everything is not wrong.

My first substack essay. So, hi, welcome to substack (I’m saying that to myself, not to you, as I assume you’re already here).

I want to write about this: how everything is not wrong. Or, to use a not so subtle reference to my album of 30 years ago: (Not) Everything Is Wrong. Also I just lied. When I wrote that I want to write about how everything is not wrong I was lying.

Mea culpa. I’m a liar.

The truth is I want to write about how the earth (and by extension, us) is being riven by a few thousand concurrent apocalypses. But you already know that. And tautologically listing the things that we already know, and are already making us lose sleep, is equally seductive and pointless. Why list what we already know? Cassandra vs. Pollyanna. I grew up listening to Joy Division and Discharge, so my inclination is towards Cassandra.

But now I’m rambling, referencing Greek mythology and books from 1913. Way to lose an audience with your first essay. Well done, moby.

So, here’s the thing: in 1995 I released EVERYTHING IS WRONG. And in that album I included a list of things that were wrong. Not a comprehensive list, but still, a bummer.

excerpt from the EVERYTHING IS WRONG liner notes

And now, here in this inaugural essay, I’m going to look at a few things that seem to have gotten better since I wrote that 1995 list of horror and sadness.

The little empirically supported goth voice in my head is, of course, still screaming: BUT EVERYTHING IS WRONG.

But, to counter that voice, here are some things that I humbly believe have gotten better.

Ready? I’m not.

Also I should say I really like lists. Maybe it’s a result of a childhood filled with grinding chaos, or just having a time-share on the spectrum, but I really like lists.

Let’s start with animals. I went vegan in 1987, and 8 years later in 1995 when I released EVERYTHING IS WRONG veganism was still about as marginal a movement as marginal movements can be.

There were a few vegan restaurants in the world, and a few skinny vegans working in health food stores, but for the most part in 1995 if you said you were a vegan you were met with blank stares and general nonplussedness. Also I make up words. Like nonplussedness and apocalypses. Maybe a future essay will be about prescriptive vs descriptive linguistics. Or not. Depends on how quickly I want to lose the 5 people who might be inclined to read my essays.

So, in 1995 the vegan world barely existed, and then BOOM, it’s 30 years later and veganism is, if not everywhere, at least spread around the globe in ways that were unimaginable in 1995 (or 1987).

We have vegan senators, vegan rock stars, vegan academy award speeches, vegan pizza, vegan donuts, vegan street fairs, vegan movie stars, vegan rappers. Back in 1995 we had brown rice and mashed yeast. Vegans probably make up about 1.5% of the global population, but that’s still 1.49% more than were on the earth 30 years ago. A trillion animals are still being killed by and for humans every year, and animal agriculture is the 2nd or 3rd leading cause of climate change, but STILL, the spread of veganism is something that I definitely hadn’t foreseen 30 years ago. So, progress! Hey-o!

Speaking of animals and the people who love them and want to save them: we now have social media. And yes, a lot of social media is, at the risk of indulging in understatement, pernicious and horrifying. But social media has enabled the animal rights movement in phenomenal ways. Animal sanctuaries can reach billions of people with inspiring pictures of animals. Animal activists in Australia can reach people in Scotland. Animal activists in Scotland can reach people in South Korea. And so on. And that is AMAZING. Truly. The global animal activist network is connected in ways that again, I never could have imagined 30 years ago.

Visiting The Gentle Barn

In an entirely different area of progress, media no longer comes on toxic discs in toxic packaging. Meaning: 30 years ago toxic plastic cd’s were shipped around the world in bleached cardboard boxes wrapped in plastic. And now, music and a lot of other media has almost no environmental footprint.

As almost all cd’s eventually ended up in the landfill, and 30 years ago record companies were producing around 20 billion cd’s a year; that’s 20 billion fewer pieces of plastic and bleached cardboard being thrown into landfills every year. And then add in dvd’s, blu-rays, cd-roms, and all of the other toxic physical media no longer being produced and then chucked in landfills. And we have hundreds of billions of tons of toxic plastic not ending up in landfills. Woo-hoo! More actual progress.

And then: film. Film looks great. It’s fun and old timey. But ethically and environmentally it’s a nightmare. Coated in gelatin (made from slaughtered animals) and coated in toxins. And then to develop film requires unbelievably toxic chemicals. And now, digitally: no gelatin, no chemicals. Just pretty pictures of kittens and sunsets and lattes.

-An aside; I was told to keep this first essay on the relatively short side, and I think I’ve already gone beyond relatively short. So I’ll include a few more things that have improved in the last 30 years, post this essay, and then go back to doing something important, like watching What We Do In The Shadows for the 4th time. p.s am I related to Colin Robinson? Simply; yes.-

Recently, as in, last week, I found the hard drive I used when I was making EVERYTHING IS WRONG. It was a technological marvel; 1 entire 1995 gigabyte in a box that weighed about 5 pounds. Holding this 5 pound hard drive I realized an obvious fact: technology is simply much lighter than it was 30 years ago. But think about the consequences of that: tv’s, printers, hard drives, phones, etc etc all weighed, on average, 50% more 30 years ago than they do now. They’re all still environmentally horrifying, but they take up less space in landfills & they require less oil to be shipped around the world. Every year we produce around 150,000,000,000 pounds of electronic waste. Which is disgusting and awful. BUT if it were 30 years ago that would’ve been 300 billion pounds of electronic waste. So, still terrible, but progress.

And lastly: we are still destroying the only home we have, but at the very least we’re unavoidably aware of the consequences of our actions. 30 years ago almost no one talked about the horrors of single use plastics, and probably only 3 people on the planet were even aware of the threat of micro and nanoplastics. 30 years ago climate change was some quaint distant concept that most of us (apart from Al Gore) believed was never going to threaten every corner of the planet. 30 years ago people still smoked around children and on airplanes. And etc. My point is this: 30 years ago we were naive, gently innocent, and unaware of the fact that the destruction of life on earth wasn’t some far off concept, but rather something imminent.

Are humans now doing anything to fix the problems we’ve created? Largely, no. But we can’t pretend that we aren’t aware, or that we don’t know what the problems are. And now we even know what the solutions will have to be: We have to stop producing and using fossil fuels, we have to stop using animals for food and fashion, we have to stop cutting down forests, and we have to somehow stop producing toxic plastics. 30 years ago these were ideas on pamphlets in health food stores. Now we know, incontrovertibly, that these are actual facts, and if ignored will destroy us. That’s perhaps weird progress, but it’s still, in its own way, progress. The first step to fixing problems has to be the awareness that the problems aren’t just ideas in pamphlets, they’re real.

So as annoying as this is to my inner Cassandra, not everything is wrong.

-moby