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2021: Moving Slow and Fixing Things
Seed ~ Root ~ Grow ~ Sustain
What if we told you that humanity is being driven to the brink of extinction by an illness? That all the poverty, the climate devastation, the perpetual war, and consumption fetishism we see all around us have roots in a mass psychological infection? What if we went on to say that this infection is not just highly communicable but also self-replicating, according to the laws of cultural evolution, and that it remains so clandestine in our psyches that most hosts will, as a condition of their infected state, vehemently deny that they are infected? What if we then told you that this ‘mind virus’ can be described as a form of cannibalism. Yes, cannibalism. Not necessarily in the literal flesh-eating sense but rather the idea of consuming others — human and non-human — as a means of securing personal wealth and supremacy. ~ Seeing Wetiko: On Capitalism, Mind Viruses, and Antidotes for a World in Transition
Developers still seem a little baffled when told that the systems they’ve built (systems that are clearly working very well) are corrupting the public sphere. In part, this is due to the newness of the industry. Doctors for example, are technical people too, but they’ve been trained on a code of ethics developed over a very long time: first, do no harm. The tech sector has had a different ethos: build first and ask for forgiveness later. Now we’re being called to account, as a result of becoming too powerful and too dangerous, too quickly.
