Things I write in English
These days, the internet feels like an archipelago of holy wars, so much so that the very first thing you do, when you interact with someone, is try to figure out which particular crusade they are enlisted in, just so you can avoid the “triggering” moment – that precise instant when the fellow loses his grip and the holy war slips out. At which point you get the inevitable: “I just couldn’t help myself, sorry.”
When something happens a second time, you’re no longer allowed to call it an accident. At school they told us that through two points you can always draw a straight line; in geopolitics, when you hit the same wall twice, you are looking at a pattern, not bad luck. We have now had two – and arguably more than two – episodes where superpowers got bogged down by a form of resistance built on cheap, almost trivial technologies. And the pattern is always the same: the countermeasures needed to neutralise those “low‑end” tools rapidly become so expensive, and so complex, that they start to undermine the very idea of being a superpower in the first place.
If, during the Enlightenment, you had told people that one day the sum of all human knowledge would be available to everyone, Diderot, d’Alembert and Voltaire would have positively purred with satisfaction. For men like them, the very idea of knowledge being instantly accessible to anyone curious enough to seek it was not just progress, it was progress in its pure, abstract, almost religious form.
Yesterday was a strange day, because I stumbled across an odd discussion on the Fediverse. It started with a Dutch person criticizing the history of the Netherlands, claiming that Dutch kitchens are small because the Dutch used to be barbarians who cooked on the floor.
Non puoi, in questi giorni, scrivere un post sul blog senza passare dall’Iran. È ovunque: nel rumore di fondo dei media, nei soliti editoriali indignati, nel déjà‑vu di una storia che abbiamo già visto recitare troppe volte. Il copione è prevedibile, le battute sono sempre le stesse, e proprio per questo l’unica cosa sensata da fare è attenersi a ciò che si sa, evitando con cura di comprare le menzogne più comode.
People who grew up on Terminator, or similar films, almost automatically imagine that if artificial intelligence ever “took power”, they would do so through an enormously destructive war, full of explosions, killer drones and ruined cities. In that fantasy, the seizure of power coincides with the apocalypse: the AI rebels, attacks humanity and, in doing so, paradoxically ends up destroying the very world it supposedly wants to rule. Yet, as the Noble Cassandra – a fictional character I created in one of my science‑fiction novels – very aptly says: “Control is not lost. Control is relinquished.” And this apparently abstract line, in fact, describes with some precision how things actually work.