Liberal no. 44/1999
Dear Mina,
I had to give in to the demands of my two teenage sons and finally settled on having the Internet installed on my home computer. They say that without the Internet, they can no longer do their research for school and only with this tool are they able to communicate with foreign friends they met this summer. But aside from the undoubted usefulness, there are also many dangers. Pornographic sites with all kinds of nefariousness, but most of all a great waste of time: they have now reduced even evening outings. What should I do?
Davide S., Imperia
Dear David,
With the monster you have to live. Knowing that he is a monster, but treating him with extreme respect and enormous caution. I do not believe that anti-modernist crusades bring great results. Certain fundamentalist communities in Puritan America continue to persist in passivist attitudes, even rejecting electricity. And if we don’t want to fall into the same ridiculous abyss as nostalgics of the ancien régime, we will have to learn to live with all the monstrosities of our nocturnal age.
Certain debates on and around the Internet seem to me to be the repetition of issues as old as the world. And we discuss it with bored passion, forgetting that the same topics have already been analyzed with much more depth. In the last part of Plato’s “Phaedrus” there is a dialogue between Socrates and Phaedrus. Recalling an ancient Egyptian fable, according to which the god Thoth had given men the gift of the art of writing, the two Greeks come to the conclusion that writing is an ambiguous gift, because it leads to a cluttering of knowledge and limits the power of memory. Socrates claimed greater value to orality because the written word provides only an appearance of wisdom. Only the philosopher who argues without the need to refer to a writing possesses the capacity for conviction that written words do not.
Many centuries later, soon after the invention of printing, there were those who were horrified at the possibility of knowledge being disseminated on a large scale. Intellectuals were forced out of the ivory tower of academic culture, and the circulation of ideas became a fact available to most. And still in the eighteenth century Condorcet had to uphold the primacy of the press, which enabled men to know independently of the established power. The book as a tool of democracy, against all forms of control by institutions. If we then consider that even today in China, political power is still doing everything to prevent the Internet invasion from tainting the purity of ideological communism by introducing strange democratic ideas, it becomes clear that although the means and tools change, the problem is still the same.
The freedom that reigns supreme on the Net does not include forms of censorship. And, like all freedoms, it involves a huge amount of risk. Organs sold outside of regular health care venues, supermodel eggs auctioned off to the highest bidder for more beautiful children, and sites where people marry, divorce, and make love online. Musical tracks that can be downloaded without any loss of sound quality, books and cars to buy, museums to see, trips to book, apartments to rent, religions to follow, refugees to find. And so nothing more and nothing less than what this crazy world already normally offers in reality.
Perhaps the notion that there is reality, virtual reality, on the Internet should be questioned. Perhaps the virtuality is already here, on this side of the screen, on this backdrop of life where the follies and genius with which the world is charged are camped out. We have placed on the Net only that which already invades the scene of normal existence. Insignificance or evil stand a priori. And rather than being outraged that children’s bodies are being sold as if they were sandwiches, it should first be noted that the Internet reflects the filth that is already the tragic outline in which our world wallows. With the only aggravating factor being amplified mirroring, which can be enjoyed in the vilest anonymity.
But along with all this, of course, there is all the beautiful and all the useful that make our existence more worthy. And so, leaving aside porn sites (I may be the only one in the world who has never visited one, not even by accident), I get lost in the Net and surf until I land on the great actors, the great directors, the texts I don’t have in my little library, the news, the cooking recipes.
And so it is reconfirmed that the crux of the matter is always and only in use. The Net tool is only one possibility. Fortunately, there is still intelligence to guide the choices.
