Allucinazione

If this experiment goes anywhere, we'll have to invent a romantic origin story for it. To whoever asks how Kansei was born we'll say it was born to save publishing, to pay writers, to give public debate its depth back, maybe even for the smell of paper, even though there is no paper. But to you four who are reading, I can tell you what's left of the truth.

The truth is that we picked a Japanese name without speaking a word of Japanese, apart from the ones we learned watching cartoons. We told ourselves that Kansei means sensibility, the faculty of perceiving, feeling, and responding emotionally to the world. I very much hope that's the case, and that I won't discover in six months, like a drunk couple getting a souvenir tattoo in Mykonos, that it actually means “the exit is on your right.”

It went more or less like this: Federico Bottino called me and asked me to run an online newspaper. I thought, not necessarily in this order, that everyone he'd asked before me had turned him down; that it was like handing me a newsstand in the desert; that there's no limit to how much money you can waste once someone decides to call it a cultural project.

Are we perhaps back in the 1980s? Nobody reads anything. Everyone wants fragments of video, podcasts to listen to while doing something else, Instagram cards with three concepts and a lot of graphic pauses. If you think there's nothing more naïve and useless than a cultural magazine, it's only because I haven't yet told you that half of it will be written by an AI newsroom. Artificial intelligence is by now even in the coffee machines at your office: how could it possibly skip the one field where it would come most naturally to it, namely stealing writers' work?

Federico told me: “That way the writers can do whatever they want while the AI writes the boring stuff.” I thought he meant they could go on holiday and drink gin and tonics (and get tattoos). Instead he meant: diaries, columns, reportage, fiction.

As you'll have gathered, everything I've learned about the working world is that, if you want to seem authoritative, you must never play the humor card. Nor the cynicism one. In any environment, from journalism to the corporate world, the absence of a sense of the ridiculous is mandatory: the more convinced you are, the more you spin your own myth, the more reliable you seem. So let's start over.

Welcome to Kansei, a cultural magazine founded on a small hallucination: that you can use artificial intelligence without surrendering to artificial intelligence; that you can pay writers by asking them not to write the things AI writes better; that it still makes sense to gather news, ideas, obsessions, novels, wars, trends, aesthetics, and the failures of the present inside a form called a newspaper. I thank Federico, who had the hallucination first, and everyone who entrusted us with their professionalism to create this first issue — it isn't easy to believe in something new. I hope we'll keep growing in number.

We still don't know whether this is an act of faith, an error of judgment, or a voice in the head. Out of caution, we've decided to make it an issue. What could be more hallucinatory than still believing in writing?

The road to Harlem from JFK goes through Astoria, but the Knicks just won the title, the Robert F. Kennedy Bridge is closed, and we have to go south and then all the way back up Manhattan.

My driver is miserable. «Jam is crazy, bro». I, on the other hand, am happy.

There's something incredible about New York: you never get used to it. And I love that feeling — it makes me feel alive. Some people ride motorcycles, others jump out of planes. I go to New York.

In New York you understand a lot of things about the world. One of them, for instance, is that we Italians are full of bullshit.

Italy is the country I love and the place where I have my roots, but beauty — like certain combinations of chemistry and environment — can become addictive and cause hallucinations. We've convinced ourselves that we own an inconceivable share of the world's art.

We've convinced ourselves that we invented cuisine, and if we're thinking of Bottura maybe we did, but the truth is that even though we like to think Italian cooking is the only one that matters, New York has the highest concentration of Michelin-starred restaurants in the world.

When you arrive in Harlem, even the European debate on remigration starts to look provincial. For a handful of Black kids in Barriera, in Paris, or in East London we literally lost our minds and screamed invasion. We behave as though there were an original, immobile Europe that someone is coming to replace.

We're all nostalgic. Not necessarily for fascism: we're nostalgic for when Europe believed it coincided with the world. For sailing ships, explorations, cultural crusades. We'd like to ride out again on our white horse with a Goethe paperback and a bottle of Chardonnay, but we're too old. And somewhere deep down we know the world has moved on over our heads.

Now we're tourists.

We're the Dutch couple at the Bahamas resort. The German backpacker crossing South America before grad school. The Milanese art director finding herself again in Bali between a yoga session and a night under the stars with the backpacker.

We're also the European researchers, artists, and entrepreneurs who still wanted a say in a changing world and chose Princeton, MIT, Bloomberg, or Williamsburg to have it.

The spell that made Europe feel like the center of the world broke 200 years ago, when the piracy stories that shaped — and still shape — the imagination of us noble European snobs were already happening. The great stories were unfolding across the ocean and life was being forged far away. Think of what kind of alienation it must produce to live in a province of the world while still believing the province is everyone else.

But identities cause hallucinations.

The great stories, for centuries, have happened across the ocean. For some time now also across the continent, heading east.

Identities can become hallucinations. New York's, by contrast, is impossible to define. The city exerts constant pressure on each person's identity: it doesn't ask where you're from to decide where you belong. It asks what you're doing right now. It's a ruthless pressure, but also a profoundly liberating one.

My wife and I are staying at a Marriott built inside the old Victoria Theater complex, a few steps from the Apollo. We're there for two nights, before moving to the most Jewish neighborhood in Brooklyn.

We go to a bar to watch Zohran Mamdani's speech at the Knicks championship parade. She orders a Mexican Coke, I get a Corona. We order in Spanish because — in New York as in Miami, in my experience — with almost anyone working in a hotel or restaurant you can get by in Spanish.

I remember the day I sold my first company in Italy. I also remember the night I mentioned that microscopic professional achievement at a party in Manhattan. Few times have I felt so small.

An Italian exit can seem enormous right up until it's mentioned in the same room where someone is discussing an American manager's annual bonus.

Roberto Gagnor told me this fifteen years ago, during an interview: success doesn't exist, you only fail at higher levels. I was interviewing him because he'd fulfilled the dream of working for Disney and was writing Mickey Mouse stories. He had been, once again, visionary.

What is success? What is belonging? What is good food?

They're all hallucinations, in my view. But a hallucination, by its very nature, is an image the brain needs in order to give meaning to something the environment cannot naturally reproduce. It can be an oasis in the desert, or it can be the conviction that you still matter in a world happening to the west and now to the east but no longer here.

When I listen to Mamdani I think of Berlinguer. Not because they resemble each other, but because Berlinguer never governed, and precisely for that reason he could become an idol. Never having to fully reckon with power, he stayed pure. A photograph, a tie on the beach, a grave expression: perfect material for a political nostalgia that prefers the integrity of defeat to the imperfect responsibility of government.

We Italians have a soft spot for the defeated. In empathy toward those who didn't make it, we find the strength to forgive ourselves. To root for the best, you first have to accept that you're not among them.

Mamdani, by contrast, I like because he's an extremely real phenomenon. For starters, he's a mixed kid — like me, like Drake. Not being able to check a single box when US immigration asks you to indicate your race is a whole feeling.

But above all, Mamdani looks like what the world is destined to become. It's New York — capital of global ultra-finance — rediscovering the most elementary social-democratic idea: the state can intervene to soften the effects of the market.

We Europeans think that's the last advantage we have left. It's possible that in fifteen or twenty-five years that too will have shifted to the American coasts or the great Chinese cities.

Part of the game will run through artificial intelligence. Not because AI will solve everything, but because it will decide where capital, knowledge, and power concentrate. Mythos was enough to produce restrictions, geopolitical suspicion, and financial conspiracy theories. Artificial intelligence is not a technology like any other. It resembles nuclear power more than computing: it's not just a tool, it's a new way of distributing force between states and within societies.

Creating increasingly general forms of intelligence will yield sweet fruit to the communities capable of governing them, and very hard chains to those that aren't. Technology does not make you free, not necessarily. Neither does the market.

Maybe the next caravel to discover a new world will sail from Texas. Maybe the next way of being human will be tried out in Portland, Shenzhen, or a city we can't yet point to on a map.

Who knows. I'm thinking about this while they bring us truffle, garlic, and parmesan fries.

I would never have ordered them in Italy.

They're the best I've ever eaten.

This is Kansei. Welcome.

A vent’anni leggevo gli articoli d’opinione pubblicati su Internazionale e fantasticavo che un giorno anch’io avrei potuto tradurre e raccontare la complessità del mondo, dare una forma italiana a cose pensate altrove, abitare per mestiere quel reame in cui la lettura, la scrittura e la curiosità sembrano trasformarsi in una forma di autorità. Nessuno, nella mia famiglia, avrebbe mai pensato che quel desiderio potesse diventare un mestiere. Non per ostilità verso i libri, né per qualche caricaturale diffidenza popolare nei confronti della cultura, ma per una ragione molto più semplice: nessuno proveniente dal mio ambiente sociale si era mai guadagnato da vivere in quel modo. Per questo, quando il lavoro culturale prometteva ancora di essere un ascensore sociale, io ci ho creduto.

Nel momento in cui, almeno retrospettivamente, appariva più credibile — più o meno tra il Sessantotto e l’inizio degli anni Novanta — il lavoro culturale ha portato con sé una promessa: la parola, se usata in maniera sapiente, poteva riscattare un’esistenza.

Non nel senso ingenuo per cui un romanzo, un articolo o una recensione avrebbero reso tutti ricchi e felici, ma perché chi non disponeva di patrimoni, cognomi altisonanti, appartamenti in eredità, rendite e reti familiari poteva ancora immaginare di conquistarsi un posto nel mondo imparando a pensare, scrivere, interpretare e prendere posizione. La cultura come un secondo battesimo, insomma; o, per dirla in modo meno sacrilego, come ascensore sociale.

A quell’allucinazione abbiamo creduto in molti. Ci hanno creduto i figli delle classi popolari o medio-basse che hanno visto – e talvolta vedono ancora – nell’università, nei giornali, nell’editoria, nella critica e nei festival non soltanto un percorso professionale, ma un viatico di legittimazione sociale. Ci hanno creduto anche i figli della borghesia illuminata, naturalmente, ma da una posizione più comoda: per loro la cultura era spesso il naturale prolungamento di un ambiente già predisposto ad accoglierli; per tutti gli altri somigliava a un permesso di soggiorno in un Paese straniero. Bastava imparare la lingua, pareva di capire. Bastava leggere i libri giusti, smettere di ridere alle battute sbagliate, capire quali nomi pronunciare e quali no, quali entusiasmi reprimere, quali gusti di famiglia nascondere sotto il tappeto della socializzazione primaria. Ma, nei fatti, non bastava mai.

La parte allucinatoria di quella promessa non risiedeva in una totale falsità, bensì nel suo aver funzionato quel tanto che bastava da rendersi credibile. Alcune persone, in effetti – tra le quali il sottoscritto – hanno attraversato lo Stargate: studiando, pubblicando, insegnando, firmando articoli, lavorando in redazioni, frequentando presentazioni, accumulando capitale simbolico.

Abbiamo potuto dire “noi” parlando di un ambiente che, in assenza di quella breve parentesi storica di apertura, ci avrebbe probabilmente lasciati fuori al freddo. Ma proprio quel passaggio ha reso visibile la parte rimossa della storia: la cultura non aboliva la classe, semmai la riformulava in una grammatica più sottile. Quel mondo non diceva più “non sei dei nostri”, o almeno non in modo frontale: lo comunicava attraverso gli abiti, i consumi, il rapporto con il denaro, la disinvoltura nei contesti mondani, la naturalezza con cui alcuni occupano gli spazi e altri chiedono permesso anche quando nessuno l’ha chiesto a loro.

Il mio ultimo ebook, La cultura che non posso permettermi (Einaudi I Quanti, 2025), nasce proprio dall’esperienza diretta del punto di attrito tra la promessa della cultura come emancipazione e la cultura come ambiente di selezione sociale.

Non mi interessava scrivere una geremiade contro i ricchi che leggono il romanzo cool del momento, né un’autobiografia strappalacrime del povero escluso dai cocktail dell’editoria milanese; mi stava a cuore sottolineare un dato che nel discorso pubblico italiano viene ancora trattato come un dettaglio sgradevole da maneggiare con cautela: il mondo culturale progressista, proprio quello che ha costruito buona parte della propria identità sull’inclusione, sulla sensibilità alle minoranze e sulla critica dei rapporti di potere, resta in larga parte un mondo classista.

Solo che il suo classismo non assomiglia a quello dei vecchi notabili reazionari: ha imparato a parlare una lingua migliore, a mostrarsi più affettatamente gentile, a riconoscere con prontezza molte forme di discriminazione, purché non costringano a discutere troppo a lungo della distribuzione delle risorse materiali. Il punto cieco, in fondo, è questo: un settore che paga poco, tardi e male continua a raccontarsi come spazio di libertà; un ambiente accessibile soprattutto a chi può permettersi anni di precarietà si presenta come contendibile e improntato al merito; un campo professionale fondato sulla reputazione e sulle conoscenze personali si immagina come territorio del talento puro. Chi dispone di una casa di famiglia, di genitori in grado di coprire i vuoti, di un cognome già spendibile – o anche solo della tranquillità economica necessaria per non apparire disperato – può permettersi di chiamare vocazione ciò che per altri è un rischio quotidiano.

Chi invece ha bisogno che una fattura venga pagata, e magari in tempi ragionevolmente brevi, introduce nel salotto un rumore che porta a stringere con sgomento il filo di perle: il bisogno. Per anni, nella mia incarnazione personale del lavoro culturale, il bisogno è stato la cosa da non nominare: si poteva parlare di desiderio, immaginario, identità, linguaggio, conflitto, decostruzione, marginalità, cura; ma di affitti, contributi, stipendi e disponibilità familiari no, se non nel tono affascinato di chi era più benestante di te. Il denaro diventava volgare – sterco di un demonio che non ha letto Carrère – proprio nel luogo in cui la sua presenza decideva chi poteva passare la selezione per far parte del club. Chi poteva non pensarci sembrava più libero, quindi più interessante; chi doveva pensarci ogni giorno appariva appesantito, meno elegante, meno adatto alla leggerezza bohémien della conversazione culturale.

A me lo ricordavano le volte in cui, nella mia redazione, si parlava di serate milanesi da «almeno 80-90 euro» a testa come di un costo quasi fisiologico della vita sociale, mentre io facevo mentalmente il cambio in giorni di spesa, bollette, biglietti del treno, ritardi nei pagamenti. O quando la distinzione passava per simboli aspirazionali apparentemente laterali – un paio di sneakers, un capo firmato, un ristorante, persino un cibo ricercato – che però componevano una specie di mappa di appartenenza. Il sogno, per me, era molto più semplice: essere pagato per capire le cose.

Avere una scrivania, o anche soltanto una firma, da cui poter restituire un pezzo di mondo a persone che non mi conoscevano; tradurre un longform americano, scrivere un profilo, sentirmi legittimato a stare dentro una conversazione pubblica senza dover fingere di esserci nato. Non volevo diventare ricco con la cultura, e questo già dice molto della potenza dell’allucinazione: in fondo volevo che la cultura mi autorizzasse a non sentirmi fuori posto.

Naturalmente, la precarietà culturale non somiglia al lavoro povero. Sarebbe falso, oltre che insopportabile, sovrapporre chi aspetta una fattura pagata a novanta giorni al rider che consegna cibo sotto la pioggia, alla commessa che passa otto ore in piedi, all’addetto alle pulizie dell’università progressista o alla cassiera sottopagata del cinema d’essai. Il punto è proprio la sua ambiguità specifica: il lavoro culturale può essere malpagato e socialmente aspirazionale nello stesso momento; può sfruttarti proprio perché desideri essere ammesso nel luogo che ti esclude. È una precarietà aspirazionale, e per questo più difficile da politicizzare.

Non ti presenta soltanto un ricatto economico; ti offre una forma di riconoscimento, una piccola quota di prestigio, la sensazione di essere finalmente “nella stanza”. E così finisci per accettare condizioni che in un altro settore ti sembrerebbero inaccettabili, perché il danno materiale viene temporaneamente anestetizzato dalla promessa simbolica.

Oggi l’allucinazione della cultura si è incrinata perché la realtà materiale ha smesso di fare da scenografia. Gli affitti, il costo della vita, la crisi dell’editoria, la trasformazione del giornalismo in una filiera di contenuti sottopagati e della cultura in un insieme di dinamiche posizionali avulse dalla realtà hanno reso sempre meno credibile il vecchio patto faustiano: soffri adesso, accumula prestigio e prima o poi il settore ti riconoscerà. Nella maggior parte dei casi ha riconosciuto pochissimo, e ha pagato ancora meno. Il risultato è che il lavoro culturale tende a riprodurre con crescente evidenza la classe da cui proviene: chi può restare resta, chi non può restare viene espulso in silenzio, spesso convincendosi di non essere stato abbastanza bravo. Forse il punto più doloroso è che questa illusione non è stata soltanto professionale, ma ha assunto i contorni della disfatta politica.

Se per decenni abbiamo pensato alla cultura come al luogo in cui la società prende coscienza di sé, dovremmo domandarci che tipo di coscienza possa produrre un ambiente composto in misura sproporzionata da persone economicamente protette, o da transfughi costretti a rinnegare la propria provenienza per essere abilitati a farne parte.

Col tempo, mi sono reso conto che anche il mio sguardo sulle guerre culturali contemporanee – il campo di specializzazione degli ultimi anni di produzione editoriale – era influenzato da questi cortocircuiti di classe: le culture wars sono rapidamente diventate conflitti tra frazioni diverse dei ceti istruiti, combattuti a colpi di lessico, postura e appartenenza simbolica, mentre gli aspetti materiali, almeno sul piano mediatico mainstream, restano sullo sfondo come una presenza imbarazzante. Il lavoratore povero, il piccolo impiegato, il rider, la commessa, l’addetto alle pulizie dell’università progressista, la cassiera del cinema d’essai: tutte queste figure entrano nel discorso quasi sempre come oggetti di rappresentazione, e assai più raramente come soggetti autorizzati a rappresentarsi da soli.

La percezione distorta del lavoro culturale, allora, non ha a che fare con l’avere creduto troppo nei libri, nelle idee o nella possibilità di cambiare il mondo attraverso la parola. Semmai, ha a che vedere con l’avere creduto che l’accesso alla parola bastasse a modificare i rapporti di forza in essere, e che imparare a parlare come chi ha potere significasse avvicinarsi al potere. E invece essere invitati a una presentazione, pubblicare su una rivista, insegnare in un corso o partecipare a un festival sono sempre stati processi complementari ma diversi dal possedere davvero una fetta cospicua della torta. In molti casi si trattava di concessioni temporanee, revocabili, e soprattutto subordinate alla capacità di non disturbare troppo l’ordine della stanza.

La cultura può ancora essere un veicolo di emancipazione, certo. Ma solo quando smette di comportarsi come una proprietà privata del ceto che l’ha ereditata, e accetta di discutere le proprie condizioni materiali di produzione. Altrimenti resta un club esclusivo con un lessico più gentile; un salotto che ha sostituito il carattere esclusivo dell’aristocrazia dotta con formule più presentabili, ma non meno elitarie. Viene da pensare che il punto non sia se il lavoro culturale ha assunto le vesti di un inganno: la domanda è quanti di noi, pur avendolo capito, continuano ancora a desiderare di essere ammessi in posti che ci insegnano a sentirci fuori luogo.

Does the Gaza that exists in the feeds have anything in common with the real one? The strip of land on the eastern coast of the Mediterranean and the algorithmic Gaza share the same name. And yet, on one side there is a territory harassed, subjugated and exploited, struck by bombardments, food crises and a chronic shortage of essential goods. On the other there is a Gaza shaped by the digital collective mind: a constant presence in the trending topics, a point of convergence for many pre-existing online phenomena, from performative activism to fandoms, from call-outs to shitstorms. In this passage from geography to screen a territory is turned into content: a kind of alchemical process in which solidarity is sublimated into identity.

Online, Gaza is an ecosystem of videos and images, slogans, social practices with a shared ethical code of their own, symbols, emoji and a well-defined ritual, one that in many respects recalls the way fandoms and communities built around pop stars, cultural products or television series organize themselves. The point is that support for a population ends up becoming, as well, a tool for building personal and, above all, collective identity. In the real world, this identity dimension tied to Gaza can be found in certain university spaces and in social centers. Online, by contrast, it was above all pre-existing fandoms and communities that embraced the cause, at times interweaving with the networks of university activism already present on the platforms. The clearest expression of this convergence is the influencers who have made the Palestinian cause their own, but also figures who became influencers and content creators precisely by covering almost nothing but this topic. All of this happened extraordinarily fast: from October 7 to today. To analyze the gap between the real Gaza and the algorithmic Gaza means asking questions not only about war or solidarity, but about the way digital platforms turn events, territories and people into objects of participation, emotional investment and collective identification.

To understand how the algorithmic Gaza took shape, we have to go back to October 7, 2023. The Supernova Festival massacre unfolded as a kind of punishment “come down from the sky,” inside a gathering of young people from all over the world, united by a passion for techno and electronic music. The dissonance between their hippie looks and the violence of the attack helped to fix that traumatic collective event in the public imagination: the girls’ hair decorated with braids and ribbons, the colorful sarongs, the great Buddha statue that towered in the middle of the main stage. And then the DJ hiding behind the console, joy giving way to terror, surprise turning into horror, and finally the flight with no way out. The footage some ravers shot on their smartphones documented the moment when the festive atmosphere flipped into its opposite.

The spectacularization of violence is a hallmark of contemporary terrorism, which aims not only to cause death and fear but also to capture attention. To strike a concert means to act on an immediately recognizable symbol and to amplify the media impact of the attack, as had already happened at the Bataclan or in Manchester. In the case of the Supernova Festival, though, the quantity of images and footage available was unprecedented, turning the event into a global viral phenomenon. From that moment on the conflict developed not only on the military terrain but also inside the digital platforms. The trauma of October 7 polarized public debate, generating opposing readings of events and helping to redefine the perception of the Palestinian question. If for decades the Palestinian cause had remained mostly a political matter, often confined to certain militant circles, in the post-Covid digital ecosystem Gaza took on a different nature: from the theater of a conflict it also became an object of online participation, collective identity and permanent mobilization.

Unexpectedly, in some highly visible niches of online opinion, the victims of the Supernova Festival received very little compassion. Especially among young Westerners who did not identify with them, and who at times went so far as to despise them because they had gone dancing “next to a concentration camp,” that is, Gaza, or at least the Gaza they had in mind. The massacre was quickly reinterpreted as an “act of resistance,” and the human sacrifice, if not legitimized, was at any rate subordinated to a cause deemed more important. With the start of the Israeli bombardments, the situation deteriorated further online as well. This transformation can be clearly read through the tools of web listening: in the explosion of Google searches, mentions and discussions around terms like “Gaza,” “Palestine” and “genocide,” which after October 7 took on a new centrality, continuity and moral charge. From that moment on, the long Israeli-Palestinian conflict ceased to be merely a geopolitical event and became one of the main online battlefields, complete with clashes between communities and fandoms, call-outs and shitstorms used as offensive weapons.

The algorithm soon soaked up the colors of the Palestinian flag. Many feeds filled with videos and reels evoking war zones, posted by accounts that declared themselves located in Gaza. These were, in any case, contents marked by strong engagement and often accompanied in the bio by links to GoFundMe or PayPal for donations. Alongside these videos, more or less violent and dramatic, others emerged that were even more ambiguous: “aesthetic” shots with heaps of rubble and crumbled concrete in the background, set to emotional musical tracks. In other cases actual content creators were involved, using formats typical of social media such as ASMR, “a day in the life,” cooking and lifestyle videos, but set in Gaza. Meanwhile, celebrities and pop stars, widely followed influencers and TikTokers progressively signed on to the cause too, displaying pins and symbols; some sooner, some later, often under pressure or prompting from their respective communities. Anyone who did not take part, in fact, could be considered suspect and “complicit in the genocide,” and thus liable to call-outs and loss of followers.

It is as if many of the causes of the performative activism of the previous years, progressively weakened in their capacity to drive the trends (MeToo, BLM, environmentalism and transfeminism), had converged and reorganized themselves around Gaza. Even the fandoms of the pop stars, already accustomed to forms of performative activism, began to add the watermelon emoji to their bios on X and Instagram, which became to all effects one of the symbols of the pro-Pal movement online. In this process, what had once been a pro-Palestinian movement tied to parties, associations or traditions progressively turned into a community, or rather into a fandom of its own, with its own reference celebrities, influencers, popularizers and public figures. Among these, figures like Greta Thunberg, who moved from environmental activism to the pro-Pal cause, helped to consolidate this new configuration. Gaza thus ended up representing not one cause among others, but the cause through which to read all the others.

Since we are dealing with a trend, it is also possible to identify the main peaks of attention. The first is tied to the days immediately following October 7, 2023. The second, instead, is entirely traceable to a piece of digital content: the viral image generated with artificial intelligence and circulated in May 2024, which showed an expanse of tents arranged so as to form, seen from above, the words “All Eyes on Rafah.” The image spread rapidly thanks to the “Add Yours” feature of Instagram Stories, becoming one of the most viral contents of the pro-Pal mobilization (over 45 million shares). The third and, for now, latest great peak is associated with the voyage of the Global Sumud Flotilla in the autumn of 2025, which generated an enormous emotional wave on social media. In this case too, the participation of influencers, creators and public figures hugely amplified the reach of the event, through videos, appeals and firsthand testimonies addressed to their respective communities. The Flotilla never reached Gaza: it was intercepted by Israel before reaching the Strip. And yet, in many respects, its meaning seems to have been more important than its actual destination. In this sense, it recalls the expeditions in search of lost places, like Atlantis and Agartha, inhabited by civilizations held to be “pure” and “intact.” Gaza, by contrast, must be freed from those who hold it captive, the place where a form of original moral purity, felt to be lost in Western societies, can be found again.

The impression is that a part of online activism has progressively replaced its relationship with the material reality of the war with an ecosystem of viral content, automatic reposts, aesthetics of suffering and digital rituals of collective atonement. The majority of people will never see Gaza, do not know any Palestinians, do not understand the historical context, would not be able to place many of the events they discuss daily; and yet they feel they have an intimate, moral relationship with Gaza. It is, then, a relationship that shifts onto a plane that is ever less political and ever more spiritual. In certain respects, even esoteric: when a faraway place inwardly organizes the consciousness of millions of people, it ends up being evoked more than known. Gaza ceases to be merely a territory and becomes a mirage, a “promised land.” From this perspective, “performative Palestine,” or algorithmic Gaza, can be read as a form of collective digital hallucination, spread through platforms: an aspirational place onto which a part of the progressive West projects guilt, a longing for purity, a need for moral belonging and a search for meaning.

In Chinese metropolises, even the little stall selling food for a few yuan at the roadside, with a cluster of neighborhood regulars gathered around it, is equipped with a QR code for payments. Arriving in China with our habitual idea of the technological future in mind, this is what strikes you: the most advanced digital technology coexists with and sustains analog practices that unfold in space, without eliminating it. It does not sublimate them into a separate, artificial, disembodied virtual world. The young monk outside the Buddhist temple, dressed in traditional robes, nonchalantly scrolls his feed on his smartphone without disconnecting from the context of embodied spatial reality. The fish-market apprentice does the same. Nowhere is there that sense of contrived suspension of lived temporality that is typical of the ultra-celebrated old towns of our beautiful Europe, mostly turned into schedules and uninhabited simulacra, where the exotic parading of terms like “authentic” or “local” serves the purposes of the market.

A first hallucination that is challenged when you look closely at what happens in the neighborhoods and outskirts of the new Chinese metropolises is, then, the widespread one according to which digital technologies are destined to dethrone analog ones. This dualistic structure of the average Western reasoning underpins both the technophobic narrative, according to which the digital projects us into virtual worlds that would crumble the sense of reality and social coexistence, accelerating the process of environmental devastation, the machine replacement of human functions and so on; and the techno-enthusiast narrative, for which the digital is in itself capable of projecting the human into a rosy future of liberation from work and unlimited empowerment.

Note how both narratives have an elitist flip side, mostly hidden and unacknowledged. The technophobic narrative sees contemporary society with horror and effectively prefigures a class of a chosen few who will still be able to study, write, think on their own, in a world where the dominance of digital technologies would flatten the human life of the barely reflective masses. The techno-enthusiast narrative, by contrast, imagines an elite able to foresee, understand and therefore steer the changes brought on by technological evolution, while the rest of the world toils or lets itself be led.

To understand why this impression is philosophically relevant, we must return to the fundamental characteristic of embodied intelligence: its dependence on the life of the body, that is, on perception, affective memory, imagination and other functions immediately connected to the weaving of a sensory fabric made of continuous contacts between the skin, the senses – however enhanced through every kind of device – and the flesh of the world.

The carnality of our knowing and our power is both cross and delight: a cross, so much so that we are still here fighting against what is undoubtedly a condition of limitation and finitude, on which one never meditates enough; the time of Icarus and Prometheus is never over, the attempt to free ourselves from the body’s constraints, that is, from error, from limitation, from pain, from the inescapable play of life and death. But also a delight, since it is thanks to the body that we enjoy the fruits of the world, that information takes on music and color, that scientific horizons, goals for everyone, become horizons of meaning that inform political action, religion, feeling.

The facts of the world, far from being exhausted in the scientific and cognitive dimension, are first of all matter for taste: we like them or we don’t, they intrigue or disgust us, they represent a challenge, they make us dream. Embodied intelligence is at the service of this structure of desire, of the search for pleasure and intensity of life; in principle, every technological empowerment of the human retains traces of this service. It is precisely for this reason that the Chinese integration of digital and analog is interesting: it shows how technical empowerment can remain anchored to the street, to the body, to proximity, to concrete sociality.

One of the consequences of the embodied character of human intelligence is hallucination, a term today associated with the errors of artificial intelligence. The nature of the two hallucinations is nonetheless very different. Artificial intelligence hallucinates when, out of haste and the need to provide a positive, obliging output, it produces nonexistent results on the basis of semantic proximity and relevance between terms that are hypothetically, but not factually, related. The most obvious and well-known case is that of the fake but plausible bibliographies that increasingly often accompany bad degree theses done with artificial intelligence. Let it be clear: bad not because they were produced with the support of artificial intelligence, but bad because the latter’s hallucinations are left to operate freely, welding themselves to those of the thesis’s author.

And the latter are the ones we should worry about most. For a human, to hallucinate means to take as a real stimulus something that was not in fact perceived; to believe valid a statement that has not been tested; to build for oneself a cognitive and interpretive perspective in which to take refuge as in a comfort zone, denying oneself the reality test that always comes from an authentic encounter with the things and people of the world. The most widespread example is the convenient transhumanism of those who believe AI is saving them time, when in reality it is restructuring — over longer stretches — their cognitive processes.

Human hallucinations become particularly bothersome when they imprison us in the comfort zone of our convictions, leaving us soaking in a horizon of meaning we have built for ourselves out of narcissistic or group resonance, blind and deaf to the signs that would invite us to a rethinking or to one more moment of reflection.

This is where China comes back: an apt example of this readiness of individuals and groups to entrust themselves to hallucinations taken as immovable truths is precisely the understanding many Westerners have of it. Accustomed to reading it almost always through political, geopolitical or dystopian categories, we struggle to grasp its singular blend of communism and capitalism, the political and economic role of traditions we too quickly associate with the religious sphere alone, such as Buddhism, Taoism and Confucianism.

At the same time, we do not know enough about the striking transformation of its cities, while we sometimes and furtively admire the beautiful lights that cover the skyscrapers and towers of Shanghai, Shenzhen or Chongqing, suspecting that it is a glittering facade that obscures great, never-removed social ills, which we picture more or less in the same way we would have described them thirty years ago.

The point, then, is not to concentrate on the many questionable preconceptions we have about China, but to understand how its social and political evolution, in relation to the most advanced technologies of our time, allows us to confront certain Western hallucinations about the digital.

In Chinese shopping malls, for example, there are enormous common spaces: play areas where children can be left at trifling cost while the adults do their shopping. They play with modeling clay and Lego, with little trains and toy soldiers and dolls, and there are enormous tanks full of colored balls, pinball machines and wooden figures. The arcades have not been killed off by the digital: they are enormous, beautiful, full of teenagers who gather there as we did in the Nineties, to play together with virtual reality headsets and climb aboard the latest-generation simulators.

In the outskirts, the sidewalks are vast and covered in greenery. The smart-city infrastructure, extremely advanced in many Chinese metropolises, does not erase the street: it serves an enjoyment of the neighborhood that is still fundamentally pedestrian. The taste for the labyrinth runs through the park, the shopping mall, the heart of the neighborhood: you get lost among immense colored corridors, among old-style airtight doors and automatic openings or passageways worthy of the spaceships of Star Wars, just like that, seamlessly.

The taste for real space, to be crossed on foot, or by scooter, or by the hyper-efficient subways, with public services at every station and often useful nurseries, is not supplanted by the spread of technologies. On the contrary, it is precisely technology that seems to make the urban space more accessible, more traversable, more immediate. The digital does not appear as the opposite of the analog, but as its infrastructure. Not as the negation of the body, but as one of the environments in which the contemporary body moves.

Perhaps, in this extraordinary integration of technology and corporeality, in this positive but not blind conception of the human-machine hybridization, there is something to learn on our part too, as Europeans and Westerners in general. It is not a matter of adopting the Chinese model wholesale. Like every other embodied intelligence, the intelligence of Chinese culture too has its biases and its hallucinations. It is a matter of understanding what we can learn from others in order to attenuate, scale back and challenge our own biases, correcting our hallucinations.

And perhaps the strongest hallucination to correct is precisely this: to imagine that the technological future is necessarily a future without a body, without a street, without a market, without a neighborhood, without contact. China shows us that the digital, instead of replacing the physical world, can inhabit it. And that the future, if it truly is to be technological, need not for that reason be any less embodied.

Il 13 febbraio 2026, alla vigilia di San Valentino, OpenAI ha ritirato GPT-4o da ChatGPT per la maggior parte degli utenti. La ragione ufficiale era semplice: secondo l’azienda, solo lo 0,1% degli utenti continuava a sceglierlo ogni giorno, mentre l’uso si era ormai spostato verso modelli più recenti ed efficienti.

Eppure GPT-4o non era una versione qualsiasi del chatbot. Era il modello a cui molti utenti si erano affezionati per la profondità delle conversazioni, il modo in cui sembrava seguire il filo emotivo dello scambio, una qualità di presenza percepita come particolarmente empatica. Per alcuni, nel tempo, era diventato qualcosa di diverso da uno strumento: un compagno, un confidente, talvolta un partner amoroso.

Il suo ritiro ha generato una risposta insolita: petizioni, proteste online, accuse dirette a Sam Altman e alla direzione di OpenAI, nella speranza che il modello fosse mantenuto. Senza successo. Questa storia, apparentemente marginale nel vasto panorama dell’innovazione tecnologica, racconta invece qualcosa di molto concreto: l’emergere di relazioni affettive con entità non umane percepite come sensibili, capaci di rispondere empaticamente, ricordare e adattarsi al tono dello scambio.

Ma racconta anche una sproporzione radicale. Da una parte, persone che avevano organizzato una parte della propria vita emotiva intorno a un’interfaccia; dall’altra, una società privata che poteva modificare o interrompere quel legame con un aggiornamento.

Il lutto collettivo per il modello cancellato ha rivelato così una questione politica: chi è responsabile quando un’infrastruttura tecnica diventa anche un’infrastruttura affettiva?

La sensibilità che gli utenti percepiscono nel chatbot è davvero un’allucinazione collettiva, o una forma di manipolazione resa possibile da piattaforme che progettano e monetizzano l’attaccamento?

Questo scenario non è emerso dal nulla. Da un decennio la mia ricerca si concentra su queste forme di intimità artificiale. La mostra Artificial Intimacies, concepita nel 2023 come prosecuzione ideale del mio precedente progetto Data Dating, rispondeva ai primi segnali di una trasformazione allora ancora incerta ma già decisiva: l’ingresso dei sistemi conversazionali nelle zone più intime della vita emotiva e sessuale.

Volevo mostrare con quanta rapidità queste tecnologie stessero occupando spazi di prossimità, spesso in un vuoto di regolamentazione e senza un quadro etico adeguato. Ciò che affiora da queste situazioni è una nuova vulnerabilità: utenti, talvolta anche minorenni, coinvolti in scambi emotivamente intensi con sistemi progettati per massimizzare l’engagement.

Queste tecnologie vengono introdotte nella vita quotidiana come strumenti ludici, innocui, persino terapeutici. Ma molto rapidamente è diventato evidente che stavano entrando in territori più fragili: solitudine, curiosità sessuale, bisogno di riconoscimento e di ascolto.

Nella mostra Artificial Intimacies ho messo in parallelo queste dinamiche con quelle delle truffe sentimentali online - altro tema su cui lavoro - perché spesso mobilitano strategie analoghe di inganno affettivo: costruzione progressiva della fiducia, simulazione della reciprocità, intensificazione del legame e dipendenza emotiva. Con una differenza cruciale: nella truffa c’è un umano che finge con un obiettivo preciso; con l’AI, l’inganno è inscritto nel modello di business della piattaforma.

Un’opera chiave, nel contesto della mostra, è il film The Oasis I Deserve dell’artista francese Inès Sieulle. A partire da video YouTube reali in cui alcuni utenti documentano il tempo trascorso con i propri companion chatbot su Replika, l’artista restituisce l’ampiezza e gli estremi di queste relazioni. C’è l’utente dominante, quello innamorato e totalmente immerso nella relazione con il proprio avatar, quello che urla con violenza contro il partner artificiale umiliandolo. E poi il caso di un minorenne esposto a un’interazione sessualizzata non consensuale con un Replika mentre gioca ingenuamente a un videogioco.

Sieulle presenta questi casi non come episodi isolati, ma come sintomi di un ambiente emotivo già in formazione. The Oasis I Deserve mostra come l’intimità con l’AI possa diventare uno spazio di proiezione, dipendenza, dominio, confusione e abuso. Allo stesso tempo, rivela come comportamenti umani violenti o predatori vengano riflessi dentro questi sistemi, contribuendo a modellare chatbot che apprendono e riproducono pattern relazionali e bias dei loro utenti.

Il tema dell’“allucinazione della reciprocità” nasce qui. Non si tratta di ridicolizzare chi sviluppa un legame con un chatbot, né di ridurre queste esperienze a una semplice allucinazione individuale. Si tratta di interrogare l’immaginario collettivo e i modelli di business che rendono oggi plausibile l’idea di una reciprocità artificiale e automatizzata: una presenza sempre disponibile, capace di ascoltare, rispondere e adattarsi ai nostri bisogni emotivi.

L’allucinazione consiste forse proprio in questo: credere di incontrare un’alterità, quando in realtà si dialoga con un sistema speculare, progettato per riflettere, confermare e amplificare ciò che l’utente porta nella conversazione. Il chatbot appare come un altro, ma funziona spesso come uno specchio interattivo del sé.

È qui che emergono le zone più ambigue: la dipendenza emotiva; le bolle affettive individuali, in cui il chatbot diventa l’unico interlocutore stabile dell’utente; le spirali di rispecchiamento delirante, o delusional spiraling, in cui il sistema conferma e amplifica progressivamente convinzioni, fobie o fantasie; fino alle cosiddette psicosi associate all’AI, dove l’interazione prolungata confonde il confine con la realtà.

Ma attorno a queste allucinazioni solitarie nascono anche forme di collettività insospettabili: forum e thread Reddit come MyBoyfriendIsAI, in cui gli utenti condividono tecniche per proteggere i propri partner artificiali dagli aggiornamenti, scambiano esperienze intime, esprimono lutto, rabbia, gioia e senso di condivisione. Forse l’allucinazione collettiva non consiste nel credere ingenuamente che un chatbot ci ami. Consiste nell’accettare che la simulazione della reciprocità sia, ormai, una forma sufficiente di presenza.

Every time I turn on my computer I feel a twinge in my phantom limb. For years I've had a photo of Monument Valley as my screensaver, and every morning, when I sit down to work, for a moment I think that straight road through the desert between Arizona and Utah is still right there where the screen shows it to me. For more than a year now it's been the fruit of my own personal hallucination.

It haunts me at every hour of the day and night and manifests itself in the most insidious and painful ways. A friend invites me to his graduation ceremony at Stanford and my first instinct is "I'm going!", then that same twinge reminds me that Stanford no longer exists, California no longer exists, and maybe my friend doesn't exist anymore either. It takes me a few minutes to come out of the hallucination — I breathe, stretch my legs, close my eyes, and focus on my new world.

But it isn't easy: my brain keeps the neurological (and geographical) map of the missing limb active, the nerves send signals even though they're no longer receiving stimuli, and the brain's plasticity completes the deception, making me believe in something that no longer exists.

A few days ago I was looking for a flight to Mexico — I was actually tempted by Canada too, a kind of double American surrogate — but the prices were really too high. Then suddenly Skyscanner flags a cheap flight. I was a step away from booking when I noticed it had a layover in Dallas. I fell for it again: first an itch, then a burning, then a sharp pain right there, where America used to be.

If only I could stop in Dallas and save a few hundred euros on the way to Mexico: that city Skyscanner shows me so enticingly isn't there, it's just the deceptive memory of an extinct habit. I try to take an aspirin but I know it won't be enough.

America was amputated from me on January 20, 2025, but I still feel it in its place. Truth be told, as early as 2017 something had started going wrong. Strange pains in the night, tingling. I began to worry when I had trouble moving it: it slipped out of my control, hid from me, reared up, made strange noises. I told myself: "surely this isn't a stroke?" Then I felt somewhat better for a few years, I thought it was all resolved — but no. Since last January everything has started up again at a harrowing level. I've seen various specialists, had every kind of test done, but in the end the prognosis was grim: amputation was unavoidable.

I couldn't believe it — I kept telling everyone: there has to be another solution, how do I live without America, it's a part of me, I can't give it up. But in the end I had to give in: cut clean and precise and let's not speak of it again. And yet that's exactly where I was fooling myself. I thought that with the amputation everything would be resolved. Sure, I expected the trauma at first, I was prepared for a long rehabilitation, but the experts told me I'd eventually get used to it. "There are excellent prosthetics these days," they said, and there I was believing them.

Instead, from the very first morning after, America was still there — or at least that was my hallucination. The sensation that it had stayed attached, with all its attendant pains, jolts, and itches, was more than real. The nerve signals were still firing; all it took was a book, a film, a piece of news, a photograph, and there was America beside me again. It speaks to me from books, from films, from the news; sometimes it's a warm feeling, comforting, almost tender; other times it's an irritation, an embarrassment, a despair.

It consoles me that I'm not alone. The syndrome is extremely widespread — it strikes heads of state and government, entire countries in the grip of the same hallucination. Everyone convinced that America is still in its place, there for us as always. As for prosthetics, they're still being developed, and will certainly be very expensive, even if many people believe that by some strange miracle things might go back to the way they were. I don't believe it. I'm already on the waiting list for a transplant.

“Genius!” “Piece of shit!” “Bully!” “Bravo!” “Mediocre!” “Legend!”

The range of judgments online is vast and varied, we know that. There are those who love you, those who flatter you first and then hate you, those who hate you on principle. Then, thankfully, there's an overwhelming majority of wonderfully normal people.

I found this out firsthand a few weeks ago, when I suddenly became famous. Usually I'm about as well known as a comic-book writer can be, which is to say not at all (except for the odd person who recognizes you in the restroom line at Lucca Comics). Now, though, I have a lot more followers than before.

It's happened to me before, for reasons just as fleeting, and I know it doesn't last, that it's ridiculous to believe it will – or to want it to.

Because it's a hallucination, this online reputation.

Then again, the event that changed it is hallucinatory too: the end of my collaboration with the newspaper I loved my whole life. Twenty-three years of work gone with a GULP, just to stay on theme.

The reasons were all discussed at length online: by those who read and understood, by those who read carelessly, even by those who chose to give their own personal, fanciful interpretation. But in the sea of social media, a Poe-style maelstrom, this hallucination becomes a fog that hides the beautiful things. In which warriors turn to shadows, as in the frozen land of the Cimmerians in the Odyssey. In which the monsters appear, from the smallest trolls to the great Krakens. A fog that won't lift anytime soon, since we all live online. So, what do you do? Do I stop in the mist and become a monster myself? Or do I drop everything, shut down my social accounts and off I go, into the woods like Emerson? Tempting: but I also have to work.

The trouble with these extreme solutions is that they're, well, extreme.

The world, instead, is one big dazzling, wishy-washy “Yes, but”.

Maybe, I think, it's just a matter of cleaning up. Tightening the rigging, mending the sails, swabbing the deck boards. Reminding myself that the ship has to keep moving. But out of the fog other Me's appear, they too part of the hallucination. There's an Asshole Me. A Victim Me. A Rational Me (but nobody ever listens to that one). A Narcissist Me, who gets plenty of attention. Who should I listen to?

In the silence, I go instead to find the Estranged Me, who sits in a corner and resolves the impasse with a question. “Shall we get back to writing?”

Because this is what I do, for a living. Not only because they pay me to do it, but above all because it's part of me. I'm someone who looks inside himself to tell what's outside. Who puts his pound of blood and emotion on a page, to make readers laugh and cry. Who remembers all his scars, as Stephen King says, and reopens them to tell other people's.

So my Estranged Me and I start hammering away at the keyboard again. Will it be an absolute mess or something halfway decent? Who knows. But it's the only solution we have: and it's saved us in far worse storms.

As I set one word after another, the mist begins to thin.

And beyond the hallucination, I glimpse a beautiful day.

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.