‘Thinkwashing’ Keeps People From Taking Action in Times of Crisis
When it comes to issues like climate change, too many let the perfect become the enemy of the good, while the world burns.
"Less than a decade ago, “wait and see” arguments about climate change still circulated. “We often hear that there is a ‘scientific consensus’ about climate change,” physicist Steven E. Koonin wrote in The Wall Street Journal in 2014. “But as far as the computer models go, there isn't a useful consensus at the level of detail relevant to assessing human influences.” The idea was that the world needed more data before it could respond to the threat posed by global warming—assuming such research indicated a response was even necessary.
Today, outright denialism is dormant, but delay tactics have never been more in vogue. Many of them fall under the banner of what I’d call thinkwashing, a combination of willful ignorance of existing knowledge, policy perfectionism, and an all-or-nothing position on the role of technology in society. It’s not limited to climate change, either. People thinkwash whenever they magnify the complexity of the problem and undermine real possibilities. Whatever the issue, entrenched interests have perfected their response: It’s complicated.
It’s easy enough to empathize with these arguments; 21st-century challenges like artificial intelligence, climate change, and the threat social media poses to democracy are astounding in their legal, social, and economic complexity. But while organizations may tell the public they’ve got the “brightest minds” working on a given issue to no avail, the roadblock is often not intellectual but political, says Marianne Jennings, a professor of legal and ethical studies at Arizona State University. Meaningful action is possible—but when companies are unwilling to address root issues, it’s often because doing so would threaten their revenue stream. Instead, they demand more research amid dire circumstances and promote distracting alternatives.
Thinkwashing is not thoughtfulness. It is not a helpful contribution to the discourse or an essential injection of skepticism. It’s a way of obscuring the basic fact that “complicated” intellectual questions can often be answered, at least in part, by straightforward moral imperatives and a pragmatic approach to the future.
Over time, thinkwashing has trickled down from corporate PR campaigns to the general public—typically in the form of a profound techno-pessimism that is also an obstacle to action...
Take direct-air carbon capture. Tech billionaires like Bill Gates, an investor in these plants, have suggested that they will one day be able to extract emissions out of the sky at scale, passively decarbonizing an electrified but otherwise largely unchanged world. Already, Microsoft has purchased one such facility, thereby helping to bring its business down to sub-zero emissions by 2030—without necessarily disentangling itself from the fossil fuel economy (though it’s promising to do some of that work too).
These plants are unlikely to keep pace with accelerating emissions, or to have significant impacts on atmospheric carbon in time to avert catastrophe, as article after article has laid out. While Microsoft may have found its silver bullet, negating the emissions of the current global economy would require a huge leap in extraction technology, the establishment of a vast new industry, the construction of plants around the world, and incredible amounts of energy to operate. Even then, if our consumption of fossil fuels continues to grow, we would still fail to neutralize the threat of carbon.
These make for some serious shortcomings to this imagined techno-utopia. But that doesn’t make these direct-air carbon capture efforts entirely useless. While these machines cannot decarbonize on our behalf, they could be helpful in a plan to draw down past emissions. Yet because some are overestimating the potential of carbon removal, cynics can seem to prematurely discard the premise altogether.
Such is the cycle of techo-pessimist thinkwashing: the oversimplified idea, the hype, a wave of debunks.
The galaxy brain is quickly exhausted, and people turn to a new topic, at least until some outlandish new claim pulls them back again.
A similar false dichotomy—between savior and despair—has played out with numerous other technologies, including the clean-tech boom and bust of the early 2010s, hydrogen engines, and even the Covid-19 vaccine. In each case, the problem begins when the terms of the conversation are set by the techno-optimists. “The techno-optimist doesn’t have a vision for the future at all,” says Colin Koopman, head of the Philosophy Department and director of new media and culture at the University of Oregon. “They take the present and project it into the future.” That leaves the techno-pessimists to respond with equal certainty—decrying what won’t work, what’s insufficiently radical, what’s a “distraction.”
These critiques can be vitally important. Yet technology is, in fact, changing the world every day, for worse but also for better. . .
While certainty is comforting, both optimism and pessimism gamble with the nuance necessary for progress. Allowing the uninformed, unqualified speculations of billionaires to set the stage for such urgent discussions keeps concerned citizens on a hyperreal hamster wheel, far removed from the real action.
Deliberation is important in both public and private sector leadership. But action remains the goal. “For all the words, for all the targets, for all the, you know, moral entanglements” of the climate crisis, says Stuart Capstick, a senior research fellow in psychology at Cardiff University, there is still a bottom line. To avoid mass death and destruction, we must decarbonize. A similar line exists for threats to democracy, human rights, and other core values; complicate them all you want, we must do something and we know at least a little bit about how.
Unlike thoughtfulness, which helps people make the trade-offs necessary in the real world, thinkwashing causes a perverse kind of analysis paralysis. “The status quo with all its embedded imperfections and the harms,” Capstick says, somehow tasks progressives with “making the world a sort of perfect place.” But perfect isn’t the goal; better would be enough.
So how, exactly, are people to push back against thinkwashing, especially when it’s so hard to distinguish from virtues like healthy skepticism and due diligence? The answer lies in techno-pragmatism, a merging of the philosophy of pragmatism (which states that the reason we think is not merely to describe but ultimately to predict, test, and act) with the churn of technological innovation.
The first step is to set the terms of the discussion, instead of merely reacting to hype. . .
This means asking whether the core problem is really being addressed in any conversation about change. “In climate spaces, there's an obsession with gas cars as the problem. So EVs are a ‘natural’ solution,” climate journalist Kendra Pierre-Louis recently tweeted. “But the actual issue is mobility/transit.” From there, solutions that speak to the core problem are more easily identified—in this case, more infrastructural support for walking, biking, and other ways of getting around—and aggressively pursued.
That doesn't mean that tangential problems (and solutions) get short shrift, only that their place in the larger ecosystem is properly qualified. For example, vehicles will remain important for essential services, including fire trucks and ambulances. Finding ways to replace gas engines with electric or hydrogen alternatives still holds immense value, but it’s still a few steps down the triaged to-do list.
Against this backdrop, it is important to quantify the risks of each problem—and proposed solutions. If the techno-optimist is 99 percent sure their technology will improve the world but the remaining 1 percent is the chance of an existential threat like climate change worsening, that risk is still too big to stomach. This has been the logic of the millions poured into “killer AI” prevention, but by only investing in emerging threats, we continue to expose ourselves to the risks of history, including nuclear energy production, nuclear weapons deployment, greenhouse gas emissions, and the ever present threat of pandemics.
Techno-pessimists rightly claim that emerging technologies will inevitably have big and unpredictable side effects once scaled. But given that risks are inherent, but action is essential, the world would benefit from carefully studying new technologies in small trials or specific communities, instead of needing every new device to prove itself on a global scale. Pilot programs would allow us to learn more about the pros and cons of the machinery or software itself—and to identify the specific places it could have the most impact, or wouldn’t work at all.
Entrenched positions about technology are failing to get us where we need to go. But techno-pragmatism advocates for a grounded, scientific approach to whatever comes next. It says “we must do whatever we can to ameliorate damaging possibilities without ever thinking we can get to zero,” Koopman says. We must think before we act, and we must act even when it is hard."
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