Mycelial Resilience, Unpessimism: Notes Toward Action, Against Inevitability

tl;dr

From hardcore optimists on the vanguard of climate change discussion and action to the hardcore pessimists on a not dissimilar vanguard of the climate change discussion, from the capitalists to the anarchists—there is a driving spark of resilience on individual as well as community and network-wide levels. Ultimately, I argue that the drive for resilience opens or inherently includes an underlying space where optimistic action can be allowed to occur.

There are issues and opportunities (i.e. some Anthropocenic, idk, cultural hope) in the hot, hot friction points of time vs no time, of taking a stand, of including and excluding, of leading by doing, of risking visibility/exposure, of creating conditions of possibility.

Timelines may be too long (2030, 2050) or too shortsighted (profit, and year over year growth), but the active will to address business responsibility in the Anthropocene is present in politics/policy, as well as in business, as well as in the general public, to a sharply increasing extent marked by a stark shift in the late 2010s, and entered into operational performative discourse at the international level as of 2020, with an increase in semi-militantly optimistic perspectives in social content carrying through 2022. 

To take advantage of this, branding folks hoping to help create a better Anthropocene had better be ready to be a little controversial as we try to open up spaces for big, weird, extremely sensible decisions tuned to open up spaces where things can happen new, in the brand world and unconscious.

Intentions and Atmosphere (in this Case, also Literally):
The Ongoing (Re)Archaeology of the Present

In college, three of my science credits came from a class called “Bones, Stones, and Human Evolution,” aka “Rocks for Jocks,” which was fascinating, if also stripped of some of the experimental rigor that would have made it worthy of a sciences major. In any case, the professor (who didn’t dig stuff up, himself, but whose close colleagues did) told the class that when the folks who do the digging come upon, essentially, The Dump of a long-gone group of people—it’s thrilling for them. Because paleoanthropologist-archaeologist types learn a lot about ancient societies from their garbage.

Well, in this moment, 

• where our (“Our”) trash is becoming the undeniable indicator of the geology of the time,

• and when the Valuable Thing, to Formerly Valuable Thing, to Mere Thing, to Trash non-cycle is as fast as it’s been thus far,

• when, for example, a bottle of water generates waste water at a rate of 300% over and above the drinkable water in the bottle—

• when incentivizations for lower carbon emissions are being innovated, including the purchasing of carbon offsets by corporations and by their consumers/customers

  • which has a sort of long-fermented flavor reminiscent of the Papal Indulgence, with notes of reforestation or renewable energy investment (each of which calls labor practices and land appropriations into question, and the latter of which bears implications in terms of increased mineral extraction, with potential environmental and human rights consequences in the near, medium, and long term),

• when at least one sports car floats somewhere amid the communications and surveillance satellites, and a jalopy has sat for decades on the surface of our moon, the queen of night on earth,

• when I somehow never have quite what I need to wear—

In this moment, our Trash and our Useful Objects describe, reflect, and are each other. Particle board can only be turned into sawdust to be pressed into more particle board so many times. The Coca-Cola labels read “Recycle me, again!,” in green ink. Glass bottle recycling is largely useful because glass can be turned back into sand and industries like construction are experiencing a sand shortage…

In this moment, it would be too simplistic to say that we (as branders, anthropologists, artists, commentators, etc.) learn a lot about contemporary society from our garbage, much of which was only very recently soon-to-be garbage. 

So as tempting as it is to launch a rant about how “the International Space Station, too, is trash that people ride trash to get to, and wear pressurized trash suits to do dangerous trash repair missions, with tools, which are also trash…” I will resist that temptation, for more, hopefully, optimistic intentions.


Charting a Relatively Brief and Narrow Survey of Optimisms and Pessimisms Over the Course of About Ten Years

From a brand and strategically oriented perspective, we’ve seen a few dominant, subordinate, and niche narratives arise, conflict, inform each other, and ignore each other. At the outset, I’m going to purposely set aside comms strategies based on denying and ignoring the realities of human influence on the environment. And I’ll name them as a watchout or, let’s say, ‘adversary’ to brands contributing to an Anthropocene I would want to live in, according to strategic considerations I would want to contribute to. What analysis such strategies and comms receive here will be presented as instructive consideration or counter-consideration, where and if appropriate.

Moving on from denial, two major categories of response to the situation of this present era range in expression along a spectrum from pessimism to optimism. The simple and overt pessimism of “We’re fucked!” tends to be highly prevalent in a proliferation of memes from the early middle of the last decade onward, as the conversation on climate change and impending doom and human involvement vs. human potential to intervene became clearer and more acceptable as part of public discourse. 

The memes, of course, were accompanied by frightening headlines describing truly scary reports about things like adjusted timelines and the meaning ±0.5ºC over x number of years. Financial papers like Forbes and Bloomberg reported terrifying outcomes of government and corporate inaction, with a sense of urgency that often crossed into an aura of panic. The numbers seemed implausible, the timeframe of only a few years between one way of life and wider spread disaster felt unmanageable. 

What may have been effective shock value to move readers and followers out of complacency, may also have had the counter-effect of creating a sense of powerlessness and heightened complacency. Which is a danger of pessimism, and of course has been reflected in meme culture to this day, with the still trending TikTok sound asking us time and again “why you working so hard?” and reminding us that “the world is ending,” which of course has an ironic cheeriness and willingness to embrace *rest* that reminds us of a heightened reality of the threat and a characteristically 2020s focus on self care and self worth and keeping living (i.e. staying alive) as compared with the memes and reporting of ten plus years ago.

Meanwhile, in 2012 North Carolina made it illegal to measure the rise in sea level according to forecasts matching available data, essentially choosing to favor historical linear projections rather than the more accurate to nature exponential curve favored by most researchers on the subject. The response included alarm and ridicule, and nevertheless real estate development on almost certainly unviable property persisted. It was freaky, and it’s been freaky. 

And a quick glance at forbes headlines from 2010 onward shows a move from climate change skepticism, to a mixture of alarmistness and ridiculing the alarmists (it’s just good cross promo, you know), to a straightforward and pretty negative acceptance of climate change tinged with apocalyptic inevitability, and arriving at a mixed optimistic approach around 2018, with action-oriented headlines like “2018: A Tipping Point for Climate Change,” “Comprehensive Climate Reporting Must Include Methane,” and “Climate Change in Cities: What We Need to Do.” This was the same year that Extinction Rebellion, a youth-led climate activist group named after the ongoing mass extinction of the Anthropocene. (I couldn’t for the life of me find it, but somewhere out there in the leftist dank meme stashes of Facebook, lives a meme that reads something like ‘If places like Forbes and Bloomberg are telling us that there’s no hope against climate change, I’m gonna assume they have a motivation to encourage us to be complacent and hopeless. And I’m not gonna go with that.” I’d wager it appeared around 2016-17, which is speculation, but at least evocative of the churn from the weird annals of social media to popular, and at times rather conservative reporting.)

In 2020, the Guardian ran the headline “Green teen memes: how TikTok could save the planet.” And in 2021, Forbes recognized 2020 as “The Year the Narrative Changed for Sustainability Reporting” because the trustees of the International Financial Reporting Standards Foundation proposed the formation of a board to oversee and regulate sustainability reporting standards, as was once done for financial reporting, which hasn’t given us full transparency but has given us some light to cast through the cracks, or cracks where the light gets in. 

Meanwhile, it’s worth noting a fairly niche, but somewhat influential notion represented by Instagram accounts like @environmentalist.anarchist that optimism, itself is a ploy to maintain complacency in the belief that slight modifications can allow us, in relatively affluent to affluent cultures, to maintain our current ways of life. In July of 2021, this page with about 52.3k followers declared, 

“Climate realism is climate pessimism. It is recognizing that the crisis is already here and it’s only going to get worse and then preparing yourself and your community for the effects by working to be as independent from capital, industry, and the state as possible. It is attacking those responsible for ecocide and working toward resiliency.”

Notably, even this claim that realism is pessimism ends with a call and aspiration toward resiliency. While in January of this year Forbes ran some Deloitte Leadership sponcon headlined “Actions Companies Can Take to Become Climate Leaders.”

In the cases of both anarchist pessimism and expressions of capitalist optimism, there is a built-in desire for creating resiliency (in markets and among communities, and affinity groups in the anarchist sense). There’s also a recognition of reliance on community, necessarily extremely local in the anarchist way of thinking, and ultimately necessarily both extremely local *and* extremely global in what we’re calling the capitalist way of thinking, for now. Different definitions, different missions, but not such different goals and needs—a level of desire to keep humanity alive and at least slow extinction, attempts to cultivate personal and systemic resiliency, and creating and maintaining networks of supplies and crucially *people* to do so. Corporations aren’t people, but the specter of corporate personhood appears yet again; corporations are just made up of people after all. And the word “community” has been subject to many definitions over the course of my lifetime, including regularly as a monetizable unit (which I first actively noticed at the yoga studio where I worked in Bushwick in 2017).


Tiptoeing Gingerly through Some Implications

So we have resilience, pessimism, optimism, and networks and/or communities. And risking horseshoe theory, some underlying needs and desires among groups with fundamentally different beliefs. We all don’t want to die, and we all need people. Okay. Table stakes? Unfortunately, somehow not quite. 

But beyond these reverberant, maybe resonant, tensions; and beyond the shallow optimism of reframing “We’re fucked!”; and hopefully even beyond a deeper(?) biological optimism of a body’s desire to refuse to die—there are issues and opportunities in the hot friction points of 

• time vs no time 

• taking a stand 

• including and excluding 

• risking visibility/exposure

• creating toward conditions of possibility

Time vs No Time: Looking at Now

To take action on this (networked) optimism in resilience, requires a rethinking of time scales at decision-maker levels of brands and businesses. Short term profits and long term stability of the business are undoubtedly crucial markers to track, but they create blinders to the present. Now Term thinking is essential to understanding the material reality that brands in the Anthropocene inhabit and influence. That is, if we as brand people can learn to look at the present (and teach decision-makers how to look at the present) as clearly as we’re often asked to look at the past and the future—we’d be helping equip brands to inhabit an ‘optimism in resilience’ (or something like that) that can be responsive to immediate consumer and market needs, in appropriately meaningful communication with emotional and psychic needs.

There is absolutely no shortage of issues to respond to with sensitivity toward Now-Term thinking: to the tensions between, for example, renewable energy and the externalities of something like mineral extraction for solar panels; as well as (fingers crossed?) the tensions between a brand needing to continue the activities that keep it in business and the inherent impossibility of keeping up physical production at the general current rate and expect not to pass the final actual tipping point of climate no return.

The hypothesis (I hope it’s not just a wish) here rests on an assumption that a reframing of timeframes with a focus on practices and their consequences as they affect the day to day present would tend to open or lead to a space where the future could be more holistically and meaningfully tended to. 


Taking a Stand

It’s now, it’s here. TikTok knows it. Forbes knows it (by lip service or cultural signaling anyway, if nothing else). Do the financial markets know it as the financial papers seem to claim? I’ll say, very possibly. It helps if we know it actively, too. And we have to acknowledge that to step from very possibly, to yes, actually, and more! will take some doing, some selling, some finding the most compelling truths within and around. 

The idea of taking a stand is also a matter of clearly looking at the now, the immediate term. Action around this might include rethinking goals like net zero 2050, and considering what more immediate goals could be, where to target them specifically in the world, and how to move with proper urgency and without panic toward meeting the very tight turnaround on climate necessities that we’re all looking at and that brands have to implement. 

And to create more space for the reality of right now, to let more things happen outside of the way the dance of commerce is used to carrying on, taking a stand likely also means deeply rethinking, reidentifying, redefining, and re-getting to know a brand’s stakeholders. From a flexible perspective that recognizes that historical habits of identifying and serving stakeholders have excluded, in fact, most people, and have led us to a dangerous place in a geological era defined by our activities. When we hope the choices we propose and make can change the shape of an era to something more beautiful, more healthy, more whole—then we have to make those choices and proposals for and with people who the system(s) fail to include.

And to take a stand that cultivates resilience, that moves toward optimism, brand and business decision-makers and the path to decision making would benefit from radical reconsideration. Similar to a wider aperture on stakeholders, if we want things different, we’ve got to hear from more people, and we need a different way of thinking through who’s in charge. HR/HC may rear its [blank] face here, and still this is one of the ways things change. And it’s changing very incrementally. It’s a big ship to turn out there, and very slow to do it, but does who’s at the helm right now change things? The right strategic approach that allows such shifts to emerge might help us know that.

Meanwhile, as I noted above, the psycho-spiritual-emotional-physical nature of the relationship between brands and their products is ripe for reexamination, in particular as it relates to the realities of production: Both physical production and brand and marketing activities that produce desire for a product, thereby creating consumption as a product, itself. To use an overused word, this relationship between planet, product, consumer, and brand is not sustainable. Production choices and the key metrics that could make new choices possible, based on decisions up and down the line to be proactive in building networked resilience, now-term thinking and to demonstrate the possibility of well-narrated (market) reward for production choices and actions, which could and should include seeking proper responsibility for negative consequences of business operations incurred and paid for in one way or another by people outside of yet still affected by the business.

Taking a stand can mean saying no:


Including and Excluding

My team pitched this to Adobe, and I stand by the idea for our geologic time—brands can move as accomplices to their audiences, offering only what they truly need, directing them to competitors if there are better options in certain cases, acknowledging that the brand-as- accomplice has skin in the game with the audience. Because in fact it’s true. This notion can root itself in the cultivation of resilience and activating a network/community/constellation of optimistic belief and action, connected to what is also ultimately a cultivation of mutual benefit. Created by a space built on stances meant to challenge the status quo, and allow and encourage things to happen, maybe even including reconsiderations of hyper-desire and hyper-production. 

Meanwhile, accomplice-like brand behavior as we walk through the valley of the shadow and light of the Anthropocene means fierce devotion to an audience, including saying no to pursuing audiences and opportunities at odds with an Anthropo Scenic brand’s promise to the audiences it’s devoted to. This may be naive, but brands existing agnostically for a self-regulating, self-maintaining standing reserve of audience members and types is the kind of cynical brand behavior that led me to this very moment thinking through this very line of text.

But in all seriousness, risk positive commitment to the needs of radically reconsidered and reframed stakeholders, and a strategically argued rearrangement of leadership and hiring praxis opens space for a better Anthropocene, starting in the now term in service of the long term. Let’s remember, or rather I’ll try to remember, that virtually anyone coming to virtually any brand or product is *going through it* to some extent, for some reason either immediately related to the brand/product at hand or not. Strategically speaking, we’re all having a hard time, and just getting through day-to-day existence as one among the undeniably linked community of the globe from the 2020s onward presents some kind of thing to feel some type of way about. An accomplice in non-exploitative meaning navigation, mutuality, and yes, commerce too, returns to a foundation of resiliency and helping make a space for optimism in the lives of folks, I’ll wager (again) are *going through some stuff.*

And all of this, of course, incurs risk to the accomplice brand in question. There’s risk in sacrifice; there’s risk in choosing. And it’s a worthwhile gut check to remember that the level of risk that comes with not making such choices has been well-proven, again through to this very line of questioning that led to this very line of text.


Risking Visibility or Exposure

I’ll begin here by saying, I use the word corporatism on purpose #iykyk. According to the Edelman Group’s annual trust barometer, as of 2021, we see a notable increase in public desire for brands and businesses to actively engage in policy and publicly voice opinions. This is related to the notion of taking a stand from above, with a layer of added visibility and a rising expectation for impact. On top of this desire, the Edelman study found significant and appreciable demand for public and visible involvement of CEOs in this policy engagement and discussion.

Some tension or non-tension or slipperiness gets added here, when we take into account that brands, of course, are already highly involved in policy, particularly since the unbridling of political money originating from private enterprise ushered in by the Citizens United Supreme Court decision in 2010 (the year Instagram was launched). Mind reading motivations aside, more direct and public facing engagement from brands on matters of policy could be argued to symbolize an unveiling, to a certain extent, of the corporatist system we live and work within. On another hand, maybe it represents an unfortunate reification of the corporatist system, wherein it becomes even more invisible by becoming hyper-normally visible.

In opposition to the danger of that tendency, back to the first hand, where the system is made visible, light gets in, the strategic glimmer of room for change becomes clear perhaps, and, held to a new level of public account, brands and their leaders in general will have the opportunity and mandate to move policy considerations forward, faster than the speed of traditional political will. Not to bring 19th century French economists into it, but Alexis de Tocqueville noted roughly 200 years ago that change flows from the private sector before being picked up and carried forward by the public in America (of course, often with substantial funding from the public sector). And it has tended to remain true. Our interlocking superstructures rotate at different rates, maybe.

Considering strategic implications on all of tomorrow's todays from today’s tomorrows, this risk/opportunity of visibility or exposure is a means to actively engage in looking at now, taking a stand, and committed and intentional including and excluding, in service of cultivating personal and interconnected (mycelial?) resilience and space for optimistic action toward a better Anthropocene now (and in the future). This type of public involvement, resting on a public desire for such involvement, at the very least suggests that brand & business has permission to stake some major claims on the direction and theory of change in coming years. And very potentially a very concrete opportunity to create and define the space of engagement where things occur toward building a resilient community-networked Anthropocene of optimistic action.


Creating Toward Conditions of Possibility

In short, it’s hard to see the trash when you’re used to it. But once you see it, it takes a lot of effort and/or marketing dollars to get used to it again or to stay used to it. And so I might describe a dramatic climatological unconscious shift over the past ten or so years, within which  the glowing possibilities for new stories and new actions of engagement with our geological moment may be illuminated and emerge.

Resilience and optimism are strategies for ongoing survival. And in the day to day archaeologies of this human-geologic life, we can benefit from some aid in navigation and spacemaking from the pervasive shimmering cloud of meaning-making that takes place in and between brands, and us, and each other, in a charged swirl of associations and projections.

Creating space of mycelial resilience and optimism in reconsidered timescales, stance taking, commitment, visibility, and risk positivity may just be another little step along the same incremental little road. But that space is also where untold potential nexts may emerge from the hot tensions of a cascade of society-level consciousness/knowledge shifts, focused around our accruing negative impacts on planetary life.

And so the story continues, and to work toward a better Anthropocene, brands can help expand the scope and range and involvement of that story. And we can work to help those spaces open. And perhaps, in fact, will either way.