The (Un)Changing Aesthetics of Pollution

Text: Alžbeta Szabová

As I walk the streets of Amsterdam, I notice new spaces where cobblestones have been replaced by plants bursting out, trying to overtake the facades of old buildings. All over the city, urban greening initiatives attempt to reclaim the stone and concrete in an effort to push against the rise in temperatures, save the bugs, improve air quality, and create a more livable environment. Looking around the street I live on, I could easily get the impression that when it comes to the necessity of climate action, we have moved past denial, (as well as anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance) and have started making steps in the right direction at last. When I moved to this country a couple of years ago, I remember being overjoyed at the endless seas of bikes everywhere as well as the greenery, vegan restaurants, ban on high-polluting cars in the city, solar panels mounted on houses and environmental projects the likes of which I have never seen back home. There’s a familiar image of 19th century London covered in smoke from all of its industries, accentuated by the fact you only ever see it in black-and white pictures. It serves as a symbol for pollution and by extension the start of the climate crisis. As Paul B. Preciado writes, “carbon capitalism is thick, sticky, dirty, suffocating, greasy, hot and toxic. It has covered the world with a patina of oil.” Amsterdam today (or at least some parts of it) might as well be Victorian London’s utopian alternative; look how far we’ve come!

Unfortunately, this is a false narrative. Global emissions continue to climb year by year undented by the rise of renewable energy, electric cars or green streets and the Dutch Earth Overshoot day is already past us as I’m writing this in early May of 2025. How is it possible that despite all of the visible climate action around me, everything is still getting worse? It seems that the aesthetics of harm I am most used to aren’t sufficient in this context. While the aesthetics of carbon capitalism typically look like oil spills and car exhaust fumes, in this system they can also exist unseen. The first answer to the question above is that pollution has been moved elsewhere -  whether it’s plastic and textile trash piling up in the Global South shipped away from our trash cans, mines, factories, and refineries, or power plants poisoning the air, water and land somewhere far away where it cannot offend our eyes. I will not delve deeply into the neo-colonial (or perhaps just colonial) aspects of climate change since I assume that is old news to all of the anthropologists reading this. What I instead wish to talk about is my second answer; that a lot of what we see as progressive, “green” or at least neutral when it comes to environmental destruction is not actually so. The pollution I want to talk about is made invisible just as energy or the digital space are: the preconditions for its existence and its effects are hidden from our view, depoliticized and normalized; but they have a price. 

When I moved into my recently renovated apartment my relief over not ending up homeless in this city had been tampered by a small, strange, inconvenient amenity: the only window of the loft opens electronically by a push of a button downstairs. While perplexing and frustrating in its inconvenience (making me run up and down my loft studio everytime it starts to rain) what angered me the most is how completely unnecessary it is. Why am I using up electricity to open a window? How is this helpful? Who thought this was a good idea? And why would they put the button to open it downstairs? While I’ll probably never get answers for these questions there is no other way to open the window without breaking the mechanism so now everytime I wish to breathe fresh air I have to waste electricity to do so. My stupid window mechanism has become for me a metaphor for how I see a lot of other necessary but wasteful activities in the city. There is no way to opt out unless you want to seriously inconvenience yourself, so you have to do the thing you know is wasteful and destructive - even if only a little bit. The problem with the little bits is that they add up. I know that as our energy use is rising every year, the effort to mitigate emissions from its production goes to answer the rising demand instead of replacing fossil fuels. That means if we actually want to address the main driver or climate change which every child knows about, we have to lower our energy demand. This doesn’t bode well with all of the shiny tech solutions around whose marketing campaigns are trying to convince people they’re saving the planet and making the world a better place through buying more products. 

Digitization is often perceived as a progressive efficient process which together with various tech solutions helps streamline and smooth out all of the inconvenient parts of social life. The barrage of apps, screens and cards is however furthering environmental destruction as well as surveillance, offhanding accountability and pushing people further towards the margins. For example, the disappearance of public money (in the form of cash) is one of the most insane things going on in this city. I cannot go to almost any shop in the city and pay without a card. I can’t use public transport without having an OV card or a bank card (specifically a Maestro tied to a Dutch bank), which means I cannot ride the bus without having a phone and a phone number and an address and a bank account they’re tied to. I can’t not have a phone and it has to be a new model if I want my bank apps to work and I can’t not have social media if I want to have a job or go to school. I know that these devices are built with materials mined by slave labour but what can I do about this? Please, I just want to get on the tram. I just want to open my window. 

Where there’s digital payments there’s infrastructure to support them: huge data centres consuming enormous amounts of water and energy which power our day-to-day. The digital landscape has wormed its way into almost everything we do. Products masquerading as solutions, apps aimed to facilitate every transaction, service or interaction are slowly becoming the only way to access that product, service or interaction. Some workplaces operate entirely through Zoom meetings and Google Docs worksheets and LLMs (Language Learning Models better known as “AI” to make them sound more impressive than what they actually are) are accelerating the cooking of our planet by pretending that an overblown autocorrect is somehow the answer to solving all of the world’s problems. The internet is inescapable. The global average screen time usage is above 6 hours a day, and while something like Instagram is probably not the top of anyone’s list when they think of what is destroying the planet, it definitely should be higher than you think it is. For one, data centres contribute more emissions worldwide than commercial flying. Secondly - just like everything tied to climate change - the issue is wider than the CO2 number going up. 

All of the things which I named might simply annoy or inconvenience me while pretending to make life easier. For others however, they are also making the world a more hostile and violent place. What happens when every aspect of life is locked behind a system which requires you to both have enough money to buy a phone and also a status that allows you to open a bank account and have all the documents required to do so? What is a convenience for the consumer perhaps even claims to be for the convenience of the worker. Then it usually comes with an app which takes away their benefits, worsens their conditions, makes them unable to complain or unionize and destroys more stable jobs in that industry. Whether it’s Uber, Airbnb or LLMs, everything claiming to increase efficiency is also undermining people’s rights and allowing for all accountability to disappear and be replaced by a UI or a chatbot. As AI is pushed forward with eugenic narratives of trans-humanism, outside of the digital world, this shift means more precarity, more pollution and more suffering. 

 Achille Mbembe wrote that there can never be freedom at the expense of the biosphere, and with this sentiment I dream of a world in which climate action is tied to dismantling systems of oppression instead of endless advancement of “green” efficiency-increasing techno-fixes. In this world all the money that goes into Albert Heijn security cameras and opening barriers goes to give people good enough jobs and enough wages to not have to steal food, in which public transport is free for everyone, where housing is a right, where I go to a university in which I talk to people and I never have to install an app again. This is a world in which the smooth clean aesthetics of technology cannot hide the cost that they have on our world. 

Reading Recommendations:

• “The Universal Right to Breathe” (2020) by Achille Mbembe 

• The Problem With Solutions (2024) by Julie Guthman

• Pollution is Colonialism (2021) by Max Liboiron

• Blood in the Machine (2023) by Brian Merchant

• Dysphoria Mundi (2025) Paul B. Preciado