It is rare to hear this in the middle of the second wave of COVID-19 and with the economy on the floor. But it is seen that our interlocutor is sincere. If you doubt, you prefer to look at the positive side of things:
Journalist: Hi Javier, in a while we will record, how are you?
Javier Creus: Alive and kicking, Mauro.
Since you posted We are not ants, in 2011, Creus promoted collaborative economy projects, investigated all the ways in which you can travel the world with practically no money, and the way in which knowledge, shared thanks to information and communication technologies (ICT) ” it galactically expanded the possible ”. Since he discovered the Internet in 1994, he did not stop investigating the virtues of the Information Society.
Along the way, he created the first coworking in Barcelona, designed the Ruta Maya together with National Geographic, and developed projects that he himself defines, without boasting, as utopian, linked to the common good. Today he is the CEO of Ideas For Change, the company he founded to develop global digital citizenship projects: with creative techniques and a focus on innovation, they manage to achieve social impact using technologies for purposes that go beyond mere business.
P: Javier, looking at the stages of communication, you point to social networks as completely new phenomena, and they mark the changes that we are experiencing. And yet Big Tech tends to concentration and abuse of dominance, in the same way that Bell did in the 19th century in the United States. Do things really change?
JC: Well, what we see today, indeed, is that there is a dangerous tendency to the concentration of data. And having data allows you to modify behaviors. Today the data is determining the next movie you are going to see on Netflix, the route you choose to go from one place to another, what partner you have and who you choose as president. In other words, the concentration of data is like having the remote control – the remote control – of the people, and the temptation to use that to exercise commercial or political power is brutal.
And here you have to raise the red flag. Because Bell could focus, but that meant nothing more than having a lot of customers and not letting any other company have them. Today that growth is laughable, compared to the power that companies have when they have the data of our life.
And the other thing that should give us alarm is: if you inject artificial intelligence into the data, your superiority becomes exponential. The Bell’s advantage in concentrating customers was arithmetic. The only thing that the monopolistic but analog companies could control was the price; they added one by one, and affected a single variable of the question. And instead, with data and AI, you concentrate information and directly control people.
P: Well, that’s why I ask again if things really change as much as they seem …
JC: Hey, we created vaccines in a year and it’s awesome! Poverty has decreased in the last twenty years more than ever. Today the greats of communication are monsters, but I don’t know who dares to invest in the futures of these companies; none of them were in the Standar and Poor’s twenty years ago.
The problem is that we have it in our eyes! We are looking at GAFAM, and at China, with 19th century eyes. It dont have any relation to. The current capacity of companies and governments, handling data, we have never seen. And when we are digesting one wave, the next comes. Cycles last between 5 and 7 years and decision makers are considerably slower than that.
P: Now then. The general course of technological capitalism does not seem to be heading towards inclusion. That is why there is more and more talk of universal basic income and experiments of that style are being carried out in different parts of the world. How do you see that?
JC: The first thing is that today we cannot analyze society with measuring instruments that we created in the postwar period. That is to say, it is clear that not only the activity that is carried out in exchange for a salary is productive, as we thought after the Second World War, when the challenge of all Humanity was to produce: to produce cars, to produce houses, to produce airplanes, produce food. So we measured what we produced.
Our measure of growth and value must change, because otherwise we understand that, if we wash our clothes by hand and dry them in the sun, we have not produced anything because, seen through the eyes of that capitalism, there was no electricity consumption, nor we employ no one. We don’t increase gross domestic product by doing that! -Serie-.
The problem is that there are things that we did not take into account. Because if I have a factory that takes white shirts and dyes them red, GDP increases twice. The first, because I produce red t-shirts; and the second, for the cost of cleaning the river whose waters are stained red because I dump my waste there.
So the first thing is to discuss the notion of value. What do we call value? What we are measuring has little to do with human dignity. What is the cost of having a dirty river dyed red that you cannot drink from? That is what we have not asked ourselves until these years. And now we begin to understand it.
On the other hand, the key is to see the potential in people. Because if you give someone a privilege, if you make an exception with him because he has a problem, for example, a disability, and for that reason you pay him a subsidy, then you condemn him to not do anything truly valuable because, if he does , the subsidy ends.
But it turns out that all the research shows that if a human being can choose between doing and not doing, because he has his basic needs resolved, he chooses to do. It means that entrepreneurs are not the result of a genetic mutation, but that people prefer to do things, except when they are between a rock and a hard place!
It happens that perhaps before it was understood that what they choose to do has no value, but today we can think that if they start playing the guitar or painting pictures, that is probably valuable for society.
P: ¿Is that why you focus on innovation and creativity linked to the knowledge economy? How do you take advantage of that perspective?
JC: Well, the first thing to look at is the systems, because in the scenario I imagine, we are changing the basic social functions: providing people with energy, food, mobility. By changing the purpose of the system, you change the system.
Then, you need an anticipatory look: if you are running after events, you will always be putting patches. What we need is to get ahead, and for the next wave to be the transformative one. The regulation must be anticipated at least 5 years.
And the third thing we must see is that the transforming agents are the citizens. What corporations and public organizations could give us, we have already seen. Coffee discussions about whether the square in front of the bar should be managed by the town hall or by the bar owner, are sterile. Today it is directly the people who must take charge and get involved.
Q: But in that sense do you think of a direct democracy? Because today technologies allow people to express themselves on each point, but our political and institutional organization proposes sophisticated systems that many qualified professionals employ …
JC: It is that a new social contract is needed. The democratic and republican constitutions were founded on 3 pillars: property, work and representation. And it turns out that the 3 today are in crisis! First, because we can no longer uphold a rule that supposes a pact between owners, as they were in the nineteenth century. Today we understood that we can be collaborative, like Wikipedia or open software, and not try to own assets exclusively.
On the other hand, salaried work is already on the way to extinction, and we know that value is expressed in many more ways than wages, and therefore we should have the right to contribute more than to collect a survival wage or not even that. . I would like those who intend to donate their data for the common good, as we have proposed with Salus_Coop -N de R: the health data cooperative that, in Barcelona, allows each person to decide who and for what accesses the data, what They are stored in the cloud – it can be rewarded, because what it makes available to everyone has a value.
And the representation ostias! it must change because it was intended for deputies from overseas who came to Madrid by boat. Of course, when the means of transport is the boat or the carriage, you necessarily have to delegate. But it turns out that today we are capable of working remotely and in real time, so we must think again if there is a need to be represented, when and how, and on what occasion one should come forward and speak for oneself.
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If there was something that Creus lacked to deepen his reflections, it was lighting a cigarette. The puffs of smoke allow him to harmonize in equal doses the depth of each idea, with the sagacity he uses to find an ingenious twist to each approach. Sometimes he answers by specifying, sometimes he changes the focus, but he is always methodical; take notes, organize ideas, break down problems.
These days, with Ideas For Change, it is developing innovation projects and public-private collaboration in El Salvador, to transform its logistics structure with digital technology. The plan is financed by the IDB.
Meanwhile, Javier is investigating together with the European Commission how Blockchain can transform social relations, and in the second half of the year he will set foot in Argentina to participate in the International Diploma in Digital Strategic Technologies, of the Champagnat University. He will speak on the salient aspects of the Knowledge Economy.
Q: With Blockchain, a new expression of the economy appears, a technological, digital liberalism, which does not need the traditional support of the banks. Do you think it is an opportunity for emerging countries?
JC: Yes of course. What exists in the so-called emerging countries are two fundamental things: nature and youth. Right now you have to look at Africa. There is a brutal network of SMS distributed payments in Kenya! And the same with electrical energy: a solar panel and a battery to charge the mobile. In other words, steps can be skipped today.
In November, I was discussing some issues with the president of the electricity company and her communications partner in Uruguay. They have covered 80% of the territory covered with power supply and connectivity. I told them: the other twenty percent do not do it with the traditional centralized system in which I throw a cable, mount a tower … Ostia! Do it with Starlink from Elon Musk, distributed power, and direct connection to satellite. Because it already has the same quality, and if not yet, then it will have it shortly.
In summary, if in the last 25 years we have connected 3 billion people, in the next ten we can connect 4 billion more, most of them young Asians, Africans, Latin Americans. Imagine what that will mean, a new world!
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The new world that Javier Creus sees coming needs, according to him, decentralized data and citizen education for participation in public affairs. More free but recognized licenses and more free software for globally connected human intelligence to do its thing.
The digital transformation movie seems to have been scripted by him, so well he understands it. I wonder if those who are filming it will respect the ending that Javier predicts …
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