Aloha,
In describing the nascent field of
conservation biology in 1985, Michel Soulé defined it as a “crisis discipline”:
“In crisis disciplines, one must act before knowing all the facts. Crisis disciplines are thus a mixture of science and art, and their pursuit requires intuition as well as information”.
While Big Tech “moves fast and breaks things”, those concerned with the broken things (minutiae like democracy, or mental health) have difficulties constituting a united front. Earlier this month, a multidisciplinary group of 17 authors
proposed the study of human collective behaviour as a crisis discipline: they argue that without a shared understanding of the collective behavioral effects of novel technologies, it is hard to preserve our endangered democratic ecosystems. They propose to unite different strains of social science and to learn from ecology and biology, as the lead author Joe Bak-Coleman explains in this
interview:
There’s been a lot of work that’s been done here, and I don’t think we’re trying to reinvent that wheel at all. But I think what we’re really trying to do is just highlight the need for urgent action and draw these parallels to climate change and to conservation biology, where they’ve been dealing with really similar problems. And the way they’ve structured themselves, like climate change now involves everything from chemists to ecologists. And I think social science tends to be fairly fragmented in subdisciplines, without a lot of connection between them.
I’ll pause in August: I hope you can too, and that you will be able to be inspired by approaches and experiences that are out of your everyday radar. See you in September!
Aloha,
Marta Arniani
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