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2021 should have been the year in which we’d recover from Covid crisis. It is instead going down as the year in which turbo-individualism is moving on to its final, paradoxical and almost parodical form: it’s finally blooming into anarchism.
Looking at the process under the lens of last century’s politics, this is at the same time ironic, and beautifully mind boggling.
Continue reading “Democracy is not Anarchy”
Embracing the change has easily been one of the most repeated mottos of the last decade or two.
Those of us who work in a corporate world have seen all sorts of motivational posters, trainings and meetings aiming to teach us one important lesson: Change is Good.
While the focus finally fades away from this mantra, it is worth noting one thing: Change is Change.
It isn’t good, nor bad… it is a device like the internet and knives. And how we use it, is entirely on us.
When 2018 started, not many analysers had realised that the “sentiment” around the I.T. industry was changing.
By the time the year ended, what happened was before everyone’s eyes:
While some of these points weren’t entirely new, they reached a new magnitude.
Under the changed climate, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix all suffered losses between 25% and 50% of their respective stock value.
Physiognomy is often described as the pseudo-science of inferring character from facial and physical characteristics.
What is fascinating about it is the idea that as we age, we bring with us the signs of who we are. Our wrinkles hide the story of our predominant facial expressions through the decades. Our posture says a lot about our employment and status. Our mouth shape and mandibular position are significant of how we wanted to portray ourselves through time, menacing or friendly for example.
There are however also concerning aspects to this pseudo-science, and in particular as our ability to process Big Data enhances, physiognomy is going to play with the edge between good and bad science: the more we store images and videos of faces, expressions, and human interactions, the more opportunities A.I. will have to examine training material and learn prejudice and discrimination.
What would happen if Capitalism was to come to a peaceful end at some point in the coming decades, as I proposed in this post?
Culture is a complex system of communicating vessels, and it would be impossible to shut down capitalism without causing a chain reaction of cultural consequences that are seemingly far away from it: it won’t be enough to imagine a different model for our economy to understand how our world would change.