The Dumbest Thing Ever & Why Children are Struggling to Learn to Read
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The Dumbest Thing I’ve Ever Seen, or, Why We’ll Never Actually “Solve” Climate Change
Yesterday, Jake and I went to a supermarket and I saw this monstrosity: televisions replacing glass on refrigerators. Instead of clear glass through which you can see whether a drink is out of stock or not, this grocery store has installed high-tech sensors within the refrigerator to depict digitally what could be seen within the fridge with the human eye if there wasn’t a TV in the way. The absolute waste and inanity was truly astonishing to me.
I’ve never seen something more useless in my life. Once I got over my bafflement, I couldn’t stop thinking, “This is why we’ll never solve an issue like climate change.” If we can’t even see how a glass door on a refrigerator is a perfectly adequate technology, how will we slow down the development of even more, equally unnecessary so-called ‘innovations’? The sad answer is: we probably won’t until it’s far too late. We’ll come up with endless excuses as to why this technology is needed (even when it obviously is not), make claims that we’re reducing carbon emissions in the energy sector, and still use more energy than has ever been used in the history of the planet to… run completely pointless TVs in grocery stores, among so many other absolutely ridiculous things that no one asked for and no one needs.
I know I’m being glib and negative, but this sort of thing earnestly disturbs me. I want a world where we solve the ecological crisis — I think we all do. But when things like this are normalized (and therefore invisibilized) we are creating a baseline that is harder for us to come back from. When completely unnecessary consumption of resources happens like this, I just can’t help but to think of the people having to drink from polluted rivers near the precious metal mines; the miners earning a dollar a day for their grueling labor; the steel mills and factories producing the TVs with an exploited labor force; the shipping vessels to bring the product to the United States; the energy used to get it from some port city inland to Salt Lake City; and then the energy used to power the TVs (not to mention the energy used to power the refrigerators themselves, another aspect of our world that has been rendered ‘invisible’). It’s all part of an interconnected chain that is by nature unsustainable. This sort of needless consumption, no matter how “clean” the energy source that keeps the machinery rolling, will never be made ‘sustainable’ because the consumption itself is the problem.
If we don’t start recognizing the difference between truly adequate technologies and superfluous ones, the gains we make in combating our multivalent ecological crises will continue to be dwarfed by the losses.
Has anyone else seen this sort of thing out in the world? How did it make you feel?
After posting, my friend reached out and shared with me the website of the company that makes this very stupid thing, and he told me that this company has secured $100 million in funding so far, which makes me gag. I also had to go back to the same supermarket, and there I discovered the true reason for these TVs: advertisements, which invariably block me from actually seeing what is on the digital rendering of what is in the fridge.
Sold a Story: Why American Children Can’t Read Well
This past week, I listened to this podcast by investigative journalist Emily Hanford. I had heard of it while watching this video describing how there have been recent revelations that children in America are reading at a much lower reading level than they have in generations. In addition to a lack of reading comprehension, many children simply weren’t taught how to read words in an effective way, namely that phonics instruction has frequently been used as a last resort rather than as a foundational principle for learning how to read.
What was interesting to me about this podcast is that much of the way children have been taught to read in recent years is based on the idea that children can pick up on reading just like they pick up on language, as in, they can pick up reading just by being around books and words. To me this indicates how we often forget that we are an ancient animal, and we don’t evolve as quickly as we’d like to think. Reading and writing has only existed for around 5,000 years, and for most of that time, the vast majority of people were illiterate.
While there are biological indicators that we have evolved to use language, one of the features of our creatureliness that makes us distinct from other animals, we haven’t had reading and writing as part of our lives long enough to learn how to read without being taught. Learning by being taught is also one of our fundamental human qualities: it’s the foundation of culture.
Perhaps one day we’ll evolve to learn to read by osmosis, but until then, explicit instruction for children, such as phonics, seems to be an indispensably important thing. I would love to hear from parents if you’ve had any experiences such as what is mentioned in this podcast, or if you disagree with it entirely. I’m not a parent, and I have exactly zero experience teaching reading, but still this podcast intrigued me enough to listen all the way through.
There won’t be anything from Jake this week as he is tirelessly working on animations for the next episode in our series of short films! But stay tuned for a new essay (hopefully) this week, and next week’s newsletter. Additionally, our goal is to have the next film episode out by the end of the month, so subscribe on YouTube if you haven’t already! Paid subscribers (on Substack or Patreon) will receive the film ad-free and 2 weeks early.
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What a harmful spoliative abstraction.