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Published on 2025-04-18 23:00:00 | words: 1920
If you have been reading articles on this website for a while, you know that sometimes I start article series, and then overlap with other new and ongoing series.
On 2024-10-20, on a rainy day, posted an article with the title the structural elements of change: part 1 - #Utopianhours #Turin.
Then, I continued on other article series, and added few more articles.
For my standards, it was a short article- less then 2,000 words- and this one too aims to be equally short, and mainly including pointers to further material that will evolve beyond this article.
I was waiting for 2025-04-20, as it would have been exactly six months- but, as your probably know, it is going to be an holiday week-end, so, I waited to first see some expected announces and results.
Not for myself, but for the location I am living in (Chinese way: World, European Union, Italy, Piedmont).
If you read the article series "EP2024", that started publishing in March 2024 (months before the European Parliament elections, but including since March 2024 a long list of "future forecasting" segments stretching months, that were just simply a connecting-the-dots exercise)...
... or even the more recent article about ReArmEU as a first step of a long journey (exactly one month ago), we are in a state of flux.
And that it is being polite: at least in Italy, be it the leading coalition, the constantly reshaping opposition, and the assorted cohort of trades unions, industrialists' bureaucracies, past-their-prime talking heads, and obviously wolfpack wannabe leaders (actually, more "Lord of the Flies"), on a daily basis sounds as if we are watching a kind of socio-economic-political "reality TV" without a scriptwriting team.
Or, to be even less polite: headless chickens only worried about keeping their keep, while pretending that they are looking for the future.
Curiously, as when I was writing the previous article in this series, again yesterday (and probably tonight) we had plenty of rain.
And, just for good measure, as in October 2020, received yesterday a reminder message about the forthcoming (October, of course) Utopianhours.
To keep this "pointers" article short, have a look at either my Facebook or Linkedin profile, for my "stream" on three elements:
_ local (see the definition above) social, economic, political commentary
_ publications and other product announces or progress reports.
Yes, I am still in Italy- so far, none of the potential opportunities abroad turned into a contract for a new mission, hence, I keep looking around while continuing my research and publishing activities- standby for more announces about releases.
Again, the purpose of this article, as the previous one, is to share threads that will expand later.
Anyway, in this case actually I have already been working on some of the threads- sometimes, for years.
And started here and there to release bits of information, sometimes mildly disguised under other products or services- e.g. look at the 12 articles within the "Organizational Support" section, or the mini-books published so far.
One of the obvious themes is my take on AI- as you probably read already, I did toy with it first in the 1980s (PROLOG etc), before even I started working officially (and, actually, recycled some approaches and concepts also in my proposals for methodology improvements, after "testing on the ground").
As some of you know, I do not have any official university title, but I never stopped studying, learning, unlearning, relearning, and connecting the dots, both before, during, and after missions.
I was, as some of my American friends would say, blessed by having the chance, since the early 1980s, to work first in politics, then in the Army, then in business, with people with much more domain-specific experience in whatever industry or domain I worked with: and work as a sponge, without refraining from crossing the Ts and dotting the Is to turn whatever happens into a learning-and-communication experience.
So, Artificial Intelligence in my case is about "orchestration" and "blending"- a mix human-AI integration.
And will soon share further material, both conceptual and practical.
Unfortunately, generally I have to repeat what I wrote in October 2024 (and many times before since 2012, and even before discussed since the 1980s with foreign contacts): We Italians want to live in the XXI century with XXI century services and opportunities, but whenever there was a similar occurrence of complexity, the natural instinct (almost a Pavlovian reflex) generated proposals to...
...rebuild in-tribe what other tribes had already available, to avoid having to barter.
Of course, it is fine if you have to dig holes, or do other activities that require half a day of training.
Anyway, when what you are talking about requires years or decades of aggregate learning, what you are proposing is actually an "autodafé" bordering self-defeatism.
So, why this second article, if so far, except references to previous articles and forthcoming material, there is nothing more about the structural elements of change?
In the previous article, talked about Utopianhours in Turin to hint about the form, design, shape, purpose of cities.
Many after COVID and the invasion of Ukraine talked about the "demise of the global order", specifically the end of globalization.
I beg to differ- also without President Trump daily stream of twists and turns, it is not a demise, but a reshuffling and, if possible, an increase.
You probably read on this website my commentary here and there about "Gordian Knot" and Carl Schmitt, and his position that actually applies to our modern world of corporations that expanded on the concept heralded e.g. centuries ago by the East India Company.
So, another structural element of change is the de facto disintermediation of the relationship between citizens and the space they dwell in, personally and professionally (cities etc), and non-State entities that have more impact on their everyday life than the State they claim to be citizens of.
In the 1970s, there were discussions of "Banana Republics"- and I quoted few times in the past a couple of books about manipulative practices carried out for strategic purposes.
Well, a bit of a tongue-in-cheek, but obviously I am thinking to "Our Man in Havana" and its follower "The Tailor of Panama".
Frankly, have a look at our modern economies: we are used to access energy, services, products, infrastructure- and none of that would currently work at an economically sustainable level if we were to replace delocalization and economies of scale with full reshoring without diluting the standard of living for a significant chunk of our population.
So, as I shared a while ago on Linkedin, and in previous discussions offline and online, nearshoring would still imply a differential level of standard of living, and a pure reshoring would instead require a massive restructuring of production processes and our approach to time, work, and, of course, "income".
Nothing frankly really new: but, as I wrote long ago about data, the idea is simply that, unless we want a technocratic Middle Age as it was in Europe centuries ago, with indentured servitude as the norm, we have to reconsider two elements that many "technorevolutionaries" often forget.
Whenever you introduce a cultural change, you need to have a phase-out and a phase-in, and obviously a transition period.
It cannot be painless, but politics should be the art of sometimes doing something that will put you in history books, but will not necessarily bring you again a seat at the next elections.
A private company might flip a switch and drop a market, as often they do with products, even after they did their "Pied Piper" routine, and brought on board even multinational customers invest significant amounts of money on a product or service, investments that imply a restructuring of processes, organization, mindset- and are left hanging in the wind.
A country (or, for the European Union, a structural coalition of the willing that is not a mere "fair weather friendship") has to do a sharing of the (certain) pain and of the (potential) gain.
So far, probably many would say: platitudes.
Well, probably yes.
As the way to implement is the same that, since the early 1990s, when I first used as material for a course in methodology in a banking environment a new regulation from Basel on anti-money laundering, uttered to those attending: yes, we do the analysis and the point is to identify the requirements, processes, etc.
But the only way to implement those changes is to accept that we are part of the problem.
If we (I am referring to countries as political entities, not as individual citizens) do not accept that to stop money laundering we too need to stop using the same channels whenever convenient, we can keep building barrier upon barrier, but we will be the first ones to circumvent them and find loopholes.
The same applies to mutualization of infrastructure and flows: some techno-enthusiasts say that replacing "fiat" money with cryptocurrencies relying just on the usual "embedded" technocratic safeguards would make wealth global, independent from the will of this or that country, and more equitable.
Frankly, a technocratic dictatorship playing on the aggregates has a structural weakness: you cannot simply vote them out of office.
So, probably an interim step will be a series of "regional" e-currencies that would turn economies into flows, and "dematerialize" location and control structures, but still under an aggregated consensus from a set of parties willing to share coordination or, better, orchestration.
As I wrote at the beginning, and in the previous article in this series, a collection of pointers to be developed elsewhere- look on this website the various menu options to find articles discussing some of those points, or use the search facilities scattered along the website (within articles, published books, European Central Bank material, my AI Ethics Primer) to look for one or more keywords and retrieve specific articles, data, or book reviews.
To close this short article:
_ the first element of structural change was cities and our physical space
_ the second is the overall concept of flows and its various declinations
_ the third? the interaction between flows.
Stay tuned- the next few articles will be about some of the pointers discussed in this article and the previous one, then eventually will add the third article in this series.
Meanwhile, have a nice Easter.