The technocratic dream and the futuristic dystopia

This content was translated using artificial intelligence and may therefore contain errors.

Climate crisis

In the previous chapters, I detailed a series of geopolitical, military, economic, and social problems. Although each of these problems is specific to this stage of human civilization, there is nothing surprising about the fact that humanity has faced difficulties of this nature throughout its history. What does stand out as new, however, are the scientific and technological challenges that the human species as a whole is seeking to address at this stage of industrial modernity.

For decades, the most emblematic example of this has been the environmental crisis: a crisis rooted in scientific and technological development (the industrialization of the planet and its environmental costs), and whose potential solution is sought primarily through that same scientific progress (renewable energy, recycling, carbon capture and storage, etc.).

Some trends appear reasonably likely. First is the sustained rise in global temperatures, which poses significant challenges for different regions of the world. Naturally, this will primarily affect the warmer regions around the tropics, which include many of the countries that are currently the most unstable, many of them in the Middle East and sub-Saharan Africa. At the same time, global warming poses a considerable challenge for some of today's most promising regions in macroeconomic terms, such as South Asia and Southeast Asia.

One particularly worrying phenomenon is measured by the wet-bulb thermometer, which gauges the combination of humidity and heat. If a wet-bulb thermometer reads 35 °C, this means that atmospheric humidity is so high that sweat can no longer evaporate and cool the human body, posing a risk of death. Over the past twenty years, extreme heat is estimated to have killed around 500,000 people a year, and projections suggest that by 2070 the situation in the Middle East and South Asia could be catastrophic.

Rising temperatures also pose an epidemiological risk. In recent years, there have been increasing warnings about the possible presence of prehistoric viruses trapped in Siberian permafrost. If thawing continues, these viruses, to which humanity has had no previous exposure, could unleash a new pandemic.

Another scenario, both more distant and more uncertain, is the possibility of rising sea levels as a result of melting polar ice caps. Given that 15 % of the world's population lives within 10 kilometers of the coast, even a rise of a few meters could mean a cataclysm virtually without precedent.

Curiously, the climate crisis would not appear to involve strictly global warming, since increases in overall temperatures could trigger cooling in some regions, particularly Europe. This could happen with the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (also known by its English acronym, AMOC), which carries warm surface waters from the equator toward the northeastern Atlantic and cold deep waters in the opposite direction. The AMOC is primarily responsible for Europe's warmer climate compared with North America, despite its more northerly location. As rising temperatures accelerate the melting of Arctic and Greenland ice, more fresh water flows into the North Atlantic, changing its density and salinity and slowing the current. If this process continues uninterrupted, some estimates suggest that a point of no return could be reached in the second half of the century, leading to a considerably drier and colder Europe.

However, given the inherently unjust nature of geopolitics, a climate crisis that would spell catastrophe for the bulk of humanity could, at the same time, present an opportunity for some countries. For example, while global warming could lead to desertification in many regions, it could also mean the expansion of the agricultural frontier toward the poles. In this respect, Canada and Russia would benefit from this climatic transformation and could take on a new role as major agricultural exporters. In turn, melting ice could facilitate the exploitation of vast mineral resources near the North Pole while turning the Arctic Ocean into one of the vital arteries of global trade. For Russia, a country where most of the population and major cities are hundreds of kilometers from the sea, a climate crisis far more severe for its adversaries would give Moscow a historic opportunity to recover much of the power it lost with the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

In the Southern Hemisphere, Argentina is one of the countries best positioned to adapt to a changing climate. Its geographical diversity and extensive territory stretching along a north-south axis give it robust means of cushioning rapid climatic changes, and even in a scenario of severe temperature increases, it would hold its own as one of the planet's major food producers. Added to this is the fact that global warming could make the economic exploitation of Antarctica viable, while greater geopolitical chaos in the Northern Hemisphere unleashed by the climate crisis could give Argentina a historic opportunity to consolidate its sovereignty claim in the region. This is because, as powers face greater challenges in their centers of power, they inevitably lose their capacity to act on their peripheries. A London simultaneously facing an aging population, possible territorial disintegration driven by Scottish and Irish independence movements, a politically uncertain position between Europe and the United States, and environmental challenges will have less capacity and willingness to project power thousands of kilometers away, in the South Atlantic.

Silicon Valley

Although the climate crisis has unleashed a series of pessimistic visions of technological development and humanity's destiny, the scientific advances of recent decades have also given rise to an increasingly powerful techno-optimist current of thought, with its epicenter in Silicon Valley. This may be a simplified representation of the increasingly diverse group of people who place their hopes in technology as the principal instrument of salvation in our times, but ultimately, it is an accurate definition. The convergence of the numerous global problems awaiting us in the coming decades sits uneasily with this utopian vision, which promises a practical, economic, social, and even political solution to all the challenges that have emerged in industrial modernity.

The recently coined term tech oligarchs is useful insofar as it brings into focus the core thinking that unites otherwise disparate figures: these are people who understand technological progress not as a mere everyday reality, but as a moral imperative and even as a utopian and transcendent mandate. However, both their vast financial resources and the strategic importance of the companies they control have led them to exercise previously unthinkable levels of influence over republican institutions and public debate; levels of influence that, in recent times, have only fueled their political ambitions. This group includes the great technology magnates who, over the past few decades, have gone from prominent businesspeople to celebrities and then to key political actors: Bill Gates of Microsoft (b. 1955); Jeff Bezos of Amazon (b. 1964); Peter Thiel of Palantir (b. 1967); Elon Musk of Tesla, X, and SpaceX (b. 1971); Mark Zuckerberg of Meta (b. 1984); Sam Altman of OpenAI (b. 1985). Another notable case was Steve Jobs of Apple (b. 1955), but his death in 2011 came too early in historical terms for him to reach the levels of influence now enjoyed by the other figures mentioned.

Although technocrats constitute a heterogeneous group, they are generally united by an understanding of technological progress as an end in itself. In fact, one of Zuckerberg's main complaints after the release of the film about Facebook's founding, The Social Network (2010), was that “[The filmmakers] can't wrap their heads around the idea that someone might build something just because they like building things.”

In this sense, these magnates maintained for years that the development of new technologies would almost single-handedly provide answers to the many problems facing humanity: thus, they conceived of social media as an escape from censorship, cryptocurrencies as economic freedom, the concept of amortality²⁷Unlike immortality, in which an individual is incapable of dying, as in the Christian concept of God, amortality refers to the theoretical possibility of living indefinitely unless a specific cause of death intervenes, as with Dracula or the Greek gods. was theorized as an alternative to spirituality, nuclear fusion as a way out of the climate crisis, AI as the salvation of the world of work, drones as a new kind of cleaner or surgical warfare, and interplanetary expansion as the key to long-term human survival.

Although the meteoric rise of the major technology companies was made possible by initiatives that were originally state-led (from the internet to space exploration), and their current prosperity rests in part on their symbiotic relationship with the U.S. government, Silicon Valley's mythology has been built on narratives of private initiative, individual genius, and iconoclastic denunciations of the institutions of the status quo. Its stance rests as much on a belief in the virtues of the private sector as on open antagonism toward academia, journalism, politics, the state, and religion—coincidentally, the main sectors that provide a counterweight to its influence and narrative. While Musk has described universities as anti-meritocratic centers of indoctrination, Thiel has gone so far as to offer students $100,000 grants to drop out of college and start businesses. The tycoons' frequent tensions with journalism are evident both in acts of retaliation (such as Zuckerberg's blocking of Canadian news outlets on Meta in 2023) and in attempts to bring the media to heel (Bezos's purchase of Washington Post in 2013 or Musk's acquisition of Twitter in 2022). Yet the most sweeping, revealing, and esoteric position among the tech oligarchs is the one developed by Thiel, who has repeatedly warned of the coming of what he calls the Antichrist: a figure who will seek to impose a global tyranny through institutional control and the expansion of regulation, with the aim of enslaving humanity.

In many ways, this line of thought is a true heir to the neoliberal utopia of the 1990s: technocrats tend to see the state as more of a problem than a solution, abhor regulations, and play the democratic game while viewing the system as a potential obstacle. One example can be found in Uber's deliberate, systematic violations of various national laws over the years, documented in a 2022 leak of more than 124,000 documents.²⁸The convergence of the mounting global problems awaiting us in the coming decades stands in contrast to this utopian vision, which promises a practical, economic, social, and even political solution to all the challenges that have arisen in industrial modernity.

Musk

As for the impact technocrats have had when directly involved in government, a notable case is the Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE), which Elon Musk led during the early part of Trump's second term. According to National Federation of Federal Employees (NFFE) president Randy Erwin, DOGE was responsible for the dismissal or forced retirement of more than 300,000 federal employees, causing structural damage to the functioning of the state apparatus before the department was finally dissolved a year and a half after its creation. On top of the cost to workers came DOGE's human toll, as it imposed major budget cuts on humanitarian aid programs, most notably the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). Musk's policies are estimated to have caused around 700,000 preventable deaths in the first year alone. As for DOGE's central objective of reducing the budget deficit, the results are unclear. According to Musk himself, DOGE was going to be able to save the U.S. government $2 trillion, a figure he later revised to $1 trillion before ultimately claiming that his agency had saved some $200 billion in 2025. That figure, however, is contradicted by the fact that government spending increased by some $400 billion that same year. The government is also estimated to stand to lose another $200 billion over the next decade because of the deterioration of its tax system's capabilities.

Thiel

While Musk's short-lived experiment might be grounds for caution, the growing symbiosis between the U.S. government and the major technology companies is a trend likely to intensify in the years ahead. This phenomenon has also led various leading figures in Silicon Valley to adopt increasingly pronounced political stances. The clearest example is Palantir, its founder Peter Thiel, and his close associates, such as Alexander Karp. In 2025, Karp published an essay with Nicholas Zamiska, also of Palantir, titled The Technological Republic, which he then condensed a year later into 22 points posted on social media that came to be known as “the Palantir manifesto.”

Throughout their text, Karp and Zamiska argue, as Thiel has repeatedly done, that technological development, far from flourishing, instead faces a growing danger of stagnation brought on by a loss of innovation and a lack of political will. Much of their argument targets their Silicon Valley peers, accusing them of maintaining an unacceptable “technological agnosticism” devoid of ideological direction and philosophical substance, founded on a one-dimensional obsession with financial gain and responsible for a growing cultural vacuity that, in their view, is leading the West blindly toward ruin.

Positing that the development of AI and AI weapons is not a choice but an inevitability, the thesis holds that technocrats have an “affirmative obligation” to participate in defense to preserve “the fragile geopolitical advantage” of the United States. This would be achieved through a gradual convergence between the private sector and the state, in which corporate competitiveness would be guided by national sentiment and the collective interest. While Palantir (which faces growing controversy over the use of its technology in conflicts such as the Gaza war) is the most notable case, companies such as Google, Amazon, Meta, and Apple have been developing ever closer ties with Washington for years. This kind of symbiosis between the private sector and the defense establishment has also loomed large in the collective unconscious ever since President Eisenhower coined the term military-industrial complex during his farewell address in 1961.²⁹Eisenhower used the term military-industrial complex to describe the network of alliances and overlapping interests linking political institutions, the armed forces, and private defense companies, warning that the private sector's growing power gave it a level of influence potentially harmful to democracy.

Faced with the unprecedented power and reach of Silicon Valley's major companies today, it is tempting to succumb to dystopian visions of a future in which megacorporations displace the nation-state as the predominant form of human organization. While this idea has been fertile ground for science fiction, the historical record seems to suggest otherwise. Generally speaking, instances of corporate rule (the history of the British East India Company is a notable example) have been short-lived and dysfunctional. Added to this is the fact that private companies themselves have displayed meteoric cycles of rise and fall, compared with dynasties whose histories can be measured in centuries or, better yet, religions and empires whose histories can be measured in millennia.

The level of loyalty a company can inspire, particularly when considered in political terms, has not been substantial either. The reality is that people are willing to kill and die for all sorts of reasons, but it is generally difficult to find people willing to give their lives in defense of a private company, apart from the very particular case of professional mercenaries.

Artificial intelligence

While companies rise and fall, it is also true that the technologies they develop endure. And in recent years, the world's gaze has settled on one technology in particular: artificial intelligence.

Of all the advances of recent decades, probably none has captured the human imagination as much as AI. The idea that humanity may be approaching the creation of something more intelligent than itself is understandably a source of both fascination and fear, and has unleashed visions both apocalyptic and utopian. Although it is impossible to predict the ultimate limits of its development, the advances seen in the first quarter of the 21st century are enough to represent a fundamental change in our relationship with technology.

Although the term artificial intelligence was coined by mathematician John McCarthy in 1955 for a summer workshop at Dartmouth College, AI became an almost ubiquitous presence in everyday life following the public release of ChatGPT in November 2022. Three and a half years later, OpenAI, its parent company, reported more than 1 billion monthly active users.

ChatGPT revolutionized the market, which was soon flooded with similar offerings: Google's Gemini, Anthropic's Claude, and X's Grok, among others. This early landscape of fierce but highly concentrated competition among U.S. companies soon took on a geopolitical dimension when the Chinese company DeepSeek launched its own AI in January 2025. With its combination of comparable performance and significantly lower costs, DeepSeek sent shock waves through U.S. financial markets. Once it had been demonstrated that advanced AI models were possible with far less computing power than previously assumed, markets panicked, triggering a massive sell-off of shares in chip and data center companies and wiping nearly $1 trillion off stock market valuations.

Yet this blow did not stop the race to develop AI: it accelerated it. According to a report by consulting firm Gartner, total capital invested in the sector during 2026 is projected to exceed $2.5 trillion, a 44 % increase over the previous year, when it had already attracted more than 60 % of all venture capital investment worldwide. This is even more significant when one considers that this amount is only slightly below global defense spending in 2025, which stood at around $2.8 trillion.

Added to these titanic sums is the fact that, according to an MIT report from late 2025, 95 % of companies that have invested in AI have made no profits. Yet the more is invested in AI and the infrastructure that supports it, the greater the incentives for companies that have already placed big bets on the sector to redouble their efforts in the hope of being among the winners at the end of this initial cycle of accelerated development. This has led Goldman Sachs³⁰US investment group, one of the largest in the world, founded in 1869. to assert that projections of future investment in AI are underestimates, and that the coming years will see even greater sums allocated to a technology whose future is uncertain. And this disconnect has prompted growing alarm over the possibility of an “AI bubble,” in which a sudden change in market confidence could unleash a devastating crisis for the global economy.

Alongside the financial dimension, AI development is currently facing challenges involving the consumption of three key resources. First, the growth of this sector brings increasing demand for energy that can reasonably be expected only to rise in the coming years. According to a report by the International Energy Agency, AI accounted for 1.5 % of global electricity consumption in 2024, but this share is expected to double as soon as 2030. In turn, although data centers account for 10 % of the growth in electricity demand projected by the end of the decade, this demand is unevenly distributed. While they account for around 5 % of demand growth in emerging economies, in advanced economies, where electricity demand had remained virtually stagnant for decades, data centers account for 20 % of demand growth.

Second, as data centers steadily grow in size (Meta’s Hyperion is estimated to consume more than twice as much electricity as New Orleans and its nearly 400,000 inhabitants), they will need increasing quantities of water, resulting in greater water stress. According to the University of Houston, data centers in the state of Texas alone could consume as much as 1,500 cubic hectometers of water by 2030, equivalent to 5 % of all the water Argentina currently consumes each year.

Finally, the future of AI development rests on the consumption of an intangible but, curiously, also finite resource: data. According to Stanford University’s 2026 AI Index Report, the availability of high-quality human-generated data is marked by growing scarcity, only exacerbated by the demands of an expanding sector that requires ever greater quantities of these inputs to continue its development. According to the report, at this rate the supply of data could be exhausted by 2032, while significant uncertainty remains about the viability of using “synthetic data,” meaning data produced by other AIs.

Added to the intrinsic challenges of AI development is its geopolitical dimension. At present, the sector is virtually monopolized by the US and China, which has led to much speculation about which of these two powers will ultimately “win” the AI race, and what that would mean for its position in the concert of nations and for the sovereignty of other countries. Despite the difficulty of predicting the impact of a technology in the midst of an innovation takeoff, the recent history of cutting-edge technology shows accelerated cycles of monopolization and democratization. One example can be found in drones: fifteen years ago, these unmanned aircraft were the symbol of US technological supremacy, and today they have become an emblem of Yemen’s Houthi rebels.

With this in mind, it would not be inconceivable for the current status quo not to perpetuate itself indefinitely over the long term. On the contrary, after a period of technological maturation, the near-duopoly shared by China and the US could be broken by a proliferation of increasingly inexpensive AI systems across planet Earth.

Work

Beyond the challenges facing the sector, artificial intelligence is a concrete reality with tangible room to continue developing for some time to come. For this reason, and given the uses to which it has already been put in today’s economy, advances in AI and automation raise a major unknown: what will the future of work look like? In the most optimistic scenarios, these great technological leaps could usher in an era of global prosperity unprecedented in history, in which human labor becomes a distant memory of the past while a universal basic income allows the planet’s inhabitants to explore their leisure time creatively, devoting themselves to artistic, intellectual, or family pursuits. In this scenario, fertility would be expected to rebound, since all previous obstacles to reproduction would have been removed and, with a universal basic income, there would be a financial incentive to form larger families.

This almost idyllic vision of the future is countered by another, markedly more hostile one, in which technological development will only deepen the already pronounced divide between a super-rich elite that owns capital and the rest of humanity, reduced to an increasingly precarious workforce. In this scenario, growing inequality would also be accompanied by a deepening demographic crisis, an increase in social violence, and accelerating political instability. Moreover, this is a vision of the future in which the category of unemployed people would gradually be replaced by that of unemployable people. In this grim scenario, the drivers of the economy would no longer be human labor and consumption, but automated production and exchange between companies. Consequently, it would make no economic sense to retrain people who have been replaced by machines, and the masses left by the wayside would steadily grow. This would only fuel growing inequality and lead inexorably to a very different model of human society: one in which the very concept of the intrinsic value of life would be in doubt.

And it is at this point that AI development transcends economic and production calculations and lands squarely in the realm of philosophy, ethics, and even spirituality. In the frequently brutal history of human development, people have always retained an intrinsic value for others, if only because of their productive capacity. Yet in a world of finite resources and unemployable people, it would no longer be inconceivable for the one-dimensional logic of profit to begin assigning a negative value to millions of individuals. It is in the face of this very danger that Pope Leo XIV publishes his encyclical Magnifica humanitas, in which he warns against the construction of a new Tower of Babel, a symbol of excessive faith in human progress itself.

This stance by the leader of the Catholic Church reflects a specific reality about technological development: despite the prevalence of debates that present technology as a self-contained dimension detached from external reality, the truth is that it cannot be separated from the historical context that produces it and upon which it acts. And in this sense, we can see how AI adds another layer of complexity to a world with an increasingly unpredictable climate, a population heading toward collapse, and an ever more fragile geopolitical fabric.

Biotechnology

In parallel, the relationship between humanity and technology is about to move rapidly into some of its most complex territory to date, owing to the development of a branch of science that promises to gradually blur the distinction between the two: biotechnology. While, in the broad sense of the word, it can be said that human beings have been using some form of biotechnology since virtually the invention of agriculture, advances in recent decades have enormously diversified its applications, from food production and medical advances to environmental protection, genetic engineering, computing, and manufacturing. And it is in this key sector that Argentina has some important comparative advantages.

As for biotechnology’s applications in food production, this is the area in which our country can expect the greatest benefits. One particularly promising case is the new generation of genome-editing techniques, in which recent advances in targeted gene modification make it possible to improve crops’ stress tolerance, disease resistance, or nutritional content. In turn, integrating genome editing with omics,³¹Omics encompasses technologies and disciplines that enable large-scale measurement of the different molecular layers of biological systems, from DNA and RNA to proteins and metabolites. AI-supported decision-making, robotics, and advanced agricultural technologies (such as satellite technology and real-time monitoring) is already improving crop yields and can contribute to sustainable, climate-resilient agriculture. In this field, Argentina has the dual advantage of being a major agricultural exporter and a biotechnology pioneer, with decades of experience in both the private and public sectors, as exemplified by the National Advisory Commission on Agricultural Biotechnology (CONABIA), founded in 1991.

As for the private sector, Argentina holds a very prominent position in the region. In the world of deeptech startups³²A term used to refer to companies dedicated to providing technological solutions that require lengthy research and development processes, as well as substantial capital investment. in Latin America (valued at around $8 billion), approximately 80 % are concentrated in three countries: Argentina, Brazil, and Chile, which account for 30 %, 30 %, and 19 %, respectively. In Argentina’s case, that 30 % consists of more than 100 companies, collectively valued at around $2 billion. Argentina also leads the region in deeptech investment funds, with seven dedicated funds. Our country’s deeptech ecosystem is diverse (in fact, 15 % of its value comes from space startups), but biotechnology plays an undeniably central role, accounting for nearly 70 % of startups and 80 % of the sector’s total value.

It is true that biotechnology-driven disruption of production methods can also pose some potential risks to the Argentine economy, such as vertical farming and imitation meat. Vertical farming is a term coined in 1999, and the practice it refers to generally relies on one of two technologies (hydroponics or aeroponics) for highly controlled crop production inside buildings in densely populated urban environments.

Vertical farming and biotechnology reinforce each other: one makes it possible to precisely control the growing environment, and the other to design plants and microorganisms adapted to those conditions. This combination opens the door to more efficient and predictable production systems, and even to using plants as biomanufacturing platforms to produce high-value ingredients, proteins, or molecules. Vertical farming thus makes it possible to produce not only food but also other specialized, high-value biological products close to major consumption centers, which are often far from the regions best suited to open-field production. In theory, this would allow advanced economies to develop new production centers, diminishing Argentina’s geographical and climatic advantages. However, despite increasing automation and more efficient lighting, labor costs, energy costs, water control systems, and carbon dioxide emissions pose significant obstacles to the commercial viability of these farms. Vertical farming is inherently energy-, capital-, and information-intensive, since it requires a fully controlled environment 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Given these limitations, vertical farming is unlikely to become a financially viable alternative to traditional agriculture for many staple crops, though it may be viable for more complex or specialized needs, or for bioproducts that depend on controlled growing conditions.

As for imitation meat, it is currently divided into two main branches. On the one hand, plant-based meat, which, as its name suggests, relies on combining different plant-derived components to achieve a texture, taste, and nutritional content similar to real meat. Although an increase in plant-based meat production would boost demand for plant proteins that Argentina already produces, one of the sector’s goals is to displace meat consumption, posing a risk to the country’s livestock industry. On the other hand, there is cultivated meat, an animal-derived substitute produced from stem cells. While cultivated meat is much more efficient than traditional meat production in terms of land use, greenhouse gas emissions, and water consumption, it remains much more costly in terms of energy consumption. This means that the sector’s commercial viability will depend on advances in energy production, particularly in renewable energy.

Beyond food production, biotechnology—and its increasingly diverse branches—has the potential to become a force for structural transformation of the production structure. Just as chemistry and physics made electric lighting, plastics, the internal combustion engine, computers, and nuclear energy possible, biology appears to be on the threshold of a comparable qualitative leap, creating entire fields such as biomanufacturing and biocomputing. If the current development trend continues, by mid-century we could find ourselves with a very different model of society in terms of logistics, production, health, consumption, and defense. Consequently, as it continues to advance, biotechnology will take on an increasingly strategic role on the global geopolitical chessboard.

The Limits of This Book

However, it is reasonable to say that no branch of biotechnology is more sensitive for the future of Homo sapiens as a species than genetic engineering. For the first time in our history, humanity is developing the capacity to free itself from the imperatives of Darwinian selection, take its evolutionary destiny into its own hands, and give free rein to its imagination. The prospect that, over the next century, we may be able to transform our genetic makeup and combine it with direct neural interfaces to artificially produce a new type of human being opens up a universe of new ethical, political, social, economic, philosophical, and even spiritual questions. And those questions, fortunately, lie beyond the thematic limits of this book.

In the preceding pages, we have seen how dizzying technological development adds another layer of complexity, danger, and opportunity to a world facing structural geopolitical shifts, collective identity crises, uncertain economic futures, escalating armed conflicts, accelerating population collapses, and an imminent climate crisis. In turn, all these factors share two qualities: on the one hand, their current trajectories indicate that their critical points will converge roughly in the middle of the twenty-first century, confronting many of the world’s leading nations with an existential danger from which no way out is currently in sight.

On the other hand, all these problems will affect the Argentine Republic to a much lesser extent than the vast majority of humanity. In this scenario, the Argentina of 2050, a geographically diverse, geopolitically sheltered country with a relatively young and educated population, has significant resources at its disposal to weather future turbulence and emerge much better positioned on the future global geopolitical chessboard. To make the most of this historic opportunity, the country will have to make some key decisions about the direction of its future.