Art as Pollution

This post is part of Agora Road's September 2024 Travelogue.

I am for all intent and purpose an artist. For most of my life, I made small video games in my spare time. I even wrote a few ebooks. In recent years one thought started to bother me a lot.

Isn't art technically pollution?

There is no denying that resources are finite. Growing up in the early 2000s, there was a heavy push for "better consumption practices". Now that I think about it, we were never given any clear instruction on how to do so. The general advice being "consume less stuff I guess".

Anyway, I realized that I never saw anyone commenting on how most art creates pollution. That bothers me. I mean how come no one has pointed out this simple fact?

A good example of this are video games. While it is questionable if a video game is a valid art construct as it is a somewhat an abstract concept, I think most people would agree with the statement that "video games contain art" as people typically classify things like music and textures as art.

Now the problem at hand is that video games do not exist in a vacuum. They need to exist on something (i.e a cartridge). Even if all video games were to go digital tomorrow, they would still need storage media to exist on. The same can be said for most type of art.

Even when art exists in the physical world (i.e a drawing), it is still a form of pollution. The production of the sheet of paper likely created pollution and even if it didn't, it's not like you can grow a new tree using the material.

I recently had what was probably a very "low-level" form of depression. Everything felt incredibly boring. I fixed this by writing an article for this website. Even though art is undeniably pollution in my eyes, it certainly play some kind of important role for our psychology.

Putting modern consumerism aside, it is clear that humans have a tendency to seek new things - after all human history is one of change. As far as I know, the only group of humans that remained in stasis are the people living on North Sentinel Island. Even then I must assume that there must have been some change through their history (i.e social paradigm shifts). I suposse that our natural instincts drive us towards oblivion.

Even though I know that I am making pollution by writing this, I just can't help myself. Those last two years I tried to stifle my hobby of making small video games. This only resulted in an intense longing to make something.

While many people theorize that some kind of collapse is coming, most people focus on social and political problems. I never hear anyone discussing the inevitable resource shortage. Our modern world rely on computers to function. What will happen when we run out of material to create them?

I have no answer. Even if I were some kind of global dictator, there is no doubt that trying to force people to stop consuming and creating all art would backfire immensely. I supose all there is to do now is to enjoy the ride towards oblivion.

Written by manpaint on 16 September 2024.