Category: Politics

Political Interference

Recent elections in USA, but also UK, Italy, France and many other european countries, raised the suspect -and sometimes a near-certainty- that Russia was meddling with them: supporting one specific party or candidate, spreading fake news on social media, even discrediting other candidates through time-engineered scandals, real or fake.

Looking at the results of the right wing populists supported by Russia, the tactic is working… that is -naturally- unless we accept the only other possible explanation: that we are all just becoming more racist.

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Relay race for the west

Wealth inequality in our countries is on the rise, and population’s discontent is generating populism, which ultimately poses a threat to the very existence of our democracies.

Right wing populists so far took political advantage of this situation: it seems incredible that they understood and reacted first to what was happening… neoliberalism was their creature after all, but it’s about to die.

While the reputation of long forbidden words such as Socialism gets slowly repolished and readied to return in fashion, it’s becoming clear that right wing parties cannot take us to the next phase of our history alone: leftists must be onboard too.

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Trojan Horse in Hong Kong

The UK gained control over Hong Kong by winning the Opium Wars; a short -maybe over simplistic- description of this history chapter? When in the 19th century the risk of causing an opioids epidemic in several Asian countries clashed against commercial interests, war settled things in favour of the latter.

In light of how this all started, I entertained myself with the idea that the UK may have planned a decades spanning Trojan Horse exercise against China.
It’s admittedly a far fetched hypothesis but -planned or not- Hong Kong may end up becoming exactly that, let me explain!

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Hybrid Democracy

Political fluidity, the cultural replacement of Opinion Leaders with Influencers, and the need for a faster democratic paradigm have brought me to the conclusion that our century will see some rather major restructuring of our institutions.

One of the possibilities that are discussed time and again is the shift from representative democracy to direct democracy.
Among many reasonable and voiced complains about such approach, people may not be interested enough or simply not have enough knowledge on selected topics to be able to express an informed decision.

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Faster Democracy in faster century

We live in a fast era: technology change fast, we rarely have the time to analyze the same input twice, we multitask, we are addicted to novelty and have a idiosyncrasy for anything old.

Our century is arguably faster than any previous one, and our democracies are inherently slow hardcoded from the constitution up to follow the same paradigm that generated them decades or centuries ago.

Our democracy should, and can be faster.

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Political Fluidity

We often hear that we live a fluid political climate.

I already discussed how I do not see this as a momentary glitch in an otherwise sound political system, but rather as the natural consequence of our technological evolution; something that has not yet reached the tipping point too.

So what do we mean when we speak about political fluidity today? It is a concept related to how the electorate is mutable and their support to a leader or party is purely momentary, and could change at any time. While this was obviously always true to some degree, it is now becoming more true than ever.

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On Brexit

On March 29th the Brexit odyssey is scheduled to conclude.
The original question at the referendum in 2016 was as follows:

Should the United Kingdom remain a member of the European Union or leave the European Union?

  • Remain a member of the European Union
  • Leave the European Union

As of today, there are many possibilities still on the table… the most commonly discussed are:

  1. Deal Brexit
  2. No Deal Brexit
  3. No Brexit
  4. Second Brexit Referendum
  5. Postpone Brexit

I am not proposing anything revolutionary, but I think the option of having a Deal/No Deal referendum was not discussed enough yet.

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Influenced influencers

An influencer -by definition- is someone who is able to influence others.

Typically the word is used to signify an influence on opinions, however there was a perfectly suitable pre-existing word for this: Opinion Leader.

What is so different between an opinion leader and an influencer, that we chose two use two entirely different names and categories?

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Slow Democracy

In the current wave of populism, and revamped risk of totalitarianism, I came to wonder how can democracy survive. What I was after was a realistic path to success that would overcome the inherent slowness to reaction, to adoption of new technologies, the inertia to change.

Framing the question in those terms, made it crystal clear that populism -and even more so totalitarianism- are simply more agile in times of change. 

When this realization came to mind, considering the supertechnologies about to rise -like Robotics and A.I.– and the risks these technologies bring together with them if not handled promptly, for the first time I came to wonder: is saving democracy the way to go at this point in history?

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Cold war 2.0 and Europe

Nato conducts a military drill in Norway with over 50,000 soldiers and 10,000 between military vehicles, aircrafts and ships.

Russia launches the operation Vostok-2018: about 300,000 soldiers, nearly 40,000 between military vehicles, aircrafts, ships, helicopters and drones. China contributes with 3,500 troops.

The American administration is questioning at the highest level the role of USA within NATO (Trump), all while supporting anti-European populist parties (Bannon).

All of this happened in the last few months alone. There’s enough to start considering whether we should concern ourselves with what the future may bring.

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Democracy Miniaturisation

After the fall of the USSR, we immediately saw many European countries splitting into smaller entities, and even after that momentum slowed down, there never was an inversion, but rather a consolidation that took different shapes all the way to the present.

At the same time glocalization has grown to become a mainstream cultural trend: on one hand we keep globalizing as we did for decades, assimilating more and more foreign cultures into our own, enhancing the migration flows and letting our society becoming more diverse, but on the other hand we become more and more aware of what makes our own local culture unique exactly because we now have more elements to compare ourselves with others, thus enhancing the personal bond with our local community.

These two factors work in synergy with many others, and together they are providing an impulse towards a miniaturisation of our democracies.

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