The fourth industrial revolution
According to author Catherine Dumont, the next revolution will not simply be a paradigm shift, but a new way of conceiving the “human.”
The researcher, anthropologist and historian Catherine Dumont, author of several controversial books published by Cooltura, the publishing arm of Music Brokers, left her work as head of different professorships at universities in the United States to focus on different investigations that are the essential part of her books. In this case, she gave us an interview regarding the information gathered about what is known as the next industrial revolution.
As Catherine Dumont explains in her book, “there is a powerful group that proposes the advent of a ‘fourth industrial revolution’ and it is not about greater digitization, or more developed technology covering other areas, it is about a new paradigm. This group raises the foundations on which that near future will be built, and even proposes accelerating and organizing the transition. This revolution would be, according to its main promoters, a fusion of the biological, digital and physical spheres”.
You have named this as the ‘Fourth Industrial Revolution’?
Ha ha…. Not at all. It is not a concept that I invented. The idea of the fourth industrial revolution was first proposed in 2013 by a group of specialists developing technology guidelines for the German government. But it was undoubtedly Klaus Schwab and the World Economic Forum (WEF) that he chairs, who took the term to another level by talking about this from their platforms. In 2015 they raised it in an article in the influential Foreign Affairs magazine (published by the Council on Foreign Relations), the 2016 meeting of the World Economic Forum in Davos was called Mastering the fourth industrial revolution, and also a book signed by Schwab published that year, entitled simply The Fourth Industrial Revolution. Also in 2016, the first Center for the Fourth Industrial Revolution opened in San Francisco. This center was followed by others in different cities in the United States, India and Japan. It is important to note that it is not mere observers who forecast certain changes in the future. It is about the most powerful, influential and wealthy elite that seeks to promote this paradigm as part of a global scheme.
And how are these changes related to the Covid 19 epidemic?
The coronavirus pandemic was presented by these same organizations as an opportunity to carry out the “great reset” of the world economy. This restart supposes a change in the energy matrix under the narrative of climate change and the need to reduce carbon dioxide emissions, an economic and social system dictated by the fourth revolution, all accompanied by a new political paradigm based on global governance.
That sounds similar to what some conspiracy theories postulate…
It may sound conspiratorial, but it’s not really conjecture. Everything that I exposed in my book was extracted from various interviews, reports, annual meetings and specific events that bear the WEF’s stamp. According to the report “The Global Redesign” of the year 2010, the World Economic Forum explains that we would live in a better world if it were managed by a coalition of multinational corporations, governments and international organizations (UN-style) along with some civil society organizations. The report makes explicit that governments “are no longer the predominantly dominant actors on the world stage” and that “the time has come for a new paradigm of international governance.” These proposals are in line with an idea of world government as described by some of the so-called “conspiracy theories”: replacement of sovereign national governments by a system of world elite government that would be far from being democratic or including voting and participation. of the citizen.
What is this revolution about and why is it the fourth?
As described by Klaus Schwab in his book The Fourth Industrial Revolution, we are facing a “technological revolution that is blurring the boundaries between the physical, digital and biological spheres”. Schwab emphasizes that this is not just a deepening of the third industrial revolution, a greater presence of the Internet or a matrix that will change the economy. It is a much more profound change, which implies a fusion of the different spheres and which deserves to be understood as an industrial revolution in its own right. This fusion really implies a new type of society, but especially it proposes a reconfiguration of what we understand as a “human being”. It will no longer be a question of what people do and how they do it, but of how their humanity will be altered when technology stops being on the outside and starts operating from within the organism. Regardless of whether or not we agree with the guidelines of the most powerful in the world, there are some aspects that we need to discuss as soon as possible, because they already affect us. Privacy, for example, information management and cyber-security. And we need a clear regulatory framework regarding the limits that we will place on the manipulation of bodies, be it by incorporating chips or devices, or by manipulating DNA.
Could you give a concrete example of how it would affect our privacy?
We usually don’t worry too much when, for example, we talk about how much we would like to go to Ibiza on vacation and on the same day we start receiving offers for flights or hotels on that island. Yes, we say, they listen to us on the phone, but it’s only to sell us what we want. If I am a common citizen and I have nothing to hide, what does it matter to be spied on. Somehow we naturalize these mechanisms that invade our privacy and minimize their importance. It is because we still have the ability to review all the security of our devices, disable microphones and cameras, guarantee more privacy and even erase part of our traces and information. However, when the devices are incorporated into our body and are controlled remotely, it is likely that we will no longer have this possibility. When all devices are connected to the cloud, when our homes and clothes have sensors that continuously provide information, we may no longer be able to choose whether or not to provide that information. When the geolocation device is on our wrist, and our identity is digital, it is likely that whoever is in control knows our exact location full time. And once again, some might think: if I’m a common citizen, and I’m not escaping the law, what does it matter if they know how many coffees I drink a day or where I am at all times? The problem is never the technology itself, the data, but the use to which it is put. If there was coffee rationing, to give an almost ridiculous example, and there was a ban on drinking more than two coffees a day, the moment we drank the third cup we could be directly fined, or they could come looking for us, or even worse, we could be punished with an electrical or chemical shock. Sounds conspiratorial? Does it seem fanciful? You choose. I leave it to your discretion.