The structural changes generated by the digital revolution mean that we have to rethink the issues we must center on. Better salaries, access to health care, education, and so forth are central, but they come as results of our concentrating on the causes. We are in a knowledge society, and free access is essential. Freeing us from the attention industry manipulation is equally important. Making money socially useful, reducing the drain, and measuring what matters – overall results for society and not just GDP – are also part of reorienting what we must struggle for.

Opportunities on the horizon: opening access to knowledge

The absurdity is that so much knowledge, so much technology, and so much money are being used to deepen the disaster. This forces us to consider the obvious. Knowledge, unlike factories, can be generalized without additional costs. In the age of industrial capitalism, the proposal to reduce inequalities was the socialization of the means of production, essentially industrial facilities. Today, it's about socializing knowledge. The huge difference is that while the factory represents constructed capital and has an owner, in the case of knowledge, once created and the research costs covered, it can be generalized across the planet without additional costs.

Jeremy Rifkin pointed to a zero marginal cost society: technologies we have today in sustainable agriculture, for example, could allow their generalization across the planet, among hundreds of millions of small farmers, enabling a much higher level of productivity and a significant reduction in environmental impact. It is essential to understand that with new technologies, artificial intelligence, and planetary connectivity, the main factor of production, which is knowledge, can be generalized without additional costs. The obstacle became clear with the pharmaceutical corporations' blockade of access to vaccines and their technology during the critical phase of the pandemic. It didn't matter that millions of deaths occurred, or that the vaccines developed essentially resulted from technologies inherited from much broader advances and largely paid for with public funds. Here we return to Thomas Jefferson: ideas should circulate; they are not "property." In science and technology, collaboration is simply more efficient than competition. China brings us innovative examples1.

Opportunities on the horizon: making social networks public

The immense advancement represented by planetary connectivity makes collaborative networked processes within communities possible and practically free of charge, among groups of researchers, cultural creators, online cooperatives, and the like. Being trapped in privatized planetary systems, such as GAFAM, which seek to maximize financial returns by seeking engagement, increasing MDAUs, and encouraging pornography, hatred, and so many manifestations that generate discomfort and anxiety, as well as political manipulation, is absurd, when the technologies that make them possible were developed within the framework of public policies, and cell phones and other equipment are paid for by users.

Streets and avenues are public and free of charge, and their openness to all even allows for the establishment of a store or bakery, which will then charge for services provided. The electromagnetic waves or photons that enable the circulation of the immaterial economy belong to nature. Elon Musk buying Twitter and using the gigantic microphone it represents for his personal political views, reaching hundreds of millions of people, is a radical contradiction with the concept of freedom of information. And without freedom of information, we no longer have other freedoms. The demand monopoly is simply a distortion: in communication, we need to use the dominant medium. The connectivity that today subjects us to the owners of social media, the Zuckerbergs of life, can be transformed into collaborative social processes at the base of society. Where yesterday we sought the socialization of the means of production, today we seek the liberation of access2.

Opportunities on the horizon: recovering the social function of money

Money was once metal, then gold-backed banknotes, then just banknotes, and presently, just information on computers. As an order of magnitude, government-printed money represents only 5% of so-called liquidity. This has allowed, as we have seen, the radical expansion and diversification of forms of exploitation on the planet, even without the need for a productive counterpart. Banks today charge interest on money they don't have; they simply record it in computers and charge. Recovering the social function of money has become a crucial challenge. Even though it's just information on computers, the right to control money allows the financial platforms that banks have become, funds, and asset managers of all kinds today to define where the money goes.

In their case, it goes where it will multiply most, financing timber exports from the Amazon, weapons production, or the expansion of fossil fuel extraction—derivatives—it doesn't matter; what matters is the multiplier effect of money, not the well-being of the economy, the planet, and the population. China sets a maximum interest rate of 12.4%, similar to the 12% we had in our Constitution. Presenting monthly or daily interest is illegal in China: interest is annual. Taxing unproductive financial gains is also essential, as it encourages financial groups to foster the economy. And there are countless examples of communities adopting their own digital currencies: in Brazil, we already have around 180 community development banks with their own currencies. The impressive impact of the Grameen Bank, founded by Muhammad Yunus, also results from innovative mechanisms.

The key is to remember that money, today essentially digital information, must be redirected to finance what is needed. The highly respected giant Lehman Brothers, when it went bankrupt, had lent 31 times more money than the dollars it had in cash. Banco Palmas in Brazil represents a great example of how money can become useful for community development. Let's remember that the money the government transfers to financial groups through the Selic rate on public debt is our tax money, and the money banks lend us with leverage and usurious rates is based on our deposits. The popular expression in the Northeast is "partying with someone else's hat3.”

Opportunities on the horizon: from quantity to quality of growth, beyond GDP

How long will we remain prisoners of Gross Domestic Product (GDP)? Is growth enough as a measure of success? In 1993, the activities of financial intermediaries were added to the GDP calculation as a product, despite representing costs. Marketing, today's gigantic attention industry, is presented as a product, despite representing financial and time costs for society. The BP disaster in the Gulf of Mexico (sic) generated enormous coastal restoration costs in the US, which increased GDP. It is no coincidence that the World Bank, in 1993, considered that the extraction of natural resources represents a reduction in inherited capital for countries, thus decapitalization, not a "product" to be accounted for in GDP.

Numerous studies critical of this distorted accounting already exist, such as the Beyond GDP of the European Union, but we can move forward with the SDGs as references for progress, and adopt practical accounting, such as in Doughnut Economics, organized by Kate Raworth. The concept of sustainability summarizes this vision: ensuring the well-being of all without harming future generations. The battle for the clear definition of objectives and their transformation into concrete goals in each country, in each municipality, in oceanic spaces, and in updated international organizations must be vigorously resumed, today not as an economic curiosity or a concern of some political parties, but as vital challenges for humanity.

As long as communication, the way people inform themselves and construct their worldview and values, is in the hands of those who want to maximize attention, with sex, violence, and the like, instead of focusing on the issues of our survival and real progress, powerlessness will persist. The image of people mired in video games while the disaster deepens is so well represented by the orchestra playing on the Titanic. We must measure what matters: the common good4.

Opportunities on the horizon: convergence around critical challenges

The 17 Sustainable Development Goals, with their 169 more detailed targets, represent an extremely well-developed horizon of what we must achieve as humanity. Looking at the projections for 2030, we will achieve around 20% of the goals. In other words, humanity continues to advance toward planetary disaster, and the point of no return is approaching. But between the now solidly scientifically based vision of the pace of worsening of the situation and the daily lives of citizens everywhere in the world, with people struggling for their jobs and survival, fixated on the short term, there is a huge gap that hinders the transformation of this threatening reality into a political force.

If we add the central dynamic analyzed here, of rentierism, which seeks to maximize returns at any cost and in the short term, dismissing the disastrous impacts of its initiatives as "externalities," the path seems irreversible. The seizure of political power, as in the case of Trump and so many other politicians, represents a new high-tech system of maximizing financial returns and deforming the very institutions that should protect us. It wasn't fascists with outdated ideas who were with Trump at the inauguration of his second term, but rather a powerful new generation of high-tech individuals seeking unscrupulous personal advancement, within an economic, political, and cultural machine that represents a new system. The focal point of our struggle must be the explanation of the mechanisms, the denunciation of the social and environmental impacts, and the mobilization around the prevention of the most pressing humanitarian disasters5.

Is there hope? First of all, we need to understand the new gears of the system we face, in their various articulated dimensions: the digital revolution, the power of immaterial money, the power of planetary information manipulation, the transformation of corporate decision-making, the deformation of what we knew as democracy, a mode of exploitation that sees no problem in the irreversible social and environmental disasters that are deepening. From conversations with scientists in various fields, particularly from the collaborative work I had with Ignacy Sachs, I see that informed people estimate that the ongoing planetary disaster, the slow-motion catastrophe so much discussed, will reach a point where a political upheaval becomes inevitable, just as the global tragedy of World War II enabled international agreements, the creation of the UN, the World Bank, and the International Monetary Fund—a modicum of global governance—to restore common sense. It didn't last, and we're once again on the brink.

This isn't a matter of "pessimism" or academic bravado; the data is there: we have all the necessary information about the depth and pace of the disaster. I actively participated in the processes since the 1992 World Summit in Rio de Janeiro, and all the scientific predictions of the time are now being verified, decades later, even more seriously. How far can the blindness that only sees personal and immediate interests lead us? Rather than waiting for the depth of the converging crises to trigger a shock, I view with hope the launch of initiatives that trigger change, particularly the global fight to eliminate extreme poverty.

The Fome Zero program in Brazil had a powerful mobilizing effect, reorganizing a set of activities involving the government, businesses, social and religious movements: ensuring that children have a glass of milk is powerful and understandable. These are humanitarian goals that go far beyond ideologies and partisan divisions. While we debate grand political visions, let's ensure that everyone has their plate of food. It's impossible not to recall the political actions of President Lula, who understood the power of focusing on agendas whose legitimacy and ethical strength cannot be challenged. His powerful opening speech at the 2025 General Assembly of the UN sums it up. We are, on this small planet, on the edge of survival, close to the point of no return. The path to a new policy will pass through clear ethical and humanitarian dimensions. How long will we remain numb in the face of so many tragedies?

The systemic view of the political economy approach is important. There have always been elites willing to live off the labor of others. These are called modes of production, whether based on slave ownership, or feudalism with the appropriation of land and the labor of serfs, or factories within the framework of capitalism, with the exploitation of workers. They are technically called modes of production; here, I call them modes of exploitation, which is more accurate. And it is particularly true in this world we face today, the knowledge society, which has at its structuring core what we might call the informational mode of production. The appropriation of social surplus, based on surplus value and profit extracted by industrial capitalism, now occurs essentially through rentierism, enrichment without a productive counterpart. Summing up, we are entering the knowledge society, an informational mode of production controlled by platforms, and rentierism as the resulting form of exploitation.

These elements constitute a system structurally different from the industrial capitalism we knew and still study. It's much more than "extractive," "parasitic," or "financial" capitalism—qualifications that point to changes in the system. It constitutes a different system, in that the various factors of production, including agriculture, industry, and services, are drained and organized differently to privilege rentierism. And as a mode of exploitation, which is what it actually represents, it generates inequality and environmental dramas on a much larger and uncontrolled scale. It's not a higher stage of capitalism, but rather a new destructive system that threatens us, and whose mechanisms we need to expose and combat. It is a vital challenge, not in parliamentary or academic, but in a real survival sense.

Notes

1 Jeremy Rifkin, The Zero Marginal Cost Society; Henry Chesbrough, Open Innovation; Lawrence Lessig, Free Culture; CORE, China Open Resources for Education; Open Access; Creative Commons).
2 Eric Raymond, The Cathedral and the Bazaar; Lawrence Lessig, The Future of Ideas; Ostrom&Hess, Understanding Knowledge as a Commons; Wikipedia).
3 Banco Palmas 15 anos; L. Dowbor: Os estranhos caminhos do nosso dinheiro; Muhammad Yunus: Three Zeros; L. Dowbor: Rescuing the Social Function of the Economy; Ellen Brown, Banking on the People; Gerald Epstein, Busting the Bankers’ Club.
4 Kate Raworth, Doughnut Economics; Hazel Henderson, Reforming Global Finance; David Graeber, The Utopia of Rules; Stiglitz Report, Measures of Economic Performance and Social Progress; Patrick Viveret, Reconsidérer la Richesse; L. Dowbor, Making Money Useful: measuring what matters.
5 Mariana Mazzucato, Mission Economy; Jean Ziegler: L’empire de la honte; Tom Malleson, Against Inequality; Nicholas Shaxson, The Finance Curse; L. Dowbor, The Age of Unproductive Capital; L. Dowbor, Rescuing the Social Function of the Economy.