Crossposted at Linkedin, which is my most active community outside of NFL and Reddit.
The increasing polarization of both international relationships as well as intra-national politics has a radicalising effect. As expected, much of it is generated by the perfect storm of power politics and the dismantling of multilateralism that the current US administration is enacting:
Mike Masnick at Techdirt wrote “Why techdirt is now a democracy blog (wheter we like it or not)” and over at Science Magazine Derek Lowe published a scathing summery of how it impacts science (and the attitute towards science): The Continuing Crisis, Part VII: An Overview.
Over at Reddit there’s a clamp-down on “offensive speech” which has had a chilling effect on the discussion, and subreddits doing proactive self-censoring and in some cases even banning ambiguous words and names:
All of this mirrors the Global Risk Report that World Economic Forum put out, which should be required reading: Global Risk Report 2025 homepage
The point of the report is not that their short-term predictions are prescient, but that human short-sighted focus on current risks – very real and dangerous as they are – hides the long term problems we should address: global warming, pollution and biosphere depletion, increased national and interantional polarization, the super-ageing societies reliant on immigrants that become second-rate citizens or guest workers.
So perhaps by looking closer to home, and looking further ahead, we could start to discuss not only what we are afraid of today, but what we gives us hope for tomorrow in our societies? Becuse I dearly want to feel more hopeful, and rather than doomscrolling and complaining, is there something I as a UX designer and futures studies practitioner can do to make you feel better?