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Comment by weast | Hacker News Reader

One of my favourite videos is a striking self-promo clip commissioned by Shell in 1970s. The tech optimism is strong, with visuals that would feel much more at home in a climate shock video nowadays. the video captures the otherworldliness of oil production and large scale infrastructure in a hypnotic way. It really is quite beautiful.

https://youtu.be/_zWjT59S_wk

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> the video captures the otherworldliness of oil production and large scale infrastructure in a hypnotic way

If you're in to that kind of stuff check out Koyaanisqatsi & Powaqqatsi

Or Baraka and Samsara if you'd prefer films of the same tradition, minus the somewhat over-the-top Philip Glass scores (which I enjoy more on their own than as part of the films).

Samsara is excellent. I watched in an indie cinema, and it really generated a mood without any form of judgement in what was being portrayed.

Not a decade goes by, not a decade, without someone mentioning Koyaanisqatsi.

It's in my top 5 "must watch" movies.

There is also LUCKY PEOPLE CENTER INTERNATIONAL [0]

0, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8BZd7IBr2Y&t=3

Industry and in some sense "machinery" itself is largely seen as inherently negative, destructive, "unnatural", "against" by many today.

Which is ironic as the vast majority of the human population, including the very same people with such views, are only alive because of substantial amounts of machinery. Such as those used in the Haber-Bosch process.

lol this is literally that "and yet you participate in society. curious!" joke comic?

No, not really though. Phones are not necessary for survival but food made more available and cheap is necessary.

Why yes, I do participate in society. Curious!

Why, yes, I do moralize every time I get the chance without offering true alternatives! Who cares if poor people suffer?

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...

On an even more fundamentally ridiculous level too. The people being (Alanis Morissette) "ironic" here have absolutely no choice in the matter of literally being born.

For those unfamiliar it's this comic that was simplified to the final panel [0]. It's a great send up of a whole arm of bad faith debate tactics that tries to invalidate any criticism of topic X because the person benefits from it.

[0] https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...

Water is very destructive and yet, where would be be without it. Same goes for oil and gas.

Water isn't oil though, the former is biologically necessary and the latter is socially necessary. It also wasn't really what I'm talking about but I'll bite none the less.

I'm not really saying we get rid of it fully but we don't need anywhere near the oil and gas industry we have. About 67% [0] of extracted oil used in the US goes into the transportation sector in one form or another and an additional 6% goes into power generation.

We could eliminate a lot of that consumption through building things like nuclear plants and various green energy sources and by reducing the reliance on cars in the US. Unfortunately that latter option is going to be fighting against decades of culture and choices built into our cities, but we could also shift away from gas cars as well and it fortunately seems like we are at least headed that way though I'm betting we'll encounter a plateau in electric car adoption well before they outnumber gas vehicles.

Even if we only shifted most consumer vehicles over to some gas alternative we could probably eliminate at least a third of all oil products consumed in the US. More if electric trucks pan out though that's a trickier proposition just due to how they're used. Those two changes don't even really require large changes to how we operate our world today just shifting the energy demand away from fossil fuel onto electric.

[0] https://www.eia.gov/energyexplained/oil-and-petroleum-produc...

Oil is now biologically necessary for this population to survive: the Haber-Bosch process.

You skipped the whole bit of my comment where I talked about the percentages that go into industrial uses vs transportation I guess? Only 27% of the oil extracted goes into the entire industrial use of oil.

Are you asking me a question about this 'joke comic'?

I haven't heard of it, so you'll have to explain.

someone else posted it in this thread check it out https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/001/259/257/342...

Real, canonical, link: https://thenib.com/mister-gotcha/

Huh according to popularity metrics that site doesn't even rank in the top 200000 globally, and only in the 70000s for just the U.S.

If this was a top 1000 site I might get why there's an expectation to know about their 'joke comics', but when it's so obscure, I doubt even 1% of HN readers would know anything about this site.

It seems odd giraffe_lady would phrase it in that way.

Like many pieces of modern internet culture, this image has been detached from its real source and context, and propagated memetically through the various social media platforms.

It doesn't seem like the large majority of the HN audience would participate in this, so it's still a bit weird to assume other readers would know the reference.

The large majority of the HN audience wouldn't participate in social media? I'm not sure what dividing line you're trying to draw here.

Communication is always in part a game of references. They are a form of compression of larger and more specific ideas, and of humor, which itself is a primary vector of communication.

I'm not sure what demographic I'd belong to, but I understood the reference just fine, and it seems like many of the other participants in the thread did too.

I'm sure you've got references that I'd miss completely, that you believe to be obvious.

> The large majority of the HN audience wouldn't participate in social media?

For the spreading meme 'joke comics' portion, yes.

I highly doubt even a quarter of the reader-base would participate in this.

Its an extremely common meme.

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/we-should-improve-society-som...

Probably literally 1,000x as many people have seen that comic, as have ever visited the site it originated on. And that may be an underestimate.

I think it would be far more engaging and interesting to respond to the point being made rather than the noteworthyness of the source? I think we can maintain a critical distance to the force that allow us to live the way we do, and i do not believe this reduces us to mere hypocrites. The ability to admire and admonish these practices is deeply human!

You could read this as "you can't say anything bad about the industrial complex because you participate in it", though I think that is pretty obviously bad faith. A more charitable interpretation I would take is "whatever misgivings you have about large scale industrial practices, it's important to remember that they also massively benefit society and are in some cases necessary." Pointing out the flaws is great, villanizing is counterproductive.

I think at this stage large scale for profit petroleum extraction is literally villainous, so I'm ok villainizing. Whether it's productive to is a question of tactics that I wouldn't expect to find consensus on even among like-minded people.

There's potentially a nuanced and worthwhile conversation about what carefully ramping down fossil fuel use looks like, what responsibility we have to the people who haven't been able to take advantage of extraction yet, etc. But it's not like I'm interrupting that conversation to point this out here.

This is straightforwardly admiring the artifacts of a destructive practice and preemptively shaming & dismissing people who would find that distasteful.

A lathe can turn precise bores. Those can be used to make guns, which can be used to kill people. From my perspective, the analogy is you're anti-gun violence, but going after the people who admire the precision of the metalworking tools.

If you want to move away from fossil fuels, yes that's great. I'm with you. You're going to want the people with an appreciation for this kind of engineering on your side, as it will be necessary for transitioning any advanced economy.

If the problem is as bad as we all seem to agree it is, maybe we should cooperate to solve it instead of playing king of the hill for the moral high ground.

Applying this metaphor to this case, you're admiring the weapon, not the tool that made the weapon.

It's very presumptuous for you to be telling me what _I_ admire. I get to make that choice.

I admire feats of engineering. I've toured facilities that pump carbon out of the ground, I've toured facilities that capture carbon and pump it into the ground. They're both impressive in their own right, and it's the same skillsets and technologies required to build both.

I didn't pick the analogy here friend.

lathe : gun :: _____ : oil drilling platform, you put your own words in there if you want.

Regardless I'm within my own rights to tell you that what you admire is bad and your admiration of it is obscene.

I did pick my own words. "Feats of engineering". You are well withing your rights to tell me whatever you want sure, I'm also within mine to tell you what your saying doesn't make sense.

Appreciating the field of engineering isn't "bad" or "obscene" just because some instances of engineering lead to real negative consequences. That's a descent into the exact "society has parts that are bad, yet you participate" logic you were originally clowning on.

Great switch to "for profit" from the general "

You do realize that petroleum is not just for fuel but plays a major part in every part of our lives?

E.g. fertilizers. This kind of zero-order thinking without thinking of higher-order effects is what lead to this:

https://www.vox.com/future-perfect/2022/7/15/23218969/sri-la...

Real life is not Captain Planet (the cartoon) where everything is as binary as you point out.

The machinery looks the same regardless of the economic system. (I suppose a Soviet oil rig might have looked a little different, but basically the same thing)

Your argument equally applies to people, since we collectively cause all of the environmental problems you mention.

Are you consistent? Do you admire people? Do you find it distastful if others do?

It really is not. There’s a difference in seeking improvement in a system in which you participate and the current mainstream nihilism that demonizes our past achievements and seeks its destruction.

This puts it in a way I was struggling to do so. The "we are just saying we should improve society somewhat" counterclaim is disingenuous because the "we should improve society somewhat" is usually expressed in criticism and not solutions, and when solutions are suggested they are pretty vapid and full of wishful thinking.

Funnily enough, your response fits exactly these two memes: https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/201/090/208...

https://i.kym-cdn.com/photos/images/original/002/222/974/b91...

Especially given the context of the thread, where your reply barely makes sense. There is a difference between criticizing extreme industrialism and rabid growth and villifying the very thing we all depend on. Which is totally different from just wanting to improve society somewhat ;)

But westerners are so detached from everything that goes into sustaining their lives so there is oddly little awareness of the massive industry needed since it is all outsource over seas. Makes it very easy to dislike it from far away, especially when memes can be used to rationalize away the hypocrisy and pretend the privilege they enjoy doesn't exist

(the meme basically amounts to "yes I'm privileged, but stop pointing it out! There's nothing I can do about my own privilege, I HAVE to own that iPhone too bad for the workers lol" and is the ultimate witty retort from privileged, usually white liberal people. Which is funny since those are the people who usually like to speak about privilege, but obviously not when they are called out on it themselves.)

No, I don't think you quite understand the implication. Something like 60% of the bioavailable nitrogen in the biosphere, including that in your human body, is created industrially via the haber-bosch process. Over half of all human beings and land biomass would be dead without it. Human beings and this industrial process produce more bioavailable nitrogen than all the nitrogen fixing microbes in the world combined. This process is a very important part of the earth's biosphere now with human presence taken into account, bioavailable nitrogen production is the bottleneck to biomass production. It is probably our only viable tool to actually reduce carbon dioxide present in the atmosphere.

I don’t think you understand the comic or you overlooked the thread above. It’s ironic because calling something as basic as “machinery” inherently evil has an inherently evil implication, which is that 95% of the population would need to die.

This is nothing like “you participate, how curious”. This is “I’m against literally every piece of technology required to feed any non-negligible portion of the humans on earth”.

If a slave owner has a forced breeding program, should the children of his slaves praise the institution of slavery for the gift of their lives?

That’s not a really good analogies. The real question is: are the people complaining about all industry ready to live in a world without industry? To which the answer is obviously no for most of them. It’s akin to asking: do you want 90% of the global population to die of starvation?

Well, perhaps the problem isn't where you think it lies.

They may be willing to acknowledge your question and answer it with a whispered "yes", if you at least ask it in a way that cause them no excessive shame. Your denialism that the answer could be yes isn't quite the same thing as it being an "obvious no".

We all wander through a landscape of horrific truths that we blind ourselves to just to remain sane.

I feel there is an untold implication here that people somehow assume that the _other_ 90% would die of starvation. Surely not them!

I don't think that's a good analogy either. It's not like a wish will be granted and we'll all still be here but suddenly without tractors. The alternative to consider is being born into a world where industrialization took off slower and culture had more time to understand the consequences before they got really severe.

So it's just complaining that history didn't happen a certain way? Okay I guess.

I wouldn't mind if 90% of the population had never been born (even myself)

I wouldn't mind to have been born a giant, but here we are.

I get that some folks feel bad about human's impact on the earth, but you're going down a very concerning road here. I'm glad I was born, and I'm glad my child was born. I would love for us to move quicker towards a world that isn't trashing the earth like we are now.

I do however get a little concerned about the opinions of those who wished humans existed in far fewer numbers, especially when that involves a wish for a mass die-off (or cull!). You (or whomever) are free to hold whatever opinions you like, but when people start talking about advocating for allowing or promoting the death of large numbers of people, that's when I ask you to politely fuck off.

I never said anything about a mass die off, nobody is harmed by not having been born in the first place. We don't even need a mass die-off anyhow, we just need population control. Without population control we're going to have a mass die-off though, it's unavoidable due to the inherent unsustainability of our resource use.

I didn't say you were asking for that, but that line of reasoning often trends in that direction, and my opinions were directed those who hold those stronger views.

Do we need population control? For the vast majority of industrialized countries their birth rate is and has been well below replacement levels for decades. We're going to have a much smaller population pretty soon, and there's nothing anyone can do to change that now.

We'll see what plays out in the next few decades, but you've effectively already going to have what you're calling for. I don't think it's going to be a fun situation though - demographic collapse is no joke. Cutting down the replacement population numbers from there just seems like you'd be making a bad situation worse.

Not very long ago the average human was David and Nature was Goliath. Vast swaths of land seemed to be unbreakable by mankind, yet now the tables have turned and for many it's cringe-worthy to watch the big Humans pummeling the land with ease at a rate where the land can put up no defense

Well, I am certainly as far from techno-phobia as it might be possible, but oil rigs are examples of machinery which are connected to large damages to the environment. Not so much the machines themselves, but the oil they have been pumping. See also those - by themselves - magnificient excavators to dig for lignite. Great machinery, but if you consider the outcome, it is very dystropian.

Nevertheless, they are engineering marvels and as such quite a view to behold.

Wow! Hard to believe that’s produced by Shell. A outside of any environmental or idealogical perspective, I found it deeply unsettling just on a visual and auditory level.

There is a documentary about a concert at the bottom of the sea, really way down in the 'basement' of the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_A_platform which is 303 meters under the water surface:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YtCHHpZNxo

It's about an hour long, mostly showing the preparation of the singer, and the crew, like security/emergency training, to be even allowed to get on, and then down there. Thereby showing how it is out there. Interesting. One can omit the last half hour, or so, if uninterested in the music, or skip around that.

I've always strangely found Oil Derricks to be aesthetically pleasing for some reason.

Maybe it's just because of There Will Be Blood.

Previous comment beat me to it... This is Koyaanisqatsi for petroleum.

Strong Koyaanisqatsi vibes. Very interesting.

>with visuals that would feel much more at home in a climate shock video nowadays

That's likely because there's huge overlap between "climate shock video" and "video from decades past when big industry was visibly polluting things in the west" and "video filtered to look like it is from decades past". Basically you're pattern matching on the second order visual cues. A video of a pit mine full of modern equipment taken with a modern camera in 1080p or better wouldn't look the same so you wouldn't mentally bucket it the same way.

I think what I like so much about the aesthetic is that it its age allows me to quickly forget the second order effects of industrialization and quickly, quietly appreciate the sheer magnificence of these extraction cathedrals, the total celebration of our ability to harness nature, to defy the balance of the world in our favour. If my suspention of disbelief is paused for a minute, i recollect the opening scenes of Dr. Strangelove, where the refuelling of the bomber planes looks more like a avian pairing ritual than a technocratic feat of usurping the laws of nature. A few scenes in the shell video definitely have a phallic quality to it (like the drill bit penetrating the water, the pipes laid across the forest floor), and I even felt a moment of self referential criticism as the camera panned across the bleak oilfield in the middle of the ocean expanse.

I think I disagree on the point about the "medium is the message" framing. I dont think the camera quality has much to do with it, instead the visual qualities arise from the lack of a need to show that critical view, as the blank optimism overshadowed the less savory views by a mile. I think we have lost the capacity to view these process neutrally, independently of the medium used to record them.

I remember watching a hungarian film called On body and soul, which takes place in a meat processing facility. The footage of the meat processing is beautiful, eerily so, and it is really jaunting when you realize the only images of slaughterhouses you have seen is grainy handycam footage filmed for ideological purposes. The medium is always important, but always subservient to the gaze.

I found the video eons ago, it still has so few views and I am so happy to have brought it to light to such a receptive crowd.

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