System Change

It’s also something that I encourage people to investigate with their own practices. There’s so much that you can do beyond just making your thing. You can also work on the whole system of getting that thing and others like it out into the world. There’s a lot of room for expansion and creativity there. I think the coolest projects look at the

“Quiet Quitting” articles allowed readers to access a convenient cause (damn lazy Gen-Zers) for a pretty existential problem (work sucks). It’s also, conveniently, a way of blaming workers for systemic ills. “Quiet Hiring” deflects from organizational norms that call for eking out as much productivity (at the lowest cost) from each employee in the

PLACES TO INTERVENE IN A SYSTEM

(in increasing order of effectiveness)

12. Constants, parameters, numbers (such as subsidies, taxes, standards).


13. The sizes of buffers and other stabilizing stocks, relative to their flows.


14. The structure of material stocks and flows (such as transport networks, population age structures).


15. The lengths of delays, relative to the

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

Counterintuitive. That’s Forrester’s word to describe complex systems. Leverage points are not intuitive. Or if they are, we intuitively use them backward, systematically worsening whatever problems we are trying to solve

the great thing about living in a world of dying systems is that you are uniquely well-positioned to replace suboptimal systems with something superior. New growth takes root best in the decay of its predecessors. For most of the past, if you wanted to create a better future, you had to rally the troops and take someone else’s land or destroy