ocietal fragmentation is a real threat. As we focus on the things that separate us from our neighbors and our societies polarize, important progress points – whether we’re talking about protecting the marginalized or spreading democratic institutions – are at serious risk. Saving our progress and finding new ways forward requires we concentrate less on what separates us from our neighbors and emphasize instead what we have in common. In short, we must learn to “hang together” to save what we love about our societies.
Every year on February 20, we observe the World Day of Social Justice. The 62nd session of the UN General Assembly declared the annual day of observation in hopes of consolidating “further the efforts of the international community…[toward] access to social well-being and justice for all.” This year’s observation was the 15th to date and thus far our progress is mixed.
The world has made some important progress on gender equality across all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals since 2015, but disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic are endangering those gains. Campaigns around the world for LBGTQ+ rights have made significant progress, but that progress is uneven and, in many places, faces rollbacks. Work to protect the rights of ethnic minorities has been more difficult, and a noxious mix of geopolitical strain and COVID-19 has made the situations of many minorities still more painful.
This is an op-ed talking about World in 2050’s (W2050) megatrends (the fourth!) How is social justice a megatrend, you may ask? Well, it isn’t. Social justice is part of one of our megatrends, though—this one encompasses societal distrust and fragmentation. Considering the state of social justice around the world is a great (if not particularly pleasant) way to illustrate the challenges and opportunities of this megatrend.
Societal Distrust, Fragmentation Are Surging
Gender, ethnic, and LGBTQ+ rights are an important facet of this megatrend—but they don’t encompass the whole of it. Broadly speaking, the world’s societies seem to trust not only one another less, but there is evidence of fragmentation and distrust growing within societies. We’re well aware that populism is on the rise, and we understand that this rise has been exacerbated by uncertainty and precarity. The pandemic, increasingly tense geopolitics, and a sneaking suspicion that the institutions underpinning globalization and the liberal order serve global elites first, second, and third—and the rest of us a poor fourth or fifth—if at all.
Populism is just one part of a destructive, self-reinforcing cycle. Populism arises from and feeds into distrust in institutions—those institutions after all are seen as complicit in our current state of precarity or at least as having failed to protect us from this precarity. But this distrust also makes democracies less robust and cuts into the ability of institutions to promote rights for vulnerable segments of our societies. It also means, broadly speaking, less trust in learning institutions and science. These failures mean further disillusionment…and the cyclical nature is evident.
That’s not all. Exponential technology, which has been a powerful force multiplier for so many social goods, also makes this fragmentation exponentially worse. Populism feeds and is fed by misinformation, disinformation, and fake news. (The growth of anti-intellectualism also feeds the proliferation of bad information, as does a paucity of media literacy.) Social media, we know, allows us to separate into groups who agree with us into echo chambers, repeating and amplifying the credibility of bad information until it feels unassailably true. From here it is a natural progression to political polarization and tribalism. Those who disagree with us are bad, and suddenly conspiracy theories that implicate people we used to like or at least be neutral toward don’t seem so crazy. Our societies fragment still further, and the institutions and mindsets underpinning societal stability lose more capacity.
If You Must Hang, Hang with a Friend
So, you see, the stakes are high. The title of this piece is a nod to the quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin. In 1776 it was an existential mandate—Americans had to stay true to one another to rebel against the British Empire and failing to do so would mean annihilation (at least for the idea of a United States of America.) Today that existential mandate is more.
Our societies are more fragmented than at any other time in our lives. We are also facing some of the biggest and most dangerous challenges in living memory to humanity writ large. In a sense, this megatrend binds all the others together. Overcoming social fragmentation would allow us to seize upon the good that has accompanied what we might term social globalization. This would also have serious implications for our ability to address other collective challenges like climate change and the decay of our multilateral institutions. The same could be said of our two remaining megatrends, which deal with exponential technologies and the seismic shift in the future of work and education. All of our megatrends are global in nature, and they each have significant disruptions—be they challenges or outright dangers—inherent in the changes they herald. Of course, shared challenges require a collective response if the future is to arrive well.
So how is W2050 helping?
Some of it is technical. Recently we commissioned a report from DisinfoLab looking into how bias and disinformation can be unintentionally, deeply embedded in the training tools of the AI that powers our autocomplete tools. We’re working with other partners to explore things like how media literacy builds resilience to things like misinformation and echo chambers. We’re also working with partners to explore changing perceptions of identity and otherness—especially among marginalized communities. The lessons we’re learning from these explorations are helping us to workshop a fresh approach to policy playbooks, promulgating best practice preparations for and responses to societal fragmentation in its various avatars.
Some of what we’re doing is embedded in our model. When we (re)launched W2050, I talked about the idea of rocket ship Earth and how all of us are crewmembers—with a shared responsibility for our shared future. Our workshops, our events, our publications each seek to empower and raise marginalized voices to ensure our new hybridized learnings can benefit from their otherwise silenced perspectives.
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Societal Fragmentation and Learning to Hang Together
Image via Adobe Stock.
March 17, 2022
Our societies are fragmenting, putting decades of progress globally in human rights and democratic governance at risk. Reversing this troubling trend requires we learn to "hang together" despite our differences, writes W2050 Executive Director Shane Szarkowski.
S
ocietal fragmentation is a real threat. As we focus on the things that separate us from our neighbors and our societies polarize, important progress points – whether we’re talking about protecting the marginalized or spreading democratic institutions – are at serious risk. Saving our progress and finding new ways forward requires we concentrate less on what separates us from our neighbors and emphasize instead what we have in common. In short, we must learn to “hang together” to save what we love about our societies.
Every year on February 20, we observe the World Day of Social Justice. The 62nd session of the UN General Assembly declared the annual day of observation in hopes of consolidating “further the efforts of the international community…[toward] access to social well-being and justice for all.” This year’s observation was the 15th to date and thus far our progress is mixed.
The world has made some important progress on gender equality across all 17 UN Sustainable Development Goals since 2015, but disruptions from the COVID-19 pandemic are endangering those gains. Campaigns around the world for LBGTQ+ rights have made significant progress, but that progress is uneven and, in many places, faces rollbacks. Work to protect the rights of ethnic minorities has been more difficult, and a noxious mix of geopolitical strain and COVID-19 has made the situations of many minorities still more painful.
This is an op-ed talking about World in 2050’s (W2050) megatrends (the fourth!) How is social justice a megatrend, you may ask? Well, it isn’t. Social justice is part of one of our megatrends, though—this one encompasses societal distrust and fragmentation. Considering the state of social justice around the world is a great (if not particularly pleasant) way to illustrate the challenges and opportunities of this megatrend.
Societal Distrust, Fragmentation Are Surging
Gender, ethnic, and LGBTQ+ rights are an important facet of this megatrend—but they don’t encompass the whole of it. Broadly speaking, the world’s societies seem to trust not only one another less, but there is evidence of fragmentation and distrust growing within societies. We’re well aware that populism is on the rise, and we understand that this rise has been exacerbated by uncertainty and precarity. The pandemic, increasingly tense geopolitics, and a sneaking suspicion that the institutions underpinning globalization and the liberal order serve global elites first, second, and third—and the rest of us a poor fourth or fifth—if at all.
Populism is just one part of a destructive, self-reinforcing cycle. Populism arises from and feeds into distrust in institutions—those institutions after all are seen as complicit in our current state of precarity or at least as having failed to protect us from this precarity. But this distrust also makes democracies less robust and cuts into the ability of institutions to promote rights for vulnerable segments of our societies. It also means, broadly speaking, less trust in learning institutions and science. These failures mean further disillusionment…and the cyclical nature is evident.
That’s not all. Exponential technology, which has been a powerful force multiplier for so many social goods, also makes this fragmentation exponentially worse. Populism feeds and is fed by misinformation, disinformation, and fake news. (The growth of anti-intellectualism also feeds the proliferation of bad information, as does a paucity of media literacy.) Social media, we know, allows us to separate into groups who agree with us into echo chambers, repeating and amplifying the credibility of bad information until it feels unassailably true. From here it is a natural progression to political polarization and tribalism. Those who disagree with us are bad, and suddenly conspiracy theories that implicate people we used to like or at least be neutral toward don’t seem so crazy. Our societies fragment still further, and the institutions and mindsets underpinning societal stability lose more capacity.
If You Must Hang, Hang with a Friend
So, you see, the stakes are high. The title of this piece is a nod to the quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin. In 1776 it was an existential mandate—Americans had to stay true to one another to rebel against the British Empire and failing to do so would mean annihilation (at least for the idea of a United States of America.) Today that existential mandate is more.
Our societies are more fragmented than at any other time in our lives. We are also facing some of the biggest and most dangerous challenges in living memory to humanity writ large. In a sense, this megatrend binds all the others together. Overcoming social fragmentation would allow us to seize upon the good that has accompanied what we might term social globalization. This would also have serious implications for our ability to address other collective challenges like climate change and the decay of our multilateral institutions. The same could be said of our two remaining megatrends, which deal with exponential technologies and the seismic shift in the future of work and education. All of our megatrends are global in nature, and they each have significant disruptions—be they challenges or outright dangers—inherent in the changes they herald. Of course, shared challenges require a collective response if the future is to arrive well.
So how is W2050 helping?
Some of it is technical. Recently we commissioned a report from DisinfoLab looking into how bias and disinformation can be unintentionally, deeply embedded in the training tools of the AI that powers our autocomplete tools. We’re working with other partners to explore things like how media literacy builds resilience to things like misinformation and echo chambers. We’re also working with partners to explore changing perceptions of identity and otherness—especially among marginalized communities. The lessons we’re learning from these explorations are helping us to workshop a fresh approach to policy playbooks, promulgating best practice preparations for and responses to societal fragmentation in its various avatars.
Some of what we’re doing is embedded in our model. When we (re)launched W2050, I talked about the idea of rocket ship Earth and how all of us are crewmembers—with a shared responsibility for our shared future. Our workshops, our events, our publications each seek to empower and raise marginalized voices to ensure our new hybridized learnings can benefit from their otherwise silenced perspectives.
