Trash news vortex (updated)

I could start my critique of this New York Times story with this image.

Looks profesh and serious, doesn't it. The font says, trust us, the photo brewing and mysterious. Seductive even. But it would be more honest to begin it like this.

The story, written by journalist David Maurice Smith (who also took the pics), begins with a pop out ad directing readers to SHOP NOW. We're not sure if Smith photographed the felted slippers too, it's not clear, but probably not. Smith's story travels along as a children's tale, identifying the perps "likely from Indonesia" and those who are being rescued "including sea turtles, dugongs and sharks." 

The nature of this fly in fly out journalism and the publishing realm it sits within seeks to sever the connection to the real perpetrators of this story – neoliberals who SHOP NOW, eat supermarket fish, buy their goods in plastic, and fly and drive around the world to see 'great' art.

While preparing this little post, which could be applied to any article appearing in any ad-funded news media, the title and title ad changed to this.

Fossil fuelled consumption is the great missing character in this story, consumption perpetuated by the world's rich who consume such media. Comfortable slippers and opera are the main events in the environment of the NYT online, a story about an Aboriginal mob's cleaning up of imperialism's wastes is just the fill. 

To finish with a pretty picture...

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Who gets to critique? Examining Mike Jay's Who gets to trip?

Listen to Mike Jay's critique of Michael Pollan's How to Change Your Mind.

I think Jay makes a case in the end. However, from the point of view of someone who has read Michael Pollan's book, it appears he skim read it, looking for fault like a jealous co-reporter in the field. Jay's defensive skimming produces at times notable absences that could have strengthened his argument by citing a few key moments where Pollan unwittingly reveals his remarkable privilege (for example, his guided solo trips equating to hundreds of dollars, both flown and drove to like we're living in a time of endless oil and such finite resources are innocent and non-harming, could have been incorporated). But counter to an argument concerning privilege, there are many places where Pollan could easily attend to Jay's critique, as the latter misrepresents, collapses and generalises what has been researched (broadly) and what has been written (by Pollan and others). Jay's argument, finally, is worthwhile, for who in the future will be afforded a trip? but perhaps for naive reasons. Jay comes from a structuralist medical position, which goes something like: most people are victims of modernity, they are sick and they need taking care of. He is, for example, more concerned that Big Pharma won't be able to sell psychedelics (due to their unpredictability) than he is with the fore place of an imperialist-modelled pharmaceutical industry in society. A critique of the business model of pharmaceutical companies is absent here, like we should all go along with predator-capitalism where keeping people unwell with industrial food and medicine is key to the growth of these industries like privatised prisons grow numbers of prisoners. It's as though Jay believes industry-science is worthy of our continued blessing. As someone who rarely pays for his food and medicine, because it either comes from a garden ecology or a commons where foraged mushrooms (psilocybin and culinary) and the drawing on a great pharmacopeia of weed medicines are gathered for preventative reasons, Jay's argument has blind spots. It sits well within a somewhat smug urban realm of the LRB community, but it doesn't recognise the unavoidable fact we are all operating from an ideological place, which especially reveals itself when we set out to dismantle another's argument, as I have done here. Carbon privilege blind spotting extends to all of us who use the internet – the great polluter. Though tripping on dopamine hits from social media is nothing like brewing in a billy a tea of walked-for mushrooms, wattle and blackberry leaf and entering the imaginal realm of a creek-side ecology.

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