System Change
Adam Zeiner and
PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM
(in increasing order of effectiveness)
Awareness’ is an unambitious political end-goal for a few reasons. Firstly: awareness of what? The information circulated in ‘awareness’ narratives often uncritically props up neoliberal ideology. Neoliberalism supports the privatisation of major businesses, cuts to state welfare, and an emphasis on ‘individual responsibility
What we need are visions of the future of technology that are values-driven, but we don’t need just design fictions. We need business model fictions, engineering feasibility study fictions, interop protocol specification fictions, investment return fictions.
There exists in such a case a certain institution or law; let us say, for the sake of simplicity, a fence or gate erected across a road. The more modern type of reformer goes gaily up to it and says, “I don’t see the use... See more
Don’t remove a fence until you’ve understood why someone put it up in the first place
From mythmaking to legal treaties to weaving to movement building, what knits these various examples together is their avoidance of single solutions to complex problems, instead enabling a pursuit of multiple different actions and wider systemic changes with long term, positive transformations
The systems analysis community has a lot of lore about leverage points. Those of us who were trained by the great Jay Forrester at MIT have all absorbed one of his favorite stories. “People know intuitively where leverage points are,” he says. “Time after time I’ve done an analysis of a company, and I’ve figured out a leverage point — in inventory
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