There is absolutely nothing concrete that I can do on a day-to-day basis to protect my world, my friends, my family from people that I watch lie, cheat, and steal on national television. It's absolutely sickening.
I vote, and I canvass, and I donate. But man, when I see someone on twitter talking about how they think gay people should be shot like animals or something equally insane, it feels like there's one small right thing I could do, which is to make that person feel like shit. I don't, mostly -- it's just a toxic cycle for my personal wellbeing -- but I see the attraction. Yelling at people online (and to a further extent, excluding them from your world) feels like the only thing you can do sometimes.
And then we, the techno-futurists, don't want to deal with what's in front of us because its too small, doesn't scale, or because this problem will go away once we reach the economic Singularity or have flying cars or whatever utopian dream is in fashion.
Personally, I think we need better systems to leverage people's real, concrete pain into actionable change. Like, you should be able to donate money or time to fixing the things that really hurt you. Maybe its the DMV. Or maybe its traffic court. Or maybe its a late fee on a credit card. Or maybe its finding out that a fact you believed was made up. Right now, everything is so siloed. Imagine if everyone hurt by the DMV could pledge money to fix the problem.
I have come to the conclusion that managing our collective delusions is more important than correcting them. Reality is unbearable to the human psyche. Most collective delusions are benign or even beneficial to society.
The key innovation we require, as a society, are better feedback mechanisms to correct inaccurate beliefs. This means more frequent, but smaller, pain in response to mistakes. To those who object, the alternative isn't no pain, but rather, the catastrophic pain of collapse. Society is really a collection of institutions, and somehow in all institutions, loyalty has usurped principle, and accountability fails because the accuser is shunned, hated, feared. So, institution by institution, we weaken.
The solution, for example in academia, is to shun (fire, blacklist, etc) those "researchers" who cheat, lie, and distort their findings. In the justice system, lawyers, police, and judges who break the rules should be punished more, not less, severely than the rest of us. Again, these are not changes born of malice, or a desire to see more suffering, but rather a price we must accept to maintain healthy institutions with high standards, and so, prevent societal collapse.
In some ways I think "cancel culture" is a reaction to this lack of accountability, as an attempt to replace it, to ape it, almost like a cargo cult. Of course, there are huge problems with this, not the least of which there is not an institution behind it, but rather just mob rule that answers to no-one, not even itself.