‘The Oil Machine’: How grand eco-narratives obstruct change (a review) – The Meta-Blog, no.25.
Channel: ramblinactivist
Date: 2023-02-09

Ramblinactivist’s Videos, 2023/5, 9th February 2023.

The ‘ecological crisis’ is a big, technical, complicated issue; and all too often, therefore, how this is presented isolates and simplifies, and more especially, relies on commonly-held tropes to convey meaning. But what if those tropes are not objectively correct?; and so as the media feeds-back those tropes to the public, it increasingly distorts how we react to the ecological crisis.

In late 2022, I was asked to review the film, ‘The Oil Machine’. Let’s say, on viewing it, I was not enamoured by its content. What then dismayed me even more was how, across social media and activist forums, people reacted uncritically to the content of the film – not realising that its underlying narrative was misinforming that discussion, and thus misdirecting how we might address the complex nature of ecological change.

For the extensively referenced text of this post, goto:
http://www.fraw.org.uk/blog/posts/025/index.shtml

You can find more in ‘the Meta-Blog’, here:
http://www.fraw.org.uk/blog/index.shtml

Finally, it would really help to promote this work if you could follow, subscribe, or like my social media presence – which can be accessed from the link above. In today’s digital analytics popularity contest, all that button-pressing means something in this messed-up world; and if we’re going to challenge that, then we have to do our bit to whack the algorithms, supporting the kind of content we want to see by clicking on it.

Chapters:
00:00 Opening titles.
00:39 Introduction.
03:25 1. Drilling deeper...
08:52 2. Rules turn a ‘scam’ into a ‘system’.
16:02 3. Restricting alternatives, maintaining stasis.
20:36 4. ‘Stockholm Syndrome’ and consumerism.
26:14 Conclusion: Why the BBC can’t (currently) make a film I’d ‘like’.
27:59 Closing credits.

#fossilfuels #climatechange #environment #climateaction #consumerism #degrowth