In the movie “Serenity,” a character with a passion for information hacking says “You can’t stop the signal.” What brought this to mind were two posts on Medium by writer “Martina H”: the one that triggered me this morning, “The Supermarket Is Hiding a World Too Hot to Feed Itself,” and an earlier post (linked back from the new one) that explored other depths of that idea.

The first of those Medium posts, written two days ago, grabbed my brain with this sentence: “the whole machine is built to make me stop thinking: to make berries in Sweden in May feel normal, to make the diesel and the distance and the damage disappear behind clean labels and cold air.” The second one, written this past February, reinforced this with its observation that

Even farmed salmon depends on a chain of invisible conditions: plankton blooms that feed wild fish turned into pellets, oxygen levels that keep cages from turning into suffocation chambers, currents that flush waste, temperatures that stay within metabolic limits. When marine heatwaves sweep through the oceans, fish suffocate in nets. When oxygen collapses, cages become mass graves. When parasites thrive in warmer water, antibiotics rise.

It’s words like “disappear” and “invisible” that I’m finding to be triggering, and not for the first time. I went off on this topic last December, when I said that “we’ll do well not to introduce deliberate distortion, or indulge in pretend-it’s-not-real concealment, when our signaling systems are already hard pressed to reflect a complex and rapidly changing situation.” I’m pretty much guaranteed to phrase this in more vulgar words when I see a story, for example, about drawing from the Strategic Petroleum Reserve to alleviate the political risks of high gasoline prices. Masking the signal, in this way, is like playing loud music to cover the annoying noise of an alarm.

Gasoline prices are not the only signals that are trying to get our attention. This past weekend, the Financial Times reported that “In the past month, more than 700 wildfires have burned over 60,700 acres in Georgia, surpassing the state’s yearly totals of acreage burnt by wildfires since 2017”; that sounded so unlikely that I asked ChatGPT for a second opinion, and it found numbers of 37,000 acres per year for the ten-year average compared to 55,000 acres for just the two worst recent incidents. Further, the hyperlink for the “55,000 acres” story was “southern-georgia-wildfires-burn-52000-acres-clinch-brantley-counties” – so it seems as if we’re having trouble keeping the signals abreast of the rapidly changing situation, even when we don’t deliberately mask them.

Our “Serenity” character referenced above had two other important things to say:

• “There’s the truth of the signal. What I see. And, there’s the puppet theater…the Parliament jesters foist on the somnambulant public.”
• “Everything goes somewhere, and I go everywhere.”

Where will the signals appear? In another, particularly grim, post from Martina H we get a few ideas about that: “the grocery aisle, the gas bill, the cramped minutes at the checkout line – the receipt will start to climb…” The signals will become increasingly difficult to ignore.

This week’s note is therefore not about any one signal, but about a more general idea: we all need to “go everywhere,” or at least go to places (literal or figurative) where we aren’t being told (or even invited) to go – and we need to see what’s really there, and decide what to do about it, while livable choices are still available.