As a speaker I was, by Mediaguild invited to assist the digital tv event in Cannes. It is realy exciting to see all the mediapower walking on the sunny red carpet lanes of the seaside of Cannes. Here is the place where people design our visual environments be it for entertainment, education or business. More and more it is of course big money, but in a way there is also the question of artistic quality and professional standards. The 360 content competition, in which film, documentary or webbased productions were pitched by ambitious professionals, was a very nice manifestation of the touch between money and good value. There were also a lot of money persons from Korea or other tiger economies. It is important that people in this domain start reflecting about there activities, that was also my reason for adressing the people . You are designing our world, that is bloody hell doing philosophy so let ’s do it well. The basic question in these domains is: ” how can your product stimulate the search for the quality of life?”. This question is the corner stone of new business that is not only money driven, but mainly value driven. We can, with our products, enhance lower and higher desires within people. A lower desire, I would call a desire that forces a retreat in the evolutionary levels of our innerworld. A lower desire stimulates the digestion of easymades and mostly satisfies desires we had also when we were in the phase of the dinosaurus. Obesity is the most pregnant manifestation of ourselves triggering ourselves in the lower parts.
A higher desire is a desire that enhances activities in my highest levels, that means in the level of creativity, consiousness and reflection. This higher desire product triggers my integral being as a producing and creating being, making all levels active in the service of the higher. A product like chess gives you a real improving of the quality of your life in a sustainable way. Media are so penetrating into our innerworld, they have probably the biggest influence on the way we experience our life, value it and reproduce it. Without fear of being totalitarean we can reflect on the power of media to influence our selves. We can watch pornography which will probably influence your sexual desires and maybe also your sexual fantasies and praxis. We can also ask great talented film directors to make more beautifull movies about the subtile and delicate experience of a soul based love erotic story. Do you want to come out of the movie feeling better or feeling worse?
There is the possibility of doing some real innovation. Innovation is not doing “new things”, it is about rethinking and reconsidering the way we organize our system that is steering us. Human beings are not fixed or closed entities. They are not like atoms (at least what people think atoms are), as most cultural theories and scientific approaches regard them, without any awareness of this fact. We are interactional creatures which in fact have their identities at the level of the skin, at the boundaries between inside and outside world. The inside and the outside world are both “objective”. We are just positioned between them. The external surroundings trigger our internal world. Different surroundings are caused by different buttons being pushed on. The funny thing is now that we can just switch on the buttons that trigger us: that is the amazing thing called human experience. Only you cannot change the buttons on your own, we need to do this in orchestrated action. Innovation is about creating new surroundings so that we can have a more satisfactory human experience, but this depends of our choice to elect the buttons we push. Therefore we need deep wisdom about our real nature and most delighted state of being. You will not find any of these wisdom in de industrial knowledge society; that is knowledge about fixed atoms (which again do not exist as such). In order to create “good” human experiences we need to question the classical and renaissance thinkers, their topic was the most delighted and happy human state of being.
Now that we are almost freed from heavy industrial thinking and wil come into i-thinking or light industrial thinking, we can start again with he renaissance and dream the best dream. The point is that most people have only heavy industrial dreams and have lost the capacity for light industrial dreams. That is why innovation is always a socratic search: we need a continuous stream of collaborative thinking in socratic dialogues. Without daily training you will fall back in heavy industrial thinking, feeling and acting.
Europe needs self confidence on real facts, it needs courage to express these facts and then use the European dialogue tradition to develop new realities based on these facts.
Central value should be the ongoing dialogue on the quality of life, started with Socrates and still going strong nowadays with people like Russell and other philosophers and Beuys and other artists. This Socratic dialogue is the format for active citizens.
We should change the industrial system invented by Europeans to a system in which the production of good things is stimulated and awarded.
Growth in this system is the growth of value for more and more people.
The web 2.0 change is a start for changing systematically in stead of improvement of a bad system.
We can realize the dream of maximum democracy that means maximum participations of civilians in deciding on regulations that regulates them.
Essential in that system is the sustainable dialog about the system itself, not the system is in charge but the dialogue rules the system.
We can do this by rethinking radically some buttons of our system, let us change these buttons.
Since it is about the quality of the good life, we need to submit our research, politics and business to the valuable and meaningful needs we have not only as individuals but also as a community of individuals with a long term horizon. We will not need false politics if we have good dialogues about the meaningfulness of our needs.
This means transform the economy of desires nto a culture of preferences.
