‘Wall-E’ tried to warn us about Bezos, space and pollution

I was sick in bed when Jeff Bezos took his 10 minute ride in a cock-shaped rocket into suborbital space on Tuesday morning, so I ignored all of the cable media coverage proclaiming that it was somehow good for humanity. (It’s not). Instead, I looked at something else.

In it, a global mega-corporation destroyed Earth, turning the planet into a waste-strewn wasteland where nothing can grow. All life on the planet, except for one cockroach, has either perished or escaped to spend eternity on a spaceship called Axiom, where humans are served by robot servants, spend the entire time. day staring at screens and smiling dully as their muscles atrophy. A sign reading “Welcome to Economy Class” hangs over the heads of empty-faced passengers.

I’m talking of course about Pixar’s masterpiece Wall-E. Despite being released over a decade ago, the film seems oddly prescient about this moment when capitalist titans like Bezos are focused on turning space into a fun zone or an industrial nightmare.

When Wall-E came out in 2008, the fictional Buy-n-Large company serving people in space made comparisons to Walmart, but its director Andrew Stanton said the movie was actually inspired by the rise of companies like Amazon. He was definitely on to something. Like Buy-n-Large, which started out as a yogurt business, Amazon started out in the book market but quickly took over. basically everything. And despite Bezos proclamations he cares about the climate crisis, Amazon, like Buy-n-Large, destroys the Earth. This produces hundreds of millions books of plastic waste, spit toxic gases and global warming among its thousands of vehicles and warehouses, and helps oil companies extract deadly fossil fuels more efficiently. The company also throws away millions of products in one warehouse, and its waste problem runs deep.

Rather than making serious attempts to combat the destruction of Amazon’s environment, Bezos has increasingly spoken about how we must prepare to escape Earth completely. Right after his trip to space, he blithely notices that humanity should unload any polluting industry space out. In the past he said he wanted build colonies in Earth orbit to support billions of people.

Wall-E warns us of some of the dangers that Bezos’ dream future could bring. We might lose sight of the very things that make us human, such as having a relationship with other living things. The Earth has been turned into an endless dumping ground. Robots like the main character take care of the waste left over from a single-use lifestyle perpetuated by a rapacious business. Buy-n-Large Axiom is a glorified mall, lit by glowing holographic billboards advertising endless shit to buy on the floating chairs that transport the space station’s debilitated inhabitants to sparkling sodas and four-tier cheeseburgers. Absent is any sense of nature or community. Instead, it’s a purely consumer experience.

One thing we don’t see in Wall-E This is what happened before humanity left Earth. But based on what we know about the real world, wealthy business executives have probably seen the best results, just as the billionaire space race saw the richest man on the planet be one of the first to leave Earth. Meanwhile, climate change and ecological destruction have hit the poorest among us hardest. This can be seen in black and indigenous households who are more chances of losing everything when forest fires strike, to environmental justice communities live in the shadows chemical, paper and petroleum refineries producing single-use items this Amazon like to sell us, of which a large part ends up like waste in the poorest countries.

Jeff Bezos was right that we all paid for his stupid trip to the edge of space– not only because workers and customers made it rich, but also because Amazon and other companies have relieved of the cost of their pollution on all of us. This cycle will only get worse over the next few decades unless we take action to end it.

In real life, we don’t have a backup plan either. If the destruction of Earth continues at its current rate, we’re screwed. We can only keep a handful of people alive on the International Space Station thanks to the thousands of ground workers who support them. Even the business dystopia that is Axiom is nowhere on the horizon.

Despite these differences, a central message from Wall-E rings true: life on Earth is doomed to failure if we let Jeff Bezos take charge. We are heading for annihilation if we continue to let companies pursue endless profit growth. In Wall-E, he is a helpless robot who must suffer until a brave human leader, Captain of the Axiom, decides to spin the spaceship and rebuild Earth. Although Wall-E is dark (I cried at least four times, and it was a cover), its ending is relatively upbeat. But today it is the people who are suffering. And it will take more than one captain to turn around.