The conquest of the future: digital fragmentation and the end of globalization
The regulation of AI, the development of 6G and tensions between the major powers anticipate a global geopolitical realignment. The race for hegemony moves to the Digital Environment.
«At times, the feeling prevails that many of the organization systems that govern our society no longer meet the needs of the people we have become. Failures in the economic system, the crisis of citizen representation, the new uses and customs developed in the Digital Environment, the proliferation of fake news are possible symptoms of a crisis of representativeness. The traditional models of coexistence are no longer enough for us to identify ourselves, be productive, coexist orderly in habitable spaces or feel politically represented. The bewilderment affects us all. The feeling seems to govern us that we are devoid of a cohesive ideological framework or a clear structure that organizes the events we live, that contains us and orders reality. We are surrounded by a feeling of abyss.»
The convulsion expressed in the Ukraine War, the conflict in the South China Sea, and the growing geopolitical tensions we are witnessing have their correlation in the digital realm. The competition for technological hegemony is beginning to delineate a new space of power between world leaders. The main topics on the board are the discussions around who will be in charge of regulating Artificial Intelligence and how this process will be carried out, in addition to how the challenge of hyperconnectivity expressed in the implementation of 5G networks and its successor, 6G, will be dealt with. In this context, progress in quantum computing and its next landing in the market, and the challenges posed by biotechnology must be added. These are tumultuous times. We are witnessing a struggle between giants to capture the 21st century: the ability to decide how we will experience reality and what will be considered true or false. We are experiencing a change in the shape of the global network: the competition for digital sovereignty is transforming it forever.
«If until recently we talked about digital gardens, surely soon we will speak of digital sovereign states or states affirming their sovereignty in the Digital Environment. And this process will end up transforming the geometry of the globalized digital space. The movement is logical and does not surprise anyone: if what looms on the horizon is not so much a coexistence between the digital and the natural reality but a convergence of both, all parties will seek their place there. States are faced with the question of sovereignty. It is not just about having a presence and exercising power in the Digital Environment, but about delimiting it.
This process is comparable to what happens with airspace or maritime space and its jurisdiction; the international surface of digital information is beginning to fragment. Until now we thought of digital connections as infinite possible lines between points placed along a global sphere. What seems to be gestating now, and perhaps we will see later, is a new geometric shape: a faceted polyhedron with many faces in which points can connect, but separated by clear boundaries that delimit interaction spaces.»
The image of the polyhedron of irreconcilable worldviews anticipates a geopolitical realignment. Does the digital revolution not lead to a global utopia but to a world of markets competing to control it? Does this perhaps explain the feeling of uncertainty that invades us? History has some answers:
«At the beginning of the 20th century, an era of great changes, the Italian philosopher and political theorist Antonio Gramsci pointed out that after the fall of an old world, in the slow process through which a new one emerges, we find ourselves in an incomprehensible and terrifying world. “In that chiaroscuro monsters arise”, he wrote. This world disorder that we perceive is undoubtedly a chiaroscuro populated by unrecognizable forms.
The current feeling of instability, which many closely link to globalization and digital technologies, becomes less strange when finding in the past the words to think about these crises. In fact, we can assimilate what is happening with the proposal of the american philosopher of science and historian Thomas Kuhn about the succession of scientific paradigms that humans use to think about reality. At the moment when a paradigm ceases to produce satisfactory explanations for events, Kuhn considers that it is falling, consequently, he anticipates the emergence of a new one. The scientist calls this moment the “model crisis” and it is marked by the void of answers that anticipate the appearance of a new way of understanding the world. When society and culture are impacted in such a totalizing way, it is worth asking whether that transformation will lead to a change in cosmogony.»
In short, the clash of forces competing to shape the future marks the culmination of an old form of globalization and the beginning of a new geopolitical era. We are going through a moment of crisis that anticipates the end of a civilizational paradigm and the emergence of a new one. The competition to establish digital hegemonies that determine reality itself is redesigning the field. In this context, it is evident that the structures that govern our society are obsolete to contain the current complexity. But every crisis contains the germ of a new beginning. Perhaps we find ourselves on the threshold of a civilizational change that redefines how we experience and construct reality. Everything will depend on who captures the collective imagination and points to the horizon of a new post-global paradigm.
All fragments cited in this column belong to the book “Digital Pilgrims: Towards a Quantum Humanity”, by Adrián Sicilia, technologist and digital planner. Sicilia is also CEO of In All Media, a global technology company based in Austin, Texas.
The book is distributed free of charge and can be downloaded electronically from digitalpilgrims.org
