The Last Chog

Someday when I have time, I plan to dramatically shorten this post, or split it into two parts.

Like a giant inflatable blivet, they pumped fifty billion tons a year into it for decades. Eventually, it started pressing down on our oceans, causing mountains of water to surge onto the land; coastlines moved miles inward, lowlands flooded, weather patterns flipped, oceans acidified, fresh water became scarce, and entire species relocated or died off. The blivet was full.

Humanity ultimately adapted. However, the years preceding the Great Adaptation were horrifying: food supplies collapsed, billions of refugees clogged the borders of upland countries, and all life everywhere changed forever. That is, except for The Last Chog.

For over one hundred years, billions of Chogs, who made up more than twenty percent of the human population, lived as though there was an endless bounty. Like swarms of robotic wasps, Chogs scraped, mined, refined, shipped, formed, bought, and sold every resource on earth. Nothing was out of reach; anything could be built; and all could be obtained with a click. If it could be imagined - for maximum profit and minimal consequence - the Chogs ripped, clawed, sawed, melted, twisted, formed, and willed it into existence.

Year after year, more and more humans joined the Chogs. And why not? Mega Chogs, which included brand marketers, CEOs, government officials, oligarchs, and influencers everywhere, all prayed at the altars of consumption and consumerism. The message was clear: conspicuous consumption inspired envy, attracted mates, unlocked immeasurable powers, and evidenced happiness, safety, and security. If they all became world-class consumers, how could anything go wrong?

Until the Chogs arrived, humans lived in harmony with the planet for over two hundred thousand years; yet it only took them one hundred years to fill the blivet and disrupt life for everyone else. They did it using a combination of dirty [industrial] technology and misguided faith. If it was dirty technology that filled the blivet, it was misguided faith in climate tech that led them to believe they could return the blivet to its pre-industrial form. It did not.

As the Chog population grew, many predicted the consequence of filling the blivet, but very few had the courage or the willpower to pin the problem on consumption. The Chogs wouldn’t accept recurring declines in output, growth, revenue, market share, harvests, yields, or any other Chog chart trend that pointed down. Instead, top Chogs continued to fly private jets, sail motorized yachts, build mega mansions, and gorge themselves on luxury items and exotic foods. Chogs everywhere chased baubles, trinkets, fast fashion, big trucks, bloated boats, useless gadgets, supersized meals, and the instant gratification that came from point-and-no-think buying. Even worse, to become good little consumers, Chog children were given devices that taught FOMO [fear of missing out], materialism, status seeking, and impulse purchasing. By sixteen, every one of them could be tracked, targeted, and seduced to believe that happiness came from an endless stream of stuff.

To drain the blivet, the Chogs spent trillions. Nevertheless, they couldn’t keep pace with the rapidly growing population of Chogs and their insane, “consequenceless consumption”.

Over many decades, the Chogs had self-organized into huge tribes led by Mega Chogs. The Mega Chogs used their power and sway to mislead followers about what amounted to fights over the realignment of consumption patterns. “It’s ridiculous to dramatically cut...We just need to redistribute...” [consumption] so they said...

So, the race to rip, claw, saw, melt, twist, form, and sell continued. Fighting and competing took its toll on the Chogs - and on the world. Billions of tons of garbage and waste clogged oceans, filled valleys, and dotted the landscape like inverted trashbergs. In the pursuit of stature and stuff, they spent years commuting to soulless jobs; they overmedicated, abandoned their families, shortened their lifespans, and created historic economic and social inequities.

As the blivet swelled, a rapidly increasing number of hungry, scared, and desperate refugees flooded the borders of safer lands. Migrations of billions, that should have taken several hundred years, happened in decades. In the animal kingdom, food webs rapidly reordered as many animals and plants were stranded in lowland areas. Meanwhile, insects, birds, and other mobile species rapidly moved upland. Fragile ecosystems, that were already stressed from years of unpredictable weather patterns, were overwhelmed by these new adversarial and invasive arrivals. The oceans fared no better: already overfished, acidification was now destroying marine life everywhere.

Many, many Chogs doubled down on consequenceless consumption; they built modern castles and gated communities, shopped frivolously, cornered the market for fish and other rare proteins, burned fossil fuels, shunned that notion of “we instead of me”, and prepped for armed conflict. They didn’t know it yet, but these people were about to become the last Chogs on earth.

Previously, humans had survived plagues, pandemics, world wars, and famine. This was entirely different. Consuming without consequence had pushed nature and civilization to the brink of collapse that no ‘war’ on ‘X’ was going to fix. Instead, rebalancing the ecosystem required an unprecedented adaptation: a Great Adaptation, a period when all humans had to learn to live in harmony with nature and each other...seemingly overnight.

A decade or so before the blivet exceeded capacity, more than six billion humans were already spending multiple hours per day inside Deeply Immersive Virtual Environments driven by Artificial Intelligence (AI DIVES). People used AI DIVES for everything, including: learning, working, relaxing, gaming, training, and simulating alternate realities, or “alties” for short.

The three features that made AI DIVES so compelling were limitless depth, hardened integrity, and prophetic probability predictions; all of these features took decades to deliver. Limitless depth enabled users to travel, tilt, pan, and zoom in any direction without audio or visual boundaries, constraints, or distortions. Concurrently, transparent and universal access to authenticated, peer-reviewed, and censorship-resistant data and code had generated unshakeable faith in the integrity of the most compelling AI DIVES. However, it was the prophetic probability predictions that were imbued within the simulated alternate realities (alties) that drove engagement worldwide.

After fifty years of reinforced learning, the intelligent agents that backstopped the alties were capable of generating godlike depictions of the future. Early on, the range of outcomes depicted were vast and almost inactionable; but over time, altie simulations became eerily accurate. Over the span of thirty years, probable outcome counts fell from more than twenty to several; with one outcome always more believable than the other. Doing ‘this’ rather than ‘that’ became an obvious choice.

As time went on, the Chogs used alties to experience the alternative outcomes of everything including: storytelling via synthetic media, engineering and architectural decisions, genetic alterations, military planning, crowd manipulation, gambling, medical treatments, resource planning, logistics, healthcare, epidemiology, and even sports team configurations.

However, there was one altie that changed the trajectory of humankind. The Global Eco Mind (GEM) was a universal consumption altie that enabled users to visualize and predict the often unseen impact of consumption decisions. The GEM began life as a consumption analytics overlay embedded within augmented reality [AR] lenses. As AR users skimmed over recognizable products, the GEM heatmapped everything by the degree of environmental impact. Twenty years in, the GEM morphed into a full-on altie that not only incorporated a universe of transaction, device, sensor, social, and human behavior data, the GEM also incorporated millions of validated outcomes to build predictions upon.

As the blivet pressed down on the world, GEM users could visualize every forkful of impact. Through haunting, real-life depictions, they could see the personal, local, regional, countrywide, and global impact of every consumption decision on earth. Beginning with resource mining and ending at disposal, the lifecycle of simple items like toys, clothing, packaging, and food could be visualized in aggregate. Complex products and services such as phones, electronics, vehicles or air travel could be deconstructed and viewed similarly. To GEM users, a stick of gum became ten million sticks of gum; a water bottle became a fracked field, a chemical plant, and an ocean of plastics that led to contamination of the food supply; an airline ticket became billions of blivet-inflating air travel trips. The crushing consequences of consumption upon all living things, both near and far, were finally on full display.

The GEM caused two rapid and significant shifts. First, Chogs everywhere commanded their authenticated, autonomous user agents (AAUAs) to optimize their life and consumption choices for planetary well-being. As such, billions of AAUAs ranked and selected products based upon regenerative designs and sustainable ingredients; furthermore, they cast billions of ranked choice votes based upon the likelihood of planet-positive outcomes. Second, the GEM enabled anyone to zoom into the grid to find remaining patches of Chogs that were still practicing consequenceless consumption, and needless to say, these areas flipped from bad to good almost overnight. That’s how the Great Adaptation came about, and it’s how we got to today. The blivet is mostly full and slowly deflating, but the crushing danger has passed.

So what happened to the last Chog? The last Chog lives upon a massive mountain of coal. He makes disposable things that nobody wants; tossing them into his valley of trash where they take ten thousand years to decay whilst leaching into nearby rivers and streams. The last Chog is often seen driving around his mountain in a massive white pickup truck as he sings the ‘Intoxicating Tango’ song to himself. He has no friends. He has no enemies. He’s the last sad Chog, on the last sad patch, in the sad GEM grid of consequenceless consumption.

What’s a Chog?

The Lego Recycling Machine

The Lego Recycling Machine is a fun, relatable, and fictional story that adults can use to teach children how technology and circular thinking will inspire the earth-friendly product designs of the future.

Last week, I drove twenty-two miles to pour two Home Depot buckets of random Lego blocks into the eager mouth of a Lego Recycling Machine.

The Machine was located at the end of a nondescript stripmall, right next to an In-N-Out burger. The entire storefront was occupied by a huge Lego logo, a collection chute (the mouth), an exit hole (for boxes and envelopes), and a locked service door.

I never saw an employee. The machine was exclusively operated through the Lego Loop app that I downloaded to my phone.

Nine minutes after pouring ten gallons of mixed Legos into the machine, using the Lego Loop app, I paid for an organized box that included: 1,830 blocks from our bucket, 315 Lego Next Life (LNL) blocks, and three new Lego Building Instruction Booklets.

I left 986 [unneeded] blocks in the machine for resale to others as LNL blocks. Every LNL block sold converts to fractional Lego Coin [crypto] that I can use within the rapidly expanding LNL economy.

91 missing blocks were mailed to me from machines located elsewhere, as these machines are each capable of autonomously preparing packages for shipping.

Even more fun, students from my son’s school used the Lego Loop app to form a club. Using the app, members voted on projects by pledging blocks and Lego Coin to an array of designs. The first build completed, a huge Battlestar Cruiser, used 9,002 blocks pledged by eighteen members. Using the pledged Lego Coin, blocks needed to complete four additional designs are being purchased from others.

Lego Recycling has become so popular that billions of abandoned Legos have been sourced from yard sales, flea markets, basements, and attics the world over.

Lego Group, the company that makes the machines, now earns more profit per year from recycling Legos and reselling designs than they do from manufacturing. Moreover, the machines are adept at detecting and rejecting counterfeits; this feature has almost wiped out the Lego black market.

Lego’s Director of Regenerative Initiatives, Hans Swedman, attributes the success of the Lego Recycling Machine and the Lego Loop app to artificial intelligence and machine learning. “The machine is able to sort, size, organize, and assemble boxes of Legos and new Building Instructions in ways that could not be imagined, and at speeds that could not be matched, by an army of engineers!”

The Lego Loop app is not only enabling a new social recycling and construction experience, it’s also fostering a generation of Lego recycling entrepreneurs. One eleven-year old boy, alias Joe Cakes, has reclaimed and is reselling nearly a million blocks; his mother told me that Joe and his father visited several hundred yard sales last year, and that Joe has earned enough LNL crypto to almost pay for his first year of college!

The Lego Recycling Machine has become so important to the Lego Group that the company has been able to cut its use of virgin plastics over the last three years by more than 50%.

Lego Group, a company which has produced over 400,000,000,000 plastic bricks since 1958, is showing the world that circular thinking, machine learning, and blockchain technology can create a profitable, regenerative, niche economy that is far more reliant on preexisting product than new.

Who would have thought that the top selling toy of 2022 would be a bucket of your old blocks and a couple of machine-generated Building Instruction Booklets?

This post was inspired through conversations with my son (age 11) about AI and ML; by the nine years I spent innovating in the Auto Recycling industry; by the Ellen MacArthur Foundation; by The Paperclip Maximizer; and by a post in the Wall Street Journal titled “Lego Struggles to Find a Plant-Based Plastic That Clicks”.

After reading about Lego’s noble effort to engineer plant-based blocks, I thought, with 400Bn Legos on earth, why bother? We don’t need more, we just need a smarter way to recover and recycle the nature-resistant bricks that already exist.

Climate Change Needs a Cigarette

By 1950 over half of all men and a fifth of all women in the United States smoked. Today, after more than fifty years of anti-smoking campaigns and deserving attacks on the tobacco industry, the smoking population has declined to less than fourteen percent of the total population.

Along the way to creating broad awareness of the dangers of smoking, smoking has become uncool, dirty, and generally viewed as an addiction of the unfortunate. Smokers are called butt suckers, ash heads, nic bitches, chimneys, cancer clouds, and other ugly names.

There are a lot of similarities between ‘the war on tobacco’ and ‘the war on climate change’: unhealthy consequences that [will] span generations, entrenched big-money interests, disinformation warfare, inept initial government responses, cultural trends, and more.

What’s missing from the war on climate change? Cigarettes.

With smoking, you can point to any effect and instantly know the cause: lung cancer…cigarettes; heart disease…cigarettes; mouth cancer…cigarettes; yellow teeth and premature aging…cigarettes; bad breath…cigarettes; and other dreadful things due to…cigarettes

Sure, with climate change there’s CO2 and greenhouse gasses, but try pointing to them.

Furthermore, climate language is constructed around addition versus subtraction: The more CO2 we ADD to the atmosphere, the bigger the problem, and so on. However, adding something [invisible] to anything that appears to have unlimited capacity [the atmosphere] instantly creates a comprehension hurdle. When we can’t comprehend the size of the groceries or the bag, it’s hard to understand the problem.

Subtraction on the other hand, is easier to grok. The world has finite resources, and eight billion humans, consuming as we do today, will deplete the resources that future generations need (e.g.: clean water). ‘Unlimited resources’ is a notion that nobody should have. On the contrary, when we consume [subtract] more than we need, we are the problem. There’s a simple truth to this common sense, depletion argument that doesn’t require specialized knowledge, carbon calculators, satellite data, climate models, or Ted Talks…demand will outstrip supply.

Since resource consumption and carbon generation are two sides of the same coin, it’s my belief as an entrepreneur and a marketer that ‘consumption’ is a far easier problem to communicate and solve than ‘generation’. Here’s a crude antidote to support my thesis: “consumption pig” or “carbon footprint”? Which combination of words generates an emotional response?

Words are everything.

My motivation for writing this post is simple: Like a lot of American families, we are generally aware that there’s a climate problem. However, we are nearly clueless about what to do about it. Sure, we recycle; we talk about climate; we read about climate; I have worked on climate initiatives; but, my family is still consuming way too much of the world’s remaining resources.

Not wanting to call — even jokingly — my family, friends, or neighbors “consumption pigs”, I decided to endeavour to come up with something we can use to lovingly shame each other into trimming our consumption.

After an extensive branding exercise, I have latched onto remixing “climate change”, “consumption”, and “hog” to come up with…”chog”.

Less offensive than “pig”, “chog” is the ‘cigarette’ climate change needs.

Excessive consumption…chogging.

Kids that leave the lights on…chogs.

McMansion…choghouse.

Large SUV…chogmobile.

Shopaholic…chogaholic.

Hamburger…chogburger (meat’s a problem)

Daily Amazon deliveries…chogwild.

Instagramming soccer mom iIdling an SUV for seventy minutes…megachog.

It’s time to make chogging as offensive as smoking.

This does not need to be mean-spirited. With family and friends, I suggest using a smile. With chogholes, try alternative approaches :)

Far too many of us are chogs. If the climate crisis is as urgent as it seems, expect to be politely prodded, then shamed, and then ultimately required to reduce consumption. Chogging and the preservation of species, including humans, are incompatible. It may take fifty years, but one way or another, chogs will become…dinosaurs.

Related post: The Last Chog