Watching Jeff Bezos fly into space, thinking about the scenario Wall-E warned us

Jeff Bezos made a 10-minute trip to suborbital space on Tuesday morning, which many consider this will be good news for humanity. However, Jeff Bezos’ flight also reminds us of a famous movie. In it, a large corporation destroyed the Earth, turning the planet into a wasteland full of garbage, where nothing can grow.

All life on the planet — with the exception of a cockroach — has either died or escaped on a spaceship called the Axiom, where humans are served by machines, spending their days watching screens and smiling blankly. worship when their muscles atrophy. A “Welcome to Economy” sign hangs over the heads of passengers unaware of what’s going on off-screen in front of them.

Wall-E, even though it was released more than a decade ago, the film serves as a warning for the future when rich giants like Bezos are focusing on turning space into an amusement park. , or an industrial nightmare.

When Wall-E came out in 2008, the Buy-n-Large company in the movie serving people in the Axiom spaceship was compared to Walmart, but director Andrew Stanton said the film was actually inspired from the rise of companies like Amazon.

Like Buy-n-Large, which started out as a yogurt company, Amazon started out in the book market but quickly took over everything. And despite Bezos’ claims that he cares about the climate crisis, Amazon, like Buy-n-Large, is destroying the Earth.

The company generates hundreds of thousands of tons of plastic waste, spews harmful gases and heats the planet up by thousands of vehicles and warehouses, and helps oil companies exploit fossil fuels more efficiently. In just one warehouse, the company throws away millions of products, and Amazon’s waste problem is getting worse.

Instead of making any serious efforts to tackle Amazon’s environmental devastation, Bezos is increasingly talking about how we need to prepare to get rid of the Earth altogether. Immediately after his trip to space, he frankly remarked that humanity should move all polluting industries to space. Previously, he said he wanted to build colonies in Earth’s orbit to support billions of people.

Wall-E warns us of the dangers that Bezos’ dream future may bring. We can lose sight of the things that make us human, such as our relationships with other living things. The Earth has been turned into an endless junkyard. Robots like the main character in the movie are a throwaway due to the trend of single use maintained by a corporation.

Buy-n-Large in Axiom is a glorified shopping mall, lit by shimmering billboards offering a multitude of things to buy from the flying chairs that keep the space station’s frail inhabitants moving , to soft drinks and cheese bread. Without any sense of nature or community connection. Instead, it’s a completely unique consumer experience.

One thing we don’t see at Wall-E is what happened during humanity’s departure from Earth, but based on what we know from the real world, wealthy corporate executives can get the best results, like the billionaire space race that made the richest man on the planet one of the first to travel off Earth.

Meanwhile, climate change and ecological devastation have hit the poorest among us hard. This can be seen from Black and Indigenous families most likely to lose everything in wildfires, to habitat-protecting communities in the shadow of refineries. chemicals, paper, and oil produce the single-use items that Amazon loves to sell us, many of which end up as waste in poorer countries.

Jeff Bezos was right when he said that we all paid for his trip to the edge of space – not just because workers and customers made him rich, but also because Amazon and other corporations made him rich. put their pollution costs on all of us. This cycle will only get worse in the coming decades unless we take steps to end it.

In fact, we don’t have a backup plan either. If the destruction of the Earth continues at the current rate, we will have disaster.

A core message Wall-E wants to send back: We will be on the road to destruction if we continue to let corporations pursue endless profitable growth.

In Wall-E, it’s a helpless robot left alone until a brave human leader, the captain of Axiom, decides to turn the spaceship around and rebuild Earth. Although the future of humanity in Wall-E is quite dire, the ending of the film is relatively optimistic. But today, it is the people who are currently suffering. And it will take more than a captain to turn the ship around.

Reference: Gizmodo