Ecological rationality

Abstract

of life. It affects, for instance, what Leaning-Bear and his fellow tribe members eat, which tools and artifacts they use, how they dress, who is part of their social network, and whose laws are enforced. (4) Finally, from the perspective of the individual, at the moment of such sudden, profoundly negative, and all-encompassing change, the environment becomes deeply uncertain: Known regularities seem to break down and the environment continues to evolve at rapid pace. In short, Leaning-Bear's story is that of a revolution breaking out upon individuals. The violent winds of change that were blowing over the prairies in the 1870s seem fundamentally different to all those storms the Sioux and other Native American tribes had encountered throughout their entire history.Today, one might argue, we are also living through a period of rapid, extensive change. A different type of change--not produced by war, invasion, genocide, or migration, but by technology. The contemporary winds of change we are referring to are not blowing over the prairies, but across the entire planet. One of their epicenters--to the extent that is possible to locate its roots geographically--is Silicon Valley with its many technology giants (for the philosophical and historical roots of digital technologies, see Emberson, 2009;Hoffrage, 2019). Digital technology has had and will continue to have a powerful impact across many dimensions of our lives: It affects what many of us do on a daily basis to make a living, what is considered to be wrong and what is considered to be right, how we search for and how we find information, and how we organize our social lives--or, more precisely, how digital technologies affect this organization. These technologies determine, and will increasingly continue to determine, what tools we use and have access to, and it is uncertain what other aspects of our lives they will change. The digital winds of change might shape some individual's or collectives' lives later, with remnants or pockets of old, non-digital environments being at least partially conserved within and by more-or-less isolated groups. Older generations who might have scant contact with digital technology offer one example. In that pockets subsist for some time, the digital winds of change are no different from other changes in human history, including those that impacted on the Native American nations over the last centuries. A stunning historical example is the existence of the last free Apaches, bearing their own tragic history by hiding in the Sierra Madre in the North of Mexico until at least as late as the 1930s (see Goodwin & Goodwin, 2018).Importantly, while the digital winds of change will blow into different individuals' faces sooner or later, the ongoing digital revolution has great potential to do much harm to individuals and societies as a whole. In our view, those potential negative side-effects of the digital winds of change need to be understood scientifically, such that we, to the extent that we are still in control, might be able to c...