be Bold, be Italic, never Regular
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”
If Universal Basic Income is introduced -per common thinking- people will slack for the rest of their lives.
And Yes, some people will definitely do that, it will be their choice, and we should consider the implications.
There are people however who will never be able do anything of themselves because they are held back by the everyday needs of life: it’s hard to make something big, while having to concern oneself with bringing food to the family’s table, as Maslow taught us with his beautifully concise pyramid.
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.
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.
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.
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?
I like the title… It’s a little apocalyptic, but it conveys the idea. We all know about public debt, a constant reminder of how many countries have been living beyond their means for decades now. I am not talking about public debt tho, I am considering private debt, and specifically the debt of individuals, as opposed that of companies.
When we say that many people in western countries live beyond their means, at an individual level means that each person has an average debt of several thousand euro / dollars. For many a large portion of it constitutes their mortgage, but also student debt, and even just the credit card debts account in average for several thousand dollars/euro.
If you google today “unemployment rate 2030” you will find wildly ranging estimates, only rarely they are lower than 30% tho.
When you have hundreds of millions of unemployed people being unable to repay their debt, you may as well call that a private debt apocalypse.