The Global View at the European Digital Industry Cup

In October took place the “European Digital Industry Cup” in Croatia. Lovely country, great sailing experience, and above all, great quality of speakers!  They gave us an overview of the global trends in our industry, and in particular I loved the presentation from Claus Kjeldsen, CEO of the Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies on the “Development of the world scenario in the next 20 years”.

In his talk, he explained that the different uprisings of nationalism’s that we can see all over the world like in the US, Austria, Poland, Turkey or Italy are a consequence of the globalization: now that everybody can be reached, instead of a scenario of all of us joining forces to liberate countries, moving towards spreading open democracies in the world, this is a scenario of fragmentation, the personalization of powers.

I would like to add here Mario Vargas Llosa’s explanation; He calls this movements “the call of the tribe”: he explains that this nationalism mode is a defense system, we feel attacked with all the changes going on, so we put ourselves on a defense mode, and we look for security. it’s easy to just follow somebody and feel like being part of a group.  We feel less lonely and more strong, we feel safer.

They also see the power shifting towards China, as it was a long time ago. And it’s not the economical and political power but also the technological one too. Having technological power in these days means being able to collect more data, to make people dependent on your technology (as we are at the present of Google).

Look at the great influence China is getting in Venezuela?  Not to mention how they cope Africa and are here in Europe? We have an actual economical battle between Ali Baba and FedEx right now here in Liège, Belgium, would you like to guess who will win?

The thing is that China is, as you know, not a democracy. So we had it wrong, our wishes have not come true and there’s no spreading of open democracies. Instead other political organisations are gaining power, a little bit scary for our personal rights.

This mega-trend, foreseen for 10 to 15 years at least, makes us wonder: how we, western democracy powers, will react to this shifting of power?

What could we do to make people think? Any ideas?
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