Title: The Ripple Effect. The Major Consequences of Minor Actions | by Brent Cooper | The Abs-Tract Organization | Medium
Headings: The Ripple Effect
The Ripple Effect
The Major Consequences of Minor Actions
Stochastic Terrorism: Triggering the shooters.
(This update is to resolve some ambiguity.) The person who actually plants the bomb or assassinates the public official…

Content: The mere suggestion of it as a measurable concept may turn off scholars as it implies a sheer incalculability of effects. We are, after all, talking about actual multi-dimensional ripple effects in social systems, not a tranquil pond. Nevertheless, it doesn’t make contemplating our own actions any less important or constructive, especially in the context of the continuing collapse of the global and local into one another. Given the poignancy, utility, and currency of other related concepts such as the ‘ecological footprint’, ‘carbon footprint’, and ‘water footprint’, the ‘ripple effect’ should be considered for empirical development as a metric for one’s social impact on the world. Sometimes there are directly observable consequences to our actions, but for the most part the effects of our daily routines are unseen in any intelligible way. We see global environmental devastation and social strife on the news but we remain completely dumbfounded as to our contribution to these effects, and we’re at just as much of a loss to know how make a difference for the better. While the risks we face are systemic and seemingly beyond our control, on some level one must reduce society to its individual unit: You. To this effect, risk theorist Ulrich Beck writes,
“Whatever propels risk and makes it incalculable, whatever provokes the institutional crisis at the level of the governing regime and the markets, shifts the ultimate decision-making responsibility onto the individuals, who are ultimately left to their own devices with their partial and biased knowledge, with undecidability and multiple layers of uncertainty.” — Ulrich Beck
Here it would seem that our ripple effects are so incalculable that it would be an encumbrance to stop and consider them.