TECHOCENE: INNOVATION AT THE END OF THE WORLD

THE SUNSET FIRE GAVE RISE TO ECO-CONSCIOUSNESS AMONGST CALIFORNIA'S ELITE. WILL MORE TECH BE THE OUTCOME?

By Hannah Ongley

Due to a Spectrum outage that lasted two days, I received news about potentially having to escape the Sunset Fire by watching it burn from my backyard, receiving intermittent screenshots of evacuation zone maps from my mum in New Zealand when my phone could find service. By the time the internet came back, the fires had claimed 19 lives and thousands of homes, and watching the news was as confusing as having no information at all. California Governor Gavin Newsom was calling for an investigation into conspiracy theories about empty fire hydrants. Aerial footage of the now days-old devastation was replayed while anchors obsessed over someone who flew a drone into something called a super scooper—one of two gigantic amphibious aircraft sent by Canada to solve California’s self-imposed land-use issue, of luxury property development in the firebelt—putting the majestic first responder out of commission. In the meantime, air tankers had flown in to help, providing us with comforting footage of their “perfect drops” of bright pink fire retardant, a mix of hazardous chemicals that can remain in the environment and human body for years.

Unlike imperceptible catastrophes, like rising sea levels that exacerbate floods, wildfires dial our constant, low-grade anxiety about global warming up to boiling point—creating a distracting cacophony of finger pointing and conspiracy theory that leaves no room for pragmatic solutions like, for instance, changing the way we live and interact with the world around us. What we need in times like these, many concur, is technological innovation—optimistic, immediate, and less effective than it’s made out to be. In Los Angeles, where the ultimate status symbol is a pickup truck or a mountainside ranch, solutions to the current crisis include apocalypse-ready Cybertrucks lining narrow streets in the Hollywood Hills, giant planes dumping the Pacific Ocean on the Palisades, and mansions with swimming pools that have special attachments so fire trucks can suck them dry to save the neighbors, if absolutely necessary.

Lately, the city seems like a proving ground for the delusion that the American Dream is still possible in the age of climate disaster. But the real tech hero of the past few weeks wasn’t a $30 million super scooper. It was the non-profit wildfire alert app Watch Duty, an innovation making headlines for providing basic facts amid fear-mongering, political infighting, and aircraft porn. Tech won’t save us in the long-term, but it can help mitigate the destruction caused by climate disaster. In Silicon Valley, the industry’s entrepreneurs are experimenting with AI to help firefighters track wildfires. Chip company Nvidia has teamed up with the US Department of Agriculture’s Forest Service to create a digital wildfire that first responders can interact with, to better understand how they spread. Pano AI can send video captured by cameras placed on cell towers to emergency personnel.

I’m reminded of how Joan Didion described California in “Notes From a Native Daughter”: “a place in which a boom mentality and a sense of Chekhovian loss meet in uneasy suspension; in which the mind is troubled by some buried but ineradicable suspicion that things better work here, because here, beneath the immense bleached sky, is where we run out of continent.” This sentiment of unease feels heightened in LA, given we’re quite literally running out of coastline, hillside, and quality air. We must ask ourselves: What does it mean to live at the edge of the Pacific Ocean, on the frontier of technological innovation, at the beginning of the end of the world?

Going by the distribution of MAGA hats in Hollywood—an alarming number in Runyon Canyon before it closed to the public (worn with Alo workout separates in luxe neutrals) and one on the nice lady who owns a community-centric ceramics studio down the road—we want the same thing out of living here: to breathe clean air and swim in the Pacific without getting norovirus or cancer. Until recently, wellness culture was associated mostly with liberals who go on healing retreats in Sequoia National Park and buy candles that smell like Gwyneth Paltrow’s vagina. Fringe wellness fads of the right, meanwhile, had the sociopathic energy of an RFK Jr. However fragile, there does seem to be consensus now that climate change is real. Driving a Tesla doesn’t necessarily mean you support the Elon-Trump alliance. Nor does being into art, nature, and hiking mean you support Biden’s EV tax credits.

Last week, someone emailed me an article on the sustainability industry as a perpetuation of exploitation and injustice in eco-city design. It was authored by academic Maxim Tvorun-Dunn, who takes particular aim at “forward-looking” design studios and the eco-futurist projects of architect Vincent Callebaut: “The relationship with nature visualised in these renders, expressed through green walls and organic shapes, is one built on highly contextual and fragile encounters with nature, rather than a pluralistic acceptance of natures…”

The tropes of sustainable design—white curvilinear surfaces, vertical greenery, geodesic domes—tend to promise to heal our relationship with nature by containing and controlling it. There’s a similar idea at play in the “clean” tropes of wellness culture—sleek Apple watches, Hailey Bieber’s strawberry glaze skincare smoothie, the starvation diets of jacked Silicon Valley tech bros… Is this just survivalism for coastal elites? Self-optimization, whether via the quiet pursuit of personal growth or pseudo-scientific wellness fads, gives us a much-needed sense of autonomy and control during what has to be one of the most unhinged moments in human history. The Eaton and Palisades fires are now fully contained, but out of the ashes has risen a horde of health anxieties, with influencers pivoting to detoxifying methods: Take this activated charcoal to reduce risk of cancer from breathing in formica laminate and melted shoes! There’s a detox regimen or raw milk treatment to fix every problem in the aftermath.

Luxury and sustainability can go hand-in-hand if we can learn to share—if we can tap into something akin to the abundance mindset of Library Socialism. Sadly, the most “innovative” designs today are those that promise not only to isolate us from the dirtier, more dangerous elements of nature, but also to sequester us from our fellow humans. Elon Musk’s Robovan is an astonishing example of the potential for communal abundance going up in flames—assuming that the 20-seater, fully-autonomous Art Deco EV is as prone to spontaneous combustion as Tesla’s other creations. Musk, after all, famously hates public transport because “you have to travel with a bunch of random strangers, one of whom might be a serial killer.” I feel like the chance a Tesla might lock you inside after bursting into flames is almost part of the appeal. In the past, Musk has justified surprise price hikes on vehicles still in production by peddling the idea that customers are eco-technological pioneers, that they’re in this together—the buyer and Elon Musk—in building the future of EVs. Stargate AI, the $500 billion string of data centers stirring drama among the White House tech oligarchy, operates on this same ethos. The future doesn’t need factory workers—it needs a new generation of tech pioneers willing to roll up their sleeves and push the boundaries of what’s possible (on-site, at minimum wage).

In contrast to the type of biomimicry of eco-futurist design—spectacular and constrained—is the simple practice of learning from and imitating nature proposed by the Potawatomi botanist and author Robin Wall Kimmerer. In her recent book The Serviceberry, Kimmerer talks about how it’s not having a bunch of things that provides security, it’s relationships with our neighbors that allow us to share. Kimmerer advocates for creating smaller, tightly-knit communities so that circular economies of reciprocity and abundance can flourish. “Recognizing ‘enoughness’ is a radical act in an economy that is always urging us to consume more,” she writes.

That might seem like an impossible task in the Wild West of tech oligarchs and climate catastrophes, where the vibes—paranoid, anesthetized, and isolationist—are the perfect fuel for a scarcity mindset. But Kimmerer’s isn’t a utopian vision. It’s how many things functioned in Altadena, with its beloved community garden and seed library, where local solutions to wildfire recovery have been centered. Additionally, Watch Duty recently partnered with California State Parks to provide updates about prescribed fires, aka cultural burnings, an Indigenous form of environmental stewardship that really could heal our relationship with nature.