There are events that have the ability to change everything. Not only practical life but also how we perceive the world. The importance we give or don’t give to certain things. The scale of values. That was the case with covid, and in particular the first lockdown, and it is happening with the war in Ukraine.
Journalists, robots and war
by Ricccardo Luna
Thursday will be a month after the invasion begins and the bombs also took away many of the speeches we were making before. The exceptional importance of the metaverse, for example, or of the NFT: when there is a real war, you don’t really know what to do with virtual worlds. And then the launch of Donald Trump’s new app, Truth, which has already disappeared from the radar. And the new Apple products that made the previous ones look very old, but exactly as always. And smartphones made with plastic recovered from the oceans to save the world, an expression that cannot be heard in front of twenty million refugees.
Let’s not waste this crisis too
by Riccardo Luna
But some beliefs that seemed destined to last have also changed: the idea that fake news was our main problem; or that social networks were the cause of many evils in the world starting from hatred; that TikTok could only host silly videos; and finally the illusion that Anonymous, the mysterious legion of hackers fighting against abuses, could have a decisive role in a war.
Between blocks and sanctions, the idea of a world wide web has also faded, a great network to unite the world: the Internet appears increasingly divided by inaccessible walls: depending on where you are, you see different things. And finally, the all-Italian idea that energy was not a big problem and that we could say no to coal, no to oil, no to nuclear power and no to renewables and get by with Russian gas, came into crisis.