Unselling Our Extinction: A Modest Selection of Potentially Workable Proposals.

The dinosaurs’ reign lasted millions of years, and they were not big users of advertising agencies.

As the spark plug for the consumerist engine that has released untold epochs of carbon which will heat the Earth and almost certainly murder our grandkids, is advertising creativity irredeemable? Let’s find out.

Advertising has always been the spark plug inside the capitalism engine. And flames are badass. We might want to get used to them.

Advertising’s actual job has always been to stoke the Engine of Capitalism. And as much as we tend to deny our cog’s part in it, surprise, surprise, that engine mainly runs on the convenience of stored carbon — dinosaur-based petrochemicals used to manufacture the products our creativity sells, to package and ship it, to power much of it, and to replace it with the spanking new, absolutely vital next version within a calendar year.

The better we do our jobs, the more our trash bins are filled with the detritus of delicious Thai dinners brought to us by gig-economy-dashers in old, under-maintained gas guzzlers; kept warm in plastic containers that we believe we recycle but actually aren’t recycled at all.

Yes, my Pad Kee Mao from last night may be a delicious memory today, but a plastic record of its delivery could still be around in ten thousand years when the alien archaeologists arrive to study our mass marketing tactics through careful excavation of our landfills. These aliens will conclude that our plastics and boxes and electronics and fast food straws were once part of a complex and pervasive religion.

And they will not be wrong.

“The poor saps,” they’ll say in Venusian. “Behold their late-period design and messaging! They created beautiful religious texts (ads) that won prizes in all the Public Service categories that insisted they were a good and righteous society because they separated their greasy pizza boxes from their Amazon boxes, only to learn too late that all these boxes were reunited for eternity under a counterfeit mountain they made some miles east of what they once called, ‘Los Angeles.’”

Figure 02: The Alien Archaeologsts Trope. Call me, History Channel.

These aliens are right again. We are indeed very good at being very bad for our own long-term survival. We advertise and design sexy and elaborate packaging for our tech products whose unboxing thrill lasts 4 to 7 seconds.

We use the smartphones we find inside to tweet our approval for electric vehicles whose power as often as not comes from a coal-fired electrical grid, and whose manufacturing process is just as environmentally damaging as when we were using it to make a 1969 Dodge Charger with dubious Confederate roof graphics.

But wait — are we not actually a thoughtful, future-focused and righteous species with three different colors of wheely trash bins? True, the sterile-pak packaging we place in them has undeniably made us all healthier, and therefore more capable of making more of us. Which in turn, creates more consumption. This spiraling process, supercharged by our genius for advertising psychology, is scheduled to end us just about the time your great grandkids pay their first bill to the smartly branded and advertised, “Amazon Breathable Atmosphere Utility.”

Dinosaurs, who as far as we know created very few award-winning advertising campaigns, were so much better at the long game. Still, there’s plenty of blame to go around. If they had never existed, we wouldn’t be burning their millions of years of petro-remains to our detriment. (I will cover all this in my upcoming essay, Brachiosaurus, The Selfish Bastard of the Late Jurrassic.)

So if our own creativity is to blame, can our own creativity do anything about it? I, for the purposes of this article, believe we can. And to get the conversation rolling, here are some helpful suggestions/thought starters I propose to everyone free of charge. Unless one actually catches on, at which point I expect to be paid.

Threat Level Red punches you in the face in augmented reality.

Strategy One: Branding and Packaging. I propose we create the “Your Grandchild’s Shaking Fist®” label and apply it to every kind of package we design and market. A Good Housekeeping seal for the 21st century (and with luck, the 22nd), it predicts how pissed off your hellscape-surviving future grandchildren will be about your current use of any packaged product — glass bottle packaging gets a wee tsk related to the energy needed to make or recycle it. Plastic bottles of imported water from the South Pacific get a rapidly vibrating clench with the Pre-NRA Charlton Heston Planet of the Apes Statue of Liberty Speech (PNRACHPOTASOLS) flashing in bright orange LEDs below it. (You’ve had half a century to see it, people.)

Three wheely-bins of garbage a week, every week. For your whole life.

Strategy Two: Retailing. I propose we get someone smarter than me to write an app that tracks your own personal trash pile/trash mountain. It visualizes the garbage you create over time by secretly tracking the UPCs of every product you purchase across your credit and debit card profiles. Those with the tiniest piles will win vacations to the parts of Maui that are still above sea level on luxurious, carbon-neutral sailing yachts; those with massive trash mountains (most of us) will get all our credit cards locked for a year and our Instagram profiles deleted. See you in hell, influencers.

Nothing happens until social anxiety makes it happen, people.

Strategy Three: Social Marketing. Shamebots™. Ubiquitious bots that, when your behavior is not planetarily sound, not only shame you via your smart watch and smart speakers, but tell everyone else with a smart watch and/or smart speakers in your NextDoor neighborhood how awful your planet-murdering behavior is. Though, actually, that may already just be the next version of NextDoor. I never said any of these ideas would be original now, did I.

A pitch: planet-friendly action movies. Hear me out.

Strategy Four: Entertainment Marketing. Culture changes when the culture-making-machine changes. I read that on a blog once. So, from now on I propose we only make and market The Fast and The Furious movies with bikes. And Vin Diesel must change his name to something less fossil-fuel based. Actually this will go for all action movies. All action set pieces must be executed on public transit or electric scooters. You can still blow things up with a missile launcher, but those things must represent the patriarchy. I feel better already.

Write a bill, see the downstream effects immolate your congressman.

Strategy Five: Political Messaging. Behold the Flaming Policy Visualizer. Input the text of any legislation, then watch as any of its negative consequences, intended or not, appear as Augmented Reality flames that envelop the politician or lobbyist who sponsors it. Powerful AI analyzes the downstream implications of the policy in the context of all other conditions over years or decades. The worse the policy, the more spectacularly the politician immolates. Fun for all ages.

See? All we need to do is turn that powerful-creativity-thing that we do around — away from just powering unbridled landfill-filling capitalistic consumerism with supermodels and stock House beats to instead illuminate (in the most energy-efficient way possible) the solutions that will help our future have a future. It will then be up to (now existing) future generations to decide if a future without supermodels and stock House beats is a future worth living in.