⌖ Florence, Italy

Stories instead of sermons

A Greta Thunberg video on the breaching of the 1.5ºC limit, and her distress about it being met with little sustained news coverage. My recollection wanders to the hundreds (or was it thousands) of US news stations covering the “devastating” weather, how few (if any?) of them actually mentioned the words “climate change”.11. No doubt a side effect of oligarch-owned media bowing to Trump.

Her video is well-articulated, but I can’t shake George Carlin’s voice in the back of my head saying how (despite being well-intentioned) liberals come off as moralistic, holier-than-thou, preachy, and that the best way to actually make change is through compelling storytelling. Philosophy disguised as fiction, comedy, memoir. Vonnegut, Carlin, Mod.

With Vonnegut it’s his absurdity, which then slips in these moments of cutting philosophical observation (calling war a Children’s Crusade, showing the American Dream for what it truly is). With Mod and his memoir — this personal experience about a country that has left behind who and what made it great.

All of the in-fighting amongst factions is a smoke-and-mirrors power grab by the rich, but how do you get people to see that they are fighting with each other, and who’s actually causing the damage? How do you make art that does this? How do you hold a mirror, something to reflect and refract so people can actually see what’s going on? And how do you make this art interactive, shareable, universally relatable?