Temporarily things are worse because the institutions currently in place now were developed in the transition to the Industrial Age, they need to adapt or be replaced. As historians and Wordsworth can attest, the Industrial Age was disruptive in its time. But the Digital Age may be even more disruptive. It’s not just that the Digital Age brings change, but as in all things digital, it brings an ever-accelerating rate of change. And it’s not just institutions that need to adapt – it’s also people.
As for institutions, Clay Shirky, who has a digital age principal named for him, the “Shirky Principle,” which describes how institutions, that are dedicated to a problem, actually preserve the problem they are attempting to solve. One of his books, “Cognitive Surplus,” describes how digital technology creates value in shared processes that further communal and civic value.
As for people, Thomas Friedman in Thank You for Being Late says, “People have bodies and souls, when you feed one and not the other you always get in trouble. When people feel their identities and sense of home are being threatened, they will set aside economic interests and choose walls over Webs, and closed over open, in a second – not everyone will make that choice, but many will.”
As for gin? Gin. Shirky, in Cognitive Surplus, describes London at the beginning of the Industrial Age, and explains how people left the countryside and agricultural roots, and packed themselves into the city. He says, “Industrialization didn’t just create new ways of working, it created new ways of living, because the relocation of the population destroyed ancient habits common to country living, while drawing so many people together that the new density of the population broke the older urban models as well.” What happened next was ‘The Gin Craze’ where consumption of this ‘social lubricant’ rose dramatically and “if you couldn’t afford a whole glass, you could buy a gin-soaked rag.” Shirky explains, “It isn’t hard to figure out why people were drinking gin. It is palatable and intoxicating, a winning combination, especially when a chaotic world can make sobriety seem overrated.” For forty years, as the population of London grew two and a half times faster than the overall population of England, Parliament kept passing laws in an attempt to rid London of the scourge of gin and restore the city’s earlier social mores. And citizens kept subverting the laws. “What made the craze subside wasn’t any set of laws. Gin consumption was treated as the problem to be solved, when in fact it was a reaction to the real problem – dramatic social change and the inability of older civic models to adapt…gin consumption, driven upward in part by people anesthetizing themselves against the horrors of city life started falling, in part, because the new social structures mitigated these horrors. The increase in both population and aggregate wealth made it possible to invent new kinds of institutions, and instead of maddening crowds, the architects of the new society saw a civic surplus, created as a side effect of industrialization.”
In 2017, Jama published a research report with the following top-line observation: one in 8 Americans is an alcoholic, an increase of 49%. And alcohol use is up in the U.S. population and among subgroups, especially women, older adults, racial/ethnic minorities, and the socio-economically disadvantaged. Add that to the opiate problem and it’s possible to see what’s happening now as an echo of what happened in London at the start of the Industrial Age
Unwinding complexity is a mechanical and not a systems way of thinking. Instead of thinking mechanically – where the process is to separate things into parts and improve things part by part – a ‘systems approach’ is better. Here are some ways to think in systems.
First, parallel actions. any actions need to be conceived with other parallel actions where several approaches are carried out at the same time. This is because by design systems thwart change. Hit a system over here and the system will respond over there and correct back to its operational baseline. Systems keep operating until they catastrophically break. Military planner and systems thinker Col. John Warden, (USAF retired) says it this way, “you have to launch parallel attacks on the centers a gravity in the system, so the system does not have the capability to react.”
Second, address centers of gravity. Actions need to be aimed at viable intervention points (centers of gravity) that not only disrupt the system’s ability to adapt, but also leverage the operating system in a direction toward the desired change. Execute the right interventions that carry the work out in the right direction, and the system does a lot of the change work itself.
Third, use feedback loops in places. A leading thinker on social change, Enzio Manzini in his book Design, When Everybody Designs describes a third consideration, how to amplify the desired change through feedback loops in places, “what social innovation is indicating, with its idea of well-being based on the quality of places and communities, is the seed of a new culture…in which places and communities are not isolated entities but become nodes in a variety of networks. These are connected places and communities in which short networks generate and regenerate the local social and economic fabric, while the long ones connect those particular places and their resident communities with the rest of the world.”
Behaviors and beliefs change for many reasons including crises like a pandemic, an economic crisis, civil unrest, climate change, educational concerns, inequality, economic disparity, a yearning for a better way of life.
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