Young people will destroy everything that breaks their balls

Journalist: proposes that there was a very disruptive youth in the ’60s and ’70, which seeks to build from the collective, while now the thought is individual. You are a public official, how do you get politics from a generalized worldview of individualism?

Damián Arabia: That is the heart of the book. I believe that transformation, mainly with social networks and technology in general, led us to hypersegmentation and hyperindividualization. The spaces of belonging and the identity senses were lost. Before there was a sense of belonging of a universe that was much smaller. when the universe expands so much, what happens to you is that you can suddenly link with one and the other. I believe that what is going to happen, and what personally tried to enhance as a public official, is to discover the new identities and meeting spaces. It will have to accept them. If instead of making a denial of that, you accept it in the difference of what you believe, we will find ourselves back, but fully and completely respecting the other in its existence.

Q.: In his book he marks this intuition that collective consciousness is in disuse and that what is working, in terms of representativeness, is the authentic. How do you put the authentic? For digital necessarily?

D.A.: Of course the digital is a large channel, but the book is also a large channel, where many people feel very identified. And that is because he is sincere and genuine. I speak of the generation truth because what it does is detect that what you are saying is authentic and although you can disagree is saying sincerely what you think and this generation is very sensitive to that authenticity and very refractory to the lie, the trout already imposed. With Monday’s diary, what happened in the 2023 election? They won the most genuine candidates, those who seemed to be what they were.

Q.: In the issue of representativeness, there was a campaign at a time when the PRO was the recipient of being “the old picked up”, how do they face that challenge of renewal in terms of authenticity?

D.A.: I think the campaign, fundamentally, ended up losing for a very caresting and forced thing. Bullrich, who had freshness and the genuine very similar to Milei, won the step naturally added to the sector he lost and curiously, my hypothesis is that far from enhancing it was like a lead lifeguard.

What is happening in the world in general is that it has lost the sense of traditional representation and the falls of the party. Before you made a career within a political party, you went up and growing inside an elite, with which you had to look good. That elite, which in general were two games or maximum three, offered to the citizenship the food they had already previously digested, then the company elected between a limited electoral offer. Now that situation does not exist anymore, because fundamentally technology changed us the mode of consumption, in real and electoral life.

There are now 17 candidates for legislators in the city of Buenos Aires. That fragmentation tells us that the order changed, because now orders the demand, it does not order the supply: if a specific political party does not offer me exactly what I want, I look for a new political party; And if that party does not exist, it will exist because the demand will exist and someone will know how to meet.

Q.: In this logic of fragmentation there may be more authenticity when expressing yourself but also the difficulty of finding consensus and accepting contradictions.

D.A.: Yes, because the system we have is an outdated system. Not only Argentina, but virtually all Western democracies. We have a problem of the representation system and at some point we have to update governance technology. And why do I say this? Because everything has been updated: the way we ask for food, we supply, move, work or the way we link. If all technologies changed, why the technology we govern is still the same? How much more will politics last maintain the methods of the last century?

I think that, for example, parliamentary systems in general tend, for coalitionist representation, to a better response for this problem of fragmentation. In the US, the large majority do not feel republican or feel democrats, but they are channeled in there. On the other hand, in the European Union you find coalitionist systems that are more ductile, which meet the new definitions and new concerns that have more to do with these senses of hypersegmented representation.

Q.: It was not clear to me how, in this logic of hypersegmentation and authenticity, you think the places of growth within your space, in this sense of more direct representation.

D.A.: I found the challenge of writing coming out of the juncture and Argentine politics, and that is a challenge because all the time you have to return to day to day. He probably does not have an answer to that question and the book does not give it either, because it tends to tension the current system of representation that Argentines have and therefore to all the political spaces that are in Argentina.

The future of the state

Q.: There is an example that takes from when a transport application is installed in the cities and states of the districts decide to make their own state application to somehow absorb all those drivers and compete. It is proposed as a meaningless career because the State will always come from the back, because the private has developed and proven it. So, does the State take place to compete in the platform economy?

D.A.: If always by nature the market was more efficient and faster, today the difference is directly abysmal. The state is heavy and slow, and that does not necessarily make it negative, but you have to know because today the speed of changes and information has directly made it almost obsolete and there is something that all the time must be demanding that you act and ask you to accelerate.

You say the case of the application of cars but I also quote the case of fires in Corrientes, when Santiago Mararatea promoted a collection. There was not even the situation who really gave better response, but civil society was identified with someone who at least gave it, because the slowness and heaviness of the response of the states, and was not exclusive of a political party because there were different spaces involved, they made society more represented with a youtuber that he found a way of collaborating with the problem immediately.

I think that indeed what is coming in the world in general are less states, because the problem they have is that technology undressed its slowness and bureaucracy. If we want the State as a survive tool, what we have to do is think about what things do have indeligible faculties and try to concentrate on those to make them as efficient as possible. For example, from my point of view, you have to sustain the issue linked to security and defense, or the undelegable faculty of legislation generation and apply the law.

Q.: What happened with the case of Mararatea, was also seen in Bahía Blanca, because people wanted to give an answer with something that was sensitized to what he had at hand. The State could not reconcile that feeling, and here in Buenos Aires it was a church that offered the answer and brought together donations.

D.A.: Well, I also quote the case of floods in Valencia. Therefore: eye with that answer that these kids sign often as super individualistic and that they don’t care about anything. That is a lie; They are the first to move and are the first to mobilize before tragedies, but they want to do it honestly without political flags. They do not want to do it through groups that hide things that in the name of noble causes, which behind that there is an interest. They want to do it sincerely from their place and for the causes they feel. It is there where you meet the other, accepting that they may not be interested in the same things as you, and that logic is what will allow us to find new spaces of identity and belonging to respect with the other.

Q.: In the book there is a notion of society that could be said of post state, where there must be reforms without intermediaries, and institutions are precisely this intermediation that one votes. How do you imagine it?

D.A.: I imagine it but I don’t answer it because I would be bold. It is a book about questions that seeks to provoke from the title; It is an analysis and a proclamation. I like it because sincerely without belonging to this generation, I feel more identified with them than with mine and that excites me. I think they are intuitively finding places to let everything that helps them find them, but that they will destroy everything that breaks their balls and that they feel that they invad them. So perhaps more than the post state, what we are talking about is smaller and less invasive states, which are indelgable functions. Everything else will be community spaces where each one between and comes out voluntarily.

One of the few places that effectively survive this mass destruction of identity spaces is football, and this is because for 90 minutes in a stadium they coexist with thousands of people and at no time do you ask the next door if he is a Jewish, if he is a Catholic, if he is gay or if he is heterosexual: if your team puts a goal, you hug him as if it were your best friend and when he ends at his home. What are the two keys there? There is a hypersegmented identity, but that is respected in the difference in such a way that you do not even ask it. To the extent that everything that invades our individuality is rejecting it, we will be able to build new institutions purely and exclusively dedicated to generating that framework of coexistence with the other.

Q.: It can be anti intuitive, but you are a deputy and be responsible for legislating, beyond your deregulatory imprint. Is a regulatory framework for these new technologies? There are many artificial intelligence projects, for example.

D.A.: I am a legislator who likes to legislate to repeal, because I think part of the problem is that you can never take speed with so many obstacles. I think there is a self -reflect that we have the legislators that is that before something we want to create a regulation for doubts, and when we do not understand something it is when we get worse, instead of first trying to find out how ecosystems work.

In the case of artificial intelligence, the regulatory experience of the European Union is fateful and destructive: while the United States and China are head to head, the European Union stayed a thousand years ago by hyperregulatory legislation. So you first have to let the market run and then generate normative frameworks that give great strokes of game rules. What you have to regulate are the actions that are used with that tool, but not the tool itself because they will happen and will do it outside the law. It is not that by regulating artificial intelligence we will suddenly have better results at all, but that you are going to suffocate the sector and you will not allow it to develop; Good uses will be left behind and bad uses will proliferate outside the law and you will not be able to distinguish the useful of the useless, you will enter a logic that is not very virtuous.

“I don’t break my balls,” from Damián Arabia