The immediate future: Challenges and scales

Abstract

The media obscures information, and a surplus of information with no hierarchy hinders knowledge. The Information Society is not leading us to the Knowledge Society, and without knowledge there can be no future planning. This is disturbing at a time of crisis; hence the need to distinguish categorical challenges from anecdotal alarms and to place all information within a matrix with the appropriate topology and scale. What is and is not a challenge, using a sound sustainability criterion? Some of the most important challenges, and the ones which truly deserve our attention, are climate change, energy depletion, genetic erosion, the consequences of bioengineering, the demographic explosion and migrations, economic globalization, outsourcing or industrial migration, the shaping of the Knowledge Society, the rising banalization of culture, and the rise in fundamentalisms; in short, the exhaustion of the industrial model that has prevailed in thinking-at least Western thinking- over the 19th and 20th centuries. The scalar dimension, in space or in time, is different for each of these matters. The difficulty of identifying either one and of placing both within a hierarchy is accentuated by the challenge of scaling them properly: Which dimension and spatial transcendence do the challenges have? And at what moment in time are they expressed? Sound management of the different scales of the different challenges is a challenge in itself, perhaps the greatest of all.