After staying mouth agape yesterday as an eccentric mob stormed the US Capitol, unionizing Google would make the perfect atonement (as far as Masse und Macht goes, at least).
Václav Havel was not only a hero of democracy, the prime mover behind the Velvet Revolution and the true father of the Czech Republic.
Albeit being myself an agnostic, I find it most inspiring that Pope Francis’ lastest encyclic, Fratelli Tutti, explicitly quotes Ahmad al-Tayyeb whilst at the same time addressing some of the most striking aporias of the digital age.
As Eutopian I will be delivering a presentation with Roberta Centonze (agrathaer) at the 6th Italian Conference on ICT for Smart Cities and Communities on Digital identity towards democratic management of public goods, and more specifically on Self-Sovereing Identity as an enabler for citizen involvement in policymaking.
During her address at the State of the Union 2020, President Ursula von den Leyen has put forth that the Commission will go to great lengths in order to support Member States in setting up a framework for minimum wages, probably through collective bargaining.
Let this not be taken as an inclination to enroll him in my private Pantheon, but I hereby declare that I would pay to boast in my late thirties as little as one tenth of Warren Buffett’s stamina today. And he just turned ninety.
Behind this outrageous inability to understand why a blackface is a huge no-no, there lies that very same self-deceptive narrative which depicts Italians as brava gente (decent people) and has proven useful in dismissing as hullabaloo the Italian fascist genocide in Ethiopia, exactly as it continues to prove an ace up Italy’s sleeve when international criticism over caporalato (illegal recruitment of migrants bordering on slavery) and systemic racism has to be dodged away.
The pandemic has unleashed (or should I say rekindled) a massive conflict between generations. On the one hand, the Covid-19 is incomparably more threatening for the elderly, on the other it is the youngest who will pay, far and away, the highest price, due to a public debt looming larger and larger ahead, a plummeting job market and a long-lasting disruption in essential services like basic education. By the way, the latter has been out of order for several months on end in Italy, with no certainty as to its getting back in business.
It used to be our creed, but now it is over. It is high time for us to ditch the narrative, half naive half downright brown-nosing, whereby the multinationals of the digital revolution are perfect creatures built by enlightened geniuses. Big techs, indeed, almost invariably build their fortunes much more on the inadequacy of regulations, on unfair tax regimes, on financial unscrupulousness and on the global scale on which they operate (and on which politics is unable to be of any efficacy) than on bona fide innovation. It is not for their (albeit brilliant) AI algorithms that Uber and Lyft dominate the market, but because they have been able to exploit the gray areas in national legislation and to cut costs on the management of the working force. Gig operators were hailed as novel entrepreneurs but were, in fact, devoid of any protection and entirely depending on customers’ reviews and petty nuisances: in a word, the very parody of the American dream.
«Mums will fight for the freedom of their children. No masks no disgusting vaccines no distancing no microchip no fear!»
«June 2021. The world has been in pandemic mode for a year and a half. The virus continues to spread at a slow burn; intermittent lockdowns are the new normal. An approved vaccine offers six months of protection, but international deal-making has slowed its distribution. An estimated 250 million people have been infected worldwide, and 1.75 million are dead.»
This picture is tell-tale.
