be Bold, be Italic, never Regular
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.
Crisis are cyclical, and the global financial crisis dated 2008 left scars in our social tissue that are still far from healed. While the top 1% recovered almost entirely in a fairly quick fashion, the larger part of western population’s wages keep shrinking in terms of real purchasing power, now contributing to the rise of right wing populism, the resurgence of racism, white suprematism, sovranism and protectionism.
This scenario ignited a race against time where automation is challenged by the risk of authoritarian drifts within our society.
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.