Transition: interconnected pathways and systemic transformations - 2024 Lectio of Paolo Zanenga at Ianua High School

Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wYsYdggte-A

November, 2024

The economic and social system as we have historically known it—composed of technological, human, organizational, and financial capital—is connected to practices and markets that the different phases of the digital revolution profoundly modify and often entirely deplete. Today, in a post-industrial phase where technology has almost eliminated the time and resources needed to carry out planned processes, humans once again find themselves immersed in a techno-environmental fabric that they can question but not control. Change is therefore not only technological but also cultural and social—and it is the differing speeds of these transformations that present major challenges.

At the same time, the "old economy" cannot generate the resources required for the massive investments needed to seize the extraordinary opportunities emerging—while anticipating their risks—and to address the challenges posed by the various dimensions of "sustainability." The concept of time changes, and the concept of space changes: as the geosphere is surrounded and influenced by a noosphere capable of moving and expanding into entirely meta-territorial dimensions, a greater awareness emerges of a reality composed not of isolated entities but of unlimited interconnections.

In a linear world, objects, subjects, and data are categorized according to belonging, whereas in a complex world, belonging is multiple, and what matters is fitness, the potential for connection. The transition of our society toward a new value model can be summarized precisely in the progressive fading of the separate categories that structured the modern paradigm. Hence the search for new environments and intermediation systems to guide historical organizations (corporate and institutional) toward new relational ecosystems.