How to Fix Litter

I’m an ideas man. Person. I’m a person of ideas. Not good ideas. I’m just willing to shake bad ideas for long enough that sometimes interesting things fall out. But the internet is tough for ideas people. I had an idea for a TV show where CEOs try to open their own packaging, but then I Googled “tv show where ceos open their own packaging,” and screw me, there’s a stupid Reddit post with the exact same idea.

Pre-internet, I would have happily regaled you with my entertaining CEO humiliation TV idea, never knowing that someone else had had the same thought. A bunch of people, probably. I would have suspected. But I wouldn’t have known.

Now I know, and it’s not just ruining great ideas for panel shows with a surprise redemption arc: You can’t think of anything without a quick search revealing that someone else thought of it first. By now every half-baked thought anyone ever had has been fingered into a phone, and the search algorithms are good enough to find it.

I have therefore decided never to research anything again. The internet is too consumptive anyway. Consumptive. I’m not sure that’s a word. But I’m won’t check. I’m just going to assume I created something brilliant and on point there. So here is my next idea, which I also will not research: We should fine companies for litter. I know what you’re thinking: Why do all Max’s ideas start with, “Fine companies?” Because inequality, that’s why. That’s beside the point. We should fine them for litter. Not littering. Fines for littering is already a thing. We need to fine them for having their logo wind up in a gutter, no matter how it got there. For example, if I wander through the city with a meal, discarding Coke cans and McDonald’s wrappers, we should fine Coke and McDonald’s.

You might be thinking this sounds a little unfair. Like, what did Coke and McDonald’s do wrong here, exactly. I’ll tell you: They failed to take accountability for the total footprint of their business. They made an external detrimentality. External detrimentalities are when a business finds a way to make someone else pick up the tab for some of their product’s cost, e.g. by dumping factory waste in a river, or pretending nicotine is good for you, or passing down catastrophic climate change to the next generation. They’re also how to tell the difference between economist rationalists and corporate shills, because economists want to eliminate external detrimentalities, while people who have been subsumed into the corporate overmind think they’re a smart way to make money.

There you go. An app to send snaps of discarded golden arches to a central authority, which issues fines, which incentivizes McDonald’s to stop people strewing trash all over my street. That’s a solid idea, which no-one has ever thought of. Or they have, and it was trialed in some city somewhere, and it went terribly, possibly because people were deliberately dropping litter to get companies fined. But those are just details. I’m not going to figure out every last little thing. I’m an ideas man. Person.