Just as
This is largely a result of pollution information ecology.
Take the immenent crises , we can’t reach a degree of consensus on the severity of the crises we’re facing such that we might be able to act to avert these.
The growing threat of disasters in the world due to climate change should be cause for serious concern. It is obvious we are not properly preparing. Even when we know something bad is about to happen, we aren’t able to avert the worst of it by prudent planning; instead, we suffer needlessly in many cases.
storm-warning systems, for one, haven’t been very successful in getting people to evacuate areas. Why is that?
It is ever more the case that there is no central source of truth. Which warnings should we heed? Which threats are mere exaggerations? If the ‘official wisdom’ is that I should flee an area due to a storm warning, should I or not?
Narratives can be concocted to support any sort of conclusion - this is becoming apparent.
But nevertheless, sometimes there are times when all narratives break down.
Also, public goods are underfunded. This is a problem of incentives. When there isn’t much benefit in offering a public good, things that are inherently non-rival and non-exclusive are rarer than they need to be (like reliable information). (There is no lack of incentive to distribute unreliable information. There’s not a lot of money in telling the truth, but telling lies can make you rich). Part of this has to do with the fact that our information ecology is as polluted as our planetary ecology. But when we realize our environment is becoming unlivable, how should we respond? Just as people are starting to wake up to the level of havoc that the climate crisis can potentially unleash, it’s also becoming clear that unreliable information, and lots of it, creates another type of crisis - a meaning crisis.
How come the opensource community around the Fukushima disaster was so successful? (EU report Making Sense participatory sensing 2016 and Wisdom of Crowds 2017 and article
- location
- common, unifying, non-human threat which it was in the interest of all to solve… maybe, in a context of ethnic/social violence induced by poverty, the aim of technology is only to act as detector of the presence or absence of violence and it’s extent to provide an early-warning system for the community and an ‘SOS’ for whoever is able to help contain/curtail the violence