Digital revolution: Missing in action or maybe just a hashtag
Is it not perhaps very stressful for sellers (oops, accounts) when their sales targets increase each year? More and more each year, each year more and more promises. Productivity has to be increased as much as possible.
COVID has had the same effect as hiding in a shelter during a bomb raid in a war. Once the sirens stopped sounding, people went back outside to see the ruins left by the bombs. What ruins has COVID left for us? What do we want to build on these ruins? What is the meaning of a revolution if everything is handled on the spur of the moment? We have confused, and continue to confuse, resilience with the concept of fault tolerance. Antonio Gramsci wrote: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters". True revolution is achieved with resilience; a revolt is merely fault tolerance. True resilience is creativity, not stubbornness and imitation, and has to do with people; fault tolerance is just an annoying breakdown that needs to be repaired and has to do with machines. The machines are formatting us. This is what we are destined to witness in the coming years, and the first step will be when the hashtag “The customer comes first” finally gives way to “The supplier comes first”. Or, to be more accurate, when the inseparable customer-supplier binomial is no longer the rule. What resources will be used to stage this pseudo-revolution? Once again, it bears recalling that the Italian word for “resources” (“risorse”) is the third person singular of the remote past tense of the Italian verb “risorgere” (“to rise again”). In Italian, the remote past is used for actions that took place in the distant past and that no longer have any bearing on the present, physically or emotionally. This is precisely what is happening: we think we can colonise the future with resources linked to the past.
Self-realisation has become an end unto itself (a revolt, in other words). It is no coincidence that an advertisement for a well-known drug (Paxil) sold as the “happiness pill” claims: "Do more - Feel better - Live longer".
Do more (regardless of what you are doing)?
Feel better (without it mattering where this feeling comes from)?
Live longer (without considering quality of life in the additional years)?
And the impacts on our surroundings? Everyone is an ecologist, only to forget all about it as soon as we need face masks — we will save the world later, there is still time.
The digital revolt has standardised what we might term the “blink culture”. Everything must be consumed quickly. There are countless sites where speeches are limited to 20 minutes, others that offer summaries of books that condense 200-page tomes into a few lines (truth be told, they guarantee a maximum of ten pages). Essentially, blink culture has to do with bullet point culture. Just titles. We rack up bullet points and likes, pretending they are knowledge, culture and success: blinks.
The consequence: fast food, blitz meetings, short naps and therapy sessions, speed reading, making money before age 20, etc. As Eugenio Borgna writes: "Short, new and exciting have replaced lengthy, repeated and reflective."
Is it not perhaps very stressful for sellers (oops, accounts) when their sales targets increase each year? More and more each year, each year more and more promises. Productivity has to be increased as much as possible.
COVID has had the same effect as hiding in a shelter during a bomb raid in a war. Once the sirens stopped sounding, people went back outside to see the ruins left by the bombs. What ruins has COVID left for us? What do we want to build on these ruins? What is the meaning of a revolution if everything is handled on the spur of the moment? We have confused, and continue to confuse, resilience with the concept of fault tolerance. Antonio Gramsci wrote: "The old world is dying, and the new world struggles to be born. Now is the time of monsters". True revolution is achieved with resilience; a revolt is merely fault tolerance. True resilience is creativity, not stubbornness and imitation, and has to do with people; fault tolerance is just an annoying breakdown that needs to be repaired and has to do with machines. The machines are formatting us. This is what we are destined to witness in the coming years, and the first step will be when the hashtag “The customer comes first” finally gives way to “The supplier comes first”. Or, to be more accurate, when the inseparable customer-supplier binomial is no longer the rule. What resources will be used to stage this pseudo-revolution? Once again, it bears recalling that the Italian word for “resources” (“risorse”) is the third person singular of the remote past tense of the Italian verb “risorgere” (“to rise again”). In Italian, the remote past is used for actions that took place in the distant past and that no longer have any bearing on the present, physically or emotionally. This is precisely what is happening: we think we can colonise the future with resources linked to the past.