56K generation, which arrived at the beginning of July on Netflix, is a TV series that tells the story of getting lost and finding a boy and a girl between 1998 and the present, between Procida and Naples. The idea comes from Francesco Ebbasta, one of the minds behind the “The Jackal” project, who participate in the series with three members of the group: Fabio Balsamo, Gianluca “Fru” Colucci and Claudia Napolitano. The writing is by Ebbasta himself, together with Costanza Durante, Laura Grimaldi and Davide Orsini, with the production of Cattleya.
The dream of Generation 56k
by Riccardo Luna
56K generation it is also and above all a story that tells the relationship between individuals and technologies, the clues are scattered throughout the eight episodes, but to find out more we talked to its creator. “One of the reasons that prompted us to carry on this serial project was the desire to tell how the relationship with people and at work has evolved over the years. This possibility of communicating with everyone has changed us, has altered the way we present ourselves to the world. We risk becoming photocopies of what we are or what we would like to be ”.
One of the main themes of the series is the advent of the internet, heralded by the whistles and hums of a modem arriving on an island. A small community, like that of the island, which touches upon another niche, that of those who used the internet in those years, also because at the time “internet” was not really a clear concept. “When I approached the internet I was one of the first in my village to come into contact with it and it was thanks to one of The Jackal’s members, Ciro Priello, who had a 56K modem, a real science fiction object. The absurd thing is that Ciro presented it to me as a tool to search for your tax code, then we discovered that we could search for school easily, but the culture shock was when I came up with the idea of looking for the Spice Girls and we found all the others. spicy girls “.
On the other hand, there is an old internet adage that reads “the internet is for porn” and also in the series the relationship between the morbid and the fascinated that kids have towards porn, especially as a forbidden thing, is part of the story. “I think the porn issue was useful from two points of view: on the one hand it allowed us to stage the change in business models, when kids start selling discs full of images and supplant the turnover. of the older boy who rented VHS, on the other hand it is a way to put on the table the question of what the internet allows us to see with respect to the reality of things. The protagonist is bombarded with erotic photos that he downloads every day from the internet, but he never gave the first kiss. For me it was a nice way to show a side of our generation and future ones: the ability to explore many things plus the inability to dedicate oneself to something small, simple, of one’s own. Today there is a sort of performance anxiety in a youth who has seen everything and thinks they have to live up to it, but life is not a movie and above all it is not a porn movie and this makes them collapse ”.
A theme that is also linked to dating apps, which are brought up in the first few minutes when the protagonist and a girl with whom he has an appointment meet using one and then find themselves prisoners in a game in which no one can say. no first. “I think the ability to do things has become an inability to say no to those same things. You can do it all, see it all, find someone around you to hang out, why don’t you? Why shouldn’t you do it if it wasn’t possible before and now we offer you this possibility? In the end, each progress brings with it a small loss. There is a maxim in the series about elevators, which allowed us to get to where we need to get quickly, but no longer let us know the neighbors. That speech was not only really given to me by an elderly man, but it reminds us that speed is not always everything. Sometimes I also regret the fact that the internet was a precise place and time: the desktop computer from which I connected while my mother timed me. Today we pay the pledge of the initial euphoria in which we gave the internet more and more and wanted more and more, but then we find ourselves wanting to be a little disconnected ”.
There is not only nostalgia inside 56K generation, but also the celebration of a generation that has experienced at the forefront the arrival of new technologies that today dominate everything and that thanks to those technologies has found a way in life. “Basically it is both our story, a group of friends united since childhood who then find a job that did not even exist before, and that of a generation that has a different awareness than the past ones on how everything can change and on the cycles of history, but the increase in awareness is a constant The difference compared to today is that we first learned things because we wanted to know them, while a kid of today is already prepared, he already knows that he wants to learn something to be a youtuber, to become a player professional”.
“The internet has given us the opportunity to see everything from a different perspective and perhaps it has also made us more responsive to change and a little less grumpy. Or at least that’s my hope. If one day a new form of entertainment comes out, I may not like it, but I will know the future, because I have walked alongside the growth of video games. Let’s think of a work like The Last of Us 2, today nothing can give me the same and my only regret will be that one day I will lose these beautiful things, perhaps because I will not know how to use them. However, I hope that this being born between old and new will allow us to appreciate the next “new” more.
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