Abstract

The time has come to stop thinking of the future as a simple projection of the past. The technological revolution has brought us into a new ecosystem. Let’s leave the homo faber in the tool shed and ask ourselves again – who are we? where do we come from? where are we going? The web is the largest repository that humanity has hitherto developed, and this explains the importance of the changes it has produced. Suffice it to say that the number of connected devices is 23 billion: more than three times the world’s population. This digital connection produces every day a greater number of socially relevant objects than all the factories in the world: a huge amount of acts, contacts, transactions and traces encoded in 2.5 quintillion bytes. The number of signs available for manipulation and combination becomes immeasurably higher than in any previous culture – and this changes everything. That is why understanding the true nature of the web is the first step towards understanding the ongoing revolution, which generates a new world, a new capital, a new humanity. Indeed, a dochumanity.