The entrance hall of Julia Mengolini’s house is small. Perhaps, in truth, it is not, but it seems: in that room two by two there are more books than those that can be counted during an hour and a half interview. On the desk, crowded, a monitor appears. In this same place is where two practically impossible things happened for the owner of the house. The first is that he wrote his first book, something that, in his words “I didn’t know” what he could do. The second is that, in the midst of that mountain of leaves, Mengolini traveled through time and space. He went to Bariloche, the city where he was born, met with his first love, which finished pushing it to the political militancy, revived his lysergic marriage (in the strict sense of the word), he visited the toughest crosses he maintained on social networks, rebuilt the back room of the birth of Futurock, the medium he directs nine years ago, and even faced the panduel duel of his duel. father. And each of those stories of their own history connected them with the particular historical moment of the country and the world.
That is “the faces of the monster” (Editorial Futurock): a well articulated trip between Mengolini’s own biography and subjectivity with the historical context in which they were placed, with a special dedication to the present chaotic of new rights and digital persecutions. From the last, the journalist and lawyer can attest as almost no one. Or no one: Milei promoted a Fake News campaign against her – on a false incestuous link with her brother – and shared almost a hundred messages in that regard. Then he completed it with a judicial complaint.
Julia Mengolini: It is a very authoritarian government, which does not support the slightest criticism, nor seeks dialogue or shit. It is a very authoritarian mood, almost totalitarian I would tell you. If this government is indeed a vehicle for hate, something that I think, my conclusion that follows is that there will be a problem in democracy sooner rather than later. Democracy by definition is to agree, it is dialogue, but with hate that cannot. I think we are in a serious problem and it is important to say it out loud: it seems to me that there is a kind of fascism. I say it in the book, I quote Daniel Feierstein, Rocco Carbone. They talk about the political organization of hate, and in that sense they find similarities with Germany 1933, mechanisms that are very similar. You do not have to relive a holocaust to realize the similarities. And they never start with the holocaust, they end with the holocaust.
News: There is some sting with the word fascism.
Mengolini: There is an intellectual modesty. It would not underestimate the term, because not only that there is a possible comparison that has to do with a technique, but in political terms motorized the largest march against the government. And with the intellectual pruritos, I say, what do I know. With pruritos a fucking revolution is not built, nor are these forces that have no prurites of anything. We were still talking within a frame that is no longer that of Milei, speaking a human language and Milei doesn’t even talk to you. We will have to find the return a little, but it is not with moderation.
News: You mentioned hatred. Is that the “monster” you are talking about in the book?
Mengolini: The monsters are neoliberalism, the concentrated market, the large media, patriarchy and beauty mandates, but if I had to define only one, I think it is hate. It is a matter on which this government is built and this present. I think that emotions move us a lot, I mean: there is some rationality in the decisions that are made in politics, but I don’t know how much. They are not thinking a country from a place too rational. Yes I think there are certain digitters that yes, that Milei is an instrument of economic power and there is a very clear rationality. Milei is a chicken of emotions, you realize to see it, and it is a guy who connected with the subjectivity of the time: you have pandemic, you have social networks, you have hate.
News: In the book you propose something that is going to the idea that technology is nothing more than an instrument designed to control the population from above. In the sense that media, technology and people evolve at the same time, that sometimes the medium transfigures subjectivity itself. You get to that conclusion through your own experience: how you became troll.
Mengolini: If it were a implemented thing, it arrives there from one day to another, although it generated a rather violent wave in a short time. They have been heating me long before everyone used the word hate or knew that the trolls existed, I have been seeing as a direct witness from a long time ago how this was brewing. And he ended up taking everything, to the point that he ends up taking you, colonizing you in the ways. In the book I found that, in a key almost between literary and humor, but also a certain hypothesis that is now a troll, where even my tweets appear. That helped me for the chapter to be a little more funny but also to definitively understand what the real problem is. What is the problem? That they have hated me a lot, that they hurt me, that I have a horrible day every so often because I am a trend, that they make me cry? No, in the end the problem is real colonization, that we are all talking in the worst possible terms for a dialogue, a dialogue that breaks.
News: That is also playing with another topic that you explore in the book: individualism and cult of individualism.
Julia Mengolini: I think we are in a moment of diagnosis, and there is not one of all contemporary thinkers who are not thinking about this problem. There is also a kind of alarm about children and cell phone, children and social networks. Some of that was seen in the shock that the adolescence series aroused, which even generated a movement of parents in Britain that they are asking to begin to see harder laws for the use of networks in children. Rita, for example, has absolutely prohibited the cell phone, we are medium stalinist also here: she does not touch the cell, it is as if it were a hot grill. In fact she says “When is one big, it is mandatory to use a cell phone?”, I tell her no, and he asks me “Do you know someone who does not have a cell phone? Well, Victor Hugo Morales, Pepe Mujica, Lula, and I say:” All spectacular people. “” Well, “he tells me,” I’m not going to have a cell phone. “The problem is not the screens I put Mary Poppins, but there she sees a story with characters, with general culture, with a plot Knowing it, but it is serious insurance: if the libertarians left there something bad happened.
News: The big difference between screens, with the cell phone, is that this allows to build the logic that each one depends on himself and anyone else, the logic of me saved alone, I can work alone, I connect through the networks with my own tribe of thought.
Julia Mengolini: It is not so new: neoliberalism since the mid -70s always what he sought is to break social ties and generate divisions between societies, sought to get people to feel individuals and that the logic of the community breaks .. This is how they reign, that is, it is a methodology. It is not, then, that there is a great discovery, only that this chiche, the cell phone, reinforces it.
News: Did you have something outside the book?
Julia Mengolini: Well, maybe a little of the raising of Rita. There were some chapters that were left outside that began to be written. One was going to call “eternal rivalry with Yanina Latorre.” But I wanted to give him a little more thickness, that it was not just a succession of anecdotes. So, with Yanina’s good, what did he want to talk about? It happened to me that I made a lawsuit and the lawyer told me, “well, I wrote two pages on this issue from the heart for the judge.” There I had to do something that I had never done: put Yanina’s videos talking about me. I do not do that, I know they whistle, I find out, but I don’t give him play. Then I had to give him play. And there I was shocked with things that I did not know they were there, such as envy. I told myself, I can’t think that Latorre is envious, if she has everything, I am all she hates. And yet if you listen to it, you listen to it. In the subtext you listen to it. It is there, it constitutes it. Then I thought this could be a treatise on envy. I began to read philosophers who had written on the subject. He is very crazy, magical. First because almost all the cultures of the world have their talismans against envy, type the cat, the Turk, all that are the eyes against envy because it always existed. Second because envy is not rational: that is, logic leads you to think that it occurs because you want something you don’t have, but I rationally have nothing to yanina want and do not have. She is blonde, she is rich, she is married to a footballer, she is on TV, she is from the right, I am a brunette, I am from the left, there is nothing that I have to want. However, there is something there that is no longer well known what it is, what breaks the balls and that he wants it.
News: How was the process of watching all those videos?
Julia Mengolini: horrible. Awful. I ended how … I ended up doing the damage that I had not managed to make me all this time. Seeing it and that … the envy of the other, has this from things I was reading, which is mysterious because it also hurts.
News: Futurock is turning nine years. When is it?
Julia Mengolini: The radio is very planted in her identity at a time where everything moves. I think we have to be very persistent also in how to nail that identity with stakes a bit but without being foolish. There are storms that many times try to move, because there are moments that you say: “But who am I talking to? What do I do what I still do?” And well, there are a lot of people who suddenly say “less bad that you continue to exist because otherwise I would go crazy.” For those people who still listen to the radio and believe in us and continue to feel represented, it is important that we continue to exist. They are very ungrateful years also for our type of entities. I say, to be feminist, progressive, Peronist. But I am convinced that you have to nail the strongest stake: if one begins to accommodate the times, it loses the essence, it loses what it is. Ideas do not change, the dream remains unchanged, no matter how much half that everything is satisfied. It seems to me that this objective of a a bit more fair, more equal, is still the horizon, you have to look for more creative ways to tell it, to communicate it.
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