Note Details
- The metacrisis is a crisis about and within a crisis, a situation where our understanding and handling of crises is in a state of crisis.
- The metacrisis is symptoms of a self-terminating global socioeconomic system
- It’s happening because of (generator functions):
- rivalrous dynamics (arms race, tragedy of the commons)
- subsuming of the substate (degrading environment, damaging society and relationships)
- exponential technology (democratization of catastrophic weaponry, influence of digital media)
- Which has led to:
- exponential catastrophic risk
- diminished sense-making
- such as…
- lack of meaning
- polarisation
- nuclear proliferation
- alienation
- mass climate migration
- pollution
- pandemics
- supply chain fragility
- microplastics
- climate change
- biodiversity loss
- ocean dead zones
- What could happen (new attractor points):
- 1 Chaos (bad - no one in control, breakdown of civilization)
- 2 Oppression (bad - governments become totalitarian, 184/brave new world)
- 3 Global coordination (good - mass education, empowered civic virtue, cultural enlightenment, emergent wisdom, post ai-economy)
- Solution (how we get to #3): an open digital society - techno realism (not optimism or pessimism)
- Personalized digital learning
- Use social-media like tech for personalized developmental learning
- Learn how to see and overcome personal biases.
- Learn media literacy for better sense making and discerning truth.
- Blockchain accountability
- Government spending logged on transparent blockchains. Enabling less overspend and externality tracking.
- History recorded on blockchain. Avoiding corruption and obfuscation.
- Open science blockchain. Enabling citation mistakes to be transparently updated downstream.
- Ethically harness AI
- Use ai for semantic integration. Enabling common valued and center ground to be easily established over global ‘Town halls’
- Ai-generated crowd-sourced consensus. Avoiding coercion and manufactured propositions from elite / establishment / extreme special interest groups.
- Humanity needs to evolve to survive. We cannot ignore what’s happening, reduce our self-importance, keep playing small, individualistic games in our own boxes and hope everything will turn out well. It’s our responsibility and challenge to be conscious stewards of this transition.
Source: Potentialism