The digital revolution changes what the issues are that we must concentrate on: not just inequality, environmental dramas, and the financial chaos, but the power structure that generates them.

The path is clear: we need a society that is economically viable but also socially just and environmentally sustainable. For the first time in human history, what we produce is amply sufficient to ensure a dignified and comfortable life for everyone. This is essentially the result of scientific and technological advances, not of "markets." The scale of the tragedies we face, therefore, is not strictly an economic issue, a lack of resources, but rather a matter of political and social organization. We also know what needs to be done. With the SDGs (Sustainable Development Goals), we have so many studies and research, and we have all the necessary technologies to face the challenge: explosive inequality, with so many useless fortunes, and environmental destruction, which have been rightly presented as a slow-motion catastrophe.

The deepening of tragedies under these conditions becomes understandable precisely because of the mechanism we saw above: a decision-making process that prioritizes maximizing rentierism at the top, regardless of the impacts on inequality and the environment. The reduction of wealth taxes, the halting of international transaction tax negotiations, the strangulation of so many countries with foreign debt, the reorientation of governments and large banks toward increasing fossil fuel financing, the planetary loss of biodiversity, widespread water pollution, the plastics invasion, and so many absurdities are all part of a logic in which maximizing short-term rentier returns prevents us from taking the necessary measures to face the deepening catastrophe.

It is an age of impotence. It is important to understand that the world's decision-makers are aware of the challenges, so much so that they proclaim everywhere their adherence to ESG (Environment, Social, Governance), but they are trapped in the system, precisely because it is a system, a challenge far greater than individual stupidity. The problem is not Trump, but the forces that allow him to wield power, with similar tendencies in many parts of the world. Algorithm-guided profit maximization, instead of systemic optimization of overall results.

The deep structural transformations in how society is organized also change our views on how to fix it. Socializing the means of production could be the path to social change when the economic system is based on individual owners, the capitalists. Presently the production units, in different areas, are under the control of the absentee owners of world-scale financial corporations, with an overall rent-extraction system through online control of interest rates and dividends, while access to information has become a global digital manipulation network. We do feel helpless in the face of such wide-scale challenges, but a key issue emerges: the immaterial economy world, which results from the digital revolution, is based on access to the digits, which can have their economic and political sign changed from negative and extractive to positive and inclusive.

When 9000 drivers in New York got tired of the Uber extractive system, they created a collaborative platform among themselves and simply cut the Uber rent out. It may be a ridiculous example, but it is symbolic of the fact that the immaterial economy can have its economic plus/minus symbols inverted. We need not necessarily take over costly machinery, but we may change whom it serves. What we used to call class struggle has changed. We must reset our focus.

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 or physical products, 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 called it the "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 or very limited.

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 were 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 examples, along with so many open access initiatives. Wikipedia is a powerful example of intelligent online collaboration. Wikinomics brings us so many practical solutions1. The key issue is that knowledge has to be rescued as a commons. All my books are online free of charge, but the printed versions keep selling.

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 even encouraging pornography, hatred, and so many manifestations that generate discomfort and anxiety, as well as political manipulation, is absurd: 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. An Elon Musk buying Twitter and using the gigantic megaphone 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 do not access 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 for society as a whole2.

Where yesterday we sought the socialization of the means of production, or the reduction of the power of “robber barons” and trusts, today we must seek the liberation of access to the communication infrastructure. Practical business offers based on the internet can be charged, according to the provided service value, but not access to digital highways itself. Streets and roads are costly to build, but we use them for free. It works better and stimulates productive initiatives. We must be able to freely navigate on the waves. We need both digital inclusion and access to public communication.

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 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, along with shadow banks, funds, and asset managers of all kinds, 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, or indebtedness—it doesn't matter; what matters is the multiplier effect of money. This is how the algorithms are instructed, not the well-being of the economy, the planet, and the population. The financial system was once used to fund productive activities; presently, it drains them.

China sets a maximum interest rate of 12.4%, similar to the 12% we had in our Constitution in Brazil. Presenting monthly or daily interest is illegal in China: interest is annual. As the interest rate you will pay when taking a loan from a bank is around 2%, it pays more to invest in production than speculating on financial products.

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 local Sparrkassen in Germany are another example.

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 Brazilian Selic rate on the 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 hat".

From quantity to quality of growth

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 generated enormous coastal restoration costs in the US, which increased its 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 initiative in 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 Raworth3. 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 common spaces like the oceans, 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 communications, the way people inform themselves and construct their worldview and values, are 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 good, in its different dimensions. This is much beyond "growth." Measuring what matters, and making it public.

Decentralized collaborative platforms

The place we worked used to be the main social interaction space. The fragmentation, diversification, and robotization of so many activities in the workplace have weakened both the strength of unions and the feeling of social solidarity. The larger family structure as the basis of society has also eroded. In 1960 the “American way of life” we saw in so many movies, with the house, the car, and the kids mowing the lawn, represented 42.2% of the American households, a model for the world. Presently it represents only 17.9% of households, with most people living either alone or as women alone with kids or also unmarried couples.

The fragmentation of attention, so powerfully built and expanded by the attention industry, also contributes to the erosion of sociability. The kids are playing much less, so many adults spend hours with their necks bent over smartphones; so much anxiety. On the other hand, urbanization has become the basis of social organization. In Brazil, we reached 87% of the urban population. This neighborhood proximity to where we live opens new opportunities for conviviality, in particular with the potential of local collaborative platforms.

Instead of being manipulated through the global platforms, the ease and low cost of generating collaborative platforms open space for a revival, digital neighborhoods of sorts, and even political and economic empowerment as integrated local development initiatives can prosper. Cities throughout the world have abandoned Uber and organized local cooperative platforms; it is so simple to build a local network. Barcelona and so many cities give us rich examples.

The same technologies that manipulate us can be appropriated from the bottom up to organize local complementarities, and Trebor Scholtz’s Own This: How Platform Cooperatives Help Workers Build a Democratic Internet presents so many alternatives4. The top-down social media giants’ control is understandable; they have the money to buy Twitter and manipulate millions, but rescuing the huge opportunities of local collaborative platforms can help us rebuild sociability, inverting the political top-down control trend through horizontal networking. Time to rescue the connectivity potential.

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 and scientifically based understanding 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 political force5.

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 self-destructive 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 disasters.

Notes

1 Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams. Wikinomics. Penguin Books, 2006.
2 Tim Berners-Lee. This is for everyone: the unfinished story of the World Wide Web. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, New York, 2025.
3 Kate Raworth. Doughnut Economics. Chelsea Green Publishing, 2017.
4 Trebor Scholtz. Own This: platform cooperatives. Verso, London, 2023.
5 George Monbiot. How did we get into this Mess?. Verso, London, NY, 2016.