Humberto Schwab

The 19 October took place in Barcelona a substantial business event of a new partnership between www.zanox.com , Axel springer and Publigroupe. This global alliance wants to monetize the internet worldwide. I was the socratic moderator, and it was interesting to see how in the hardcore money corner all are looking for the right approach of the autonomous consumer. We are talking about a 60 biljoen market in internet sales. The basic formulae of zanox is the performance based internet market, which gives anybody or any individual he oportunity to earn money with internet. The relation between the innovative zanox and the old publishing medium axel springer is of course a hybrid combination, which looks very promesing. The performance based market could be a chance to enhance cooperation in stead of competition. Open intelligence is a business tool to create value. The important point I want to stress is that the real consumer- as- a- producer- approach could be the key for strong open and transparant communication between the client and the alliance. Transparancy will be a key value for the worldwide business. Integrity will be easy trackable by consumers as easy as consumer behaviour is trackable and object of focused advertisment. Maybe the quality of the advertisment will increase and the quantity decrease. Interesting is that the classical BILD has to be bought at the kiosk everyday again: the social behaviour of the consumer is integrated in the buying behaviour. Half of Germany goes out everyday to get the news. Trustworthy and loyalty are also strong values for inormation media.

We also established some certainties and uncertainties to develop some future scenarios.

The socratic aspects of the event were very minimal, but the interaction between the leaders and the interaction with the audience showed once again that there is a lot to win with methodologies (like EurolAb and socratic discourse) that enhance collective intelligence and collaborative thinking. People were very satisfied to engage in common brainstorms. The business of the future has socratic governance as a mark.

The biggest challenge we face is to understand the way our communication cultures will interfere with the way we will act and be as humans in the future. This was the topic of the Eurolab we did with students of the Gerrit Rietveld Academy and the University of Amsterdam in a honoursprogram. The synergie between these two groups is very high on designing possible futures. They draw four interesting ways of seeing the human in the communication context. The enlighted character has overcome the opposition between the revolutionairy rebel and the pompuous consumer. This character knows it is living in a world in which real and hyperreal are no longer separated, it embraces the structures that determines us, it will have a higher awareness. The transhuman embraces technology and understand the fundamenst of our communication. It sees cultures as a way of communication: new technology is incorporated in communicationspheres. The post utopian learning agent understands that we need to re-learn to use our lost senses to intensify our communication with nature and all it inhabitants. The way to get out of our crisis is to reprogramm ourselves into communicative sensibility. The momologue transhuman sees a strong value in making the world an esthetic experience using our inner and outer senses. Chips and extra sensorial devices create infinite opportunities for enriched human experiences.

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.

In this pdf file different philosophical approaches of future scenarios are demonstrated:evolutionary, catastrophic and transformational.

We cannot predict the future because of ignorance, surprise and volition.

We can make different scenarios to anticipate different possible worlds. We can distinguish conventional worlds, barbarization and great transitions.

great_transitions.pdf

Pakhuis de Zwijger organised the 6th of March a round dinner table about the question: ‘what is creativity?’.