π Climate Hope, Open Science and How Social Status Shapes Our Society
On the difference between moment and momentum and shifts in an increasingly invisible social status stack.
π Hi, Ed & Chris here. In the Atlas of the Long Now, we interpret our rapidly changing world. We do this with the historic-futuristic glasses of the long-term thinker and the toolbox of the speculative maker. The here and now is a moment that spans centuries.
π³π± Read he Dutch edition of this email.
We are unfortunately recovering from a collision with Covid. So this week, no elaborate reflections on long-term trends. However, we do want to share with you some articles and podcasts that got us thinking over the past few weeks.
β Writings on the Wall β
π The Truth is Out There (for a prize)
The majority of scientific studies and research findings are currently behind the paywalls of expensive journals such as Nature, Science and The Lancet. You have to pay a lot of money to access them. A subscription to Nature alone costs about β¬200 a year. But to keep up, you actually have to subscribe to hundreds of such profit-seeking journals.
This article (Tearing down the academic research paywall could come with a price) from Vox describes an old yet growing movement in the U.S. and EU to end this system: the Open Science movement.
The rationale of the Open Science movement (see wiki) is simple: taxpayers have already paid to conduct university or otherwise subsidised studies, why should they then have to pay to see the results as well? Proponents also hope that open access to research data will give the public greater insight into the state of science and bring more innovation.
The Open Science movement (for now) only covers publicly funded studies, not private R&D.
Another argument for making scientific datasets publicly available, not mentioned in the Vox article, is the need for a healthy public domain, in which all information relevant to public discussion is open and freely accessible.
We live in a time of fake news. A time when we no longer believe the expertsβ words without question. If the research results on which experts base their opinions were freely accessible, trust could return to the public domain. Then we could see what opinions are based on and, if opinions are contrary, studies could be compared.
Imagine a database of integrity and accessibility where both scientists and journalists and other kinds of truth seekers make their data sets, statistical analyses and journalistic sources accessible to the general public. So that you get an open chain of evidence and all the world's knowledge is recorded with integrity and freely accessible.
Of course, an average news consumer can't make sense of a database full of obscure numbers, but it will undoubtedly change journalistic and scientific mores.
For example: you interview an expert. Then you wouldnβt just make the audio recording of your interview accessible to your readers, also the studies on which the expert relies would be made public. (And possibly also the studies that contradict the expert's opinion.) This will also change the nature of the often infantile opinion-carousel, because now you can't just sell your conjectures or opinions as facts.
With the transition from the printed word to the activated word, the public domain is changing. The overwhelming abundance of information lowers our trust in the words of intermediaries. To overcome this we need to design an open, reliable and robust knowledge system that we can refer to and rely on in our public discussions.
π Climate Hope - Is a Green Valhalla imminent?
Sunk deep into Covid snickering, we read this piece (Hope amid climate chaos: 'We are in a race between Armageddon and awesome') by Damian Carrington, the environment editor of The Guardian. According to the climate activists and climate scientists he talks to in his article, we could very well be living in a climate-neutral Utopia in a not too distant future.
The source of this cautious optimism is simple: the exponential growth of renewable energy generation and the electrification of road transport. They are, according to the cautious optimists, the tipping points the system needs. All industries will begin to adapt, and it will lead to more and more investment in renewable solutions. The tide is turning.
Then we read in The Atlantic, The Climate Economy Is About to Explode, about a report by Credit Suisse in which the bank predicts that the effects of the Inflation Reduction Act (IRA) are being underestimated. According to the bank, the IRA will lead to twice as much climate investment as thought. Not $374 billion in direct investment in sustainable solutions, but $800 billion. Moreover, the IRA will lead to another 1,000 billion in additional climate investments from the market.
The question, of course, is: Will all these exponential developments and investments still be in time?
Greenhouse gas emissions are still not falling. And it's not just our salvation that depends on tipping points - the climate apocalypse is also having its moments. We read that the Amazon forest is on the verge of drying out, that the polar ice caps are irreversibly melting, that Russia's permafrost is warming, and that the gulf streams are nearing a standstill. (Not to mention rapidly declining biodiversity, land degradation and acidifying seas.)
But while the moment is giving the climate apocalypse better odds, the momentum is definitely on the side of a better world. And, thinking about the future, it's always about momentum, never about the moment. Especially not when momentum has exponential qualities. What today looks like a slow-flowing stream will be a tidal wave of cheap and renewable energy tomorrow.
With all this in mind, we stumbled upon this manic Wired article; After Going Solar, I Felt the Bliss of Sudden Abundance, by Clive Thompson, about the advent of solar panels. In the article, Thompson describes how (according to him) his solar panels in Brooklyn generate so much energy that his family can never consume this abundance on its own. He tells how his panels have changed him from a negative climate whiny to a positive hedonist.
Leaving aside the question of whether he shouldn't be better off sharing his abundance with New Yorkers that donβt have room or money for solar cells, the realisation that a sustainable economy might also mean abundance and joy is quite interesting. It will motivate legions of people who might otherwise prefer to bury their heads in the sand. Becoming sustainable wouldnβt be about avoiding the apocalypse anymore, but about welcoming paradise.
Why not. It reminds us of a conversation we once had with representatives of Eneco (a Dutch energy company). They also assumed that electricity would eventually be virtually free in the future. (We understand their reasoning, but are not yet completely convinced. After all, we still have problems with energy storage. Although batteries also seem to be getting exponentially cheaper, there is much uncertainty about the scarcity of materials.)
That said, on Saturday, Oct. 29, 6:30 p.m. IJ Room, during the Warming Up Festival in Amsterdam, Christiaan will be challenged by Bahram Sadeghi on the positive attitude of our futurology practice, Studio Monk. Which surely is outrageous. Probably Jelmer Mommers or Lisanne Boersma will also be joining us. Admission is free.
π€ It's Social Status, Stupid
Social status plays a major role in our thinking and futures modelling. Since social status is closely linked to the deep aspirations of our cultural archetypes, the Homo Nobilis, the Homo Economicus and the Homo Romanticus. At the same time, when we talk about social status with people, we often run into a wall. βI don't care about social status,β is often the Pavlov reaction we get. βPerhaps, but that seems very unlikely to us,β is usually our response, which makes them think that we think that they are pathetic posers.
We don't think that, really. All we think is that social status does its work invisibly all around us, a bit like gravity is everywhere. Apart from hermitism, social status is pretty much inescapable and omnipresent. Everyone relates to it, all day long. But explaining exactly what it is can be quite complicated.
That's why we were very pleasantly surprised by this episode of the Ezra Klein Show. In the show, RogΓ© Karma - a colleague of Klein's - talks with Cecilia Ridgeway, a sociologist affiliated with Stanford. She explains in clear terms what social status is and how that mechanism works in a variety of social situations. From the street and the store to the lecture hall and the conference room.
Social status, according to Ridgeway, is something others give us. We cannot give it to ourselves. It is a kind space of social affordances given to us by others to manifest ourselves in.
According to Ridgeway, groups of people give some individuals more space than others because the group recognises - rightly or wrongly - that that person has something important to say, something that will benefit the whole group. According to her, in earlier times, in less complex societies, this was a convenient social mechanism for giving leadership to those who deserved it in a given situation.
Today, social status works in a very diffuse way. In our stratified, complex and diverse society, it is often unclear who deserves the attention of the group. Division of labor is so advanced in our society that different areas of knowledge are required in every situation. Those areas of knowledge are often so far apart and the markers of expertise have become so diffuse that we no longer recognise them in each other.
Social status today works through many different status criteria and status ladders that, at first glance, are often hard to read for the uninitiated. After all, that gothic dracula dude next to you on the subway might just be the only one who knows about field surgery. Useful knowledge in a sudden disaster situation, but how can you know? In such a situation is to be hoped that the gothic dracula dude will be given enough social leeway by the group to manifest this other βhiddenββ side of himself
In our model we also observe this fragmentation of social status criteria.
The red box in the table above shows the social status architecture within our society. You can see how these have shifted historically, but also how they stack, toward increasingly complex social status criteria.
In the Middle Ages, the major challenge was, bodily security. Therefore, the most dominant criteria for social status were a person's attributes, both physical and character. In Modernity, the challenge shifted to economic security. As a result, property became the most dominant social status criterion. This is actually still the case, although perhaps not for long. But it does explains why, when people think of social status, they usually think of wealth.
In the last seventy years, however, the major challenge is shifting from economic security to emotional security. And as a result, personal authenticity is becoming a more important social status criterion. Only, this authenticity is a rather private criterion. It is difficult to measure and recognise. Also more and more people donβt really use the social status markers of their job in everyday life anymore, but instead they focus more on inward-looking subcultures.
It is the end the lawyer that embodies her profession through stately posture and subtle mannerisms. Instead weβll see a surfer who has quickly throw one of those itchy gowns over her tanned and muscular shoulders. Doing the job with supreme expertise, but without becoming and personifying job .
That said, this civilisational shift in social status should also be seen as an accumulation, a stack of various kinds of social status dynamics. It is not as if physical traits or property disappear as social status criteria. They just become less dominant. According to Ridgeway, this also has advantages.
People who cannot compete on physical traits or property can always obtain social status somewhere these days. Surely somewhere there is an (online) subculture where you are seen for who you really are.
π± The Subjectivity of Homo Romanticus
In the newsletter three weeks ago, we described (or argued) that Homo Romanticus has a natural predisposition to conspiracy thinking.
Some readers said that we were selling the Romantic mind short in doing so. Here we agree. The Homo Romanticus is so much more than that and holds so much potential for healing - healing our relationship with ourselves, with our community and with our natural environment.
That said, the Romanticus also has blind spots. Duly noted.
By the way, should you be interested in how archetypes have become part of our thinking, please read this essay (The Noble Art of Subjective Exploration ) by Christiaan in which he discovers that it is his deep Romantic disposition that made him feel so uncanny during our research in Tokyo, ten years ago now.
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Ed & Chris
PS1 π§ - Edwin was interviewed by Hiroaki Koizumi for Rokko Radio, the podcast of Rokkonomad, a fantastic work retreat in the forests of Rokko Mountain, just outside Kobe, Japan. You can listen to the podcast here.
PS2 π - Our book club at Pakhuis de Zwijger has started, but you can still join! We will be reading Internet for The People by Ben Tarnoff (who will be joining us!). There is still room! Sign up here.