Does teamwork really work? Part 3

By Gonzalo López Martí – Creative director, etc. / LMMiami.com

• Oddly enough, as much as our culture pays lip service to teamwork, we tend to end up paying groupie tribute to illuminated individuals.
• It is not uncommon in the marketing & advertising racket, for instance, to let one creative director take all the credit for a successful campaign in which dozens of people took part.
• Happens in all walks of life.
• It is an ancestral human atavism.
• Our brittle brains seem to be wired that way.
• The groupie gene in our DNA is a very powerful one.
• Exhibit 1: the cult of Steve Jobs.
• An alleged egomaniac who, by some accounts, made a habit of stealing industrial secrets, taking credit for other people’s ideas and screwed all his business partners throughout his career.
• As did Mark Zuckerberg (allegedly).
• Vulnerable self-esteem.
• Too much to prove, apparently.
• Hey, don’t say that, there’s plenty proof of teamwork in modern life.
• Democracy is teamwork.
• Sure.
• An awful lot of folks, however, don’t seem to grasp the concept of democracy.
• They believe it is elected autocracy.
• Dictatorship by acclamation.
• In Latin America, of all places, there is indeed an organized attempt at bringing democracy to, well, democracy.
• It is called Partido de la Red (loosely translated as “political party of the network”).
• It is supposed to use social media to bring massive, real-time participation and transparency to the smoke-filled backrooms of legislative horse trading.
• They are sorta based on that old aphorism claiming that “all that is necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing”
• If you are not part of the solution, you are a part of the problem.
• Hitler didn’t try to occupy Europe all by himself.
• An awful lot of Germans did his bidding or, at the very least, looked the other way.
• The Partido de la Red’s still unaccomplished intention is to appoint elected officials and lawmakers who will only do what constituents on social media tell them to do.
• Politicians without personal opinions.
• Conduits of public opinion devoid of any vestige of bias.
• A great idea in theory.
• Not too sure about how it’d play out in real life.
• Imagine a world in which everybody is giving their opinion about everything all the time.
• No law would ever get approved.
• Nothing would ever get done.
• When I say nothing I mean nothing as in nobody would water their plants.
• Or feed their pets.
• Or take showers.
• Or work.
• Essentially what happens to people on Twitter.
• A never-ending debate over the most inconsequential topics.
• Then again, this might be the solution for the future of mankind.
• A world in which all labor is taken care of by machines.
• In such a scenario, we will need little menial jobs to keep our sanity.
• We will need distractions.
• Bickering over mundane, irrelevant minutiae might be a way to find meaning for our lives.
• Eg; debating ad nauseam over the proper pronouns to address non binary gender individuals.
• It will be either that or an existence of 24/7 drooling self-medicated stupor and virtual reality porn.