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Since the Trump administration first took office, the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) has followed a similar formula for most of its posts on X, which are typically celebrating mass deportations, using dehumanizing language like criminal illegal aliens, and defending Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) raids. Recently, though, the account has taken a detour to post a different genre of content: aspirational pro-America artwork. On July 1, the DHS posted an image of a painting by the late Thomas Kinkade titled Morning Pledge, which shows a suburban neighborhood with a church and an American flag. Above it, the DHSs caption reads: Protect the Homeland. Then, on July 14, the DHS followed up with a piece by contemporary artist Morgan Weistling that depicted a family of early settlers in the American West. The painting, which shows two parents holding a newborn baby inside a covered wagon, is captioned: Remember your Homelands Heritage. New Life in a New Land Morgan Weistling. [Screenshot: DHS/X.com] Following the post, Weistling clarified that the DHS used his painting without permission, and that it invented an entirely new title for his work. But beyond ethical concerns about permission and copyright, the DHSs recent posts raise more pressing questions about what kind of America represents the organization’s concept of an ideal place to liveand who is included in that vision. Taken without permission After the DHS posted an image of his work, Weistling took to his official website, as well as to Facebook and Instagram, to set the record straight. (The Facebook and Instagram messages have since been deleted.) [Screenshot: Morgan Weistling/Facebook] So I was having a nice little vacation with my family when I get a message from a friend that the Department of Homeland Security has posted a painting of mine and its going viral, Weistling wrote on his Facebook page. As of this writing, the DHSs post has 19.1 million views and 34,000 likes. In a separate message on his website, Weistling added: They used a painting I did 5 years ago and re-titled it and posted it without my permission. It is a violation of my copyright on the painting. It was a surprise to me and I am trying to gather how this happened and what to do next. [Screenshot: morganweistling.com] According to Weistlings website, the painting used by the DHS is actually titled A Prayer for a New Liferather than the DHSs altered version of New Life in a New Land. This updated title, alongside the caption Remember your Homelands Heritage, places outsized emphasis on the land itself. Taken together with the paintings scene, the post seems to be skirting just around the edge of endorsing manifest destiny, or the assumption of American settlers inherent right to land in the West. Weistling did not immediately respond to Fast Companys request for a comment. A Manifest Destiny aesthetic Since the Trump administration took office in January, the DHS’s X account has become an active forum for the agency to promote President Trump’s mass deportation agenda. In early July alone, the DHS has already posted several images callously shrugging off the human suffering caused by the president’s deportation policies, which, most recently, include a new detention center for migrants built in the Florida Everglades. One repost from the White Houses official account shows a cup of coffee with the phrase Fire up the deportation planes added atop the liquid. Another image shows a border patrol vehicle in the desert, facing a distant sunset. The caption in neon green and white boasts: ZERO Releases in June. Lowest Month of Illegal Alien Encounters EVER. And a third, in a near-parody of this administrations extreme stance on immigration, shows a mock poster of the film E.T. the Extra Terrestrial with the text: Even E.T. knew when it was time to GO HOME. Take control of your departure using the CBP Home App. Between these posts are countless images of Black and brown people arrested by ICE for alleged crimes. The pivot to posting Kinkade’s and Weistlings works might be tonally jarring, but it’s indicative of the broader message the DHS account is trying to send. Weistlings body of work is almost entirely concerned with early American settlerspresenting an uncomplicated view of Americas origins, with scenes featuring a family happily riding west in a stagecoach or a rancher diligently tending his herd. Its a perspective that does not appear to include reference to Indigenous people. Meanwhile, Kinkade, who became notable for commercializing his work in the 80s and 90s, catered specifically to a Christian middle-class audience (a community that he was later criticized for allegedly exploiting). An entire section of his studios website is dedicated to Patriotic Art, the bulk of which highlights iconography like the American flag, the Statue of Liberty, and in one instance, Captain America. In Kinkades 2012 obituary in New York magazine, author Jerry Saltz wrote that the artist represented the epitome of sentimental, illustrational, conservative art. Both Weistling and Kinkade present an idyllic (and notably Eurocentric) portrayal of American societyone that, perhaps, evokes a fictional past thats implied by the phrase Make America Great Again. When the DHS urges its followers to Protect the Homeland, the question becomes: protect it for whom?
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E-Commerce
These specialty-made purses double as a mobile DJ kit. That’s because Nik Bentel Studio‘s newest purse, called the Tati Fte Bag, is actually wearable tech. The bag comes in two models: The $350 Speaker Bag, which pairs with bluetooth, and the $400 Mixer Bag, which has four input channels and is compatible with CD players, computers, phones, and amps. The bags started as a thought experiment, Nik Bentel tells Fast Company. “What if your everyday bag looked and felt like a piece of audio gear?” [Photos: Nik Bentel Studio] The resulting bags have room to hold your phone, chapstick, and mints, but they also have about three hours of play time each. Made from an acrylic shell, the material was chosen because it “allowed us to fully lean into the language of tech objects,” Bentel says. “It has this glossy, rigid, futuristic feel that instantly evokes gadgetry and display cases.” [Photo: Nik Bentel Studio] This is a purse meant to look like a gadget, not the other way around. “We wanted the bags to feel like they were pulled directly from a DJ booth,” Bentel says. Using fabric or leather would have softened the concept too much while acrylic gave the bags a “clean, synthetic, almost sci-fi finish.” The biggest challenges were precision, since acrylic has to be cut perfectly, and scale. [Photo: Nik Bentel Studio] “We wanted them to feel bold and graphic, but still functional as bags,” he says. “And of course, getting the buttons, knobs, and laser-etched details just right took a lot of back-and-forth to make sure they captured that playful realism.” Bentel has made clever, whimsical bags before like one made out of electrical cords and another for a single slice of pizza. The Tati Fte Bag brings that same sense of humor to sound. The rise of digital music and streaming has put a premium on physical music experiences like LPs and helped bring back the turntable. A boom box that’s a purse takes that impulse and makes it wearable.
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E-Commerce
After two years of reducing its overall carbon footprint, Amazon now reports that its emissions increased in 2024. The companys surge in data center construction and electricity use to support an increased use of AI helped fuel that rise, as did expanded delivery operations. Amazons total carbon emissions in 2024 reached 68.25 million metric tons, according to the companys latest sustainability report. Thats a 6% increase from the year priorand a 33% increase from 2019, when the company launched its Climate Pledge commitment to reach net-zero emissions across its operations by 2040. Amazon breaks down its carbon footprint into direct emissions, indirect emissions from purchased electricity, and indirect emissions from other sources. All three of these categories saw an increase in 2024. Direct emissions, primarily from its delivery services, grew 6% compared to 2023; the company cites supply constraints for EVs and low-carbon fuels. Direct emissions in total account for 15.13 million metric tons of carbon. Indirect emissions from purchased energy grew 1%, in part due to the higher electricity usage required to support advanced technologies like AI, according to the report. These emissions account for the smallest slice of Amazons overall footprint at 2.8 million metric tons. Indirect emissions from other sources also grew 6%, and these emissions make up 74% of Amazons total carbon footprint. That increase was driven primarily from data center construction and fuel consumption by third-party delivery service providers, per the report, which states that the company is using generative AI in virtually every corner of its business. Amazon says it’s continuing to work toward its 2040 net-zero goal, and that its progress will not be linear. It also claims it continues to match 100% of its electricity consumed in data center regions with renewable energy sources. But Amazon Employees for Climate Justice, an organization of workers at the tech giant pushing for more climate action, argues the numbers are misleading. The group says that in areas of the U.S. that are home to more than 70% of Amazon data centers, electricity comes primarily from gas or coal. Utility companies are also building out new fossil fuel infrastructure to support these data centers. To match its electricity consumption with renewables, Amazon uses mostly renewable energy creditswhich have faced criticisms of greenwashing. In some cases, Amazon Employees for Climate Justice says, the company has simply purchased the credit for existing renewables, which would have been used anyway. Bloomberg reported that if these credits werent counted, Amazons 2022 emissions would have actually been three times higher than what the company disclosed. Amazon isn’t the only tech company building out data centers to support AI. A Meta data center in Louisiana will require three new gas plants for power. Google’s 2023 emissions grew 13% compared to the year prior because of AI and data center growth. Microsoft’s emissions are up 23% since 2020 for the same reason. But Business Insider recently reported that Amazon’s data centers “are on pace to command the highest electricity demand” from all the tech companies it examined. Im frustrated that nobody talks about what AI is doing to the environment, an Amazon software engineer said in a statement from Amazon Employees for Climate Justice. They want people to think that AI is this magical tool that lives in the cloud, but what they dont tell us is that AI literally uses coal and fracked gas for its power. Our CEOs want to dupe us into focusing on how efficient shiny new AI features are, as if we dont know well be killing the planet with the few hours were saving on code. And in a year, I might not even have a job.
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E-Commerce
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