DESIGN FICTION: Karma Off-setting
DESIGN FICTION: KARMA OFF-SETTING
Munich, 2031
Deutsche Insurance has re-issued its famous and somewhat controversial insurance product, Pay It Forward, for this coming year. The product which has been described by its opponents as Karma Bribing and Gambling with God, is more in-demand than ever.
Let's look at what the brochure says:
"Back by incredible demand, our empathetic and compassionate customers want to live lives that respect and protect our environment and its many beautiful ecosystems. Today, there is simply no way for a caring, conscientious citizen to be certain of the consequences of their actions.
Our customers care. They want the reassurance that their lifestyles do not harm the environment, exacerbate climate change and or threaten biodiversity. But no individual can be expected to research the consequences of each and every daily decision
We do this research for you.
Through a simple interview, we evaluate your lifestyle and take effective steps to balance any potential harm you may inadvertently do through purchases and habits so that you can sleep soundly in the knowledge that you are not damaging our beloved Gaia.
Pay it Forward."
The genesis of the product was an unexpected one, spurred on by the dramatic drop in the birth-rate of Germany's most affluent areas. Popular opinion was that rich GenZ weren't having children because they don't want to spend their time and money on anyone other than themselves. They were the selfish generation; spoiled. In fact, it was quite the opposite. Consumer research conducted by Massenpuls on behalf of the Federal Ministry of Future Generations (BMZG) showed that over 70% of GenZ were not starting families for fear of the impact that those children would have on the planet. The consensus amongst wealthy Germans in their 30s was that any new person would be a net-negative on the world and they would not subject their children to that knowledge.
Neue Erbsünde (direct translation, new original sin), that viral trend from the mid-2020s, was deep-seated. Commentators and demographers had assumed that this was nothing more than a brief fad. A childish ideology created by the hysteria of collapsed ecosystems and weather pattern change. Meme's and movements can override the natural drive to procreate.
But meme's can be defeated.
Tellingly, 97% of GenZ surveyed said that if they could guarantee that their children would have a neutral or positive impact on climate and biodiversity, they would consider starting a family. This has been a resounding truth. Pay It Forward has been bought over 260,000 times in the past five years. German wealthy neighbourhoods have witnessed a population increase of almost exactly that.
In other words, every baby born into a middle-income or above German post-code has been subscribed to Pay It Forward.
It has been so successful that the German federal government has begun to subsidise it in a bid to boost births further.
And that is where the trouble really started. The environmental anarchist collective Naturkrieg have branded the insurance firm Eco-Nazis and buyers of the product collaborators. In late March, Naturkrief staged a series of protests in Berlin, Hamburg and Frankfurt. They also claimed a series of partially successful DDoS attacks on major federal government websites. More successfully, they launched a massive (now-viral) campaign highlighting some abhorrent behaviour by recipients of Pay it Forward. These videos show boho Germans jet-setting, burning wood stoves, clearing forested land while laughing. The videos, interspersed with horrific montages of climate damage and animal death in less well-off areas of the globe, left a deep impression on popular opinion.
The message was picked up by Opposition Christian Green Party which has made noises that not only would they ban the product, but they would severely prosecute individuals who used the product and subsequently engaged in environment-damaging actions.
Clearly, this cohort of abusers is a minority. And the discourse is further muddied by the fact that at least some of these videos are proven deepfakes. Despite this, Pay it Forward was paused on July 15th, citing an 'adverse and charged public discourse'.
Public opinion seems to have shifted dramatically in the past 6 months, following the murder of 18 young parents and 24 children in an attack on a pre-school in Prenzlauerberg, Berlin. The terrorist attack claimed by Black Summer was the latest and most bloody of a series of attacks on parents and children. The Deutsche Insurance website has a main banner stating "We stand in solidarity with parents who want to bring children into this world so they might do good. We cannot allow child-killers to dictate our shared future."
Interspersed with issues as contentious as the environment and biodiversity, inequality of those who can afford to off-set their lifestyle and the very contemporary resurgence in morality and religious, the focus on original sin and by extension its twin, eternal damnation, is it really a wonder that Pay It Forward has proven such an issue of Life and Death?
This is the first of a planned series of 100 Design Fictions focusing on Biophilic Futures.