Somethought. Something. Someone

Last week I sent an email that had nothing to do with the pros and cons of AI. It just mentioned that I use it. And it got some very strong responses.

There was a wide variety as always, but a good number of people landed in the same place: that I should be ashamed to be using AI. Specifically because of AI's environmental impact. The water, the power, the data centres, the brain rot.

Being shamed for something is an interesting feeling, if you’ve never had the pleasure. But what is it that we are actually being told? Not as much as you think, in my opinion. You can pretty much read exactly where a culture's attention is pointed by what people choose to shame you for. Right now, it's data centres and AI. Last yeart it might have been fast fashion, or supporting companies who support g3n0c1d3. Four years ago it was flights. Shame moves with the zeitgeist. It’s less of a moral compass, and more a live reading of whatever the collective mind is currently fixated on. Which doesn’t mean it’s wrong, but it certainly means it’s biased.

Nobody's messaged me about the cobalt in my phone, mined by someone in completely inhumane conditions. Nobody's messaged me about the diesel I've burned in my car every single day for the last ten years. Both, by most measures, are probably heavier on the planet and on people than the amount of AI bits my requests have consumed. But neither is the thing everyone's talking about this year. Did we forget or did we give up? Did we normalise it, or just accept it as the cost of progress. Whatever happened, the community shame slipped away.

Here's what I think happens. It's not that we don't feel enough. It's that the feeling has nowhere to land, no action to follow that will produce a solution. It’s all big scale to our individual or even community actions. The same shape as watching Irelands big international climate targets get missed and replaced with a new one, ten years further out.

I still think that shame has a role to play in our society, and I totally welcome the messages from people who feel I am not representing myself well. The shame isn't the problem. The size of it is. It’s individual shame to an international problem and that scale is not sustainable. It's too big to do anything with. What I actually want is something the size of my own two hands.

The #someone for this week is a person who turns these feelings into actions that change lives and transform communities.

Where does all this stuff come from?

I’d rather not know.

Let’s not say this anymore. Let’s choose to know.

I get a lot of my coffee from Pete at Farmhand, and this year's beans came from a farm called Finca Maracay in Colombia, shipped not by container ship but by sail boat, six months there and back, specifically to avoid the bunker fuel every cargo ship runs on. That's not a small detail. That's a farmer, a trader, and someone willing to spend six months on a boat instead of taking the cheap, more profitable option.

Pete is putting the work in and knowing how it got here matters to him, and to me.

Pick one thing you use without thinking about it. Your phone, your coffee, your chocolate, your email cloud storage. Trace it back as far as you actually can. You'll probably hit a point where the trail goes cold. That's fine. What you'll have by then is a much better understanding of what these conveniences actually cost. And your opinion will be yours, not the zeitgeist's.

Pete wrote up the sail-shipping story properly if you want the full detail.

Sean McCabe is the Head of Climate Justice at Bohemian Football Club in Dublin. The first role of its kind in world football. Before any of that, he worked in reinsurance, quit because it "didn't sit well" with him, and moved to Calcutta for two years to work in a hospice. He told me that was the first time he was properly at "the cold face of poverty" , watching, up close, a world where people just die of it, and nobody two continents away has to think about it. He described it as galling.

What makes Seán special is what he did with those emotions. Not a career in outrage. He transform them into finding the solution. He ended up at the UN, working with Mary Robinson on the Paris Agreement, spending years in rooms with all the right words and came out the other side saying none of it was landing at home in his own community. So he came back and put that energy into the strongest community group that was there, he put it into a football club. Now this football club teaches retrofitting, has a library of things, a bike co-op and bike repair workshops. Worker ownership. Actual, physical stuff, instead of another ten-year plan that hardly anyones reads.

Seán said "the doing is so much more. It's what builds alliances, it's what builds confidence."

Which is more or less the answer to the question I had this week.

If you haven't heard the episode of the podcast with Seán, here it is on the usual platforms.​

With love, Harrison

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