Navigating the New Paradigm
As we face unprecedented global crises, it is essential to reflect: dive 12 minutes into this complex dynamics and their implications
As the world grapples with the challenges of geopolitics and digital transformations, Digital Pilgrim’s recent podcast episode, “A New Paradigm,” explores the impact of these changes on our global society and the tech industry.
The episode delves into the development of alternative internet models and possible consequences for the future of the Digital Environment. We also examine the role of blockchain technology in establishing a new sense of tangibility and territoriality in the Digital Environment. This emerging topography could have profound implications for tech professionals and the business world.
Drawing from historical perspectives, the episode also explores how humanity has faced similar moments of crisis and transformation in the past. Insights from Antonio Gramsci, Thomas Kuhn, and others provide valuable context for understanding our current challenges.
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Read the episode transcript here:
Episode 15: A New Paradigm
It is interesting that many of the sanctions that were put in place a few days after Russia invaded Ukraine were related to the West’s desire to cut the country governed by Putin off from the global Internet. The international financial organization SWIFT suspended its operations in the Russian Federation, the largest telecommunications companies blocked access to their networks, and some multinational companies decided to cease operations in Russia. This probably explains why Russia has been developing its own self-managed version of the Internet, like the one that has been in operation for more than three decades in another world power: China.
What is appearing hazily on the horizon leads us to imagine the end of the global model as we knew it. If we consider the most famous moments of Trump’s presidency, we will see his constant attempts to dismantle NATO, the WTO, and the IMF. This outlook shows us a new status that is far removed from the hippie dream that gave rise to the Digital Environment but that condenses the meeting of that matrix of universal communication and the tension with global powers. It also invites us to weigh all our experiences. If the geopolitical status quo is really shifting, what consequences will that have for the development of our lives in both the Digital Environment and the Natural Environment?
Any interpretation we might make of the current moment could seem rushed and inadequate. The upheaval is so great that it is difficult to foresee the results of the geopolitical and social changes that are taking place. However, in the interest of explaining and assigning meaning to changes related to the Digital Environment, as well as their effect on society as a whole, we could see in these disputes the first attempts to push a model of territorialization in the Digital Environment.
While until recently we talked about digital backyards, we will surely soon be talking about digital sovereign states or states affirming their sovereignty in the Digital Environment. And this process will end up transforming the geometry of globalized digital space. This movement is logical and will surprise no one: if what we are seeing on the horizon is not so much the coexistence of digital reality and natural reality but rather a convergence of the two, all interested parties will try to find a place there. States are faced with the issue of sovereignty. It is not only about having a presence and exercising power in the Digital Environment but about marking off territories in the digital space.
This process is comparable to jurisdictions in airspace or at sea; the international surface of digital information becomes fragmented. Up until now, we thought of digital connections as infinite possible lines between points located throughout a global sphere. What seems to be happening now, which we will perhaps see later, is a new geometric form: a faceted polyhedron with many surfaces where points can meet but are separated by the clear boundaries that mark off spaces of interaction.
However, there is an obstacle that this transformation must still overcome: sovereignty is exercised throughout a territory with a defined perimeter. In an environment that lacks space-time coordinates, we must find some novel solution to give it material attributes. Is it possible to make the Digital Environment tangible? Developments related to the blockchain might be useful as a doorway into this problem.
The technology called blockchain is responsible for, among other things, the architectures that were used to develop cryptocurrencies. However, the potential of this technology goes far beyond that. In general terms, blockchain is a huge database that contains all the transactions that take place on a peer-to-peer network. It is a permanent chain that is resistant to interference and is collectively maintained by the nodes of a system that authenticates and records all those transactions using cryptographic algorithms. What is interesting is that the whole process works independently of human intervention and inspection authorities. Information is stored and constantly updated on a multitude of physical computers that make up a registry that exceeds materiality and seems to be inalterable. The blockchain is a disruptive innovation that could be applied to politics, economics, and the community because it allows for management of social interactions at a large scale, leaving aside the influence of central authorities.
While states move forward in regulating the digital economy, issuing their own digital currencies as a first measure, they are also studying how to find or create these missing coordinates. The interesting thing is that this project of setting up a topography arose in the Digital Environment. Some argue that the blockchain and its applications will make it possible to redesign a new type of social contract based more on consensus than on coercion, which is a characteristic they associate with states. Beyond personal viewpoints about this technology and its effects, it has proven itself to be an initial method for establishing tangibility through a decentralized network.
In turn, governments are evaluating their own applications for this technology for this precise reason. It is possible that the implementation of blockchain protocols is not the only way of establishing coordinates in the Digital Environment, but they are the first glimmer of a way to delineate comprehensible perimeters. In their uniqueness, the unambiguous digital strings of the blockchain anchor down common parameters in the Digital Environment, something that so far had been lacking. We are in the middle of a process of marking out the topography of the Digital Environment.
Another way of thinking about the fragility of the present is understanding, through a historical perspective, that the feeling of collapse is not foreign to our cultural development and that it appears when we are faced with the limits of social models or when a cosmogonic transformation occurs. This is how we can frame the transformations we perceive in different human processes over the centuries.
In the considerations throughout this podcast, we call upon events from the past to unpack the present. This is due to a view of history we have been exploring: that of its development as an expansive spiral. In our human history, we move in cycles, coming back time and again to the same situations. However, in each new round, we find ourselves in another position, at a distance from the previous experience, driven by the technological advances that have occurred. In this sense, the current process we are describing here can be compared to others that humanity has been through, and from which we can draw tools to confront it.
Just as it is not difficult to find precedents for our current uncertainty, there are also many references to other thinkers that have reflected on crises. This moment, which seems so unique and particular, can be viewed through the lens of Antonio Gramsci’s thoughts about eras of transition. In the early 20th century, a period of great change, the Italian materialist philosopher argued that after the fall of the old world, in the slow process through which a new one appears, we find ourselves in a world that is incomprehensible and terrifying. “In this chiaroscuro monsters are born,” he wrote. This disordered world we are perceiving is, without a doubt, a chiaroscuro full of unrecognizable forms.
The current feeling of instability, which many associate closely with globalization and digital technologies, becomes less strange when we find words from the past that help us analyze these crises. Indeed, we can understand the current situation with Thomas Kuhn’s notion of the succession of scientific paradigms that humans use to think about reality. Kuhn proposes that when a paradigm stops producing satisfactory explanations for events, it is falling, and this fall heralds the emergence of a new paradigm. This moment, which Kuhn calls “model crisis,” is characterized by a lack of answers that announce the appearance of a new way of understanding the world. (pisar con efecto) When society and culture are impacted in such a totalizing way, we must ask ourselves whether this transformation will lead to a change of cosmogony.
These changes do not have defined edges: we do not know when they begin, where the end, or what gives rise to them. However, we can trace back the ways in which they began and how they gradually progress due to a shift in people’s perceptions. The problem is that in order to identify changes in cosmogony, we need the distance that only time can provide. The events that history will qualify as relevant are those that have not yet been described.
In a context like the one we have just discussed, we can identify the progress of a new project of tangibility in the digital world. Based on that progress, we might ask, where do people stand? What is our place in that new territoriality? Amidst a crisis marked by the encounter between a natural world and a digital one, the instinct to establish anchoring points, to build ourselves in terms of something fixed and stable, may well arise. This process undoubtedly has social characteristics, but it also has profound consequences at the individual level.
In the next episode:
Are you sure of who you are? Explore how digital technologies are transforming our individual identities and how we define ourselves in a multidimensional world.
Digital Pilgrims is a podcast based upon the book “Digital Pilgrims. Towards a Quantum Humanity”.
