With the arrival of high speed trains and low-cost airlines, rich and poor are simply swapping long-distance transport modes.
This is exactly the case. I doubt the return of traditional cheaper trains would change much. They did let you carry your bike onto them which is not the case for most high-speed lines today though. As long as airlines are basically subsidised and we all take for granted that we can go anywhere in the world whenever we want to, the situation has little chance of changing.
When we tell companies about ourselves, we give away details about others, too. This annoys me so much I've often been tempted to block communication with people on gmail as I don't want google hoovering up my personal discussions and relationships.
Unfortunately, it would probably kill a good third of my email, much of it work-related, so I have to live with my privacy being invaded because others don't care or don't understand.
Fantastic article by Craig Mod on the implicit contracts we enter into when giving our attention to digital media. He refers to this as a lack of edges which is the best description I've seen of the issue to date. Read it.
While we busy ourselves greening our personal lives, fossil fuel corporations are rendering these efforts irrelevant.
They've pulled off the best trick ever: making it all about personal responsibility while they happily destroy the planet in the background. We need to attack the issue from all sides: personal change but, more importantly, system change.
As the amazon burns, don't count on our leaders to prevent our self-destruction. They're locked in to the system and the transnational corporations that govern it. They will not be the source of the radical changes needed.
Jeremy Lent argues the window for new ideas is opening now. We can still go both ways.
The cardinal error of such analysis, however, lies in its tendency to
mistake structural transformations of global capitalism for zeitgeisty
trends in the history of ideas.
The techno-optimism of the 90s was just a smoke screen.
