The things that we carry

Written by Leda Glyptis
6th March 2025

I had a professor at university who said things like ‘glocal’ and ‘phygital’.

We are looking to the future and building the future, but we are still doggedly carrying all of the past with us

It was the 90s.

It felt edgy.

We all nodded sagely when he said things that were essentially nonsensical. Like we knew what he meant. But the older I get, the more I wonder if he knew what he meant. Of course, it is useful to test the boundaries and continued usefulness of terminology and, as a sociologist, he was doing the right thing, perhaps, in forcing us to think about the changing world we are trying to describe. Assuming that is what he was trying to do.

Because the advantage of being vague is that others can ascribe more meaning to your words than you were ever able to yourself. Just saying. And it was a time before this time.

In the 90s, digital nomads were not a thing yet (at the time, we believed our sound systems were the height of digital innovation), so the words couldn’t have meant what you are thinking right now. If they meant anything at all.

Increasingly, I get frustrated with these words that are thrown about to mean ‘the future’ in a generic, non-committed way. In a way that cannot be described in its specifics but relies on the listener to know what you mean. And I am frustrated not because it’s lazy. I have made my peace with that. I get frustrated because it’s unhelpful. All that vagueness. It’s unhelpful because we are not there, wherever there is. We are in a place that is halfway there, and precision would be nice in helping us to solve the problems of the here and now. So that we can move onto the nicely, shiny thing of the future.

We are not quite in the past, and we are not quite in the future.

It’s a halfway thing.

And halfway is neither here… nor there. It’s in-between. Whether it’s desolate or picturesque, what matters isn’t what here looks like. Here is not where you are going. And it doesn’t need a name unless you are staying here. And I fear we are staying here. In the in-between space. So we might as well develop the right language for it. This thing we are in.

I was on a call recently and the Very Important Man sitting in a group of other important people decided to break his silence after a long while to say, thoughtful and ponderous, that the rise of digital and the rise of cyber mean that things are very different to what they were 20 years ago.

We all nodded.

Because… we knew what he meant. And he is not wrong.

But mostly we nodded because we sort of knew what he meant and he probably just wanted to say something and what he said was true enough and didn’t need an action so it didn’t have to be interpreted beyond vague accuracy.

Only the sentence is absolutely nonsensical.

We let it slide because we know what it means, but can we just call it out for a minute? So many times when we talk about the digital economy in our offices people are just saying words.

And it’s not edgy and it’s not clever and it’s not helpful.

Because a couple of hours before this call, I was queuing awkwardly inside a stationery shop that, these days, doubles up as a post office… only… not a post office as such because there is no post office in my neighbourhood anymore and, even when they were still here, they encouraged you to use DHL instead. There is a PhD thesis in there somewhere, but the point is… I needed to post a physical document, notarised and beribboned for a piece of work, and so the digital wonders of our era could not save me from the physical world.

And there I was, waiting in line while a flustered employee was trying to reboot Windows 92 in order to be able to generate labels for our parcels.

In 2025.

And I know that there are many amazing articles on your feed today about AI and quantum, about stablecoins and the attention economy.

Some of them will be genuinely insightful.

But some of them will just be saying words. Words that are zeitgeisty and generally configured in an approximation of a sensible sentence. So close to a sensible sentence, in fact, that you may not even notice that they are not saying much.

But even those that actually do say much, don’t tell the whole story. And the whole story is: we are in the in-between spaces. We are looking to the future and building the future and investing in the future, but we are still doggedly carrying all of the past with us: Windows 92, and mainframes that predate the release of Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (the best Beatles song ever written and I shall brook no argument on this). And the reality of your life, if you are not an influencer but a practitioner, is played out in the space between desperately trying to persuade school leavers that learning COBOL is the future (because it’s the present and you can’t be bringing people out of retirement forever) and realising that most reconciliation activity is done by hand or by Excel macros nobody quite understands.

That’s where we live.

And we don’t quite have a word for it.

But we need to find one.

So that we can stop speaking about digital as if it were a pristine state, an aspirational future. So that we can find the right language to describe the complexity we have created for ourselves, the tensions we carry, the risks and options.

We need a word for this stressful, messy state we inhabit.

Or at least we need to stop letting people wave their hands over the reality of where we are, saying words that can only mean something with a healthy dose of wishful thinking and a fair amount of squinting.

We need to stop being vague and hoping for the best… or we will get stuck in the in-between spaces forever and, I don’t know about you, but I find the idea of waiting in another line while Windows 92 reboots while someone is talking to me about stablecoins terrifying enough to encourage me to have any and every conversation around migrations, systems rationalisation, upgrading risk matrixes and solving the real problems right now presents us with.

Nothing can be as scary, surely.

#LedaWrites

Leda Glyptis is FinTech Futures’ resident thought provocateur – she leads, writes on, lives and breathes transformation and digital disruption.