From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
What is worrying is not the rise of multinational corporations, but the rise of social media. Facebook has 2.5 billion participants and Russia was able to use Facebook as a device to penetrate and disrupt the American electoral process in 2016.
We don't currently have the accountability mechanisms in our digital life that we do in our physical life. Physical society has had tens of thousands of years to build cultures and norms, but we haven't yet figured out how this works online.
New media conducive to fostering participation can indeed increase freedoms… just as the printing press, the postal service, the telegraph and the telephone did before.
Architecture has the power to democratize space - to create environments where all people, regardless of their background, can participate in civic life.
The neo-liberal capitalist mindset has also been a huge contributor to loneliness. Since the 1980s, alongside Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, a new form of economics came to the fore which enshrined the pursuit of self-interest over the pursuit of collective good. That generated the mindset we see today- me first, dog-eat-dog, greed is good… that inevitably begets a world where people feel less connected to each-other, more atomised, and many ended up feeling marginalised and unseen.
Transport, natural disasters, the distribution of resources, globalisation – engineers and inventors have the traits and skillset to solve the problems the world faces today. And therefore have the potential to impact the world and economy.
I wasn't just fighting for myself. I was fighting for an entire country and millions of fans around the world who believe in me. That is why I will always give 100% in and out of the ring.
People who haven't benefitted from decades of neo-liberal prosperity are right in their assessment that democracy does work for certain people, but not for them.
Many of these, I think, would have moral status, meaning it would matter how they are treated for their own sake—not just because an owner might be upset if you destroyed a data center, but because they would be moral patients in the same sense that humans, pigs, dogs, or other sentient creatures are.
I want to take African rhythm and put it into classical music, European jazz, and symphonies. I want people to come together from all over the place, through music. That's my legacy.
I think that inequality within societies and between regions has become a key cause for conflict, exacerbated by rapid information dissemination, as people are now more aware of inequalities.
Economies are built on free flow of capital within the market, which drives trade. Business and individuals need debt (finance) to invest, develop, trade and grow. This is a fundamental truth of how markets operate.