The Legendary Girl of GAA (LGOG)
LGOG: fighting the greenwashers who believe the earth is a kleenex we can dispose of
Copyright November 2022 Mil Williams, Ireland
This is an interesting proposal which came out of conversations with very clever people who didn’t mean me well. No matter: sometimes good can come out of the worst of intentions.
Here we propose rescuing metaverse technologies from their own hubris by converting them from a habitual synchronicity — everyone has to choose to meet up at the same time for a system to minimally work — into something where everyone can use it whenever they choose, without reference to other users: that is, an asynchronous functionality.
And yet utility would still exist for everyone.
It’s essentially an interactive truth machine which encourages the pursuit of the same, the valuing of the same, and the diffusion of the same.
Read, and you’ll see.
Associated content at GB 2 Earth can be found here.
Background
A long time ago I imagined a simulation – so whilst VR was coming about (2014, in this case), but needing a VR with a social conscience … like Vannevar Bush and his Memex machine:
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1945/07/as-we-may-think/303881/
The simulation I imagined was aimed at countering the awful prejudices driven by the public service broadcaster Channel 4’s programme “Benefits Street”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benefits_Street
The simulation, not the show, was designed to put you in the shoes of the poor – but also, comparatively speaking, the rich too.
Each “house” in the simulation would allow you to explore it.
Two examples of the reality of systemic disadvantage that the poverty divide creates:
One of the typical prejudices people who aren’t poor have about the poor is the trope that is trotted out about “if you’re so poor, why the big-screen tele?”. As an example of what my version wanted to do, the explorer of the space would discover that the poor family’s big TV was costing them an eventual total of £2000 on pay-per-month loan, whereas the richer families were able to buy it outright for £700.
But still you may say: “Why the TV?” People can do without a TV of course, but with little else in life because money is tight, a TV may be better than further visits to the GP’s sack of medication.
Rich people travel hundreds of miles a week in their pursuit of face-to-face relationships and wealth-generating activities and process.
The poorer citizens, meantime, rarely move outside a radius of five miles maximum, and therefore enjoy (or rather don’t) just about zero opportunities to break away from their inability to have a more mobile future, in all aspects of the term.
As a result of these disparities and many more, poverty and wealth aren’t just what you can see, but what you can access. And the true value of a life is more in the latter, which may be possible for all in some respects (the oversized TV on the one hand, the wealth-enriching business encounters on the other), than the tangible accumulation of money and other financial resources per se.
Climate change and greenwashing: what it is
Ok. So the proposed “Benefits Street” simulation had both a didactic and fun set of aspects to it.
The problems of combating climate change are multiple. But one of the biggest is two steps forwards, and ten steps back: it’s called greenwashing. Like whitewashing, only in respect of environmental issues.
Companies, corporations, and hedge funds and so on – the very wealthiest of ALL in society – are signing up to many global, regional and national agreements … and then blatantly ignoring them all: steaming on ahead, sometimes literally, with their linear economies and toxically polluting activities, the latter of which are being reviewed and/or revised in no serious nor consequential ways.
If all of the agreements delivered to date had been put in place as agreed in the timely fashions signed up to, we would all be headed to a much sounder and safer future-present. But they haven’t been, and we’re not.
In the face of this, we feel hopeless. This is the culture of the greenwashers: they wage active war on us by saying change is inevitable. What they don’t explain is that change is inevitable, but its nature is not. And this is the point we must start from. Their notion of change is self-interested: violently and abusively so.
Those of us who believe the scientists, meanwhile, understand they know what they’re saying; but equally, we feel that the alegal societal harm being toxically committed against us all – it has a name: it’s called zemiology (the science of societal harm being crimes against humanity which have been structured to be legal) – is something none of us will successfully fight back; that a proper and decent elimination of its creeping sclerosis is utterly impossible for us to achieve.
The tool of play: introduction
“The Legendary Girl of GAA (LGOG)” is content that will be delivered in the following ways:
Travelling theatre, delivering a traditional theatrical experience in learning institutions in two stages: a) as a play previously rehearsed by trained exponents of the dramatic arts and presented to the students and teaching professionals as a premier of the work; b) as a play which is then rehearsed and re-delivered by the students themselves, as well as adapted, amended, and pushed beyond the original conceptualisation.
An app for iPhone and Android will accompany these visits, and will contain a truth-tool that will vet in supportive and enabling terms the assertions present at first, and the ones added in on amendment and revision.
It’s presupposed that interactive elements such as smartboards which display what the audience wants to post at any stage in the delivery of the representation will also be present and encouraged.
Asynchronous meetings metaverse environments: here, we mean online and app-located places where people can encounter each other without appearing at the same time; can find out about climate change and greenwashing truths; the lies that are told by specific and named organisations and people; the opportunity to follow a linear path as we learn about a circular approach to the future-present WE want to make inevitable.
The truth-tool will operate in this delivery channel as well. No one can post or amend or add or revisit anything in the metaverse without the latest scientific and evidence-based knowledge being applied to it: here, I mean of course that if, as explorer of the space, you post something wrong, then the system will add a red frame around what’s been speciously admitted to the asynchronous metaverse, alongside an undeniable red cross in the middle, as well as a reaffirming graphic, link or other asset that effectively combats the lie(s) being propagated.
The structure of the content itself and its different channels
The play will have three acts; the metaverse version, meanwhile, will have three levels: that is, three linear elements which can nevertheless come around and together at any time – almost like a more modern IKEA shopping experience which sometimes allows you now to cut across the older linearity:
https://www.serpentinegalleries.org/whats-on/140-artists-ideas-for-planet-earth/
38 Fernando Garcia-Dory
Material resources.
Culture.
Society.
Another key concept underlining the whole project is liminality:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Liminality
In anthropology, liminality (from Latin līmen 'a threshold')[1] is the quality of ambiguity or disorientation that occurs in the middle stage of a rite of passage, when participants no longer hold their pre-ritual status but have not yet begun the transition to the status they will hold when the rite is complete.[2] During a rite's liminal stage, participants "stand at the threshold"[3] between their previous way of structuring their identity, time, or community, and a new way (which completing the rite establishes).
This can, of course, be quite disorientating, quite unempowering, and quite emotionally and mentally debilitating. We find, when the right solutions are ignored over decades, even over entire lifetimes, that hope dissipates to really dangerous lows. And the bad – for they are irredeemably bad – vanquish even the good’s initiation in the battles that must be fought.
It’s what’s happening to us all: all of us who don’t subscribe to the Ayn Rand-developed and Silicon Valley-adopted dogma and theology that the planet is to be plundered and pilfered for one’s own personal, professional and business advantage:
I once met with a Dublin-based Randian: he talked to me about how his clients had reptilian brains (though not him, obviously) and were there to be mined and scraped and ripped off (effectively I mean, in both senses of the word here), because if they weren’t up to the job of seeing where the rapacious come from, they had no reasonable expectations that any right existed for them to be protected from outwith their small and limited worlds.
And there’s only one victor when the victim runs. The abuser.
In this case, the greenwasher.
What we want to do to the greenwashers and similar: bust them, that’s what
One of the PRIMARY goals, then, of the content we wish to develop in order to combat this liminality inherent in greenwashing – and the consequent aggressiveness and bad faith exhibited by the greenwashers (which leads to the lack of confidence in those of us well convinced by the arguments against the status quo but unable to see a realistic way forward to implementation) – is to enable a proactive desire to become flexible but immensely firm warriors capable of pushing back the reach of greenwashing to its minimum expression. In a decade. Without giving up ever. And via a strength of mind and purpose that never falls into the idiocies of radical frustrations:
Patience is a virtue. Let’s show it. And keep on showing it and showing it and showing it. But not to the extent where we roll over and allow the world to remain a kleenex to be disposed of.
Let’s instead be warriors of peace and inclusion, not warriors of war. Not simple peacekeepers, either – never reactive, again: we will call out what is wrong from now on in, and we shall use all the financial, legal and criminal-justice tools to stop what these greenwashers do, when they pervert criminal justice through the widespread use of loopholes:
https://gb2earth.com/hunch/loopholes
And dark figure (we call it neo-crime now: but it simply pushes further the 19th century sociological and criminological idea that 20-40 percent of all crime is invisible to our civilisations), understood and applied much more widely:
https://gb2earth.com/hunch/neocrime
But first we must propose that – as always when we want to deliver deep and permanent change in how we see and culturalise our Western liberal democracies, and their ongoing recovery and reach – it must be EDUCATION and its 21st century paradigm, SELF-LEARNING, that re-engineers the future-present which approaches.
Fighting greenwashing via engagement and personal & cultural empowerment
The target, what we want to lay bare first before we knock back and eliminate surgically through education and sell-learning, are the lies of all individuals, companies & corporations, organisations both governmental and non-governmental, as well as entire nation-state agencies and others. The lies relate to their claiming they live the dream of regeneration; that they care about the future-present; that they believe it’s important to turn their linear economies into circular ones; and that, finally, they believe we should look after the earth as something others should inherit, rather than a kleenex we can dispose of.
But what are greenwashers exactly?
They sustain, via Rand and other philosophers, that they exist to pilfer the planet: the space they pilfer is constructed ably, and therefore needs a counterweight as equally vigorously constructed if they are to lose as they must, and we are to win as we should.
Now, the space we’re discussing has factories and supply lines and shops. And it’s serving to greenwash us. It’s greenwashing the linear economy so it looks like the circular one is being built.
It’s rubbish. It’s lies. And it’s not.
And so what is “The Legendary Girl of GAA (LGOG)” really about?
This, then, is the core of “The Legendary Girl of GAA (LGOG)” project:
How the very rich tell lies to keep the poor (all the rest of us) complacent:
https://ideas.repec.org/p/dip/dpaper/2013-04.html
Abstract: Present social movements, as "Occupy Wall Street" or the Spanish "Indignados", claim that politicians work for an economic elite, the 1%, that drives the world economic policies. In this paper we show through econometric analysis that these movements are accurate: politicians in OECD countries maximize the happiness of the economic elite. In 2009 center-right parties maximized the happiness of the 100th-98th richest percentile and center-left parties the 100th-95th richest percentile. The situation has evolved from the seventies when politicians represented, approximately, the median voter.
“The Legendary Girl of GAA (LGOG)” is a story whose narrative arc is constructed around how our hero goes through three linear levels to discover the secret of a real circularity:
Material resources – this is the first level, where we find out the truth of species extinction, the disappearance of natural resources, ocean-bound plastics and their implications, etc.
Culture – whether you believe you have an obligation to hand over a legacy in proper conditions to future generations. And if you don’t, what gives you the right to think like this.
Society – the future-present we want to shape, because this doesn’t only benefit our children and so forth: it benefits ourselves today. Because feeling good about doing good is possible …
LGOG’s job in the play, in a more directed way, and in the asynchronous metaverse version more loosely, is first to do the following:
Find out the truth about the greenwashing and the greenwashers – their advertising hoardings shouting out what is actually a specious commitment to properly engaged climate change.
How we deliver on this:
We will use this linear story of three acts/three levels with an object orientated environment in both channels.
However, in BOTH channels, we can as audience and/or explorers/players enrich the stories being encountered with our links and knowledge, and things we search using the BYOD strategies allowed whilst the performances and experiences.
As already mentioned, though, the constitution of the experiences will make it impossible to lie about climate change without the system framing it in a big red frame with a cross across it, and then adding in the evidence that shows its incontrovertibly false.
More to come: soon a presentation, for sure.