Beyond Stasis into the Digital Revolution
The article on the Politics of Stasis published here earlier generated the interest of Foreign Policy Romania, and I was invited to participate in a conversation on how we can change our minds about the ever dynamic and changing nature of the universe. The conversation nicely relates to Juliette Levy’s take on the digital era. Below, the intro and the translation of my answers to some of the questions during the interview (starting minute 30:00). The entire broadcasting is available online here
Intro: “From Donald Trump, to the Arab Spring, from the Dutch referendum on the EU-Ukraine relationship to the elections in Romania, from job creation and new industries to escalating job loss, the Digital Revolution seems to be guilty for the good and the bad happening to us at a speed that defies adaptation. Maybe we’d be less scared of these transformations if we would stop worrying about the state of the world and start thinking in dynamic terms about the univers, and about ourselves: to reinvent, to accept that to become, and not to be is the paradigm of the present. From Vancouver the anthropologist Alexandru Balasescu proposes this perspective. In Foreign Policy LIVE studio we discussed with him (digitally linked), with Alexandru Bodislav and Razvan Soare, experts in forecasting and strategic communication, both speakers at the conference Young Ambassadors Forum “Changing the Game in the Informational Era”.
minute 29:30 Oana Popescu (OP): “We have Alec Balasescu with us, on skype. He recently wrote an article ‘The Politics of Stasis’, and I was particularly interested in the final proposition that was, if I understood well, to change our way of thinking and to move from the importance given to what one is today towards and emphasis on becoming, as in what one may become. This seems a proposition in resonance with the contemporary world dynamic, but my question is how to get there, since in fact our generation learns more about what it was, and who we are based in that, instead of what we may become by embracing movement.”
Alec Balasescu (AB): Good evening, first I would like to give the context of the article — it is part of a internet journal created by Moving Matters Travelling Workshop, an initiative reuniting anthropology and art, emerged from University of California Riverside. The initiator, Susan Ossman is an anthropologist who wrote about Serial Migration, that is people moving from place to place, as opposed to the “classic” terms of understanding migration as moving from country of origin to country of destination (a static view of migration after all). Last year the workshop took place in Bucharest at the Tipografia Gallery — so very close to your studio. Now, the question of being, that of becoming, and how to think about it is a rather complicated one, because the instruments for current politics are those of administration of the population, based on fixed, un-movable categories. Today politics does not work with instruments that understand, accept, and encourage the becoming. But as human being, we are in fact in constant becoming.
OP: But there is a lot of resistance to change, moving, and becoming.
AB: Precisely, and this is the paradox we have to work within. The question is: is this resistance to change a “natural” one, or is it generated by the fact that if we function in categories, we have politico-administrative advantages? In other words, if I assume a static identity, I am more likely to take advantage of it, social, political, or otherwise. I think this comes from the solidification but also from the ossification of nation-states as political forms. However, if we look in current urban and regional studies, we will see that we are rediscovering the importance of cities, global cities become more important than nation states. And the cities that are winning are those who accept and embrace mobile citizens, moving from city to city, bringing and disseminating knowledge.
OP: However, what we see today in Europe is an aggressive manifestation of the resistance to change, of fear of the other, and the world seems to insulate itself in subcultures, as we said here before. People try to congregate within the known groups out of the simple fear of confrontation with something different. So my question to all the participants is “can we positively use the becoming that the digital revolution potentiates, or on the contrary, we close in, build walls, and separate ourselves from each other?”
AB: As somebody already mentioned, there will be unavoidably winners and losers. Those who anchor themselves in stasis will lose in the long term, albeit they may gain some short term advantages. Embracing fears, nationalisms, rejection or hostility towards any kind of mobility from the physical to the digital one, will not be beneficial in long term.
OP: Under these conditions, would not be proper to say that we need to increase the role of the state in assisting those who are losing to not slip into far right extremism where “the strongest survive and that’s it…” ?
AB: Exactly, you point to the core of the matter, and I think that if we look closely, the most vocal xenophobic or right wing extremist discourses come from countries that have less of a social network for their citizens. Donald Trump comes from a country that is extremely competitive and has very weak network of social security, even with Obamacare.
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OP: What kind of measures the states may take to develop a strategy of coping with this complex issues? What should it encourage in education, for example, and how?
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Is it a question of what to teach, or is it a question of changing the mental paradigm, the method of how we change and how are we to relate to the world?
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AB: An interesting example is Stockholm, the city under 1 million inhabitants with the most unicorns — start up businesses valued over 1 billion dollars, mostly in IT. The question is, how does a relatively small city generates so many successful start-ups? The answer is simple: education is free, in schools the students learn elements of programming — we do not need to be all programmers — the matter is to learn the elements that would help one navigate the paradigm shift, a new, mobile world, and interconnected and interdependent world. And the only way to create more winners in a society is by securing an upbringing of children in an inclusive social context.
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OP: The Digital Revolution and Social Media pressure the political sphere to deliver messages that would create results now, while we are talking of a long term process. We have reactions today, that go against the process of transformation and accepting of generalized mobility. Can we resolve this tension?
AB: Probably not. It defines us, it did along our human history, but it is the tension that creates the transformation. Any becoming needs resistance in order to exercise its adaptability. The way in which the political transformation will take place, for example wether the role of the corporations will increase in politics, wether the role of financial institutions will change, wether there will be new types of actors, structures, or systems that will gain centre stage, highly depends on the resistance to change, and on the points in which this resistance is exercised. For example, the educational system in Romania is one of the most conservative that I know. It is possible that this will be counterbalanced by private modes of learning, and we know very well that even if nominally we are not an IT leader, informally Romania is well sought out for its IT brain power. And the speed of internet in Romania, one of the best in the world (Bernie Sanders knows it), is one of the major contributing factors to this evolution.
OP: At the same time we have the biggest percentage of population that is not able to use internet or computers.
AB: Here is where the state or other institutions/ actors may intervene in create initiatives that may create inclusion into the framework of the digital revolution. There was Biblionet program, by Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation that aimed at creating hotspots in rural libraries in Romania. It started in 2008, with good results in the beginning. It would be interesting to revisit it know and asses its success.
