GEAB 176

The world is as big as we want it to be.

Our team is dedicated to exploring the world’s geopolitical balances of power and opening a window on how they might evolve. While the future is the cornerstone of our editorial line, we also place the plurality of information at the heart of our work. The research carried out on each topic, rigorously reported in footnotes, takes this diversity to heart: diversity of viewpoints, nations, languages, but also geographical areas.

Paradoxical as human nature can be, this media and cultural openness to the world is now in retreat.[1] While the Internet has broken down geographical barriers in an unprecedented way through the almost instantaneous dissemination of information, and while AI is making astonishing progress in automatic translation, the media landscape was supposed to be a formidable forum for different points of view on the world. Social networks, which represented an unprecedented potential for building a human community free of geographical or even linguistic barriers, are now being taken over by algorithms that trap us in filter bubbles whose sole aim is to feed us our certainties for commercial reasons. A trend towards the end of communication that extends from digital space to social interaction in the physical world.[2]

We therefore see our added value as unique, essential and necessary in this media landscape. An information system worthy of the name can only exist if it is unfailingly rigorous in its search for this plurality and diversity of points of view, a desire that requires increased vigilance when the tools that should bring us together turn into traps and close in on us.

As we emerge from the global systemic crisis of the last two decades and enter what we call the “solutions crisis”, this media obsession could lead us to believe in a global collapse. In the theme we have chosen for this month, consumerism, degrowth theories and predictions of collapse have often been linked. As we enter a period of degrowth, which is not a political project but an inexorable systemic reality, these ideologues are finding it difficult to acknowledge the facts, which do not fit the theory they have been defending. But the signs are there: our consumption model is changing.

In reality, in the rest of the world, optimism and concrete projects are inventing tomorrow’s society, and alternatives are being built, emerging and strengthened. Our future is sometimes someone else’s present. If we do not want to be trapped in a poisonous past or a fantasised future, we must pay attention to these realities that come to us less and less, make the effort to look for these signals, to put down our glasses for a moment and borrow those of the other. We are committed to doing this systematically, especially in the news briefs that you will find at the end of each issue. It’s also clear that we need to organise ourselves into a collective intelligence system to serve this ambition. That’s why we spoke to Christophe Cesetti about his experience with this method.

If you don’t want to succumb to the prevailing gloom, you can count on our monthly newsletter and its unwavering determination to carry out this mission of exploration!

Figure 1 – Translation using artificial intelligence is progressing towards equaling or even surpassing human capabilities. Source: Businesswire

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[1]     Source: UNESCO, 2022

[2]     A trend we anticipated in our March 2022 issue