Perils of intelligence

So I'm driving to work the other day, riding down I85 with the top down, and I pass by one of those digital billboards--surely you've seen these, the ones with the giant TV screens instead of the antiquated traditional pasted sheets. All that damn Syd Mead coolness in Blade Runner, and I should have known the one I'd live to see would be the damn billboards--vast urban pyramids, nope; everyone dressed like a postpunk noir character, Maltese Falcon-meets-Nagel, nope; awesome dirigibles everywhere, nah; offworld colonies, nuh-uh; flying cars, are you kidding?; big animated digital billboards... oh yeah, we got those. Philip K. Dick, with his sense that the universe was in an entropic death spiral frequently manifested through the increasing ubiquity of chintzy, garrish crap would have been mortified and proud. I can just hear him: "Oh yeah, all those stories I wrote with flying cars, I mean that was just sci-fi horseshit to sell to the editors... but the stuff about pay toilets and right-wing talking heads on TV 24-7, that was the pink laserbeam talkin'."

But I digressinly digress: I was going to mention a particular Lite-Brite billboard screen beside I85. It read:

Stop funding terrorists. Drill domestic oil.

-Anonymous

Just like that, no image, no visuals--the plain statement and attribution, white letters on a black screen, and then on to the next ad in the sequence.

Who the hell is "Anonymous," one momentarily wonders. A concerned citizen? A McCain operative slyly adding a domestic security twist to the campaign's "Blame Obama for gas prices" meme? One of the owners of the clutter of car dealerships just off that stretch of highway, looking at the fleet of increasingly unsalable SUVs? I suppose it doesn't matter.

What matters, I think, is what I was thinking as I rushed past this billboard: that, as so many others have complained, there's no place for intelligence in this soundbite world.

After all, the issue isn't nearly as simple an unnuanced as "drill here." It could be that a case could be made for domestic drilling, mind you. That's not really the issue.

The issue is that energy policy is a tangled, tangled wreck of a mess of a knot, the unentangling of which involves supply-side and demand-side solutions. It wouldn't be enough to simply drill for more oil in the States even if it would be available tomorrow (and not in ten-to-thirty years) and there weren't any concerns about environmental impact: after all, the oil is a finite resource and demand is outpacing any hopes of supply at something like an exponential rate. Factor back in the environmental costs of exposing and transporting toxic, carcinogenic, teratogenic muck that's insoluble in water when spilled, and there's a good case for ending use of oil even if it was more available than water. Drilling is necessarily an incomplete solution on the demand side: you could easily make a billboard saying "Stop funding terrorists, carpool," or (completing the sentence) "support increased funding of mass-transit infrastructure" or "drive electric" or a number of other fill-in-the-blanks options. Make it a Mad-Lib, why not?

And on the supply side, surely any solution to our dependency on foreign oil might as well include alternative energy sources and improved use of resources. Energy-efficient homes and vehicles. Wind and wave farms where geographically feasible. Assorted forms of solar (though it's to be noted that some analysts are becoming worried about world reserves of gallium, used in some types of photovoltaic cell; it's not hard to imagine gallium becoming the petroleum of tomorrow if we're not prudent). And, yes, next-gen nuclear where/when/if feasible--technologies like the pebble-bed reactor show a great deal of promise as far as operational safety goes, although disposal of radioactive waste remains problematic (not insoluble, and some of the problems are political rather than ecological).

So, I'm thinking all this as I drive on down the road, the billboard disappearing in my rearview, and I wonder how much it would cost to buy a few seconds on a billboard to say something along the lines of the above, and that's when my mind shifts to that worse issue, the lack of a place for intelligence in the soundbite world. Because how the fuck do you get all of that on a damn billboard?

Stop funding terrorists: use less power, move into a green home, carpool, ride the yet-to-be-built monorail, support new-tech nuclear, windfarms, solar power, replace your hydrocarbon petrochemical products (i.e. plastics) with alternatives manufactured from soy or other vegetable-based materials, etc....

(Oh, and if we're still struggling, let's have a reasonable discussion about whether the risks inherent in drilling and the limits of the untapped oil reserves, if there really is oil down there, are worth the costs and benefits of procuring said oil. I don't think they are, myself, but I'm willing to talk it through and maybe there's some kind of ground we can agree upon--maybe not.)

Assuming the billboard people don't charge by the letter, like some kind of telegram (kids: telegrams were kind of like text messages before cell phones... like in old movies, when... look, never mind), you'd still have to deal with a pile of cars by the highway as people drove off the side of the road while trying to read your damn message.

How do you compete with six words? Six words is a simple message. Too simple: got no nuance, boys'n'girls. But it's no wonder intelligent folks fail to make their case so much of the time. "Intelligence" may seem a bit snide or arrogant--there are intelligent but thoughtless people, so you can substitute "thoughtless" if you'd like. No matter: the point is there's no way to compete with the message. Sure, you could put up a similarly unnuanced, thoughtless billboard: "Stop funding terrorists, carpool," but let's face it: that's no better (four words versus six, 'tis true, but it's just as dumb a statement).

This is why we're losing, isn't it? All of us.