environmental advocacy

this is honestly a little belated since i've been distracted by a game i started, but there was some controversy going on earlier in this week about mr. beast's promotion of ai as a way to make thumbnails for youtubers, and while it's not expected, it's just veeeery tragic. i've talked about this endlessly but it's just so terrible how despite having climate awareness drilled into our heads since childhood, nobody bothers to think critically about how their actions impact the world. mr. beast particularly is an egregious example; yes, he's changed the thumbnail stuff to streamline a process for hiring actual artists (which is actually a very good note since it's great to know that ai shillers will change, even if that has to come after being shamed for it), but before that, using ai and advertising it for some purpose like making thumbnails for youtube is just really reprehensible when you consider he's the same man behind teamtrees and teamseas, whose goal was literally to help the planet deal with the fallout of the industrial revolutions. it's very telling about the modern hypocrisy that people display; people can acknowledge the struggles in the world under increasingly fascist governments but they can't begin to form connections and acknowledge how their own lives add onto these already established foundations.

this, i think, ties a lot into increasing doomposting across social media. i'm not exempt to this myself, since i have this tendency to be pessimistic, but i still think it's gotten people so much more complacent with doing nothing. in some regards, i understand: if you think the world's going to end anyway and that we're on an irreversible track, can you as an individual even do anything about that? i think that that's a question most people would resoundingly answer no to, but that's not the question we should be asking and acting as though it is is pretty detrimental actually. i don't think an excess of hope is ideal either, but at least that would be preferable to having people convinced that they cannot do anything as an individual. i don't think it's wrong to hope, at least. anyway, i just think that people should be more mindful. me included. which, given the state ai has rendered people's brain in, is far easier said than done.