this post was submitted on 19 Sep 2023
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Showerthoughts
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Well it's really not that simple. I assume you're referring to things like climate change and privacy concerns and general de-evolution of government.
Just to boil down a very complex subject into a lazy comment:
Let's take climate change for instance. Do corporations and government do almost nothing to curb climate change? Yes. Do they actively lie to people about climate change? Yes.
Does the public still know that climate change is a real thing? At least some of them.
Do a ridiculous proportion of people still buy gas-guzzling SUVs and plastic water bottles and use plastic bags at the grocery store unnecessarily? Yes.
Do some people have full access to the information to educate themselves very quickly on the science, and yet choose to ignore that and instead actually actively promote what they want to believe instead? Absolutely
The reality is that "blame" is seldom simple and we all carry some amount of responsibility.
Personally I view this as a sliding scale. And while I do take personal responsibility in driving an efficient vehicle and refusing plastic bags and bottles (even though people look at me like some kind of crazy hippie and mock me accordingly), I also refuse to live in a yurt in the forest. When more people move down the scale toward me, it will make it easier for me to move even further down the scale.
It's not that this doesn't matter, it does. But almost every time it's mentioned is alongside industrial climate impacts as if they were at all in a similar scale.
They aren't even close. People doing the 'well actually' thing for individual climate impacts are inadvertently being patsies for corporations to continue to deflect scrutiny away from the absolutely ridiculous levels of climate impacts they have. And while consumers are trying to move to metal straws, corporations have basically not even started trying to address low hanging fruit ways to mitigate climate change, let alone anything slightly tricky.
Yes, but expecting corporations to do it on their own is silly. They operate in a competitive environment so game theory should tell us what's going to usually happen. The laws and regulations exist, and a lot more are needed, but it's also not as simple because costs of enforcement also range from inexpensive to infeasible. In the end, it's people making self-interested decisions, whether on behalf of themselves or on behalf of corporations. I don't know of any easy solutions - my feeling is that those don't exist - so the best bet is to steer society towards better and more effective politics. More distributed and less concentrated power structures, checks and balances, enforcement, novel, effective, and efficient systems through science based analysis, as well as lots of trials and errors and fast iterative improvements based on rapid feedback loops. In short, the world nowadays moves faster than the current government systems and it's a losing battle until governing adaptability can increase in speed.
No one is doing that. I could very easily just say that you're just doing the opposite. That is, deflecting personal responsibility from individuals and just blaming corporations. It's very easy to just lean back and blame corporations for your choices but the reality is that they simply couldn't sell this bullshit if individuals weren't buying them.