“There is nothing in existence which can be attributed to a vice in nature; for nature is always the same and is everywhere one; her virtue and power are everywhere the same; that is, the laws of nature according to which all things come into existence and pass from one form to another, are everywhere and always the same, and therefore the means of understanding the nature of all things must be one and the same, namely, by the universal laws and rules of nature.”
-Spinoza
“Life in plastic, it's fantastic.”
- Aqua
Part I - The Past
There is a Singaporean legend about a race from long ago.
An elephant, a pig and a frog challenged each other to run along the ocean from Singapore to the shores of Johor, in Malaysia. Whichever animal failed to reach the shore would be turned to stone. The first was the frog, who boasted that he could easily leap much further due to his small size and powerful legs. However, he did not jump far enough to reach Johor, and instead plummeted into the water. He was turned to stone, and soon the sand, waves and trees would grow and crowd that island (that once was a frog) called Pulau Sekudu.
The elephant and pig ran together. This strategy was also not successful. As they sprinted across the ocean waves, they became too competitive, crashing into each other and tumbling down into the deep. For their failure, they were also turned to stone, embracing each other for geological eternity, creating the island that would come to be known as Pulau Ubin.
Pulau Ubin, the island of the elephant and the pig, has seen many people visit its shores. Some of these people were Germans. More than a hundred years ago a family of these Germans were happy and busy running a coffee plantation on the southernmost part of the island. In this family lived a young girl. She had financial security, loving but hardworking parents, and that beautiful island; with rocky beaches and dense tropical forests which she explored whenever she could. In her world everything was perfect, and when she wasn’t helping at home, she was outside playing. Then came 1914, and with it, the First World War.
There are two accounts of what happened next to this little German girl in Pulau Ubin, but they both start with the British taking control of the island. In the first account, the most widely accepted, she was out playing at night when she came back to find her plantation had been seized. Her parents had been shot dead and left outside whilst the British ransacked the place. Completely terrified, she ran as far as she could, but because it was so dark, she could not see. She ran and tragically stumbled right of a cliff into a granite quarry. That fall would kill her.
The other story, less commonly believed, was when she came back to find her dead parents and the British soldiers close by, she ran into the jungle, successfully escaping capture but ultimately dying of starvation. After the war, her memory still lingered among the people who found her body, and in order to appease her wandering soul a tiny temple was built. In that temple an urn was placed to pray for the young girl, in the hope her spirit would find peace.
For twenty years the temple survived without great attention. The story was not very well circulated, and only a few people came to pray specifically for the girl, because Buddhist shrines soon took precedence in the temple. But then things changed once the temple was moved to a new spot where an old granite quarry once stood. The Na Du Gu Niang Temple was built right on top of what many believed to be the young German girls final resting place, and those who were praying to her were soon rewarded.
Rumours circulated that lottery winners, from Hong Kong to Singapore, had prayed to this girl at the temple just a week before their big payout. It did not take long for the temple to become popular for those seeking similar luck. Today, you can find many pilgrims still praying here for success in a betting game called 4D. In 4D, you choose any 23 sets of 4-digit combinations from 0000 to 9999. If one of your 23 numbers is picked, you win. This game is played only in three countries – Malaysia, Singapore and Germany.
A man native to Pulau Ubin moved to Australia around 2003. In Australia his life was as normal as any other East Asian expatriate. Until one night he had a dream. In this dream he was visited by a young girl, with long blonde hair, who asked him to follow her. She had a strong European accent. In this man’s dream they went walking in his city until they found a toyshop that he had never been to before. She pointed in the window to a Barbie doll that was tucked away in the corner. She spoke to him and said he must buy that doll, and place it next to the urn of a young girl in the Na Du Gu Niang Temple, back at the island of his birth, Pulau Ubin. He had this dream for three nights in a row, and after the third time he resolved to find the doll.
He had never walked along the path to the shop in his waking life but he had learnt it well enough from his dreams. During the day he made his way down to the shop, and there it stood, looking exactly same as he pictured. So did the same Barbie doll, hiding in the bottom corner, that the young girl in his dreams had told him about. He bought it, and quickly organised a plane trip to Singapore and then a boat to Pulau Ubin. Once there, he took the doll to the temple, and placed it down next to the girl’s urn. To this day he still meticulously maintains the temple. The girl has not visited his dreams since.
The temple was destroyed and rebuilt a few years ago on the same spot by a businessman who was told to do so by Johor monks. They said it would bring him good fortune in his future. The new temple was made of granite, instead of wood. The Barbie and the urn still reside in that temple, sometimes called the “Berlin Sanctuary,” where many come to pray at the doll’s feet. They leave offerings to the Barbie, in the hopes it will satisfy the spirit of the young girl, or bring them financial fortune. Plastic hairbrushes, pink lipsticks and perfumes are just some of the items people choose to appease her soul.
This whole story has very little evidence to back it up. The rest is outright fictional. The man who had the dream about the doll has changed the story more times than he’s stuck to it. Accounts conflict about the family being German or Dutch, and we don’t know if they owned a coffee plantation at all. We have no idea if lottery winners ever prayed at the shrine before they won. We know the island was formed from the slow movement of tectonic plates, not an elephant and a pig.
Unlike the golden calf that Moses destroyed on Mount Sinai, the Barbie on Pulau Ubin will never go away. Hopefully this will be the only Barbie that we’ll ever pray to, but I can’t be sure. When the worship is up, she’ll still be around. This plastic idol will eventually be torn into pieces, finding its way into the food we eat, the temples we build, the oceans we fish from and the air we breathe. The same goes for the jokes. Soon you will get sick of the Ryan Gosling Barbie doll. Your Barbie vinyl and movie accurate yellow skates will only exist to collect dust. The Barbie pink sandals and slides, cheap polymers made from oil, will break but never breakdown. And of all this pink mess will go to some mysterious dark spot in the ocean.
If you bought any of this stuff, just know this isn’t my attempt to shame you. This isn’t some “you hate capitalism yet you have a job and buy things you like hmmmm hypocrite much?” essay. We all buy stuff and we can’t just all of a sudden stop. We also buy stuff we don’t need. Humiliating you for your individual contributions to saving or contributing to climate change is a waste of everyone’s time. I am not holier than thou because I don’t buy Barbie’s dream house. You should just know that your internet jokes have a far longer lifespan in the real world.
Part II - The Present
By now the Barbie movie is leaving the cultural zeitgeist.
To give it full credit it survived multiple months, which is more than you can say for most modern cultural moments. In this digital world things do not stay relevant for long. Everyone has had their say and your opinion is surely solidified, even if you haven’t seen the film, and I’m not here to challenge you on it. I don’t care whether you think it’s a feminist masterpiece or a shoddy corporate attempt. If you care that Greta Gerwig has sold out or not, that’s fine. I really don’t care.
Every critical thing to be said about the film, from the intelligent takes to the braindead slop you see on Letterboxd, has been said. I don’t plan to change your mind about it one bit. I’m not going to talk about the movie, because it’s nowhere near as interesting as all the plastic involved. Not all Barbie dolls will be as carefully preserved and prayed to like the one on Pulau Ubin, but even when they are crushed, shredded, and dispersed, they never go away.
The most boring couple you know will dress as Ken and Barbie for Halloween, even if they already hosted a horrible pink themed party last month. Because the costumes from the previous party are so cheap they’ve fallen apart by now so they’ll have to get new ones. They’ll both be wearing new bright blonde wigs, made from synthetic fibers. When those wigs fall apart the week after again, they’ll be thrown into the trash. These $15 party shop wigs will never ever biodegrade. They can only get torn apart into smaller and smaller strands of plastics (unless they combust first), until they become so small and so light we breath them in.
Because she’s Barbie, she has to be pink, and not just any pink, but that specific bright magenta, that Mattel have trademarked, Pantone colour #e0218a. The boring woman in this boring couple will wear her polyester outfit, that will cost more than most cheap Halloween costumes, because #e0218a is one of the costliest man-made, chemical-based colours to create on polyester fibers. The Barbie pink costume will be discarded when it rips or inflames her eczema. It will follow the same cycle as those blonde wigs, never returning to nature; as it never came from it in the first place, but slowly disintegrating, until the bright pink strands choke a few more sea turtles.
The headbands, pink cowboy hats, sequence flared magenta jeans and your “I Am Kenough” shirts will never, ever, be recycled down or disappear. This is because they are almost 100% man-made, and could never naturally exist. Scientists have been working on making synthetic fibers that mimic the attributes of plant fibers for years in chemical laboratories. These poly/ethel/synthetic/evil plastics are morphologically immortal. I’m sorry Spinoza, we proved you wrong, we have made “a vice in nature,” and it will kill and outlive us all.
It’s nearly impossible to calculate just how much “stuff” has been made from and for the Barbie movie. We know so much of that special pink paint was used in the production of the film that it caused a global shortage. The company, Rosco, was completely depreciated of 12 different pinks throughout the whole production. We are still in a global shortage of pink paint today. This paint was used on both the interior and exterior of the massive houses, the roads, cars, lamp posts and fences, that were all built to be large (but just a hair’s-width under life-size) in the production process. To create a toy world, something that’s both real and not, an “authentic artificiality” that Gerwig aspired to, apparently required 15 meter tall painted skies that wrapped around the whole studio set, which was almost 250 meters in length.
What happened to all this production “stuff”? Some things were thrown into the Warner Brothers vault, like Barbie’s bright pink car, which’ll be around long after the nuclear holocaust. Some stuff was probably taken home by cast members who everyone was too afraid to say not to, but the rest? The giant wrap around pink slide that Margot Robbie specifically requested? No idea, but wherever it is, it won’t be going away for a while. And what about all the plastic created not during the film’s production, but afterwards, by the toy company that financed it?
If you want to buy a Barbie doll, a new one that looks like Robbie putting on a brave face through benzo withdrawals, you’ll probably buy it through Shopify. Shopify has seen a 56% increase in all doll sales this year, not just Barbie. Mattel made a profit of toys alone they never expected to see, because they did not predict the film to be nearly as successful as it is. Ken-ergy hoodies are consistently some of the best sold products from Amazon to AliExpress. Multiple retailers have a new Barbie inspired range. Vintage Barbie doll collectors have never seen such massive demand in their stupid passion, with the prices of rare plastic women higher than ever. I mean just look at all this from Kmart. We’ll be seeing this pink for a long time.
A film that is a toy commercial, a movie of product placement, not just one with product placement, has certainly created many things. We don’t know how many Barbie things have been made from this film (because of impenetrable corporate secrecy) but we know it’s a lot. We also know, eventually where all that plastic ends up.
There are more Barbies than Europeans by a difference of over 200 million. A great deal of the Barbies find their final resting ground in the ocean. The same cannot be said of Europeans. Their ugly husks wouldn’t last as longs as beautiful Barbies would anyway.
These dolls stay in for the ocean for a very long time. You have probably heard of such beasts like “The Great Pacific Garbage Patch,” as if there exists some big hulking leviathan, patrolling the waters and swelling with toothbrushes and Aldi bags. This Moby Dick of discards is more like an amorphous cloud than a visible entity. If you were to fly over it, you’d never know it was the white whale. The majority of the plastic in this ocean is not intact, and has been broken and dispersed into such small pieces you can’t ever see the “patch”.
One of those bright blonde Ken wigs may be running through the Nile, Danube, Tiber and Yangtze all at once and you’d never know what to look for. A fair bit is swallowed up by the larger sea animals, such as dolphins and whales. In a year’s time this one area of garbage will be as large as Queensland, but a great deal of this plastic sinks quickly. As barnacles and sea life grow on the underside of rubbish, eventually their weight drags it down to the bottom of the ocean. For the smallest sea dwelling organisms, plastic has become a new home.
Larger sea animals should not be eating plastic. Every reptile, mammal and bird will be poisoned by the toxins that leech off it. But because such a great deal of smaller plastics are the final shards of Chinese take-away containers, they smell like food. So, sharks, polar-bears and penguins fill up until they can’t anymore. But on the micro scale, and at the bottom of the ocean, is the “Plastisphere,” where bacteria and deep-sea horrors have adapted so well to plastic that even if you had a method to remove all the plastic from the ocean, you would disrupt the ecosystem so much in the process you may kill more life than you save.
Bugs and enzymes have evolved to digest plastics faster than we ever could imagine. A sea shell is nowhere near as durable as a Lego brick, so microorganisms choose the latter to travel longer distances. Smaller bugs that skip across the ocean’s surface can now use Air Pods and bike tires to travel further than ever, and it’s slowly becoming essential to certain species’ migration. Plastic’s durability has introduced new enzymes all over the ocean, and as it has become the most diverse element in the world, cluttering every space imaginable, it is now an environment in and of itself.
Now plastic has become digestible to the very smallest living things, but soon fungi and terrestrial insects may have to make their own plastisphere, as ocean plastic climbs our shorelines and into the forests. Hopefully the smaller animals can do the heavy lifting with their genetic mutations, so we can keep on making all the Barbies we want, and never have to worry about having to eat them ourselves.
Barbie is the most prolific person on the planet. She has more jobs than Johnny Sins. She taught little girls that they can be anything, from an astronaut to a desert storm operator. We have made well over a billion of them. And the little ocean bugs are eating them up. The problem is, they’re just not eating fast enough
.
Jenn Lavers runs the Adrift Lab, an organisation that focuses on the effects of ocean plastic on marine life, such as these shearwater birds of Lord Howe Island. This photo was taken by Lavers and her team, showing an autopsy of one of these birds, from an island less than a two-hour flight away from Sydney. The smallest sea life is doing its best to adapt to the plastisphere, but anything larger than that is struggling.
Will we survive what the shearwater bird cannot? Maybe, but there’s less room on Noah’s Ark, and this time we’re rocketing into space.
Part III - The Future
It looked like a weeping eye all alone out there. It was blue and only blue, except for the gentle grey ring wrapping around the planet. As we approached the ring our ship slowed, and started making its long, familiar route down to the surface. We’d all done this trip before, and even if the work wasn’t exciting, being here to do it was.
It was Sloan’s and my job to record the makeup of the system as we entered it. We were at our recognition stations by the time we reached the outmost ring.
This far out we encountered all the expected heavier metals.
Computer registered 5,092,323,245 individual # lead-pieces #, 34,085,452,124,143 # chromium shards #, and 270,240,082,462 cubic # litres of mercury # all up. But by the twelfth ring we found the interesting materials. 8,352,624,624,832 # fragmented satellite aspects #, and 43,156 completely intact ones. 16 were still actively broadcasting, although we weren’t allowed to tune into the signal, as company policy dictated.
There’s a long stretch of nothing between here and ring thirteen, but from then onwards everything is wholly unique in composition. I’m always mesmerised by the sheer numbers of odd things I see here.
314,093,562,277,929 # unique vehicle compositions #, including some 53,267 # fire engines #, 627,930 # ice cream trucks #, and 473,728,284,001 # small fishing vessels #.
105,926,342,021,462 # typographically English-based signage #, including 390,146,146,041 # vacancy sings #, 725,861,147,251,921 # stop signs #. I couldn’t help but chuckle when we calculated 24,246,716 unique signs reading # gentleman’s club #. All of this, so far out in space, was incredible to behold.
Further in however was just a mess, a fascinating mess, but a mess. This was the real junkyard. Looking out the window now, as computer whizzed with data, calculating every little thing possible, I just tried to distinguish it all from each other.
It was a stranglehold of stainless steel and plastic. We recorded some 50,155,142 rare-metal combination code #sandwich-machine#. Something known as #tin based can# 356,618,342,892,826 of them. Those old #electrical based media player#, 614,825,725,133,946 worth of those ones.
145,527,146,825,005 # laminated learning textbooks #. 510,678,8347,1346,842,657,246,463 # garbage disposal bags #. 642,615,009,218 # golden beckoning cat figurines #.
I decided I’d keep the digital list to read in between missions.
Unfortunately, it felt like as soon as we had started going through all the fun stuff it was over. We were well passed the ring and going to breach the atmosphere soon. Computer was still recording everything it could but it was the same composition you’d find just before entering any pre-homed planet now; polypropylene, nitrogen, polyvinyl chloride, oxygen, polyethylene, carbon dioxide, acrylonitrile butadiene styrene, the usual stuff, all of it so small only computer knew it was there.
And then we were through. We went cruising down for a few minutes until we could see individual ocean currents. Floating for a while, computer told us we were 143.26 meters above the ocean’s surface, so we went scanning for originals. I didn’t take long to find them.
The first one we found was very round, which was what we wanted after all. He (I think it was a he, it’s hard to tell because their faces have been disfigured for so long, but computer said at some point they had functioning male genitalia, so he) bobbed along silently. They were red and blistered. Our ship came down to just barely touch the water’s surface to greet his corpse.
He was scooped up into our autopsy station. Sloan asked computer for his historical trajectory, but we weren’t trained to interpret his data. I guess that’s why they call them originals; you’d need a historian to understand all of this mess, but the whole crew was fascinated anyway.
Apparently, he was born in a district called # Serbistan #. He held down # 17 credit accumulating positions #. Was forced into # mathematica competitions # and being a # data interpreter # at a young age but preferred to stay at home and read # paper-based information tablets #, whatever those were. Apparently, he was quite talented at # steel string-wood composite-instruments #. He had two offspring with two different original women. Apparently, he consumed a great deal of # fermented-fruit based liquid # throughout his life.
The life of originals was always fascinating to read about. Their death, not so much. It was always polyvinyl poisoning. No matter if they came from # AustraZealend # or # Chenghai #, if they were # Christechians # or # Roboticist #, it was always the same. Polyvinyl poisoning. He was situated in the autopsy chamber now, a big floating blistering ball of flesh. His face was squeezed tight and flat from the sun. All we had to do was make a small incision from his chin to his bellybutton for it all to come tumbling out. His skin, the red, puckered layer, let forth a torrent of things.
# phone-screen-protectors #, # ink-containing-pens #, # containers #, # lids #, # acetate-spectacle-frames #, # labels #, # monitor parts #, were just some of the items I could see being registered, but computer was calculating quicker than I could interpret. We scanned them all and sorted them into a scale from high to low toxicity and from digestible to non-digestible plastics. We eventually had the plastic pile separated, from the original, which was now a long, flat rubbery skin tube.
Once we had all the data we needed, we carefully placed all the plastic back into the skin and sealed it shut, and labelled the originals corpse #413092#, right under where the neck once was, before ejecting it back into the ocean planet. Our missions had a strong leave no trace policy because we couldn’t disrupt the delicate balance of everything here.
We spent the next few days going through the same process. Finding bloated originals, dissecting them and analysing their plastic innards, before placing everything back as it was, labelling the dead sacks, and dumping them back into the ocean. Everything was very stock standard, until we came across our 356th one, and we found something extraordinary.
This one was also an original man. He had died from polyvinyl poisoning as well. But when we opened him up, we found a perfectly preserved item inside. This was an unbelievable rarity in terms of ocean plastic. It was inside a # polypropylene-display case #. When computer had removed it, we could only describe it as a small copy of an original women, at least what they used to look like. What we still look like. It had opposable arms and a neck and it was fixated in a perfect smile. Computer described it as a # human-female-miniature-mimic #. The code was # Barbie doll #.
We had a long argument about it. Half of us wanted to take it home. It was so unique, the corporation would see this asset as immensely valuable, with their at home machinery, far more sophisticated than anything travel based, would most likely reveal key insights about old-world materials that, really, would benefit civilisation.
The other half argued more heavily in favour of this leave no trace policy. We would be breaking the astroscientific code, after all, if we were to neglect our duties. Computer was listening to the whole conversation, as computer always does, and had already asked permission from higher ups about this. We heard back almost instantly. The company wanted to keep the doll. So keep the doll we did.
We left that day.
We had our data and the doll, which was safely concealed in the pod bay electro-vault.
Everyone soon had their synapses hooked up to the TeamDreamMachine™. Then we entered the dream state, which would keep us company for the next thousand or so years that it would take for us to return to the company home. Computer kept us comfortable whilst we travelled through space.
We all decided to do a round of dream golf first and foremost. A good way to kick off years of enjoyment. The green stretched literally as far as our imagination allowed. Before we hit the first ball however, we saw something in the distance.
We had an extra, unaccounted for, visitor. As they approached we realised it was a she. She was young, not a teenager yet, with long blonde hair. She spoke to us in a heavy German accent. She said we had to take the doll back, it was hers, and we had stolen it. She demanded, angrily, that we return it to an island called Pulau Ubin.
We carefully explained to her that “islands” no longer exist on her planet. And that the doll was now company property, and we didn’t have the authority to take it back now. Besides, you can’t exit the TeamDreamMachine™ until the trip was completed, we told her. She was dismayed and burst into tears. I told her not to worry, she could just dream the doll, and the island, and anything she wanted. Here, away from the real world, she could have everything she ever wanted, and get rid of everything she never did.
Eventually she got used to the TeamDreamMachine™, but it took months of crying and sulking. The destruction of Earth really haunted her. But she got good at golf quickly. We played sports and went for trips in our dreams for hundreds of years. She dreamt all of Pulau Ubin and we were fascinated to explore it with her, from the depths of granite quarries to the coffee plantations high on the mountain tops. All she ever dreamt of were her parents and that island. And the doll, of course.
The little girl wanted her doll.