#2: How do we unscrew ourselves? Climate change as a complex category mistake
If you missed my first story, I’d recommend you read it first.
The digital technologies of the convergence ecosystem are unleashing a wave of innovations in all aspects of life. They are enabling start-ups and incumbents to design new business models, new approaches to create, transfer, and capture value that are opening up exciting ways to address environmental unsustainability. On its own, each new start-up is perhaps merely a drop in a bucket, but together they form a tidal wave that is reshaping our economic system with planetary boundaries and human longevity in mind. Let’s not forget, for all the (justified) scaremongering about climate change, global warming is often portrayed as a problem for the planet. As if the planet itself cannot deal with a different temperature? In the minds of many, this misunderstanding leads to a subconscious dissociation. We talk about environmental sustainability and planetary boundaries and in doing so create a mental narrative of a problem that is outside our own scope and latitude of action. We are not “the planet” and it’s not our boundaries that our being transgressed. In reality, this way of thinking is anchored in a category mistake.
Gilbert Ryle (1949) introduced the idea of a category mistake in The Concept of Mind. A category mistake occurs when we think of something (an object, a problem, a challenge, an idea) as belonging to one category while it actually belongs to a different category. In conversation and in social sciences, we are more adept at category misunderstandings rather than mistakes. Because we have long ago given up on the idea of a single truth, especially in the post-truth era shocked into the mainstream by DJ Trump, we have become very well versed in the notion of category misunderstandings. This happens when one person believes a specific problem or idea belongs to one category and another believes it belongs to a different category. While these people technically speak the same language, they cannot truly understand each other. As George Bernard Shaw famously said: “the single biggest problem in communication is the illusion it has taken place”. We see this constantly in the “news” these days and it has massive effects on how and what we think.
Why does it matter? Categories are foundational to how we think. Human beings are boundedly rational. Thus, we are unable to optimize but have to satisfice instead because we do not have access to all information nor do we have sufficient processing capacity to absorb all information (Simon 192). Because out intelligence is not endless, we rely on categories for sense-making. Categories are thus cognitive shortcuts that frame external reality into coherent simplifications of an endlessly complex world (Durand and Thornton 2018). Music or film genres, industry sectors, and patent classifications are examples of categories. But categories not only reflect our thinking, they also constrain and structure it. Yet, we do know that many films blur genres, many companies span industry boundaries, and many inventions do not neatly fit within a single technological domain (Cattani et al 2017; Rao et al 2005). There is abundant evidence in my field (management studies), that spanning or blurring category boundaries is a problem. Scholars have established the notion of a “categorical imperative”: for an object to be valued accurately, it needs to fit within a single category (Zuckerman 1999). If a piece of music, a type of wine, a company, a movie or whatever other object straddles multiple categories, that object faces a category discount. Firms that are active in different knowledge domains (like conglomerates) tend to be overlooked and discounted because evaluators assume they have less expertise and perhaps because evaluators themselves lack the expertise to accurately value these more complex organizations (Wry and Lounsbury 2013).
This is what is happening with climate change, global warming, the breaching of planetary boundaries and most of the other jargon we use to speak of what essentially is an existential threat to all life on earth. By framing global warming as a planetary problem, we dehumanize its meaning. Modernity has detached us so far from nature that we fail to truly recognize that we cannot have any economic or social growth if we destroy the lungs of the earth. It’s like having a fever for 50 years and not even taking aspirin. We categorize it as a problem that is outside of our personal scope: this is the first category mistake. It is the original framing of the Covid-19 pandemic as a Chinese or Asian epidemic.
Because climate change straddles multiple categories in that it is not only an ecological, but also a humanitarian, economic, and moral disaster, it receives less attention, not more. This is the lesson from the category literature and our second category mistake. Global warming is enormously complex and requires multi-disciplinary action, transnational coordination, massive investments, implementation of long-known ideas, development and rapid scaling of new ideas, reductions in some of our living standards, and radical breakthroughs in the global food, water, and energy systems and so on. This is what many countries in the world are getting right with the coronavirus. The scale of intervention is massive, the actions relatively decisive, and with some exceptions — often in countries run by populist leaders with questionable priorities — the results are not nearly as tragic as they could have been. And finally, we are making a third category mistake. We are short-term satisficers in a long-term game. We crave instant gratification at the expense of our long-term happiness. We fail to recognize causality if the effects happen over a long period of time. We categorize as important chiefly those things that affect us quickly and downplay the importance of the future. Because the problem requires urgent action but the effects are long term, we categorize is as a problem we can deal with tomorrow. This is a problem the Covid-19 crisis does not face because we feel and see the consequences immediately. While we live and love on this planet, we somehow manage to forget this inconvenient truth: As American comedian George Carlin said when talking about climate change: “the planet is fine; but we, we are fucked”.
So how do we get “unfucked”? It will take a lot but there is hope. I won’t endeavor to speak too much about the need for political bravery and more stringent regulation. I believe this is required but there are much more experienced and knowledgeable people to write about that. I’m not going to write about a carbon tax that should be implemented to make people and companies accountable for the CO2 and other greenhouse gasses we put into the atmosphere. This series of articles is also not about the need to start a global movement away from fossil fuels. It is not about our moral obligations to change our behavior, drive and fly a little less, reduce our meat consumption, stop eating fruits flown in from overseas, cool our rooms so much that we can sleep with a thick blanket (or heat our houses so much that we can walk around naked). It is not about how we should care more about future generations. It is not a call to arms nor a manifesto for eco-terrorism.
I want to talk about how individuals, small and big organizations, and even governments are using the technologies of the convergence ecosystem — big data, IOT, AI/ML, and blockchain — to change the narrative. I write about how innovators, shakers, and movers are turning the sustainable development goals (SDGs) into business opportunities. By telling the stories of some of the thousands of people that are building businesses to tackle the most salient problems facing this planet and the humans that inhabit it, I hope to shine some light on a new pathway that is emerging. While I am an environmentalist, maybe even an ecological fundamentalist, I am no tree-hugging yuppie. Meeting the SDGs and addressing climate change will require all the resources the most powerful innovation engine in the world — capitalism — has to offer. There will be greed, there will be bargaining, there will be winners and losers, there will be monopolists, and there will be creative destruction. But when the dust settles, hopefully, what we will be left with, is a better, fairer, greener, more equitable world where business growth means ecological restoration, where GDP growth equals carbon reduction, where individual wealth is not strictly measured by the car you drive and the watch you wear but by the people you surround yourself with. Let’s dive in.
