle, you need to organize and act politically. Ultimately, your power comes not from your individual action itself but from the fact that it may help convince more people to do the same.
All that said, the suggestion “delete some mails” here is just remarkably useless. Even compared to other barely useful suggestions like, say, “limit your total Youtube/Tiktok/Instagram time to 2h/wk” or “downgrade your video streams to 360p”.
When the intern writes the press release with zero guidance?
