Time to step back: 3 themes worth noting
Stories that fell under the weekly radar.
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The end of the year is nigh, and although you won’t find me doing predictions or top-tens, it’s a good time to unearth some themes that got a bit lost in the weekly news cycle.
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The Worldwise View
Let’s take a moment to step back a bit.
Every week I come across much that I don’t get to share with you for one reason or other—often because it’s not about the more pressing issues of the day.
This post gathers some of those stories to point to big-picture themes that I think loom large at this moment, as 2020 draws to a close.
A sense of senselessness
Do you have this persistent feeling that nothing much makes sense any more? Well, you’re not alone. Writer Tim Maughan names it in this piece on Medium OneZero: the modern world is just too complex for us to understand.
“From social media to the global economy to supply chains, our lives rest precariously on systems that have become so complex, and we have yielded so much of it to technologies and autonomous actors that no one totally comprehends it all.”
He calls it a sense that No One’s Driving. And he urges us to delve into understanding how we’ve lost control before we can “hope to retake the wheel”.
The piece takes a stab at this with an analysis of the “constant flow of physical goods, capital, and data, and the networks we’ve built to manage those flows”. It argues that these networks evade accountability, leaving politicians powerless to effect change—and so, enter populism to fill the vacuum.
I’m not so sure that this sense of losing a grip centres primarily around massive faceless networks; or that we should be looking for ‘a driver’. This analysis in MIT Tech Review, which focuses on technological aspects of how the modern world functions, in fact puts the leadership challenge down to a rapid fragmentation of physical, social and digital worlds.
But Maughan has definitely put his finger on something with his thesis. And naming that sense of senselessness is important.
One more thing: One of the world’s biggest science experiments shows why everybody needs to re-examine what it means to know something - MIT Tech Review
Futurism now
It’s fair to say there’s not much that can stop the march of technological advancement, in spite of the potential consequences (just think of the story of Frankenstein). Examples of that advancement are all around us.
3-D printed steak, anyone? An Israeli start-up is close to launching plant-based steaks produced with industrial-scale 3D printers. The alternative meat market is booming, and last week we saw news of the first approval of lab-grown meat for consumers.
Who said that people doing manual jobs can’t work from home. All you need is a machine that lets you remote-control a robot to do the work for you, be it planting seeds or stocking shelves. It’s a technology that’s now been commercialised after 40 years of research.
Tired of the big bad world of the Internet? There’s a way out (if you can code): just create your own ‘digital garden’. It’s a growing trend: more people are now making their own sites where they can connect with others about things that matter to them.
There are more glimpses of a high-tech near-future: weightless and invisible batteries, drones for remote deliveries that are set to reshape home design; automated and digitised bioscience that feeds into anything from medicine to energy.
Futurism is alive in the present.
One more thing: Even more benign technologies leave a mark—how the digital camera has changed us - Spectrum
Slow social shifts
While technology races ahead, dreaming up utopias and threatening dystopias, it does so against the constant hum of how societies function. And that’s much harder to shift.
Countries are still chasing economic growth based on GDP, never mind the abundance of evidence that it’s incompatible with well-being and sustainability. Inequality is persistent, and arguably a hallmark of our world post-pandemic. This is now paired up with growing nationalism, one sign of which is the move by the UK to cut its foreign aid budget at a time when it’s sorely needed by vulnerable people around the world.
But the picture isn’t static. The world in which aid operates is waking up to the endemic problem of racism. And one social movement with strong momentum behind it is that of decolonisation.
Africa is at the centre of this movement. The shaking off of colonialist legacies comes up more and more in conversations about genomics research and research for development. It comes up in scholarly analyses of global protest. And it’s there in reflections about what colonial history means about whose knowledge counts.
The shifts may be slow, but they’re the foundations on which technological futures are built. How those futures pan out is—or should be—as much up to citizens, scholars, writers and artists as it is up to economists and technologists.
One more thing: How to curate a pandemic: Three prominent curators on how they are (re-)situating their respective curatorial practices in relation to the political moment of reckoning with legacies of racism - Africa is a Country
A final note from the week’s soundtrack 🌎
Worldwise is written by Anita Makri. You can help keep the project going for the cost of a cup of coffee—or spiced chai, or why not, something more potent.
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