That said, I am not sure you go far enough and am left wondering what is to be done about the new normal from the grounds set here. This is not really a fault with the article. It’s a question I continue to wrestle with in my research on something as seemingly and relatively benign as innovation in communication technologies. Even there, the most satisfactory answers to the question of acceptable risks are usually tentative and restricted to a particular range of cases. This feeds into the sort of corporate individual responsibility and compensation model you bring up. I agree to terms of use, I accept the risks that come with that. The benefit is that we’re able to compare risks, locating ourselves somewhere between the poles of what is a seemingly natural response to extremely unlikely events, “it will never happen to me,” and the absolute view that forbids action in the face of uncertainty, “it could happen to anybody.” Of course, the agency to make those choices is often out of the hands of those potentially harmed by the actions you detail. If we accept that the current arrangement is unacceptable, the questions become: What degree and kind of information and what scope of agreement would satisfy requirements to attain social consent to, for instance, build a new datacenter in a field outside of a rural Midwestern town?

That line often stumbles down the road of information overload, which says that we can’t possibly process the data needed to make satisfactorily informed decisions in the modern age at a personal let alone societal scale. I think that argument suffers from a failure of imagination that accepts that because our cognitive architecture seems to cause us to ignore the possibility of unlikely events we have to accept that incapacity and work with it, among other things.

The problem with engaging the risk society from the perspective of the cost assigned to life (and I don’t mean to say that’s all that’s going on here) or the related deviations we’re willing to accept or transgress, while it is rhetorically effective (nobody worth consulting is comfortable putting a price tag on human life), is that it suffers from a related problem as the argument of information overload in that it accepts the terms of the new normal. I would not accuse you of arguing that increased fundings for school lunches was in any way “good enough.” But the problem I’m talking about is that increased funding for school lunch programs is entirely compatible with the risk infrastructure you seem to be otherwise critiquing. School lunches have been proven to improve academic performance, which in turn we can imagine might correlate with future earnings and a safer school environment. It is easy to argue for because it is a low-risk solution. The problem of our value system that funnels money to school security guards and not lunches bears on a host of cultural problems, and with panicked perceptions of risk surrounding children, but not the process of risk management. The new normal tells us that the risk of development is measured by the possibility of the loss of life x the value of life, and we must rely on these imperfect measures because the alternative is to do nothing that conceivably places someone in harm’s way, as the standard of informed consent set by rational choice theory is impossible to meet. In some situations it is easy to conceive of how to work within broadly acceptable standards of risk within this system, like boosting school lunch funding. But arming teachers and staff, putting cameras in every classroom, etc., are all similarly low-risk moves by the current calculations (the cost of a gun and training relative to a potential gun-death lawsuit makes the rarity of gun violence almost inconsequential). Changing the imposition of a security state apparatus on schools seems to require fundamentally changing the concept and function of risk.

At best in the present system of risk we can hope to weight values to encourage different investments while making the standards of acceptable risk more stringent for the things we dislike, basing those modifications on an idea of punishing corporations or secretly or not-so-secretly hoping to make the cost of doing a certain kind of business too high. Anything that even attempts to remotely account for long-term projections of benefit or harm to cultures and environments caused by large-scale programs or disasters crosses over rapidly into unsustainable development.

Different models of rationality are available, as are methods for accounting for risk in light of the social commitments. Without pursuing those prospects, we’re not modifying risk, but values and thresholds, and in that case I’m not sure what sort of reasonable demands other than those reforms I mention above might arise from an awareness of this normality.