Welcome to Riskopia

Riskopia is a word that I created in my efforts to highlight the risks that humans face from the technology they create. 

Those efforts sometimes involve interacting with organizations that want to know "what organization are you with?" When the answer "I'm independent" does not compute for such interactions, I say Riskopia.

Before I explain why I think riskopia is a cool word, let me address this question: who owns riskopia? As far as I can tell, I'm the first person to use this word. Not long after it popped into my head I searched the internet to see if existed: nothing. No companies registered as Riskopia. No Riskopia domains. So I went about registering Riskopia as a domain and the name under which I do business. If you search the internet for riskopia I think you'll find this website tops the results.

Riskopia: meaning and origin

While studying risk management at university I encountered Ulrich Beck's writings on "risk society" which at times frame modern life as humans coming to terms with the risks created by their own technology (think air pollution and climate change). This perspective aligned with my own perceptions. 

Past thinkers coined the words utopia and dystopia for worlds that are, respectively, idyllic and horrific. The topi in these words indicates a place, and I thought risktopia might be useful as a word for a world where life is somewhere in between, but dominated by dealing with risk.

Then I began researching how people perceive risk and found that this can vary widely, like human vision. Some people can see distant objects quite clearly, but not those that are nearby, and this is called hyperopia. I happen to have the opposite condition, myopia, where nearby things are in focus but distant objects are blurry. The opia part of these words relates to conditions of sight—think optics—and so I thought riskopia was a good way to capture the notion of seeing risk while hinting that this ability varies between people.