Tag: society

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Sedentary society

The football or soccer world cup, like other sports, used to be an event which mobilized people to become active as well. Many people, particularly the young, joined football teams and clubs or practiced in backyards. The sedentary society has managed to transform this in the 2020s into a seated activity (football soccer seated 2026). In order to capture attention and time spent in a shopping center, itself a good predictor of money spent, the FIFA world cup serves as a means to promote football at any costs. Sit and kick, that is the new lifestyle. You even have your hands free to do something else. Eat and drink, probably. Great, that the football-mania is over in 2026 for a while. Time to get real exercise.

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Internet pain or gain

Billions of people are forced to lose time when clicking through webpages. Instead of the default  to deny cookies, we are forced to “opt out” in most instances to a collection of random data-hungry, largely in-transparent and more or less risky cookies. It could be simple. It just needs a consensus to make the no-cookies rule the default. By such a simple measure the open information part of the internet is strengthened again. All for pay or “pay-with-your-data” offers on the internet would have to make you to confirm your “opt in”, thereby alleviating the burden for search of information. Huge corporate interests that rely on advertising profiles are, of course, an obstacle to such changes, but search engines of the internet would gain importance again before generative AI and AI-agents shall make own search and clicking on cookies denial a different routine again. For the time being we keep wasting our precious time to deny cookies. Just changing the default shall bring back a better internet and the focus on ease of access, diversity of information and better privacy. Make the internet fun again! Choose your browser consciously as well. 

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Magnifica humanitas

With the “Encyclical Letter” entitled “Magnifica humanitas”, Pope LeoXIV puts himself expressively into a long historical tradition of the catholic belief to be not only a religious leader, but also an institution that puts humanitarian values on the top of its agenda. As the catholic church is a globally active institution, which covers the whole life-course of individuals based on defined doctrines, the massive changes that are under way in the field of artificial intelligence asked for some guidelines to frame the church’s understanding of this relatively new “Deus ex machina” of the 21st century. In the Encyclical, there are several mentions with respect to comparable socio-economic developments of the past. In choosing the name of “Leo”, the Pope referred, from the earliest days of his Pontificat, to Leo XIII as a particularly important predecessor for himself. The latter has made his reputation in the Christian Church with the Encyclical “Rerum novarum”, which raised awareness to the risks to humanity with an industrialization and capitalism being pursued at all costs. “Res novae” of our time, which is AI and all its fields of applications have a potential to affect the course of humanity for decades to come. Leo XIV doesn’t condemn it as the devil in machine form, but puts emphasis on the potential of AI to assist us to enhance the “Common good”. This is the task of many, not of only a few, as he refers to in his Encyclical of 2026-5-15.
(Image: Extrait: Saint Augustin, Les Confessions, book 13, chapter 28).

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Electric ships

The transformation of mobility to an all electric mobility has been discussed mainly with regard to a narrow vision of the automotive sector. Beyond land based vehicles like lorries, buses, cars and bicycles or electrification of trains, shipping has been a niche market of the all electric society. The amateurs of silent shipping, sailing and surfing have explored and adopted the electric alternatives for quite some time. The professional ferry boats and river crossings have also opportunities to join the all electric society with a range of ships available for orders like from “Ampereship”. The increasing share of electric fun on water and electricity-propelled ships gives additional drive to the “All-electric-society”. 

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Electricity generation

On a global scale, electricity generation based on wind and solar has been growing quite fast since the year 2010-2024. Wind and solar have outpaced nuclear energy production as well as the stagnant sector of water based energy production. The Global Electricity Review by EMBER provides the statistical evidence for this evolution in 2025.
The interesting evolution arises mainly because countries with a lower level of GDP have invested heavily in solar and wind energy as this form of decentralized energy production does not need heavy investments in network infrastructure. Countries with larger population growth can keep up with electricity generation according to local needs. Local production and consumption become a key in strategies of local development. The finding that households in low-income countries use on average only 1 kWh per day is an amount that 2 small solar panels can already cater for (example image below).
Countries next to the equator have relatively constant days of 12 hours daylight across a whole year. The feasibility of no-carbon sustainable energy production is driving global growth in this sector.

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Electric Dynamo

Mr. Zénabe Gramme born in 1826 has developed the first electronic dynamo, which transforms kinetic energy into electricity. The turning of a wheel is sufficient to produce enough electrical energy to light a bulb or several LEDs. The inventor is honored in front of the museum of the CNAM in Paris (see image below). The reach of this invention has changed the lives of many people until today and for many years to come. The “all electric society” builds on such examples of inventions that become common knowledge only years or decades later. Financing such research and experiments can have enormous benefits for a society or even humanity as a whole.  

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Quantum battery

The first prototype of a Quantum battery has been successfully tested. The Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation CSIRO with corresponding author James Q. Quach published the paper on the “quantum battery tuned for strong light–matter coupling” (Kieran Hymas et al. 2026) open access. Although there have been close to 20 papers on the theory behind quantum charging already, the demonstration as a proof of concept (in business terminology) has been missing so far. The superextensive charging with photons builds upon “a laser pump pulse with bandwidth ~31 nm and resonant with the LP branch induces excitations in the quantum battery” (Kieran Hymas et al. 2026 p.3). Since batteries need not only be charged, but also discharged in a safe and fast way, the prototype demonstrated also this additional functionality.
This is a huge step towards the feasibility of the “All electric society” as the efficient storage which includes fast charging and discharging beyond storage have been a bottleneck in the wider adoption of the “All electric society”.
(Image: old fashioned NiMH battery charging at home)

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Fossil costs

On 2026-3-5 it has become sufficiently clear that the USA and Israel attacks to topple the terror regime in Iran have repercussions across the world markets of fossil fuels. 1973 and 1979 had told us already the lesson that a reliance on fossil fuels like oil and gas, which is produced in only a small number of countries, can disrupt energy supplies drastically. 50 years later we are much less vulnerable to supply shocks due to the stronger reliance on renewable energy sources. The supply shortages are only likely to happen, but energy suppliers are fast to cash in on these expected shortages. Prove of evidence that energy markets are driven more by expectations than actual availability of fuel stocks.
The advertisement of a Belgian recycling company “Powered by sunshine, driven by electricity” is a perfect summary of how to deal with shortages of fossil fuels (MCA recycling in Brussels, Image: former Brussels stock exchange).

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Democracy in Energy

Can there be democracy in energy? Power supply and power distribution are core topics in the theory of democracy as well. One of the foundations of democracy is the separation of power into a legislative, executive and a judicial power. A resilient democracy can assure a sufficient functioning of this fragile “balance of power”. In an energy market or a nation’s energy distribution a comparable balance of (electric or gas) power provision might be envisaged. The costs of parallel infrastructures of power distribution are high, but the resilience of overall power distribution will benefit. Also from a redundancy perspective, more than one distribution system may step in if there are failures or delivery problems with one of the distribution networks. The democracy in energy perspective goes beyond this simple analogy. Power supply as well as power distribution have been concentrated in large public or private enterprises, which might care little in terms of security or reliability of the overall system, not only during armed conflicts. Independent energy production and use, for example through wind and solar energy including batteries have pushed the feasibility of more democracy in energy to new boundaries. These technologies have enabled a new bifurcation and make room for more democracy in energy. It is a rather realistic version of a previously rather utopian vision.

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Social time

What does the „social“ have to do with time. Well, time is a perfect case of a social construction or a fundamentally social construct. The definition of time as „Greenwich mean time“ is nothing but a useful socio-political statement to synchronize time across the world, or previously an imperium. Points in time, as shown on a clock(s), can be helpful to synchronize human behavior. We might want to show up on the same point in time to start or end work. Of course there are thousands of ways in which such synchronization might go awfully wrong. This makes for splendid drama and movies have a long history to capture our attention on this matter. Social expectations, a social, psychological, and even a biological concept in extreme cases (Pavlov effect) make many of us to get a bit itchy, if time is getting short to meet other persons or an expected event is going to happen. A lot of social pressure is transmitted through the ticking away of time. The mechanism to internalize social patterns (for example prayer), via time and the clock, is quite powerful and has been used in movies throughout the history of the cinema. Even the individual endpoint in time is in almost all cases a shared social experience and turns into a kind of socially relevant time. (Take your time to watch The Clock by Christian Marclay).