Back during the gold rush, there was a sudden explosion of inequality. In the mining towns, some owned concessions, business licenses and strategic assets – and these were the ones who made the most money. Everyone else (especially the miners) just got poorer. It’s called the “Cantillon effect” and it explains the deep imbalance between the distribution of wealth there where it cycles the most. Yesterday like today. In the XXI century just like in the days of the boomtowns, expansionary monetary policies, quantitative easing and the emission of public debt have all contributed to the erosion of monetary value. This has deepened social inequality, especially in the Silicon Valley – which appears as a frontier of technological innovation, but which looks more and more like our tragic and unfair future.

This November, the USA will elect its president. The markets may seem to portray an image consistent growth, with unemployment under 4% and the best markets in recent memory, but the victory of the democrats is anything but certain. The Biden administration managed the post-Covid phase with a new course and by injecting trillions of dollars into strategic national production. But the situation is fragile. There’s an America that’s suffering from high inflation, and that hasn’t been able to compensate by investing. Many Americans have more debt than ever, and mortgage rates are rising along with the price of homes. This is an America that struggles and which is afraid, which stopped dreaming, and may well drag the world down into its own nightmare.

According to a report from ARK – invest (the monetary fund which analyses the frontiers of innovation), we can currently pinpoint seven mega-trends on the future that we’re facing already. Artificial intelligence, robotics, electric mobility, space industry, crypto-currencies and cutting edge personalized medicine – based on RNA and genomic editing. These trends are groundbreaking, and they’ll potentially be able to revolutionize our lives. The seventh trend is the collection of all the dangers we see in exponential vertical acceleration – without brakes nor regulation – the rise of the new privileged, the effect on occupation, environmental devastation and even the existential risk for humanity due to the rise of thinking machines. Tomorrow is uncertain, always on the cusp between the bright futures harked by the techno-optimists, and the dire predictions of the more cautious “dystopians”.

Architecton is a documentary by Russian director Kossakovsky, presented at the latest edition of the International Berlin Film Festival. The film is a strong critique against construction in concrete – a material which tragically represents our modern day: short-lived, perishable, polluting and unsustainable. Architecton invites us to find another way, to push back against the pervasive rhetoric of greenwashing, to embrace the reasons of true ecology, to use durable and sustainable materials, to point on circularity, to redefine the relationship between man and nature.

Water is the most commonly exchanged resource in the world. The “virtual market” of blue gold is four-hundred times that of petrol. But the water crisis is one of the main emergencies of our time, especially since technological acceleration requires a constant use of water. For every twenty prompts given to ChatGPT, we consume half a liter. In order to train the third generation of GPT, it took 700 thousand liters. The revolution of artificial intelligence requires enormous amounts of H₂O to cool down the intricate web of servers. Readily available water reserves have halved since 1970, and at this rate they may run dry by 2040…

A few days ago, a Delaware court suspended the payment of Tesla’s compensation package to founder Elon Musk, which was originally decided in 2018. The package was worth about 56 billion dollars, which is unprecedented even for the fantastical world of tech companies. And this sanctions the entrance of capitalism into the age of digital feudalism. The seven tech giants - Apple, Microsoft, Google Alphabet, Amazon, Nvidia, Tesla and Meta – form a new aristocracy that demands absolute authority and is even challenging States. On the other side, we have the American antitrust authority – or Federal Trade Commission – with the young thirty-five-year-old Lina Kahn at the helm. The match has just begun, although the first few rounds seem to have gone to the Magnificent Seven.

Moscow, 26 September 1983. It’s a few minutes past midnight, when lieutenant colonel Stanislav Petrov looks the apocalypse right in the eyes. On the screens connected to OKO - a satellite system which signals the launch of nuclear warheads from the USA – five missiles have appeared on their way towards the Soviet Union. Protocol requires calling the Kremlin to prepare a counterstrike. But Petrov doesn’t believe in the attack and instead decides to report a system error. A few minutes later, he’s proven correct. The machines misread some weather patterns. The decision of one human has saved all of humanity, but what would happen if one day Artificial Intelligence should be in the place of Petrov?

“Rebuilding Trust in the Future»” was the theme of the latest edition of the World Economic Forum, held like every year in Davos. This title immediately sounded vague when considering our present time of constant crises and the earthquake that is shaking globalization itself. Despite this, the meeting continued to show its “good side”: a cavalcade of abstract rhetoric, incapable of grasping the challenges of our time – from the environmental emergency to the crisis of global production chains. But the Forum has two faces, the second of which reveals a beehive crawling with private agreements and exchanges of favors between companies and states. The ambivalence of Davos is a perfect mirror of our present, of its deepest contradictions and of the inactivity, which restricts any attempt at change.

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a new danger for global markets. The raids of the Houthi, a Yemenite rebel militia supported by Iran, have blocked one of the arteries of global commerce: the Red Sea route on which 12 percent of global wares and about one third of containers travel. Several shipping giants have suspended the passage of ships in the area. The price of oil is rising, while the costs of transport between Asia and Europe are soaring. The latest emergency is worsening the crisis of international balance in the frame of a general trend that, along with the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic, is turning the twenties of this century into the age of de-globalization.

Looking at the main financial indicators, the situation at the start of 2024 looks better than the most optimistic predictions. Inflation is dropping, American growth is constant, unemployment is stable under 4%. The equity sector and Big Tech shares are all booming. The markets are telling the fairy tale of the best of all possible worlds, but reality is quite different. On our planet Earth, we can see the shadows of a looming third world war and a ruinous environmental crisis, while the assets of globalization are in tatters. Finance looks more and more like a magician’s mirror, distorting perspectives and tricking the eye to guarantee the perpetuation of the present state of affairs.