<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - changes]]> 10 <![CDATA[Crisis and crisis]]> In November 2008, I finished writing this introduction for an article for the magazine Lluc with the same title, which was published in issue 867 of January-March 2009: “Not all crises have the same etiology. There are conjunctural crises, which once the storm has passed, disperse and the sun shines again. However, there are true tsunamis, that devastate everything in their path and require a significant task of reconstructing the economic, social, and institutional architecture that orders our lives. I understand that the current crisis is not a conjunctural crisis, but rather that we are facing a true structural crisis or 'crisis of regulation' that will change our social imaginary, productive structures, and institutions on a national and international scale”.I sensed that important changes were coming, but not on the scale of what has happened to us in these last seventeen years in terms of the impact of recent technological revolutions: intensive use of the internet by a new generation of mobile phones and the creation of new applications to manipulate public opinion on an unthinkable scale, social polarization and, above all, since covid and the emergence of generative AI, an enormous concentration of scientific, economic and political power in very few hands, which would make Marx himself pale with his law of the concentration of capital.The first major technological revolution was that of agriculture, 10,000 years BC. According to Cristian Canton, associate director of the Barcelona Supercomputing Center, the time until the massive social impact of the agricultural revolution took between 1000 and 4000 years. In terms of a technological system, it encompasses slavery and feudalism where wage labor does not exist and a few individuals concentrate maximum economic, political, and social power through the exclusive ownership of land and labor. Throughout this period until the modern age, writing and money were invented.With modern science and the Renaissance, Humanity moved towards the industrial revolution over a period that represents less than a tenth of the time it took for the agrarian revolution to achieve its massive impact. This period introduces revolutionary economic changes with the emergence of wage labor, capital accumulation, and leaving land rents in a marginal place. Not to mention the political and social sphere with the introduction of parliamentary democracies and the welfare state, without forgetting the scientific and technological advances: vaccination, printing press, aviation, electricity, railways, automobiles, telephones, antibiotics, nuclear energy, among others.And now we enter another major systemic change with generative AI, which has its precedent in the emergence of the web and the intensive use of the internet for more than twenty years now. Why is it a systemic change? Because the internet and its massive use to generate value through generative AI are at the base of the internet of things, robotization, financialization and tertiarization of the economy, and the geostrategy and security of states. And now all this is in a few hands that want to control everything, that is, power in capital letters and on a planetary scale. It is a revolutionary change that has come upon us suddenly at a surprising speed, less than ten percent of what it took to implement capitalism. As The Economist says in its latest issue of May 16: “Finally, humans could, like horses in the age of the car, become uneconomic. Incomes could go mostly or entirely to the owners of capital, who then spend it on things made by AI and robots using natural resources they monopolize. This dystopian possibility is behind the warnings from Silicon Valley that state intervention, and perhaps a Universal Basic Income (UBI), will be necessary”.It is not surprising that for this reason Pope Leo XIV signed, on Friday, May 15, his first encyclical, titled Magnifica Humanitas, on the protection of the human person in the era of artificial intelligence, where it is affirmed that the technological revolution of AI represents a social transformation of a magnitude comparable to that of the second industrial revolution.The dilemma is this: either a democratic way out of generative AI control by society and a UBI is proposed, or we can fall into capitalist neo-feudalism, that is, into a new barbarism where democracy and the control of capital and labor will once again fall into a few hands on a global scale.

]]> <![CDATA[Veterinarians return to the offensive against the drug law after a year of implementation]]>

The veterinarians of the Balearic Islands They continue to demand changes to the new regulations governing prescription medications. Despite the modifications made by the Spanish Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food, almost a year after the regulations came into effect, the Official College of Veterinarians of the Balearic Islands (COVIB) believes they are "not enough" and that "work must continue to fully adapt the law to the realities of clinical practice." Therefore, COVIB will support the demonstration called for this Wednesday in Madrid by the Veterinary Professional Organization (OCV) to highlight the ongoing discontent within the sector. Attendees will demand a real reduction in the bureaucratic burden of the system that controls veterinary antibiotic prescriptions (Presvet), greater flexibility in the use of antimicrobials based on clinical criteria, and a review of the medication transfer mechanism, among other demands.

]]> <![CDATA[Mallorca in transition]]> Sometimes there are books that are ahead of their time, or that, without being ahead of their time, capture the spirit of an entire era. They can even help us imagine future, or better, ones. This is the feeling I had with this novel. Monument, by Alba Noguera (Palma, 1997), winner of the VIII Antoni Vidal Ferrando Prize and published by the Calongí label Adia Edicions.

]]> <![CDATA[The world is a bad gag]]> There was a brief gag from the series The young people in which Balowski enters a shop and says something like, "Good morning, is this a cheese shop?"; "No," replies the shopkeeper. "We've ruined the gag," the first one concludes. It was an absurd and delirious scene, but since we live in times where absurdity and delirium have taken over reality, perhaps it's time to accept that this running gag Life is losing all its charm.

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