We need new operating systems. Whose job is that? by Alastair Parvin
“When we are looking for explanations or solutions to these kinds of complex, systemic crises, our natural human tendency is to focus on the behaviour of particular individuals or groups, or look to our governments and political leaders to act. And, to be sure, activism and politics will always have a crucial role to play, and these challenges will require principled political leadership. But we tend to overlook the extent to which politicians too are players within a complex game: hemmed-in by constraints and incentives of their own. We like the idea that there is someone, somewhere to blame, but no one thinks that they are the bad guy. Everyone looks for an ethic to fit their paycheque.
In other words, we tend to overestimate the extent to which our problems are a particular function of particular individuals or groups, and underestimate the extent to which they are a function of the systems themselves; the behaviours they engender, the incentives they create and the markets they shape. It’s not the players, it’s the game. The common functions, infrastructures, standards, protocols, rules and tools that we use to collaborate and compete with each other. They are the pond we all swim in; the field on which the game is played; the white lines on the road. [...]
These systems are not natural. They are not just there. They are man-made. The platform upon which our society and economy is built is not a naturally-occurring substructure, but a kind of societal operating system; a stack of systems that has been built up over hundreds or thousands of years. They were designed; sometimes gradually, sometimes at specific moments in history, sometimes collectively, sometimes by particular individuals.
And if they were designed, that means they can be redesigned. To quote the late anthropologist David Graeber, “the ultimate, hidden truth of the world is that it is something we make, and could just as easily make differently.” [...]
When confronted with these everyday crises and contradictions, everyone is increasingly willing to say ‘it’s a systemic issue’, but it is no one’s job to try to actually try to change those systems or build better ones. The private sector think it is the public sector’s job, the public sector think it is the private sector’s job. So it seems to fall down the gap between the sectors — the crack in the sofa.
And yet it is down that crack in the sofa where — we believe — the solutions to our most intractable social, environmental and economic challenges are to be found. To borrow a turn of phrase from Churchill: first we shape our systems, thereafter they shape us.”