Why do we need to shift from current paradigms?

“We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive..."

Why do we need to shift from current paradigms?

Whether it's the health issues of fast food, or the harms of social media, most of our biggest challenges in industrialized countries are driven by some important underlying paradigms, or ways of thinking:

More is always better.
What someone chooses in the short term is “what they want.”
Nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes.

These paradigms show up everywhere: in our economic systems (which reward bigger companies, but without considering many of the harms they create), in the way we treat plants and animals, in the ways we spend time socially, and in many other decisions we make.

🤔 CONSIDER:

What are some of the ways that these paradigms show up in the design of social media applications?
When are these paradigms not true?
When is more not better?
When are short-term choices people make not what they want?
When does treating nature as a stock of resources for human purposes backfire?

Company CEOs and Boards of Directors are required to make short-term profits for shareholders even when it leads to harmful consequences for well-being, other living beings, or our environment. This is, in part, the result of paradigms that tell us that “more is better” and “nature is a stock of resources to be converted to human purposes.”

As a result of all this, companies compete to find the fastest legal paths to profitability and growth. Almost always, that means using the latest technologies to find new ways of driving consumption, which also drives more rapid extraction and harm of our natural resources.

That approach can look good in the short term, but consistently leads to big problems in the longer term. That’s exactly what’s happened with social media, fast food, deforestation, carbon dioxide generation, and much more:

McDonald’s sells about 50 million burgers each day.
Global food production accounts for 25% of all greenhouse gas emissions; 7.5% of emissions are from meat and fish production alone.⁶
We cut down about 10 million hectares of trees each year—that’s an area of about 24,700,000 football fields.

Actions like these at massive scale have put the world in a dangerous situation—one that will be inherited by your generation.

Extreme weather is accelerating, destroying homes and displacing millions worldwide. We are using our planet’s resources far faster than they will ever replenish. And we are destroying the delicate ecological balance that allows humans to thrive.

“We live in a world in which a tree is worth more, financially, dead than alive, in a world in which a whale is worth more dead than alive. For so long as our economy works in that way and corporations go unregulated, they're going to continue to destroy trees, to kill whales, to mine the earth, and to continue to pull oil out of the ground, even though we know it is destroying the planet and we know that it's going to leave a worse world for future generations... What's frightening, and what hopefully is the last straw that will make us wake up as a civilization to how flawed this theory has been in the first place, is to see that now we're the tree, we're the whale... We're seeing corporations using powerful artificial intelligence to outsmart us and figure out how to pull our attention toward the things they want us to look at, rather than the things that are most consistent with our goals and our values and our lives.”

– Justin Rosenstein, co-inventor of the Facebook Like button, in The Social Dilemma

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