The Future Is Already Broken
On artificial intelligence, collective amnesia and the illusion of progress
While Karl Marx’s homeland is being invaded by fresh outbreaks of totalitarianism, with the recent regional election in Saxony-Anhalt providing sad confirmation of this; while Germany is being shaken by an icy wind blowing to the right; while the solidarity embodied by Merkel’s «Wir schaffen das», we can do it, is disappearing into a chorus of boos; while all this is happening, we nearly forget that revolution, like punk, is a flower that never dies [see: Manolo Morlacchi, La fuga in avanti. La rivoluzione è un fiore che non muore, Agenzia X. 2008].
The problem, then, is not the substance, which burns as fiercely as in Gil Scott-Heron’s most famous song, but rather the cultural facade, which has replaced television with TikTok. The revolution will not give your mouth sex appeal / The revolution will not get rid of the nubs / The revolution will not make you look five pounds thinner, because / The revolution will not be televised, brother
Social media are the new opium of the masses, numbing the senses and slowing our reaction times. The recent, disturbing results of the PISA studies demonstrate this. Functional illiteracy is growing at an alarming rate, inversely proportional to the ability to understand anything more complex than the average text. Emotional intelligence is being replaced by artificial intelligence, an intelligence so fake that it cannot even simulate its own inability to feel.
Neuroscientist Giorgio Vallortigara has clearly explained the distinction between intelligence and consciousness [for example, in Pensieri della mosca con la testa storta, Adelphi, 2021]. The former, like AI, solves problems; the latter, by contrast, allows us to feel, to experience emotions.
On Instagram, one identical game after another appears, along with stories created without the slightest trace of creativity, using banal prompts that would have made the first programmers of the early Internet laugh.
The future that awaits us is post-apocalyptic, but not as we imagined it when we were young: no zombies, no radiation, no acts of heroism. The adventure remains purely virtual, and therefore barely interesting. What awaits us is a great nothingness in which boredom and mediocrity reign supreme.
In their novels Am Ende der Welt liegt Duisburg am Meer [Henselowsky Boschmann, 2018] and Milchzähne [Blumenbar, 2021], writers such as Sascha Pranschke and Helene Bukowski imagine alternative futures that are neither cool nor epic, but simply piles of rubble with no memories of the past. Nothing more than a broken hard drive, a sad metaphor for brains damaged by the constant bombardment of advertising impulses, which in the end stress our grey matter more than electroshock ever could.
In a present riddled with illnesses that once went undiagnosed, perhaps because of medical incompetence, or perhaps because their causes were not so deeply rooted in our society, we have all become extreme hypochondriacs. Telegram & Alzheimer; Candy Crush Saga & Parkinson; Bluesky & impotence; 3D-Printing & coeliac disease; YouPorn & psoriasis. And many more.
What difference is there between this present and the 1980s I grew up in, under the shadow of a Cold War that the fall of the Soviet Union finally brought to an end, wiping away the nuclear remnants of Chernobyl and the three-eyed fish from The Simpsons?
Perhaps none.
And yet we have gone back to those days, with long-dormant conflicts and ghosts of a dark past returning to roar. Russia is bombing the West, the Middle East is in flames, the United States is being led by a madman emulating Kubrick’s Dr Strangelove and — last but not least — Nazi-fascism has once again been brought back into the mainstream.
I wish it were a bad dream; instead, it is reality.
Perhaps I should ask ChatGPT to invent a portrait of me in the 1980s, like many people are doing these days, except that I actually lived through those years, and I don't need a poor digital imitation to avoid feeling them all over again.
Revolution, as Mao Tse-tung used to say, is no dinner party; it is not an essay, a drawing, or an embroidery; it cannot be carried out with the same elegance, composure and delicacy […]. Revolution is an insurrection, an act of violence […].
A rose covered in thorns, dying and rising again like a phoenix from its own ashes.
I still wanna believe, like Fox Mulder.
The future will not be sterilized.