This summer hasn’t come with the traditional slowing down of the news. You really have to force yourself to disconnect. When you do, you realise not only that this is good for your health, but it also gives you the chance to reconnect with yourself and start considering the value of all that you do, and of all that you are. This is the moment when you recover your identity.

Identity and values

Our identities and our individual values belong to us, and they are deeply rooted in our human experiences. Society has recognised some fundamental rights like privacy that protect our freedom and individual existence. Fundamental rights are declared in constitutions, and they can even be enforced. Nevertheless, we don’t think of those rights so much these days. We just take them for granted, and only protest when they are abused.

Moreover, since the arrival of the Internet in our lives, we have been fascinated by the wonderful possibilities for our communications, and in our daily lives we have become actually dependent on the Internet without considering any of those fundamental rights. This explains how fundamental rights have been abused by the big tech companies like Google and  Facebook with no opposition from their vulnerable users.

Time to wake up!

But it is time to wake up and realise the situation. Not only for ourselves, but for the next generations as well. You can watch “The Great Hack”  (Netflix documentary), or have a look at Project Veritas videos, including Google plans to hack U.S. presidential elections… Politics are revealing the problem of manipulation. Our political opinions, our ways of thinking, our preferences and choices are in the hands of a few technological giants we use in our everyday life. But so is our digital identity, our data, our privacy and security.

In such a situation as this one, we might feel some despair, but actually we have the chance to fix the Internet and help build a better web. There is Life after Google, as George Gilder explains in his great book. There are great decentralised computer networks designed so that you can keep in control of your identity, your data, your privacy and your security. Go to the link to understand why we need a decentralised Internet (a 2 minute video by Ryan Shea, co-founder of Blockstack).

I am standing

Now, because I am really concerned about fundamental rights protection (including authors’ intellectual property rights) in the upcoming Internet 3.0, I have become a proud evangelist of Blockstack in Madrid. In 2016 when I first heard about Blockchain technology, I discovered Blockstack, and I started following the progress of their platform for applications that protect your rights.

Moreover, in the next season I am looking to foster discussions and bring awareness on Fundamental Rights in these digital times. Because I think this is the moment to stand for next generations and their free use of the Internet.

As an author I have devoted many years of my life to stand for the Arts and Music as precious tools for human education. Today I cannot undervalue the power of new technologies in the future education of free human beings. Hopefully, I will retake my work as an author at some point, and I will be back to some unfinished projects. But now I feel that my best contribution for the future of education is participating in the construction of a better Internet, respectful with our fundamental rights and freedoms.

Thank you for reading and have a nice time!

Georgina García-Mauriño –LinkedIn–

“Only Art that is free is vital, only creativity which is free is joyful”.  (Sergei Rachmaninoff and 28 other musicians’open letter to the newspaper Nashi dni, February 2nd 1905).