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What does it take for people to see that for all the problems technology and markets have solved, they have unintended side-effects that, after enough time, can

by spodek 8y ago

What does it take for people to see that for all the problems technology and markets have solved, they have unintended side-effects that, after enough time, can become global problems? Pesticides and population growth expanding into more and more territory helped a lot of human problems in the past, but created new problems. Expanding into new territory escaped problems of poisoning, desertifying, or overfilling the land . . . until we populated the whole planet and the environment reached toxic levels of pollution. You might say the environment isn't yet toxic to us (though some places are), but it appears so for some essential symbiotic life. If experts in the field don't know what's happening, then people who estimate carrying capacities for the planet don't either, raising the error bars downward for their estimation. Systems perspectives predict outcomes like this and suggest systemic solutions, not technology or market solutions alone (though they are important), which are likely exacerbating them. A key leverage point I see are they system's beliefs and goals. They're hard to change, but such changes have happened before.

cfadvan 8y ago
What does it take for people to see that for all the problems technology and markets have solved, they have unintended side-effects that, after enough time, can become global problems? Pain. Pain on the personally detectable level, and someone they trust to explain to them why they’re hurting. As it stands now few people feel that pain, and if they do, there are legions of smug pricks telling them tall tales about the cause. If the Arab “Spring” and subsequent crises had been clearly and accurately framed as an environmental issue first, people would be freaking out. Instead it’s gotten every kind of spin short of the reality of drought leading to skyrocketing food costs in depressed economies.
joe_the_user 8y ago
What does it take for people to see that for all the problems technology and markets have solved, they have unintended side-effects that, after enough time, can become global problems? It is fairly easy to see this and some portion of people see it immediately. Unfortunately, another who profit from these things ask "what does it take for people not to see and stop these things?" and the answer is fairly visible in the way global warming has been [not] addressed.
closeparen 8y ago
>technology and markets While I agree in general, in this particular case, technology and markets today are trying to get more people onto less land and in arrangements that require less energy. Current public policy is holding it back.
- quadrangle 8y ago
  Put the blame where it belongs. Public policy is being held back by powerful interests who profit from the status quo.
  - closeparen 8y ago
    “Powerful interests” in this case is grassroots community organizers protecting their homes from unwanted change by pushing back against global capital.
    - quadrangle 8y ago
      While there's definitely a status-quo bias among myopic community folks, there's also totally deserved distrust of global capital. Global capital does not have the public interest as top priority and certainly isn't focused on sustainability and decades-long time-scales. Global capital is overall profit-prioritizing, externalizes tons of costs, invests massively in lobbying governments for their interests, and focuses on relatively short-term growth figures. It sounds like you are suggesting that if only grassroots push-back would go away, global capital is generally solving ecological problems. I hope that completely backwards view isn't what you're actually suggesting. Maybe you are talking about knee-jerk anti-density, anti-development stuff? While that NIMBYism is a real problem, and there are real developers working in the right direction, we still have far more global capital and power behind fossil-fuel companies and pesticide manufacturers etc. than behind sustainable-development tech. Despite all the push for electric vehicles, car companies are pushing way-oversized usually-single-occupant vehicles (SUV's and pickup-trucks-that-people-use-just-for-commuting and such) as much as ever, and lobby for all the unsustainable public infrastructure for them… At any rate, the org doing the best at combating both the unsustainable and corrupt capital growth-focused nonsense and the counter-productive NIMBYism is https://www.strongtowns.org https://www.strongtowns.org (not sure what the best equivalent is for issues around pesticides and healthy biodiversity).
specialist 8y ago
Neil Postman's Technopoly was my first intro to these ideas.

by spodek 8y ago

cfadvan 8y ago

What does it take for people to see that for all the problems technology and markets have solved, they have unintended side-effects that, after enough time, can become global problems? Pain. Pain on the personally detectable level, and someone they trust to explain to them why they’re hurting. As it stands now few people feel that pain, and if they do, there are legions of smug pricks telling them tall tales about the cause. If the Arab “Spring” and subsequent crises had been clearly and accurately framed as an environmental issue first, people would be freaking out. Instead it’s gotten every kind of spin short of the reality of drought leading to skyrocketing food costs in depressed economies.

joe_the_user 8y ago

What does it take for people to see that for all the problems technology and markets have solved, they have unintended side-effects that, after enough time, can become global problems? It is fairly easy to see this and some portion of people see it immediately. Unfortunately, another who profit from these things ask "what does it take for people not to see and stop these things?" and the answer is fairly visible in the way global warming has been [not] addressed.

closeparen 8y ago

>technology and markets While I agree in general, in this particular case, technology and markets today are trying to get more people onto less land and in arrangements that require less energy. Current public policy is holding it back.

quadrangle 8y ago
Put the blame where it belongs. Public policy is being held back by powerful interests who profit from the status quo.
- closeparen 8y ago
  “Powerful interests” in this case is grassroots community organizers protecting their homes from unwanted change by pushing back against global capital.
  - quadrangle 8y ago
    While there's definitely a status-quo bias among myopic community folks, there's also totally deserved distrust of global capital. Global capital does not have the public interest as top priority and certainly isn't focused on sustainability and decades-long time-scales. Global capital is overall profit-prioritizing, externalizes tons of costs, invests massively in lobbying governments for their interests, and focuses on relatively short-term growth figures. It sounds like you are suggesting that if only grassroots push-back would go away, global capital is generally solving ecological problems. I hope that completely backwards view isn't what you're actually suggesting. Maybe you are talking about knee-jerk anti-density, anti-development stuff? While that NIMBYism is a real problem, and there are real developers working in the right direction, we still have far more global capital and power behind fossil-fuel companies and pesticide manufacturers etc. than behind sustainable-development tech. Despite all the push for electric vehicles, car companies are pushing way-oversized usually-single-occupant vehicles (SUV's and pickup-trucks-that-people-use-just-for-commuting and such) as much as ever, and lobby for all the unsustainable public infrastructure for them… At any rate, the org doing the best at combating both the unsustainable and corrupt capital growth-focused nonsense and the counter-productive NIMBYism is https://www.strongtowns.org https://www.strongtowns.org (not sure what the best equivalent is for issues around pesticides and healthy biodiversity).

specialist 8y ago

Neil Postman's Technopoly was my first intro to these ideas.