More than technology or language, what defines us as humans is that we can be revolutionary. It’s not about being able to change and adapt, it’s about being able to do it forcefully. Humans are revolutionaries because, in addition to evolving a model, we are also able to change it completely.
We talk a lot about transformation when we refer to managing digital or energy change, for example, but maybe we should start thinking about revolutions, because it’s not the same. While transformation is a change from what was before, that is, an evolution, revolution is a change against what was before. Transformations are sometimes achieved through pacts, while revolutions are never kind to the status quo.
Managing change through revolution means accepting that it may take a struggle to achieve a new outcome. We are living beings and therefore we are capable of change like everyone else, but what makes us different from other species is this ability to imagine scenarios that revolutionize everything that was before and, moreover, to understand that the ‘confrontation will be part of this process. Evolution calls for pacts, while revolution assumes and incorporates the fact of being part of a conflict.
But to be revolutionary is also to be optimistic, because the word indicates the hope that the struggle is to achieve a change that improves the situation. Because if we believe that change will be for the worse, we would no longer speak of revolution but of crisis. We say technological revolution because deep down we expect a change with positive results, and we say climate crisis because deep down we believe it will get worse. We would say climate revolution if we were optimistic, and technological crisis if we were pessimistic, so the word revolution contains a background of hope.
The story explains examples of great social changes arising from a revolution that breaks with the previous model. The Neolithic revolution, the French Revolution or the industrial revolution have been model changes that can be based on an outbreak of violence as much as on the adoption of a new technology. Computing, chips, internet, algorithms or artificial intelligence are not part of a digital transformation but of a digital revolution. It will be necessary to confront the previous model, the one born of the industrial revolution that has ordered the world for the last three hundred years. We are facing the opportunity to explore another horizon that will be radically different and will therefore generate conflicts.
In these pages of La Vanguardia we have already shared reflections on how the digital fact forces us to order our relationship with information just as at the time we began to order labor relations, or how the globalized digital economy calls into question the current model of wealth distribution based on salaries and taxes, not to mention the problems that the current political system of nation states has to control the activity of digital companies capable of operating on billions of citizens. It will not be an evolution, a transformation from the previous model, it will take a revolution capable of proposing a new way of doing things that will most likely have to face the previous model.
In the business and economic sphere, we have already seen cases of conflict, with digital actors proposing new models that cause the closure of companies that until recently were leaders. The commercial, legal and tax techniques they are using will need to be discussed, and a lot, and this debate will be a serious conflict without a doubt. But in the institutional and social sphere, the stage is still dominated by anachronistic actors and an ecosystem of new actors capable of persuasively representing themselves in the discussion is lacking.
To say that we are living through a period of transformation is to want to minimize the conflicts that will be caused by the change that is being carried out. Certainly there will be aspects that will simply evolve and we will be able to manage with the method of transformation, but there will be many other areas of the social, economic, political and cultural environment that will result in revolutions, and we will have to accept that moving towards a new model will cause a conflict.
