Happy new year everyone. We are back to being wicked in 2021, though we will be starting slow and catching speed as the weeks roll by. 2020 was quite the chaotic year, and that's if you're lucky. Many have had it much worse: losing jobs, livelihoods and in the worst case, their lives.
I hope 2021 is a better year.
We spent the last two months on our ‘Wicked India’ course. Here’s the link to the final output in case you haven’t seen it yet.
Wicked Minds
Many things are going to change with this newsletter, starting with the name. It’s no longer ‘Greenup’ but ‘Wicked Minds.’ The focus remains the same - India story, Climate grammar, i.e., imagining India as a flourishing society in the era of climate change, but neither climate change nor India’s flourishing can be isolated from other wicked problems and the wicked minds needed to solve them.
For example, we can’t understand the flourishing of the Northeast of India and the impact of climate change without understanding the nexus between:
Identities - tribal, communal, regional and the pull or lack thereof of the ‘idea of India.’
Migration, both from the NE to other parts of India and from neighbouring countries to the NE.
Water and rivers, especially the Brahmaputra, and the uptick in floods as well as droughts.
Geopolitical competition between India and China. China building dams upriver will have impact on migration and water at the very least.
Climate change can’t be understood as a standalone ‘scientific’ phenomenon or even a discrete sociotechnical problem that can be solved with renewable energy technologies. To understand the full wickedness of climate change is to:
understand that it’s embedded in every other wicked problem out there and
cultivate various wicked virtues that will help us address wicked problems as such
Here’s another use case for cultivating a wicked mind. The COVID crisis has shown how ill-prepared we are to enact smart policies, choosing instead to have a blanket lockdown. In an alternate universe, a ward in North Bangalore could have a different policy than a ward in South Bangalore.
The failure is systemic - even when bureaucrats and politicians understand the need for adaptive policies, our institutions aren’t capable of carrying those out. For example: we don’t have data and we don’t have people trained in using that data. The wickedness doesn’t end there: the only way we can collect such fine grained data is through surveillance at a level that threatens democratic politics. A just solution to this challenge will involve:
understanding the needs of communities at a fine grained level
building data systems with a layer of machine learning combined with
spatial design that informs state intervention and
a moral framework that guarantees rights by design
What Next?
We aren’t taught how to create a better world whether individually or in collaboration, which means grappling with two kinds of wickedness:
The various wicked problems that revolve around the wickedest problem of climate change
The various skills and virtues one needs to be fully human in this era, a ‘wicked mind’ so to speak.
Think about it as A) engineering education - making the world a better place - combined with B) liberal arts education - making the world a better place.
A+B: making the world a better place.
Isn’t that wicked.