Internet in Italy was born in Pisa, now in Pisa it tries to understand its imperfections

Between the Leaning Tower, the Maritime Republic and the thousand stories that tourists must know tourists who, arriving in our beautiful country, very few know that Pisa is the mother city of the Italian internet.

Yet right on the banks of the Arno, on April 30, 1986, the first national internet connection was activated at the headquarters of the former CNR Cnuce Institute. In three decades, what was new for a small niche has grown globally and the subsequent birth of the web has made it the fulcrum of our contemporary communication.

Imperfection in Pisa, the Italian mother of the internet

Not surprisingly, really Internet Festival has been held in Pisa since 2011, an event that animates the buildings and streets of the city providing opportunities to learn about how the network is changing. In the meantime, it is enough to walk down the street to understand how our life has changed. Tourists are taken more by their smartphones than by the wonders of Piazza dei Miracoli, beauty flows before their eyes as if they have already seen everything. They are right, it has been like this for some time between Instagram, Tik Tok and the search engines that indicate if that restaurant is good or if that church deserves the queue.

Me too’Internet Festival lives the same dimension. From the enthusiasm, perhaps exaggerated, of the participants of the first editions, we arrived at a program that aims to analyze the problems and difficulties of the network. To do this, you have to go through every experience. Even from imperfection, the key word of this edition.

The network between the enthusiasm of the origins and the current commodification

Imperfection is everywhere, let’s think of those who take advantage of the continuous fashions that involve this world. The blockchain intoxication, incredibly valid for every application, which the metaverse seems to have supplanted as the new magic word of these months has not yet passed. Probably no one is quite clear what it will be, we didn’t even know about the internet, but many seem to be sure that the metaverse will be the solution for their niche of interest. With sometimes paradoxical solutions such as those created to share the management of a beehive: perhaps for a “vegan future”, this is the goal, more awareness of reality would be needed than a hypothetical iteration of the internet as a universal and immersive virtual world.

There are those who know it well. Here we talk about “techno magic”, a term that can make us smile and lead us astray but which actually integrates the theme of the new addictions created by the network, between futuristic visions and remote archaisms. Like those who live in Pisa.

The bureaucratic end of an anarchist network

The contemporary internet also means law, indeed it is above all legislation, a rather odd bureaucratic end for an architecture born as an anarchic expression. Who would have thought in the 1990s that we would come to wonder if the rights of the Data Governance Act are really effective? Yet this is the theme. There are important guests to talk about it, starting with Dianora Poletti, judge of the Court of Cassation, Fernanda Faini of the Interdepartmental Center “Frontier Law and Technologies” (DETECT) and the journalist Federica Meta.

A debate in which, in the end, we come to ask ourselves another question: given the “pathological” dimension of the protection of digital rights, are we sure that the judicial path is the real and concrete one?

The show to exorcise the fear of dystopias

Does talking about it help you find answers? Maybe not. The crisis of the physical world seems to have also impacted immaterial realities. There is no longer any discussion on the latest social network, on the contrary, the fear of their interference has suspended everything waiting for what will happen.

The festival shows seem to respond to this desire to “normalize” a system that is too complex, gamification is the protagonist in the squares and we even have Monica Guerritore who talks about issues such as NTT, specifying their differences from NFTs, and the “active spectator” who , through the purchase of tokens, it becomes the flywheel of its projects but it is not enough.

Coming out of the most cheerful representations, the fear constantly emerges that – through the network – some of the scariest dystopias written in science fiction novels could be realized.

Drones, interactive routes and smart cities are no longer current issues but now represent a legacy of a past that is so recent but already distant in the race of the network. Yesterday was one thing, tomorrow they will be an instrument to represent another. In Pisa, however, there are tools to understand, the Festival closes on Sunday and for those who want to spend a different weekend than usual, they can discover that the Italian internet was born and lives under the Tower. Who would have thought?