C‘it’s a beautiful word, “future”, which should represent a treasure chest of hopes and desiresbut today it is the term that in the entire vocabulary causes us the most fear. Verlaine said “The future no longer exists as it once did” and he was far-sighted. Even the Sex Pistols with their «No future!» they had warned the audiences of a now bygone generation, but their punk cry almost seems like a bleat compared to the chaos into which we have fallen.
Only in the last year has history had an unthinkable acceleration and we found ourselves in an era punctuated by wars and new catastrophesi, in a time that is increasingly difficult to decipher with the media we were used to.
The power of new technologies and the alternative truths put into play by Artificial Intelligence create a continuous loss of meaning and disorientation that transforms into an existential restlessness now considered as the new global disease.
Serena Dandini (photo by Gianmarco Chieregato).
We watch our grandchildren play football on the usual pitch under the house and shake our heads thinking about the tomorrow they will have to face. In reality we are already living in a dystopian future, like the characters in a William Gibson bookbut we haven’t realized it yet. In his science fiction novels the author describes a world in which democracy has slowly been hollowed out one step at a time: does it tell you something?
“Resisting the dark times. The new totalitarian system” by Asma Mhalla (Einaudi).
When the going gets tough, tough books come out in bookstores to face reality and Resist the dark times. The new totalitarian system by Asma Mhalla (Einaudi), specialist in the geopolitics of technology, is a viaticum for maintaining our values firm while living in what they now already call post-West.
The author retraces for us all the political and technological steps that have projected us into this new era explaining the reasons and causes of our descent into hell. His well-documented theses are a true antidote to the indifference and cynicism into which we have fallen and in the end he recommends “thirteen small exercises for a free mind”: a cognitive survival manual more useful for our mental health than any sun salutation.
All articles by Serena Dandini.
iO Donna © ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
