At the dawn of the industrial era, the critical factors of production were capital and labor, with three social categories (not mutually exclusive): entrepreneurs, workers, and consumers. In the emerging era of cognition, the keys are the creative minds of humans, communication and geolocation network systems, and the network effect of platform users (see “Network Effect” by Del Sol, 2020), which feed back into each other. We increase the cognitive capacity of humans and information machines through algorithms that we humans implant in them.
Industrialization divides and hierarchizes roles, while digitalization tends to horizontalize and integrate.
As in any evolutionary transition, both eras – industrial and cognition – coexist, one in decline and the next in emergence. In this overlapping space-time, disruptive phenomena leave behind dysfunctional behaviors with the emerging era. In this process, societies undergo tensions and adjustments. Disruptions (technological, environmental, social, and biological) shake us out of our stability and challenge us to change our paradigms to cope with the conditions of life presented to us in the new era. Economic and social paradigms tied to the previous age show obsolescence.
The new context forces capitalism to reformulate itself to internalize its social, environmental, and global effects, while communism, in frank decline (leaving aside the sui generis China), “denounces” the excesses of capitalism without offering an effective system for generating human development. Social democracy, for its part, validates the market as a mechanism for allocating resources, endowing the public system with a regulatory role to avoid excesses, and deploying public policies of social solidarity with those lagging in development.
Which of these systems is most functional for the age of cognition? Which of them is most conducive to modern entrepreneurship? Perhaps none: the elites and even representative democracy suffer from morbid symptoms. Are we nearing a new social and economic system where entrepreneurship can be effectively deployed?
In a constituent process, these questions are crucial: they refer to the framework of common coexistence in a new era. The Constituent Convention and the network of conversations it generates, both within itself and in society, allow us to debate. The critical analysis and collective reflection of the moment we live in must be strongly promoted in all business instances, contributing new ideas and developing the capacity to adapt that we require.
Daniel Fernández
Originally published in El Mercurio
Photo by Joshua Earle on Unsplash
