Mastodawn

I don't own a car. I take public transit everywhere, and I do think personal vehicle use has real environmental costs. But I don't think driving is inherently unethical.

I live in Seoul, and the city makes transit easy for me. That's not a virtue. It's a condition I happen to benefit from. Some people live where transit barely exists, or where it doesn't get them to work, school, or care. In those places, driving is not optional.

The same is true of flying. In parts of Europe you can cross borders by train. In island nations, or in places with weak land connections, flying may be the only realistic option. “Just fly less” means very different things in those places.

A lot of what gets called my ethical choices comes from the conditions I live in. That makes me wary of turning structural failures into personal morality. If the alternative is missing or unusable, shaming people for not choosing it solves nothing.

When environmental harm gets framed as individual moral failure, attention shifts away from the structural changes that would actually matter. It's not an accident that oil companies spent decades popularizing the idea of the personal carbon footprint.

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Mx. Aria Stewart

@hongminhee So much this. Even while there's a moral dimension, it's not black and white, and the system of washing harms as 'personal responsibility' when people who reinforce the systems have names and addresses is not good at all.

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🫧 socialcoding..8h ago

@aredridel @hongminhee

Yes well said! In society we lack ways to deal with wicked problems. The kind where there is no one single solution. It is a given that special interest groups apply their lobbying and propaganda powers to influence public opinion. And that #activism for the good cause and against malign actors lacks ways to spark a large mass of people into coordinated #resistance and onto pathways towards #solutions. The call of the #activist is for #awareness and #participation, but that all too often requires 'sacrifice'. Often harsh moral judgment is given to those who contribute insufficiently in the eyes of the activist. As result the activist does not win people over, and activism may even backfire.

Social experience design, while focused on tech foundations first, is a generic solution development methodology aimed at ability to affect societal impact and solve wicked problems. It defines #CALMculture as a way to organize activism in a commons.

https://discuss.coding.social/t/challenge-calm-culture-to-mitigate-polarization/681

Challenge: CALM culture to mitigate polarization

Fediverse vs Purity spirals? When I say that on the fediverse and in progressive movements in general “we divide ourselves to be conquered” it is based on the observation how willing we are to bash each other’s heads in, based on the slightest ideological differences, or in many cases just by misinterpreting someone’s 500-char toot. The discussions that follow are very aggressive and often lack any nuance whatsoever. This creates purity spiral dynamics whereby influencers and peer pressure dema...

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