What I mean by the metacrisis is the idea that a large fraction of the variety of missteps, unintended consequences and crises unfolding around the world are downstream from a single nexus of underlying causes. Resolving these problems one-by-one won’t help us much overall if the underlying causes are not addressed; more will come, some of them as unintended consequences of prior solutions. It’s a crisis of crises in one sense, in another sense the apparent crises are just symptoms of one larger hard-to-see, slowly-unfolding crisis.
What I mean by the metacrisis is the idea that a large fraction of the variety of missteps, unintended consequences and crises unfolding around the world are downstream from a single nexus of underlying causes. Resolving these problems one-by-one won’t help us much overall if the underlying causes are not addressed; more will come, some of them as unintended consequences of prior solutions. It’s a crisis of crises in one sense, in another sense the apparent crises are just symptoms of one larger hard-to-see, slowly-unfolding crisis.