Democracy falls on the Internet – Corriere.it

When a book that cost two years of painstaking research is understood immediately because it does not support widespread and consolidated theories, but rather has the courage to question them, dismantling them with a painstaking exercise of documentation and arguments. The wise Prophets, oligarchs and spies. Democracy and society in the era of digital capitalism by Franco Bernab and Massimo Gaggi (Feltrinelli) starts here: how many times in an abused exercise of metaphors have we been told that information technology and the internet are comparable to electricity and the steam engine, the two great social and technological revolutions at the basis of the modern economy? The information society – of which artificial intelligence with ChatGPT is only the latest expression – has thus become synonymous with progress for everyone.

Bernab and Gaggi, in a well-informed and therefore worrying book, lead us to question this reassuring contemporary dogma: digital capitalism has only the external features of past phenomena such as the rush for electricity, with its innovative geniuses such as Alessandro Volta, Thomas EdisonNikola Tesla, and the great financiers and industrialists such as JP Morgan and George Westinghouse.

Today it is easy to superimpose current heroes such as Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg and the fathers of the internet such as Tim Berners-Lee on these names. But there is an alarming caveat: digitization is silently destroying democracy and contributes to the disappearance of the middle class. Therefore, if it can be considered a technological revolution, the social fallout that steam and electricity have had is missing, fueling new industries and new scientific research, where digital tends to cannibalize and suck everything in like a black hole that does not tolerate resistance to its own gravitational force, not even from light.

The strength of Prophets, oligarchs and spies resides in a formula that may seem easy to use at the drawing board but which is often a difficult exercise to put to work: a special amalgam of two very different authors in terms of experience and professional backgrounds. Bernab led for decades as a protagonist the dominant realities of the two large industries compared, passing from the chair of CEO of ENI to that of Telecom Italia. Energy and telecommunications. Gaggi, well known to readers of Corriere where he was also deputy editor, has been exploring and decoding American society for twenty years as a columnist from New York.

The result is an unusual ability to link complex themes and levels with credibility and coherence, from the exercise of democracy to the functioning of industry and the economy, passing from the post-war period to today through the great crises: 11 September and the attack on the twin sisters of Al Qaeda leading to the disastrous Patriot Act, the law that allowed the first mass surveillance; and then the crowd of rowdies led by a shaman who on January 6, 2021 stormed Capitol Hill, the American Congress. Never before in the history of American democracy – reads the description of the case with which the two authors decide to open the book – had such a potentially subversive fact occurred.

Being well documented Prophets, oligarchs and spies does not hide behind a detailed analysis of the phenomenon without giving faces to responsibilities: the first and most cited is undoubtedly that Bill Clinton who represented – despite the political suicide linked to Monica Lewinsky – a model for a whole host of new progressive leaders who felt comforted in embracing the religion of the web without hesitation. Starting with Tony Blair, but also Barack Obama.

Here then is a red thread patiently unraveled by the two authors who from the origins of the packet network born in the seventies in France with Louis Pouzin, the man who would inspire Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn, the fathers of the Internet Protocol, brings us to the deepfake, AI-driven drones and to cyberwar also touching Ukraine, Russia, the crisis of parties, Twitter, Instagram, TikTok and the rebirth of populism that from Donald Trump reaches Beppe Grillo.

Incidentally, the rich anecdote on the birth of the information society from the 1950s onwards, with happy incursions also in the history of electricity and communication in Italy (as when we are reminded that Sip, the ancestor of Telecom Italia, was the Piedmontese hydroelectric company), makes reading pleasant and encourages us to take useful mental notes.

But returning to the culprits, or at least those responsible, what caused the growth and consolidation of a toxic oligarchy for the very functioning of democracy was for Bernab and Gaggi precisely that season of deregulation which, although already started by Ronald Reagan, at the end of the nineties it allowed the nascent internet industry to put down such deep roots as to create new financial empires capable of overshadowing those of the past. The American will not to kill the baby of innovation in the cradle therefore continues up to a point close to that of no return. We need to talk about it now because we may be the last generation able to remember what life was like before, Justin Rosenstein, considered one of the fathers of the button, told the Guardian like.

Another repentant, Evan Williams, one of the fathers of Twitter, thus confessed to the New York Times in 2017 the end of the founding myth: I believed that giving people more freedom to exchange ideas and information online was enough in itself to create a better world. I was wrong, internet in pieces. But it’s not just naivety: the book recalls how many have denounced that Facebook, perhaps the most toxic ingredient in Silicon Valley, had realized in unsuspecting times that not only social networks created an addiction similar to opiates, but they fueled a widespread sense of anxiety and insecurity in adolescents.

The era of digitization is a revolution in its own way, but not a social one. Unfortunately, the crisis in publishing and the press has contributed to this deformation, which feeds critical thinking and not the creation of echo rooms that indulge us in our worst instincts. The one guilty? Always Clinton: it was Section 230 of his Telecommunications Act that created the conditions for internet exceptionalism, with the suspension of editorial responsibilities by the platforms on everything that is published. In conclusion, Bernab and Gaggi remind us, we are not finished in 1984 by George Orwell, but rather ne The new world by Aldous Huxley: Nobody forbids books and information. their excess of contradictions is enough to drown out the truth.

The essay and the appointment

Prophets, oligarchs and spies. Democracy and society in the era of digital capitalism, written by Franco Bernab and Massimo Gaggi (Feltrinelli, pp. 312, euro 22) will be in bookstores from Tuesday 28 February. Franco Bernab president of Acciaierie d’Italia. was CEO of Eni and Telecom Italia. Massimo Gaggi columnist for Corriere della Sera – of which he was also deputy director – in the United States. On Wednesday March 1st at 7 pm, at the Feltrinelli Foundation in Milan (viale Pasubio 5), the two authors will discuss the themes of the book with Davide Dattoli, Alfonso Fuggetta and the mayor of Milan Beppe Sala, moderated by the journalist Serena Danna