Dear reader, my intention with this substack is to produce a coherent book on petrohistory, but what you’re getting here is far from the fully realized work. To support this project, buy a paid subscription now, and I’ll send you a “free” copy of the book in a few years, when it’s ready. It will be better than the below.

I thought that this essay on plastic would make a good second read-aloud. It was before I came to Snuckstack, so I don’t know if people have looked at it.

This time I got fancy with audio mixing — this is my first time playing with audacity or recording audio, so forgive me my amateurism. There was this weird impulse to try to bring you into my brain-space.

Last we left off, our historical protagonist, petroleum, was starting up the cold war. I thought that to begin the last half of the 20th Century, I could pivot to plastic as a downstream spawn of petroleum. I was wrong: although plastic is much more visible to us, the main story of environmental history remains the burning of fossil fuels, the suicidal drive to self-immolation, release of energy, and then atmospheric freedom.

Plastic is a mere byproduct of that need for combustion. You’ve got to refine petroleum to make fuel, and you’ve got to get rid of whatever’s refined out. It’s industrial waste that they’ve found a way turn a profit on, no matter how cheaply they sell it. A defecation of the oil refinery.

The biochemicals in petroleum that were entangled while they were buried for millions of years together, forming the muck we call crude oil, are refined apart into different products, but they remain aspects of the same project of petroleum: “moving the Earth’s body toward the Tellurian Omega — the utter degradation of the Earth as a Whole” (Cyclonopedia, 17). They are equal and opposite petrological drives: fuel is consumed immediately, plastic lives forever, and they both are world-destroyers.

Plastic invaded material life utterly and became a cornerstone of the ideology human exceptionalism that is necessary to justify the degradation of the ecosphere. It is infinite in its potential to realize human fantasy: material doesn’t have to look like itself anymore. Here we have a thing that would never exist but for industrial chemistry. What gets lost in this plastic utopianism, on both the consumerist and environmentalist side, is plastic’s origins in petroleum. The oil — infected as it may be with war machines — becomes organized on a molecular level. Does this make the war machines inert, as if trapped in amber? Or do they gain significance and influence? If so, they are masters of camouflage, to appear to be mere subjects of human desire. But that is precisely how they reproduce.

Plastic is unique in that it can never be returned to the earth; everything else can be returned to the biosphere eventually, even at the molecular level — dust to dust — but a synthetic polymer will never break down, will never be metabolized. It is free from, and excluded from, the biological processes that were formerly only transcended by nirvana. A fish may eat it, but it will never become fish. Anywhere it does break down into small enough bits to be ingested (“microplastics”), it will act as a toxic invader, cause cancers and digestive problems, and stubbornly remain itself. Plastic is petroleum made immortal.

Plastic is a core substance to the ideology of petrocapitalism: the visible end of the ideological spectrum. An omnipresent physical reminder that we are not animals anymore (according to the ideology. Out here in reality, of course, we are very much animals). The idea that anything can be artificial or synthetic is itself engineered to make us feel special about ourselves. To make us feel like we alone can instantiate something new into the universe: a substance that didn’t evolve along with everything else here on this planet, Something New Under the Sun. The cost of this hubris is, of course, ultimately borne by the inhuman. And so the mythos of a Synthetic substance come alive, a coming synthetic world, straight into the stupid Singularity. Stupid or not, the fact that plastics will be on this planet forever does, by itself, offer some promise of a post-human epoch on this planet. Perhaps something will evolve that eats plastic, maybe evolve out of the plastic-eating microbes we’ve already released into the ecosphere.

Polymer describes the structure of a molecule: a long chain, comprised of component “monomers.” These molecules are huge; one plastics worker described a polypropylene molecule as a “cathedral that goes on for miles and miles.” Polymers are quite common in nature; DNA is also a polymer.

In an essay about how plastic is alive, it might seem pseudoscientific to point out that DNA is a polymer. But that doesn’t change the fact that the components of plastic and DNA have a basically similar molecular architecture. In the case of plastic, chemists insert different precursor molecules onto the chain to change the physical attributes of the final material. DNA does the same thing, but with much more complexity. Nonetheless, even with simple molecules, over time impressive things can happen once chemicals begin to engineer (or be engineered for) their own reproduction.

Plastic doesn’t reproduce sexually; it has a much more efficient process: reproduction by symbiosis with humans. This turns out to be much faster, more efficient, and more fecund than old fashioned sex. Simply by appearing to be a material, it has colonized every niche of economic activity and every micro-ecosystem. The endless variation of polymer structure, able to become a huge range of different end products, makes it infinitely adaptable. And instead of relying on random mutations for evolution, it uses human engineering, which in turn allows us to feel as if we are gods.

Does plastic have to be formally “alive” to be recognized as an invasive species? Plastic has enabled levels of consumption exponentially higher than any other time before. The endless variation in polymer structures allows it to be endlessly and rapidly adaptable, which is rewarded with massive material proliferation. And, it may be needless to reiterate, it will outlast us.

Just as industrialization had a coal-driven phase and a petroleum-driven second phase, so did plastics. The first plastics, which dominated before and during World War II, were derived from coal ash and tar. After the War, the industry largely shifted to petrochemicals. The plastics made from coal products were largely thermosets, which means they can’t be melted, while today thermoplastics are more common; they can be melted. It was in that moment of transition from one to the other, plastic invaded and quickly dominated our material lives and became fundamental to the ideology of petrocapitalism. That moment climaxed in 1952, when Du Pont and ICC (in Britain) lost control of the formula for polyethylene in an antitrust judgement.

Besides their material differences, thermosets and thermoplastics have different cultural and political resonances, identified with their distinct historical contexts. The dominant feature of early plasticity in the reign of the thermosets was strength. That gospel of synthetic strength reached its climax in and after World War II, and Pynchon does a virtuosic job of making fun of it in Gravity’s Rainbow. Ten years after the war, when polyethylene became the first mass thermoplastic, the key aspect of plasticity became disposability. Strength or durability is an attribute of the material itself, but disposability is an attribute imposed from outside by economic need filtered through ideology.

It’s worth briefly going back to thermosettical times, if only to see what’s changed and what’s stayed the same in our thermoplastic world.

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Kraft, Standfestigkeit, Weiße

From the beginning, plastic was declared immortal by the marketing guys supporting the Bakelite brand, which was the first mass-market synthetic polymer. (Celluloid came first, but celluloid, made from cotton, is an antebellum story, and I’m restraining myself from writing about it). The name Bakelite has nothing to do with its bakeability ( you shouldn’t put plastic in the oven, though it won’t melt). It was named after its inventor and chief egotist Leo Baekeland. It entered the market in 1907, and it’s made of coal tar and formaldehyde.

In 1924, the company’s publicity guy hired a freelance writer named John Mumford to write a book about it. He boasted that Bakelite has “a solidity that mocks at the disintegrating forces of heat and cold, time and tide, acid and solvent; with a dielectric strength which fits it to withstand high voltage.” The chemists weren’t looking for a cheap substance, they were looking ...