On Maxing it, after 2020-1
Easing ourselves into our chosen maw of more and more and MOAH
The years 2020-2021 did so many things to us. In many ways they’re not over: the pandemic ‘continues’, commensurate with its repression from consciousness and cultural memory. This itself is an interesting and paradoxical moment that bears precise repetition (because you may be already repressing it):
the pandemic ‘continues’, commensurate with its repression from consciousness and cultural memory.
‘What pandemic?’/It continues1.
Among the many subtle-profound effects of the pandemic’s first acute few years was the sudden and precious opportunity to be stopped and think; to reflect on what it is that we’d been doing (and with whom, and for whom, and ‘for why’); to ask one another how we’d been living, and how we might wish to live our lives; and to take those insights and transform them, from hope into a new and better modes of existence.
After the first chalk rainbows of the pandemic smudged in the winter rain of 2020, we promised: we will be better people – better partners with better partners, involving ourselves in new jobs and habits and commutes, ones we don’t loathe and that don’t grind us to dust. After the pandemic, we will know how to live.
This has been a huge lost opportunity. I do know of individuals who made important and meaningful changes by reflecting existentially during 2020-1. But collectively we have failed to think and feel our way toward a wisdom with a deep enough purchase on our souls that we would develop a new ethics of commitment – something resilient enough to withstand the accumulation and expansion of pre-pandemic dyanmics, all of which are now accelerating. Given the chance to be stopped in our tracks, to pause and think and change direction, or just slow down and stop careening into the traps of our lives, ‘we’ have ‘decided’ – what? We have decided to double down on the worst of our old ways. After 2020-1, we took a precious opportunity for positive change, and decided instead on… what we now see all around us. We decided to say ‘fuck it’, and max it.
There are small signs of this. Single use coffee cups and take away coffes stands out. Until the pandemic, there was some growing awareness of how needlessly wasteful the popular thirst for fast coffee was. With all due ironies2, re-usable coffee cups had become a thing. Yet as of 2025 in Melbourne, people grumble about coffee hitting >5 dollars3, but no one complains about the fact that single-use cups have become the de-facto choice: not only have they seen a resurgence, they’ve become the dominant and totally socially acceptable choice, to the point where baristas make it in a take away cup by default, and sometimes even only serve single use cups.
Before the pandemic, takeaways were a sign you were ‘busy’, commuting, didn’t have time to enjoy a coffee. You put up with the inferior end product as a trade off, becase you were underslept and addicted and needed the caffeine to function, and had five minutes until that class or meeting started.
During the acute phase of the pandemic, disposable cups and takeaways became a habit entrenched by public health concerns: it was a sad fact of our deprivation. Our inability to go to cafes meant we had to make do.
After the acute phase… people just got so used to take aways, they became the norm, the sector seemed to become driven by nothing but warm convenience itself, and most people forgot that, once upon a time, some people sat down and took the time to have coffee together – which was at least half the point of the whole thing. The 2020-1 habit of take aways didn’t eradicate covid, but it’s curious that it pretty much did in two notions: the small notion of a re-usable cup, and the larger notion that we might actually sit down and take five minutes to enjoy a coffee together, in porcelain or glass – and that, if we don’t have that five minutes, we could just admit that we never had enough time for a worthwhile coffee in the first place.
The small example of single use cups and takeaways adds up: you could fill a tram every half hour with the 50,000 of them Melbourne was producing in 2022.
It also points to a general dynamic I see in play in the physically bigger examples I’m about to turn to in this post. The cups show us the dynamic. Firstly, by needlessly generating landfill in this way (indeed, by ‘hitting the accelerator’ with this habit, by ‘aggressing’ on what we were doing before we knew better), we repress awareness of the pandemic’s ongoing existence, as well as awareness of the damaged and stressed ecology from which it emerged, and the urbanised, socially accelerated, aeromobile culture that propagated it so quickly and effortlessly. Zizek’s structure of fetishist disavowal is a neat fit here: ‘we know very well’ single use cups entrench the needless production of ecologically destructive waste (click the link above to see how), ‘and yet…’ cafés offer them and customers prefer them (or no longer know any different), walk around with them, bitch about paying over five dollars for them, throw them away, persist in this cycle4.
Basically, in 2025 we have found ourselves in a society that knows better, yet everywhere indulges itself in doing worse, wherever possible, perhaps as a mark of a kind of stubborn, regressed, defiant ‘privilege’. We don’t have a solid ecology or a stable geopolitics, but we sure as hell have every right to a huge warm coffee – and don’t let anyone take that away from you. In line with my 3S/3SD line, this is stupid and it’s surreal, and we appear also to be very stubborn about choosing to do it anyway. Single use take away cups maybe aren’t full-blown 3SD, because they’re not dangerous per se. As something stupid and destructive, it’s a novel synthetic compound: 2S2D=?
In the previous 3SD post, I pointed to the increasing popularity of TikTok and Temu as other signs of the dynamic I see permeating 2025. What I was also trying to indicate there was that, in a world of systems, the collective effects of ‘microchoices’ (like coffees and swipes and clicks) are recursive: we indulge in all these dumb or dangerous things, and as a consequence, we become more involved in them, demanding bigger doses, wanting more for our maw, wanting MOAHHH…. We should be off Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp, because Suckaberg is now some kind of fascist; but we stay on his platforms, keep posting. We should stop talking about Musk and Trump, because they feed and grow larger, wealthier and more powerful by feeding on attention; but we are drawn into being reactive to their vortex and the spectacle of American disintegration anyway. This is dumb, dangerous and destructive, as well as surreal, stubborn, and stupid – it is full blown 3SD. But hey, that being true – fuck it, let’s do more of that! Let’s go to it gladly. And let’s do it harder, faster, bigger and louder than we were doing it a decade ago. Let’s blast it, let’s blast around blasting it; let’s max it out. It’s terrible (or just not very good), let’s put more in our maw in the name of MOAH; let’s max this, let’s do it.
In 2025, 3SD dynamics are starting to hit the very popular choice for maxing. We can see maxing at work in the aesthetic and material form of increasingly popular objects: smartphones, SUVs, and cruise ships. Interestingly, these were some key objects of the acute phase of the pandemics. Smartphones were the things we lived on; SUVs were the things that were unavailable; cruise ships were plague ships, full of stranded ill suburbanites and exploited lonely sailors. At this phase of the repressed pandemic, they are all for maxing – all the better to get a bigger dose of 3SD into us, on a brighter, faster screen, with more entertainment.
Smartphones have been on a maxing journey that is fifteen now. Like the teenagers on them, they’ve been getting bigger and heavier since 2010. But maxing probably won in 2023, when the iPhone Mini – designed to pack more camera, processor, battery life and screen resolution into a smaller package – was discontinued. By 2024, the iPhone Max was the top-selling smartphone. Apple’s maxed phone accounted for about a quarter of all Apple’s smartphone sales, in the year where Apple finally beat Samsung to reach #1 in the global smartphone market. By 2024, maxing won over small and sensible.
Given that an iPhone mini weighed 141 grams, and that Nokia is landing phones <100g, the size and weight of the Max is both a striking social fact, and a big sign of how maxing has les to do with utility, and more to do with sign value5 and consumption. It is also a cultural shift, one that shows how quickly we’ve become accustomed to things we found grotesque, silly, and superflous within living memory, like phablets. The first time the phablet attempted take off, around 2011-12, they were reviled as the kind of naff and daggy object that should apologise for its own existence, like a BMW X6 or SsangYong Stavic. The original Galaxy Note weighed 178g and was 146 x 82 x 9mm; the iPhone Pro Max is 229g and 159 x 76 x 8.25mm. The Max is bigger and heavier than the Note… but we no longer see its phablet-ness, many of us now see an object of desire, an object of more and MOAH. Where the iPhone Mini and current Nokia models – or the Suzuki Jimny – show how we can use technical innovation to create something smaller and lighter that uses fewer resources to make and consumes less energy – instead, most consumers want to Max it.
In Australia – especially since 2020-1 – people have also started maxing it with their cars: motoring journalists have even started referring to these massive vehicles as ‘full size’. Grotesque pickups and titanic SUVs have been the norm in the US for decades, but in Australia, although some enthusiasts bought them, there wasn’t a category – let alone a bestselling category – called ‘the SUV’ until the 2010s6. In a curious synchroncicity, just as phones embarked on their embiggenment, the SUV really took off here.
As of writing, the best-selling car in Australia is the Ford Ranger, a large SUV that, like the iPhone, has gone on a materio-aesthetic journey from large-midsized pickup/ute to its maxed apotheosis. The success of the maxed version of the Ranger has caused maxing responses from its segment competitors. As the Ranger has become more dominant, more American, more paramilitary, Hiluxes and Isuzus have responded by getting MOAH larger and MOAH ‘muscular’ and MOAH American looking, MOAHHHHH… RAM-like. Those veritable ‘phablets’ of the SUV category, the Dodge RAM and Chevrolet Silverado, have thus not only become popular in their own right, they have set the ‘model’ for the market leader to imitate. Just like all bodybuilders wanted to look like Ronnie Coleman in 2003 (with scary results), the RAM/US SUV/phablet-sized truck is the form that the Ranger imitates to make acceptable, and consumers go: coooool. And yet, only recently, the RAM appeared comically huge to most Australians7. Yet, like the Silverado, and like Toyota’s new competitor, the Tundra the RAM is a ‘valid’ choice now. They are almost always black, and seem to always be driven by guys who wear baseball caps8 and sunglasses, many of whom are white guys with beards9.
We should think about these post 2020-1 social facts really carefully: after the change to pause and reflect, Australia’s popular choices now are single-use coffee cups, maxed smartphones, and maxed Ford Rangers. This has happened over two decades when average television sizes doubled (while people only keep them half as long), while Australia now has the largest houses of any country in the world. At least we’re number one at something.
What it means, in this country at least, is that society is coming to be dominated by a preference for maxed objects (in maxed houses, with maxed TVs), necessarily designed with less regard for ecological impact, materials and energy use, necessarily a less appropriate, sustainable, other-regarding use of space. There is no way we can be buying a maxed take-away coffee, a maxed new phone, or a maxed American-style SUV and be thinking about the state of the world, or even just ‘our kids’, or trying to live in a way that might reduce our harmful impacts on other people, the environment, and the future. On some level, we have to be doing this to defy, spite and coax our own demise10.
I say this as someone (not the only person I know) who caught covid in December. Although the acute phase was a Gnarly Cold with Bat Virus Characteristics, it has taken six weeks to get my energy levels back – and I’m lucky. Something about it seemed to damage the way energy was produced in my body, and left me with symptoms that match mild depression. In this country, where stats are fairly accurate, covid kills about 150 people a month – but when I think about its other effects, from the mild long covid I recently experienced to the breakdown of marriages I still know happening… yes, it’s still happening.
I mean: the re-usable ‘keep cups’ are all industrially manufactured, many of them Made in China of plastic, many of them not ever really used – a bit like green bags for the supermarket. 2010s greenwash for middle class consumers who want their catastrophic way of life to feel less harmful, and maybe be a teeny weeny bit less harmful. Maybe. I say this as a person who uses green bags and has a few Keep Cups in their cupboard.
Coffee beans have just hit an all time high globally, and local labour and business costs are the highest they’ve ever been: there doesn’t seem to be a cogent analysis of this though, just people shocked by how expensive coffee ‘suddenly’ seems.
Perhaps use of the cups is a defence against awareness, in the way that all mindlessness is a dissociative defence against knowing and feeling and owning what we ‘know’. In terms of ecological awareness at least, it’s a strange irony of the repressed pandemic. As a social fact, it means we have all tacitly conspired with one another in deciding to regress together, and walk around drinking warm milky drinks out of sippy cups*. The big take away latte is regressive; the take away coffee consumer is a regressed; everyone knows and no one cares and everyone keeps doing it, although it’s the wrong thing to do, although it’s not very good.
With Baudrillard’s shorthand: use value has a functional logic, exchange value has an economic logic, and sign value, with a logic of status differentials, ‘signs of difference’. There’s also symbolic exchange, which, never mind for here, it’s Baudrillard’s acid trip, important to him and his work, but maybe not here.
Another topic for another post, but ‘utes’ – which may be an Australian invention – have a different lineage. The first SUVs I recall being called SUVs here were Hummers, which pro Iraq people bought after the US invaded and occupied Iraq, killing over a million people and creating Islamic State.
It was way too big, in a way that screamed inferiority complex and micropenis: it used to be self cucking, but now, all the MAGA bros want one… as signs they are ?big and hard?
N= about 20 now for this obs.
Again, we need to dispense with the idea of ‘utility’ here, and look to Baudrillard and sign value. Nearly no one needs a RAM or Silverado, just as no tradie needs the Ranger Raptor (‘cooler’, bigger, blacker, and that can do 0-100km/h in 5 seconds): yet suddenly, a whole generation claims a need for towing capacity and a concern about getting bogged on building sites. Elephant in the room: SUVs are a tax write off for tradies and business owners, and this has driven sales to the point where they are 50% of all vehicles sold – SUVs sales as a percentage doubled over the decade to 2023. I need to find the figures, but I read somewhere that this has negated any ‘gains’ through electrification, hybrids, and elsewhere in transport.
The surface logic is: ‘I want a coffee and I am in a hurry’, so I buy a take away coffee; ‘I want to watch video for several hours a day on my phone, wherever I am’, so I buy a huge new phone with a bigger, brighter screen and faster processor; ‘I want a huge enormous truck – so I buy one. I want a maxed one, so I buy a maxed one. They’re cool. Beneath this, surely: death, demise. Back to Adorno and ‘what Wotan wants:’
“If I had to speak psychoanalytically, I would say that, of the forces mobilized here, the appeal to the unconscious desire for disaster, for catastrophe, is by no means the least significant in these movements. But I would add – and I am speaking especially to those of you who are rightly sceptical about any merely psychological interpretation of social and political phenomena – that this behaviour is by no means purely psychologically motivated; it also has an objective basis. Someone who is unable to see anything ahead of them and does not want the social foundation to change really has no alternative but, like Richard Wagner’s Wotan, to say, ‘Do you know what Wotan wants? The end.’ This person, from the perspective of their own social situation, longs for demise – though not the demise of their own group, as far as possible, the demise of all”.