On 8 September 2013 in Italy the most important thing for many was Gianroberto Casaleggio’s speech at the Cernobbio forum. I remember it well, I was there too, in Cernobbio. And there were, as usual, almost everyone who counts in this country. It was right that Casaleggio was there too.
Once again Valerio De Molli, grand master of ceremonies of the event, had been right. The 5 stars were not yet in government but they were already an explosive force on the political scene. Starting from Grillo’s blog, they had built an unprecedented political position focusing everything on digital, as a tool for aggregation, communication and also as a frontier towards which to lead a traditionally analogue country. But their rise was a problem for the ruling class that every first weekend of September meets in this town on Lake Como: the old parties were the ones they wanted to get rid of.
Behind the construction of this movement was Gianroberto Casaleggio, certainly a visionary. You might not like it (many didn’t like it), you can even hate grillini, but if one reads the books that Gianroberto Casaleggio wrote fifteen or twenty years ago, one realizes how far his understanding of the changes that digital would have led to society and politics. In short, Casaleggio’s intervention in Cernobbio was a small event.
Enhanced by the fact that at the time one of the rules of the forum was secrecy: the so-called “Chatham House Rule”, so what was said in the room, among the speakers, could not be reported. Now the rule has actually been swept away from social media and almost all the interventions are online a few minutes later. But in 2013 this was not yet the case. And therefore about what Casaleggio had actually said, more or less contemptuous voices and judgments ran after each other. Until 13 September, five days later, when the audio of the complete speech was published on Grillo’s blog. With a rather strong opening: when he cited the first televised confrontation between John Kennedy and Richard Nixon in September 1960. “Then he said to himself: show me a politician who does not understand television and I will show you a loser”. The conclusion for Casaleggio was: a politician who does not understand the Internet today is a loser.
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