Anechoic Rescue

It is hard to say, whether there is an increase in the number of conflicts or just an increase in the number of conflicts being reported. The 21^st century might best be defined by the information revolution, but there is a long way to go and we still have another six months to survive 2020. The word ‘conflict’ primarily takes us into the realm of battles & wars, however, that aside, we today are facing conflicts of belief, accepted truths and perspectives that are getting eroded away because of our ever changing definition of life.

 

For a long time, living has been defined through quantized levels above survival. The genius of man, built upon a mammal that could stand on two feet, had opposable thumbs and proportionally the largest brain, gave this blue planet a civilization highly evolved in all sensory experiences. As true as the existence of matter & anti-matter, humans have balanced the tussle between their good and evil. Our development brought great value and learning, but everything that makes life easy is not necessarily good. We, today, have both the best medicines to cure and the worst weapons to hurt.

 

In such a scenario, it is information that makes each human more equal as the possession of the same bears no physical limits. Realized to be vital, the control of this democracy, bereft of rabble, is today the battlefield of Internet giants and governments alike. The simpler times that we reminisce had little info flow, limited options and thus the bliss of ignorance. Issues existed as much as today. The Moore’s Law growth has given us more but has started a fire that has become self-consuming in nature. A crucial part of information architecture is to design a user experience or user interface to ensure that just the right amount of information appears on a webpage or app screen: enough to make it relevant but not so much that it causes information anxiety which is not only a capitalistic side effect but also a symptom of our desire to not focus on the moment. The two combined are the reason and alibi for our ever-losing searches for facts on where we are today.

 

As the major focus on all news media nowadays, the data on Black Lives Matter on platforms like google search, AI driven articles, social media and commercial news (that is the closest I can phrase them) has muddled a social uprising into a cultural and political leverage for infructuous sloganeering leading towards everything except a rational path to the solution. The news on the clashes between the Indian and Chinese Armies on the Indo-Tibet Line of Actual Control too is so overloaded with expert-analyses that the small amount of official versions fade away in doubts. Corona Virus is holding on to relevance at a high cost of lives, but information flow on any of these issues has neither aided resolution nor aspired the confidence of truth. Then why do we fuel this?

 

·      We love being victims: While there is a psychological reason, but our addiction to bad news is the easy proof on this.

·      We are Bored: Event info is constantly updating giving us something to constantly consume. Just see the screen times we waste on just surfing.

·      Perpetual availability: The media has trained us to expect fast news and instant updates as the default way to stay informed.

·     Virtual Social Capital: By constantly consuming, we always have something new to share with friends and colleagues, thus positioning ourselves as being ‘in the know’. The number of people with the ‘I’ syndrome on social media is one indicator.

·      We ‘binge consume’ info: We approach info like the next episode of a Netflix Series. We are desperate to find out what happens next and follow the narrative to its conclusion, which keeps us clicking for more.

Information Overload is not the same as “Sensory Overload.” This is when your mind is bombarded with images, sounds and sensations that overload the brain. The brain can handle tens of millions of signals from our senses every second. Think of the number of light sensors within the eye, and equate this to the resolution of a digital camera (and the corresponding file size of the photos it produces). Then include the thousands of touch-sensitive areas of the body, and the range of our hearing. But we can still deal with all of this, because the brain has had tens of millions of years of evolution to deal with this. Compare those tens of millions of years to the few decades we’ve been dealing with information such as TV & Internet. Our brains are still learning to deal with this.

 

So in the scheme of things, there are the information controllers (facebook, google, news channels), the people who pay for that (advertisers / sovereign propaganda) and then there is ‘you’. Yes, you deserve to know. It is your right. But do you need to know? Is it relevant? And do you need it all the time? Most of the info we crave is “Just-In-Case” while it could even be acceptable “Just-In-Time”. De-clutter your life. Don’t let technology fool you into being in control of information. Your twitter notifications, or instagram likes are just added echoes to the noise you don’t need in the first place. They fog your thoughts and prevent you from listening to yourself. Make your space anechoic and listen to your thoughts. If god never wanted you to listen to yourself, the ears would have been far from the brain.

 

I don’t advise isolation, we are social animals. Internet media is a great platform with endless possibilities. Network news is a good check on the powers and open information is great empowerment. It is just that ‘you’ need to be in control. Like medicines, there is an ideal Minimal Effective Dose (MED). Every pill has an MED, and after that specific dose, no other positive effect occurs and overdose is obviously harmful. Consuming information is somewhat similar. You need just a precise amount of it to help you to achieve your goals and put your plans into action. Anything more than that won’t improve your results any further and overload is the bane we want to avoid.

 

In this age of information, “you” are the product and you, yourself, are the buyer. Value yourself.

Up Above the World. So High.

Air Travel, in the times of Corona is more like a necessary evil. Flying commercial still remains the fastest and the most convenient way to move around, especially after getting habitual of a few hour hops vs an overnighter on the road. We are still arguing that international flights, primarily from hotspots in China and other nations should have been stopped late last year only and saved us the agony of a rising curve that was predicted to flatten. The prudence of that aside, the ability of air travel in carrying the virus has certainly been accepted and has changed the airline industry for good.

 

Today, taking a flight implies masking up for the cab journey with a topping of gloves and healthy dollops of sanitizer till just the security check. One is then layered with a face shield and if you are unlucky in the middle row, a PPE gown to save you from your neighbours, in the socially cramped economy class. Fear, precaution or just instructions to follow, the feel of flights is history and it has also taken away the oddly satisfying meals and the seriously debatable coffee that kept you up but made the next seat guy snore away.

 

Emotions are strange chemical reactions. They make seemingly quantized events like going from Place A to B an experience to remember and letting go, a hard choice. The recent take off was ironically a sinking feeling. It was a “Surgical Strike” on the senses with the cabin smelling of strong disinfectant and the crew dressed like surgeons. From being a poly-sensory experience that I was looking for, the flight got downgraded to candy crush and a constant nagging in the head, “are we there yet?” It offends the human ego that nature is indifferent to us. However much we want, the mother elephant and her unborn are not coming back and this virus is not going away. Living with difficult truths, unfortunately, is normal.

 

Another view on this new reality of protective gear and sanitizing liquids is on the volume of discard these single use items create. Their medical-hazard aside, the pollution side-show itself is a big add, on the plastic choking of the planet. The 170 odd passengers and crew, after taking off from mom’s airport and landing at the son’s airport (Bless their souls. Great leaders), disposed 170 masks, face-shields and about 50 PPE gowns. And this happening with every flight presents a substantial source of the new-normal pollution.

 

Our country has shown great ingenuity in exponentially increasing the production of PPEs and sanitization chemicals. Currently, PPE manufacturers use materials such as polyester, polyamide, polyethylene and other polymers. As good citizens we may assume that PPEs, being primarily plastic conform to recycling processes, but PPE is not recyclable (with the existing processes) or biodegradable, and it needs to be treated as waste. Sanitization chemicals contain ethyl alcohol, isopropyl alcohol or both to kill bacteria and viruses on hands and surfaces. Alcohols have long been known to kill germs by denaturing the protective outer proteins of microbes and dissolving their membranes. However, the excessive use that we see today needs another look as the solvents are sure to find way into the water systems or even the food chain and may become a concern through bio-magnification.

 

So, what can we do about the PPE waste issue? Gloves, masks, and wipes are playing a vital role in our lives right now as a way to protect people from contracting and spreading the corona virus. Still, harming our environment and possibly polluting the already endangered water sources should not be a necessary consequence. Sustainability of production, use, discard processes and by-products needs to be the foremost focus in this case. Using biodegradable materials, adding end of service indicators and making multi-use items instead of ‘single-use and discard’ variants, come to mind as options for a better PPE. But these ideas require quite an investment from a manufacturer’s perspective and a deviation of the lowest bidder syndrome from the buyer’s side. The easiest and cheapest way to market is rarely, if ever, the most sustainable way.

 

An interesting thought here could be the Circular Economy for the PPEs. A Manufacturer-Distributor combine could cater for PPE supplies to major bulk breaking points like airports, hospitals etc and collect the used PPEs and ensure a systematic discard / recycling. It holds value, as the economics of scale will allow investments into retooling of manufacturing processes as well as recycling procedures, leading to an environmentally safer lifecycle for the now inescapable PPE. It is a major change in this recently booming industry as ‘Before-Corona’ the hand sanitizer or the PPE were more of an emergency requirement than a routine and that has brought a whole new scale to fore. We may wish or impose environmental prudence on industries, but realistically, corporate sustainable development is not environmental or ethical but economic; if it fails economically as a business concept, as an engine of innovation, then it fails.

 

How can you help? Simplify the problem, wipe away the propaganda, listen to experts and use common sense. Wear cloth mask in safer areas, an N-95 mask is not needed everywhere. Use and discard PPE in the proper way and please remember, just because it is from a public dispenser, you don’t need a ‘large’ of hand sanitizer; it’s a different type of alcohol. And yes, please wait for sometime before crushing social distancing as soon as the aircraft lands.

Disclaimer: This was not my flight. Image from Twitter

 

Take the World Environment Day as an excuse to start. Long after COVID-19 is solved, we still will have to protect the Earth.