There Are No Solutions – Only Alternatives

The problems of the present are piling up. I keep oscillating between an impending sense of collapse and the saying that supposedly every generation feels that its own is particularly doomed.

And yet: Two summers ago, I dug through climate literature for a project, and since then I am avoiding steam baths, because they remind me of the bulb temperature that forms the opening scene in Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry of the Future. I will never be able to erase this from my memory.

The so-called «bulb temperature» describes the combination of heat and humidity at which the human body is no longer able to cool itself through sweating. In this state, there is nothing left to do but overheat internally; one begins to cook from the inside. Even our tissue can be gently steam-cooked, like a chicken breast. A situation that could soon become reality in some climate zones.

In short: it seems that we really are living in a particularly pivotal moment, and that something fundamental has to change. That is why I accepted the invitation from the FDFA, curious to see how it intends to rewrite democracy.

Josh Lerner and Greta Ríos from the People Powered project then introduced us to the Waters Theory of Change. The inverted triangle shows, at its tip, the mental models that must be questioned in order to bring about deep societal change.

Change: The Question Is Not Whether, but How

At Dezentrum, I work on the question of societal change through technology. Precisely in this field, I repeatedly notice how dominant a particular “mental model” is in our thinking: technology is the solution. In this blog, I would like to put forward the claim that in order to achieve real systemic change, we must question exactly this model.

This belief shows itself, for example, in the idea that vacuum cleaners can filter CO₂ from the air, that AI can predict the next extreme weather events, or that apps can combat poverty through micro-crowdfunding.

If we take a closer look at these “solutions”, it becomes clear that in the end they are all business models whose viability depends on the continued existence of the problem. The CO₂ in the air is the basis for the filter system’s existence; structural inequality is the variable that the app assumes as a given condition.

Even if, in light of the reality of the climate crisis, measures such as filtering air, soil, and water will likely be unavoidable, they do not solve the problem of societies whose economic systems are based on pumping ever more fossil fuels into the atmosphere.

And here it becomes clear that we are not dealing with one, but with two intertwined mental models: on the one hand, an economic system that is causally dependent on fossil energy, and on the other, the notion that it is possible to cushion or even reverse problems through resource-intensive technology.

This is how paradoxical solutions emerge: new data centres for AI systems that are meant to warn us about extreme weather events themselves consume as much electricity as entire cities.

Here it becomes evident how important it is not only to think about approaches that offer a solution within the same frame of reference. How difficult this is becomes clear to me every semester anew when I give my guest lecture on societal futures at Lucerne University of Applied Sciences and Arts.

The Future of the Past

For example, I always bring up the postcards in which Jean-Marc Coté imagines the year 2000 at the 1900 World’s Fair. They show school classes—only boys—absorbing books through headphones connected to a meat grinder. Or a female cleaning worker, conventionally dressed in a black dress with a white apron, cleaning a bourgeois living room with the help of an electric broom.

So already in 1900 it was easier to imagine the existence of an electric broom than a household cleaned collectively. Let alone girls sitting at school desks.

If I now update these postcards using ChatGPT, we see the following: even in the year 2100, the techno-future consists of a household robot and a tired housewife doing the laundry. In the classroom there are girls now, but still sitting frontally, just as in 1900; we see no shared play, everything bathed in the cool halogen light of the “future”.

Futures instead od Future

And ironically, after I spend two hours trying to break open this mental model, the students still talk about a robot butler. This shows how deeply rooted the assumption is that a desirable future is simply a more technologically intensive present.

That not only the status quo is being cemented here, but also a notion of progress that is not really capable of engaging with change, is the final point I want to make.

If we look at images of the future of agriculture, this becomes clear: from 1900 to 2100, a monoculture field is seen as the way to go. Water—which, with near certainty, will also be scarce in Switzerland by 2100—is distributed by drone. The fact that, in the face of floods and droughts, shifting climate zones, and changing soils, a fundamental transformation must be assumed cannot be taken into account by ChatGPT’s predictions.

Is maintaining the status quo even capable of incorporating the structural changes that lie ahead of us?

Personally, I do not think so. If we want to take the structural changes ahead of us seriously, we must begin by stopping to understand the future as a monolith travelling through time, and start thinking in scenarios. At Dezentrum, this is why we always speak of futures, in the plural, rather than a single future. This breaking open initially creates uncertainty, but ultimately strengthens our capacity to act—if we accept that change will happen and that we can work towards it.

I am often then asked about alternative solutions. But the sobering answer is that a solution is the answer to the wrong question. There is no solution to systemic change, because profound transformation does not follow a simple causality. What we must do instead is to fundamentally ask ourselves what kind of future we want. Why is the robot butler still the more popular image of the future than one with so little wage labour that the household could be comfortably run together?