We’re Measuring the Wrong Things

Yesterday, I read two posts making essentially the same point - one about the environment, the other about advertising.

David Powell wrote that “pointing to what a spreadsheet says you can do is one of the major reasons we’ve ended up frying the planet in the first place.”

And Tom Goodwin said “here we are, a world where advertising looks awful, except in a spreadsheet.”

It might seem like there’s not much connection between the environment and advertising - and yet both areas are having the same problem: damaging behaviours are justified by pointing at numbers.

And there are real consequences to this.

“The climate emergency is treated not as a profound moral question of the age but an accounting exercise to be gamed.” [David]

“Digital advertising is filled with secret markups, scams, fraud, it funds organized crime, outrageous fees, fake data, fake clicks, bots.” [Tom]

These are both symptoms of the metacrisis, in two important ways:

1️⃣ The behaviour is a consequence of multi-polar traps [“if we don’t, someone else will”].

• If Acme Power doesn’t drill for oil, then Generic Energy will. So Acme shrug their shoulders and get drilling.
• If Generic Marketing doesn’t run that campaign, then Acme Ads will. So Generic shrug their shoulders and get to work.

2️⃣ The numbers ignore the externalities.

• Habitat destruction is not included in Acme’s spreadsheet [along with a whole bunch of other stuff].
• Dopamine addiction is not included in Generic’s spreadsheet [along with a whole bunch of other stuff].

This is just one reason why the metacrisis matters. People across different industries are seeing the same behaviours - and starting to question them. The metacrisis provides a framework for looking at those behaviours - and, crucially, the incentives they are based on.

If we can understand the incentives more clearly, we can then think about more effective responses. This can start with simple questions:

• Are we caught in a multi polar trap here?
• What are the externalities of this decision?

On some levels, the metacrisis is this huge ‘thing’ that can be hard to get hold of.

But on other levels, it can be a practical tool that guides us to better outcomes.