Technology gives us new powers that our ancestors could only have dreamed about, but these powers also enable us to abuse our common shared resources even more.
Accelerate to sixty miles an hour with the press of a pedal! Summon any music to play with a few taps! This was the stuff of gods. Freud said that this combination of humans plus our extending technology made us “prosthetic gods”.
But now that music can be summoned into a loud Bluetooth speaker beside a tranquil lake with campers all around. So many vehicles with accelerator pedals leads to gridlock on our shared roads. Our “commons” are under attack.
With technology’s hockey stick exponential growth, those attacks are coming faster than can be accommodated. Climate change is the largest example, as our planet is the ultimate commons. But I’m amazed how it shows up in smaller niches: the commons of a movie theatre now threatened by screens, the commons of coffee shop ambiance now threatened by speakerphone calls, the commons of wild nature now threatened by suburban sprawl.
Historically problems of commons management have been solved by laws or by social convention, but both seem too sluggish and too impotent to keep up.