The rise of solutionism

By Gonzalo López Martí / Creative director, etc / LMMIAMI.COM

“The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge.”
Stephen Hawking

• Solutionism is increasingly present in the world of marketing and advertising.
• Two disciplines that used to be humanist crafts with a touch of alchemy are now permeated with growing doses of algorithmic pseudoscience.
• It is getting out of hand.
• Methinks we are increasingly witnessing an enormous game of short term thinking, hype, smoke, mirrors and fraud.
• See, solutionism is a disorder of sorts, a delusion.
• It leads folks to believe that every single variable and moving part in a given process can be managed to determine the outcome.
• Pure unadulterated wishful thinking.
• Solutionists, aka solutionistas, come in all shapes and sizes.
• Most solutionists are highly educated.
• There are plenty ignoramuses in the ranks too.
• Solutionists sell themselves as problem solvers when they are actually problem creators.
• That urge to build golf courses in the Arizona desert and border walls between nations?
• Yup, solutionism.
• Solutionism is particularly pervasive in, but not limited to, mainstream Anglo Saxon Protestant culture.
• Solutionism is HIGHLY pervasive in Silicon Valley.
• Silicon Valley worships at the altar of solutionism with fervor and zeal.
• On the antipodes of this worldview, Latin Catholics, like yours truly, tend to be fatalists.
• Fatalism, not to be confused with pessimism, is the belief in the inevitability of fate.
• Once again, it is not pessimism or resignation.
• Some fatalists are very optimistic.
• The particularity of fatalism is that it accepts we are just humans who simply cannot foresee, let alone control, all the variables and moving parts in a process.
• Common sense, if you ask me.
• At times, all we can do is cross our fingers and push ahead.
• Trust me, a little fatalism can save you and your healthcare coverage provider a truckload of money in therapy and psychotropic meds.
• But back to solutionism.
• At best, the solutionists are just forcing us to cheat at solitary.
• To believe the hype they believe in and to drink the Kool Aid they are drinking.
• At worst, they are the pied pipers leading us happily over a cliff.
• Can we blame them if by lying to themselves they lie to us too?
• Solutionists fancy themselves big picture strategists when most of the times they are just easily distracted tacticians.
• Solutionists pride themselves in being curious when, more often than not, they are just dilettantes.
• Solutionists operate well in the contained abstract environment of academia, where the politics are so vicious because the stakes are so low.
• Solutionists believe data is king.
• Of course, they’ll duly ignore data that won’t fit their preconceptions, dogmas and aprioristic theories.
• Thing is, solutionists, like every other human being, have an agenda: they need to justify their existence and their salaries.
• To be continued.
• Meantime, should you want to know more about the solutionist phenomenon, refer to the book “To Save Everything, Click Here: The Folly of Technological Solutionism” by Evgeny Morozov.