The culture twinks aren't serious but want to be taken seriously

When I started writing for newspapers, newspapers were already dead — which is precisely why I could write for them. As a friend puts it, I was born too late to enjoy the fat years and too early to feel at home filming myself over breakfast and monologuing about foreign policy from my bedroom.

At twenty I spent my time writing my own nonsense on social media — things I wouldn't say in private today. I made a fool of myself many times, always without success: for free. So when I see the new barbarians, they look a lot like the old ones. Just better at monetising.

The preamble was obligatory, given the subject. Today there is a small generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings, almost all curly-haired male twinks with the gift of the gab, who have understood one thing: nobody wants to read, but there is an open range of people willing to watch anything. They'll watch drain-clearing videos, so of course they'll listen to a poem if it makes them feel more cultured without the effort of opening a book. (Passive entertainment beats active entertainment — it's not as if before the internet people learned to play instruments or read poetry; they watched TV, played video games, stared at street mimes.)

Like the twenty-year-olds of ten or fifteen years ago, they too dream of cultural institutions: newspapers, television, major publishing houses, festivals. The difference is that today those institutions count for even less, and so they walk through the door more easily, because they bring three things that traditional intellectuals often no longer bring: the audience, the audience, the audience.

The decline began in 2011, when the thirty- and forty-somethings of the TQ movement were signing manifestos and demanding space in Italian cultural life. They promised to defend literary quality regardless of commercial success. Some went on to run festivals or win prizes; many others survived by earning steadily less in the publishing world — still preferable to actual work: as I write this, two labourers are taking turns in my scorching attic breathing insulation dust. AI will not replace them.

Fifteen years after those heartfelt appeals against savage neoliberalism and culture-as-commodity, those same cultural circles are forced to applaud people who stepped onto the stage precisely because they have followers and views. And so the twenty-year-olds have taken a seat beside the ninety-year-olds. Could a nation that fetishises grandparents and grandchildren really have had a different kind of generational turnover?

I happened to work for one of those Instagram channels that do popularisation for people with no intention of reading. One day my boss came in and showed me the latest genius — meaning someone who had invented a career through online content. If you don't produce content, you're a spectator.

This guy is a very young twink, sharp, curly hair, good-looking, knows how to talk. He is Edoardo Prati.

I found him insufferable. Everyone in the newsroom was mad about him. I remember sharing one of his videos with the caption: «Can't he just do drugs like everyone else his age?», feeling very witty. Someone explained to me that he had an agency behind him. That's the formula newsrooms use to say a person has become untouchable: agency people ask for more money, impose conditions, complicate any collaboration. At his age I had a blog.

Meanwhile Prati was growing. He even grew a little moustache. He appeared on Fazio, in Repubblica, at festivals, in theatres. In short, he was preparing to become the next Minister of Culture. And there I still was, writing that sooner or later he and the other educated twenty-year-olds would vote for Vannacci. Sorry, Edoardo — it wasn't you. It's me.

At first I thought what bothered me was his way of speaking, the affected lilt of the student imitating his professors. Then I thought it was the platitudes — though they were platitudes for me, not for someone so young; I simply wasn't his target audience.

In the end I understood that Prati wasn't what bothered me. It was my colleagues, my boss, every fanatic commenting under his videos: «You're a genius». I would probably have thought Umberto Eco was an idiot too if he'd gone into a kitchen to do video op-eds.

Anyway, we only like young people when they act ninety. If they hold a book instead of a smartphone we act like we're witnessing a miracle. It wasn't Prati I had it in for. It was the viewers.

I disagree with Irene Graziosi when she argues that what stops these young people from being taken seriously is above all the persona they have built on social media. Italian culture over the last forty years has been full of personas, especially on television. How many times have we said that today Pasolini would have ended up in Gianni Sperti's chair on the dating show Uomini e Donne?

The problem isn't that they are personas. It's the type of persona they have chosen to become. They present themselves as new barbarians, but they are cultural traditionalists whose idea of culture is: the classics, theatre, the major publishing house, mainstream television, the literary festival, the professor who at the end says well done. They are ministerial clerks. Which is exactly why, when they appear on TV, they dress the way athletes dress when they go to Sanremo, the way our grandparents dressed on Sundays to look their best.

They want to be recognised as intellectuals according to criteria set by adults, not to invent new ones. Even when they speak the language of revolt, they offer a popularisation without edges — compatible with festivals, with Fazio, with the culture pages, and with audiences who want to be reassured that there are still young people capable of quoting Lucretius.

Cultural institutions don't see enemies arriving, but well-behaved confirmed children: young enough to bring an audience, old enough not to actually question anything.

Raffaele Giuliani has made himself recognisable by playing a tattooed Cacciari dressed like Funari. His persona seems built to render in monologue form the union of comments left under news cards: the left-wing activist. Some people are reminded of Sgarbi, but not even the catatonic post-depression Sgarbi is this devoid of vitality. Sgarbi became famous because he flogged his audience; this Giuliani strokes it.

Giorgiomaria Cornelio, whose name everyone gets wrong, speaks with that academic vocabulary where you must always «inhabit the space», «inhabit the problem», «sit with the problem». Notice how these educated young people always love Battiato, Amanda Lear, and then the armed left. They'll tell you with a smile that they appreciate Margherita Cagol. Imagine someone coming up to you and saying they're into Joy Division and Totò Riina.

Riccardo Pedicone, a sort of Gen Z Baricco out of Stranger Things, interviews writers on a podcast called Felici Pochi, alongside two other hosts. At 15 he drops out of school and meets Don Alberto Ravagnani (who in the meantime has left the priesthood and become just another muscle-influencer), and ends up living in a parish centre in Busto Arsizio. Practically his own personal Don Mazzi. Pedicone then grows up, founds his own cultural association, transforms that hunger for community into a hunger for a community. Again — what can you say to kids who love literature instead of spending all their time on Hinge trying not to get laid?

After a piece by Andrea Minuz and Michele Masneri on the «baby opinionists», Prati responded with an Instagram carousel. He wrote that they, unlike adult journalists and writers, get «picked up, sold and thrown in the bin». That instead of finding pages to fill they found contracts (he can dry his tears with the bank transfers). That if they stop feeding the algorithm or refuse to run naked toward the horizon to promote a poetry collection, they get eliminated (certainly not Cornelio, who is more bare-chested than Pasolini, and that's fine by me).

Prati seems to imagine that those who arrived before him found publishers ready to nurture them and newspapers willing to invest in their talent. Some perhaps did. Many found cash-strapped newsrooms, underpaid freelance gigs and no one to catch a typo. If previously a hole on the page demanded an underpaid contributor, now there's something better for filler: someone who already comes with their own audience.

The most disappointing thing for me is that today's twenty-year-olds aren't satisfied with selling thousands more copies than the journalists — they want to be taken seriously.

Maybe they really are an unlucky generation. I couldn't say whether more so than mine or less.