Last night in TEDxGijón, we witnessed one of those magic moments that occur once a decade… if we’re lucky. Natalia had twelve minutes to tell the structural origins of the crisis, reclaim Boulding, distinguish neoliberalismfrom the globalization of the small, explain several success stories from the direct economy and propose P2P reindustrialization…

The result was much more than that. Even in practice, she had surprised us. As Nat talked, the public, made up mostly of other conference-goers and their friends, paid more and more attention and at the end, broke out in applause — the only case we saw where that happened.

In spite of being scheduled to speak at night, when the public already was very tired, the effect was amazing. Natalia, alone on the stage, got excited, improvising parts of the speech she had previewed for us in the morning. She started directly and got right to the point. She presented Asturias, the “natural paradise,” as a place of productive desertification, not very different, and for similar reasons, from Eastern European countries. But her focus was somewhere else: on turning away from dependence both on grants and on financial capital. And she brought a warning: the “saviour business” isn’t coming, and start-ups won’t rebuild industry or create employment.

She started to give examples, models from the vuvuzela to BQ, outlining a true small-scale, large-scope program for local reindustrialization.

And she had an uncomfortable message for the dominant nationalism and localism: abandon the obsessive idea of “from here,” and put a real effort into “attracting developers, engineers, designers, makers…” that feed a cooperative fabric that makes a place for an unemployed generation and feeds large repositories of free designs.

Natalia was on fire yesterday. There was hope in the embraces and congratulations from the public. It’s time to make a revolution. It’s time for the revolution that a generation dreams of to become a productive revolution.

Translated by Steve Herrick from the original (in Spanish)