Sharing something a little late—I had talked about this briefly with Anand and Rachel at our last Tide Pool social gathering. It’s an incredibly gauche advertisement for Apple, in which Tim Cook (the CEO) stages a “Status Report” on Apple’s corporate responsibility/ environmental sustainability initiatives with… Mother Nature (played by none other than Octavia Spencer). It is, hands down, one of the cringiest pieces of media I’ve seen in a while (and Elon Musk is hard to beat!); and yet, unintentionally, it provides such a striking metaphor for inadequacy corporate greenwashing. The fact that it was made at all signals to me a total lack of broader social awareness among these Silicon Valley types that I find fascinating—and staging the response to climate change as a board room meeting stylized to look like one of those really shitty made-for-streaming Neil Gaiman adaptations (I’m sorry, but modern forces embodied in gods just…. works better as a book) speaks volumes about the corpo-eco-responsibility cinematic universe, where global forces are personalized, aestheticized, and endlessly subject to petty bean-counting negotiation.

For your viewing displeasure: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNv9PRDIhes