The war of consciences today passes through the internet

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When did we stop understanding the world? When did we stop understanding each other? And before that: how are our opinions formed?
Anyone who tries to answer these questions will be able to feign security but can’t help but wonder, perhaps in the extreme periphery of consciousness, how much his life in the community is influenced by what he has found or thrown away in the modern Borgesian library: the internet.

The Borges Library

Neither The correction of the world (Einaudi 2022), Davide Piacenza starts from the system of knowledge of our times, The Borges Library, the one in which our certainties fail and our confusion increases, and where above all sooner or later we all deal with a frustrating basic lack of communication. As if that weren’t enough, we live in the midst of infinite culture wars, battles and often fought wars online in which we all slip into a faction of belonging that often changes (or sheds skin) depending on the perspective, the digital platform, if not even the instant of a post or the reference instance. There are feminists and skeptics of lockdowns, allies of minorities and sworn enemies of political correctness, in our Babel. Someone becomes radicalized, while someone else finds himself locked up in a series of Chinese opinion boxes from which he no longer knows how to get out. extremes. And it can be deduced that awareness is the only tool that shows us a way of salvation, albeit continually tested by new ideological traps, sudden changes of direction and etiquette or sterile role-playing games between opposing factions that now aim almost only signaling each other, gaining privileged reputations within their respective audiences. Before their political distortions, which also arrived in Italy from the United States – the place of election of the culture wars, in which the right cries to the dictatorship of cancel culture and the activist and “correct” left risks illiberal deviation – Piacenza reconstructs the historical origin of the flagship terms of this era (the aforementioned cancel culture and politically correct, and then shitstorm, woke, Terf, in addition to schwa) and explores its role in the serial diatribes that colonize the ravines of the web. What was meant to unite or bring together can now divide forever: this is the trap we have built around ourselves without paying too much attention to it, and which in the last decade has led to a fragmented, hyper-quarrelsome society, unaccustomed to discussing and change your mind. Political use, personal use, the dimensions overlap, the interlocutor is whoever you want. In today’s world, then, go from privileged to virtual victims, and from victims to perpetrators, is a moment, explains the book. As in the case of Emmanuel Cafferty, the penniless San Diego repairman who found himself singled out as a white supremacist for a chance gesture immortalized by a passerby and posted on Twitter, and lost his job; through thinkers like Harold Bloom and Michel Foucault, activists like Loretta Ross and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, and columnists for the Economist and the New York Times, we are being led on the path to enlightenment, if only awareness (for which we are grateful) to defend ourselves give it shitstorm, a term that even in the absence of a literal translation makes us understand that the risk is that any online intention – from the worst to the best – is distorted and corrupted by forces beyond the control of the agent subject. “On rare occasions” – he says Piacenza – “where the same language is spoken on social networks, on the shelf of the Library there is no agreement on the right use to make of it”. So if Facebook, Instagram and Twitter may not have ruined the world (there is no doubt that they are tools with still enormous and advantageous potential), it is true that they have contributed to spreading, even among those who do not use them extensively, a common and increasingly accepted perspective on reality: that of the “fragmentation of everything”. Every day it’s up to us to put the puzzle back together to correct the direction of our words and ideas: or, even earlier and more creepily, that of our actions.

Davide Piacenza, The correction of the world, Einaudi Stile Libero Extra, pp. 320, €16.50