It feels like industrial society had a wealth distribution system that is no longer working in digital society. For centuries we have built a mechanism to finance infrastructure and public services based on the fact that those who earn money must put a part of it into the common pot. Our system of redistribution of wealth in the territory has been basically organized around salaries and taxes, but this formula is quickly exhausted because the big global digital platforms capture a lot of wealth, but proportionally they have few workers at home and for they pay so little salaries here. Thanks to the unfortunate coordination of the world's tax mechanisms they have also learned to benefit in legal ways to pay little tax here. They don't share enough of what they earn.
For example, the possibility of listening to streaming music has made us stop buying from record stores, which have ended up closing and therefore stopped paying salaries and taxes. We don't buy music, but we pay a monthly fee to platforms like Spotify, which, for its part, doesn't hire people here and can legally tax anywhere else in the world that suits it best. The proof that the digital model distributes wealth badly is that Jeff Bezos, the founder of Amazon, in just over twenty years has accumulated a personal fortune of one hundred and forty-four billion dollars. Another example: Google has only 337 workers in all of Spain and a ridiculous share capital of 3,006 euros. Digitization makes it possible to earn a lot of money without this being correlated with the creation of jobs and without clear mechanisms to return part of the wealth obtained to the territories.
In addition, technology is becoming more and more disturbing. When we discover something else that machines can do well, what really worries us is that we're left with one less job option. We need work to make a living, and if machines do our jobs, it's not clear what we'll live on. We need financial resources to access housing, food, leisure, education or health. Nobody gives us these resources: we get the money in exchange for doing something. The problem is not that the machines know how to do things, but that we need to do something if we want to get paid, if we want to live.
Work is ceasing to function as a system for distributing wealth, both individually and collectively, and it is also ceasing to function as a key mechanism for our livelihood. For most of the 20th century, if you were well prepared, you could find a good job and make a living, but this logic has not stood the test of time. Nowadays, having a job does not guarantee being able to live in society with the minimum required. We have important segments of the population in conditions of poverty despite having a job, and large segments of the population over 30 years old and well prepared who live in shared flats because it is impossible to bear the price of a rent alone. Something has broken. Many young people no longer want to define themselves through work, even if they have one, because it is too volatile to make it the center of their lives. A job used to be for life and now no job is. It is a disconcerting moment because the model of life and society that we have proposed for everyone for two hundred years is no longer credible to more and more people today.
Digitization is making processes increasingly autonomous and efficient, and this has a direct impact on the world of work and therefore on our social system of wealth distribution. Digital transformation will create jobs, but they will not be enough to support the system we came from. We need to find a new model if we want the digital society to be fair in terms of wealth creation and distribution, and in this transition everything seems to indicate that work will have less weight. With all certainty we will have to get much more serious about fiscal issues, and if we manage to recover some of the wealth generated we may be able to talk about universal basic income or other similar solutions. From a society built around work to a new society built perhaps around information. In any case, during the coming decades we will have to build a new model, a new social contract.
