I wanted to build the great media of the future. I believed that the Internet would become the technology that revitalized journalism. However, the future ended up destroying me.
What happened?
With PlayGround, created in 2008, we managed to position ourselves in just seven years in the ranking of the 10 media outlets with the largest video audience in the world.
Quite an achievement.
To combat large-scale misinformation on social networks, Silicon Valley platforms decided to manage the supervision of information that had previously been human with artificial intelligence.
They have solved little or nothing.
After automating such important decisions as managing truthfulness and quality, AI chose the easiest path to combat fraudulent journalism: stop giving importance to journalism in general.
Now we watch videos of kittens.
An algorithm was given the responsibility of making the most important decisions of information and democracy. And thus my company ended. How could my bet on the future destroy me?
And so he also delved into the history of the future and became a writer.
In the 16th century, with the birth of modernity, a new time was created: the future, which brought with it the creation of capitalism: a system in which money was invested to earn money in the future and get into debt in the future.
And the mechanical watch appeared.
That promoted the erroneous belief of an objective and linear time that always marched forward, thus creating the false myth of the future and progress. The illusion that, thanks to technology, science and economics, society would improve over time.
We continue to believe in it.
Today our entire society is a clock of colossal proportions; but the sunrise is not the same every day, nor is the palpitation of our hearts uniform or linear, and nature does not have straight lines; On the contrary, it is sinuous and changing.
How did we live time before?
Our ancestors did not believe that time was objective or linear, or that it would get better. To think about tomorrow, they used words like becoming, which means 'to come falling', or destiny, a time governed by forces that exceed our capacity.
They were not concerned with the future.
Time was relative and circular, always linked to natural cycles: it was born and it died, and then it was born again. Ideas that would be endorsed by modern physics, such as the theory of relativity, quantum physics or thermodynamics, which advocates entropy and the circularity of space and time.
Seeing the future as evolution triumphed.
Thanks to what I call future capital (the union of future and capitalism); The way of spending time linked to nature would die in people's minds in favor of a time that only looked forward, towards infinite economic growth.
Today no one bets on the future anymore.
True, six centuries later no one believes in the promises of the future. The climate crisis, the threat of AI and the breakdown of the social elevator say the opposite.
But there we continue.
Our entire society continues to be designed according to that fictitious time: five-year business plans, future stock markets, the Ibex 35, the plans of companies and governments for “sustainable” growth… We have decided to continue being deceived by the future because we cannot stop believing in capitalism.
What are the consequences?
Believing that the future would be better than our past and present made us forget the negative effects of our actions. If tomorrow is going to be better than now, why worry about the environment or people's mental health?
An idea that has remodeled us.
The climate crisis or the overpopulation of our species are the result of that naivety: believing that all our innovations would end up bringing us a utopian future.
How to end the myth of progress?
We must realize that our Earth and our bodies have limits. Degrowth is the only solution.
That's what Nobel Prize-winning economists say.
The repercussions of AI are too dangerous to be left in the hands of companies in Silicon Valley whose mandate is unlimited economic growth. But today we are all condemned to innovate without control so as not to be left out of the game.
Any other ideas to avoid living in installments?
Pay attention again to time that is not governed by the clock, such as that of nature's solar cycles and internal rhythms. Listening to the heartbeat, our inner clock, will return us to the present. Salvation has no greater mystery: it is here and now.
