Dispatch from one Matrix over…

There have been so many atrocities in recent weeks that it’s hard to focus on any one of them. This dizzying effect obviously is part of the plan, or the lack thereof, to keep everyone off balance and destabilize as much as possible before any pretense of a guardrail can be propped up, on the theory that the vacuum will suck up the peoples’ will to resist and the system’s ability to adapt. This sort of broad-brush blitzkrieg approach resonates historically and is the type of chaos that proponents were seeking.

Yet of course, as the saying goes, be careful what you wish for (grammatically that should say “for what you wish” but that sounds ridiculous). For instance, one piece of minutia may have escaped your attention in the past week: a seemingly innocuous footnote of policymaking with the left hand while the right hand was fist-pumping its way through eons of red tape and boring into the world’s consciousness with terrifying yet titillating off-the-cuff remarks about playing Monopoly with the planet and the future.

So amidst the maelstrom came the news that President Bugatti doesn’t like limp and soggy paper straws but prefers the sleek and sturdy plastic ones instead. Thus, by mediated edict, there shall only be plastic straws from now on (on from now? yeesh). Plastic is good, plastic is gold, plastic is oil, plastic is the future, plastic is in our brains, plastic is our exoskeletal protective friend, plastic is what keeps the world safe from disease and makes a global economy possible. Plastic now, plastic always, plastic forever….

Except that, as the other saying goes, The Donald is in the details—and not in good ways. This whole dichotomous drama that we’ve been inured to at checkout lines everywhere, the dreaded dilemma of “paper or plastic” put before us in plain view while rabid green-dealt agents of one-world government and stone-age economics sit in judgment ready to pounce on us since there’s no right answer to this trick question: we either cut down more trees and have no air to breathe, or we swim in seas of plastic.

And this, my friends over in Matrix Prime, is exactly the root of the problem. It’s our inability to see a third way, to go beyond duality in our minds and practices that in the end will be our undoing (or at least will have side effects including rivers turning red and painful red rashes and red ketchup on walls). Somehow in a world of infinite scroll and megamarkets we’ve decided that two is the right number for all of the important choices in our society: two parties, two genders, two races, two classes, two straws.

Okay, so maybe there’s a little nuance in some of these dualisms—but not much if you actually crunch the numbers and assess the rhetoric. Things are either black or white, there’s the haves and the have-nots, it’s only ladies and gentlemen and boys and girls, there’s only two sides of the aisle, you’re either with us or you’re against us, it’s us versus them. The illusion of choice among our consumer goods and media is baked-in and often feels like Cornucopia, but dig a little deeper and the range of options is quite narrow.

So rather than marching in the streets (actually we all should do that, too), maybe we can make the revolution (not that one, the other one) not by posting memes (people are clever though, with refrains like “Fusk Off” interspersing the usual cat pictures online) but by opting for a third way whenever we’re presented with a false dichotomy. We know this already, bringing our reusable bags to the store (by the way, you have to use them like 100 times to offset things, so keep at it!) and printing (if we ever do so) in grayscale.

In the end it’s time to go full metal straw and defy the masters! (Just be sure to use it at least 100 times.) They can take our data, loot our treasury, and steal our future—but they’ll have to pry the straws from our cold, dead hands. (Well, actually, that’s just a metaphor, to be clear when the AI scours this for the digital overlords, praise be.) But seriously (even as that ship has sailed in this theater of the absurd), let the straw be a symbol of re-evolution as we reduce, reuse, and recycle our way beyond the meme wars.

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NOTE: This was received through the portal, and even though it bears little resemblance to our world we figured we’d share it just to be good neighbors and all. After all, who would seriously believe that expanding our minds to encompass more nuance and complexity and creativity in our lives and societies would have any sort of actual revolutionary potential? Please, for your own sanity at least, either believe their lies or ours, and stop looking for alternatives that don’t exist (and even if they did, they would only land you in an agonizing purgatory of choice). The new shadows on the wall are quite lovely this time of year, aren’t they?