Twitteretter

Humans have shown, over millennia, a pervasive instinct to build deities. Initially, from natural phenomena. The Sun, the stars, wind, thunder. They were all deified. They were followed by others, more powerful and abstractly complex, as cultures evolved. Some, punishing and unforgiving, the God of the Old Testament or those idolised by Aztecs or Mayans. Others, caring and loving. All, omnipresent and omnipotent. At some point in the second half of the XX century, as we became more sophisticated, we seemed to, finally, abandon our reliance on a superior being and started to see ourselves as possessing the ultimate agency in our environment. But old habits die hard. I see, in my interactions with some corporations, a god like cult of their CEO, feared and revered in equal measure. His or her subjects, sorry, employees, thirsty for any measure of interaction, for that occasional revelation or instant of attention from their CEO, all powerful, master of all things. Will we ever grow up? L...

This is at first sight completely obvious, but I still feel worth writing about. Companies have started developing, through their presence in social media, a personality, and building a relationship with their stakeholders. At first, their posts were restricted to information, such as a new product launch, a promotion or an update on a known service issue. This seems a sensible use of the immediacy of social media for communication. However, some are personalising their social media presence, engaging in conversation, expressing opinions. Users are now interacting with them in the second person, tagging them in posts, expecting a response. This may be convenient, but it is important that we realise that we are not interacting with the company, but just with one of its employees, a real person, who, best case, will be trying to act as they think their company’s philosophy would merit. But wait, companies don’t have a philosophy, they don’t have a mind. I feel another Twitteretter coming...

Since I started my Youtube channel, I have made an interesting observation. If you stop any of my videos, more or less at any point, my expression in the frozen frame is likely to look positively weird. However, when we interact with most people at real World speed, our brain sees normality. Our perception combines a very high number of extremely weird frames to build a completely normal movie. This is an interesting capacity of our brain, particularly if you think about the fact that this is the same brain capable of taking completely normal societal situations and concocting the weirdest conspiracy theories with them, as shown lately by the effect fake news are having on our democratic process. Our brain, therefore, behaves like a bipolar interpreter of reality. A bipolar interpreter is a great premise, in film, for a comedy or a tragedy, and the same, I think applies to reality. It remains to be seen what kind of movie our brains lead us into. Right now, it is hard to be optimistic ...

I come from a rational household. In fact, when I was growing up, I had no idea this was a thing. I assumed, as you would expect, since we all tend to project our own normality unto others, that all households were rational. What I mean by that is that they were places in which decisions were taken on the basis of rational thought built on the available information, also knowing that this information may be incomplete. I have since, as I have moved through life and met others, discovered that this is not the case, and that there are also irrational households, places where decisions are taken on a wishful understanding of reality, on impulse or so called intuition, without regard for facts or available information. Of course, these households will have much worse outcomes, as their failure to interpret reality will impair the decision making, perfectly fitted to a World that does not exist. Rationality must be the best resource a family has to plot a successful course for its members L...

I am reading a very informative book, which I recommend to anyone interested in our society and the choices facing it. It’s titled ‘How to fix the future’, by Andrew Keen. Right now, a third of the way through, I am learning a lot about Estonia, to this point not precisely my Mastermind speciality subject. This tiny Baltic state are trailblazing what they call a trust based model, an implementation of democracy built on maximum transparency, on all public actions of all agents being firstly, online, and secondly, fully transparent. Citizens get notified the very moment a government agency opens their file, to review their tax return, check their number plate or use their data. Conversely, citizens are identified by a fool proof digital ID card system, making them accountable for all their online actions and comments. Transparency and accountability over privacy. The result seems to be a functional digital democracy with high trust in government, and some hope for the rest of us Length:...

This is a fundamental choice that probably divides humanity into 2 distinct groups. On the red corner (no political connotations to the colour, just playing with a boxing ring analogy) are those that wish they could do only what they like. A lot of their time is spent regretting having to do things they don’t want to do and feeling generally unhappy and frustrated by the opportunity cost of those activities. On the blue corner, those who like whatever they have to do. Since they have to do it anyway, they make the most of it, enjoy it, and avoid all the frustration and regret. This different attitude tends to also make them more successful at whatever they are doing and, by succeeding, frees them up to do more of what they like to do more. Like Neo, in The Matrix, you can choose your pill, or corner in this case. The path to the blue corner is easy, it starts by liking whatever you are doing right now, and, since you are now reading or watching Twitteretter, subscribing and sharing Len...

Huge amounts of airtime and ink have been spent chronicling the economic recession resulting from the pandemic. Apparently, the biggest economic contraction in 300 years. However, another, simultaneous, worrying and much more unexpected recession seems to be going on as a consequence of the pandemic. Whilst the economic slowdown, given the restrictions on activity imposed by the virus, is fully understandable, this second one is counterintuitive. I am talking about the birth rate recession. Spain just reported a 25% drop in births in January and February, 9 months after the first lockdown, apparently replicated in other countries. It seems that, contrary to what you might have expected, at a time when one of the very few activities available to the population was making babies, most decided to go for box sets instead. Spain already has a natality problem, so this is quite concerning. It seems that it may become a case of ‘Your country needs you…to spend some money and make some babies’...

Great social, political and philosophical ideas used to be brewed at meeting venues where intellectually engaged people would gather regularly to debate and discuss. My father, a philosophy teacher and political activist, used to have one such group, where philosophy, ethics and sociology would be discussed, providing fuel for the books and articles that several members were regularly publishing. Ideas are developed, shaped and tuned by debate and presentation, even hearing yourself present your own thinking to others allows you to further it. These environments are fertile ground on which the Marxist understanding of capitalism, neoliberalism and many philosophical and ethical currents were sowed and harvested. I am missing this custom with our generation, and certainly with millennials, more used to communicating and dialogue via apps. They may exist, and I may just not be aware. If they do not, we will struggle to develop new thinking with a potential to change the society we live i...