Vogon Today

Selected News from the Galaxy

Goofynomics

#goofy13

Some time ago, someone who thought he knew a lot, in commenting on the opportunity to contribute to a/symmetries (we were talking, of course, about contribution of ideas), made a somewhat disdainful assessment: "In any case the driving force has now sold out, you can see it in Montesilvano, where no one comes anymore…".

So, in other words: it is better to look for other outlets to express your thoughts: more authoritative and more and better frequented places.

I feel like I can say that what we saw last weekend belies this declaration of presumed death recklessly released by an ambitious young man: 403 people in the room (excluding the speakers, the staff, and a handful of other last minute guests, essentially local administrators ), for an edition conceived and organized at the last moment, little publicized, and above all little supported by the blog, where, as I told you a few days ago, I have less and less time to stay with you. When Meloni and Salvini came, ten years ago, there were 466 of us in the room. Not many more, therefore, considering that that year up to the beginning of November I had written almost 400 posts (398), while this year we don't reach 80 Having made due proportions, in fact, the visits to the blog are almost greater now that I don't write, compared to when I was pushing like a madman, to satisfy a communicative urgency that the facts have not, I would say, worn out, but rather channeled elsewhere. Having made due proportions, and observed the (true) numbers, the "traction" that some remember from the "heroic" season of the blog was therefore not greater than the current one, if measured by the #goofy numbers, which saw their maximum in 2019, just above 700 (while I'm sure many of you thought the maximum had been reached earlier). Unfortunately, we live in a world of optical illusions, and it is not enough to repeat and demonstrate it (otherwise, what illusions would they be?).

To close the point, I would say for the future that next year we will do better: we will start earlier, we will involve more (starting from the many who ex post express the desire to have wanted to be there). I'm interested in the right thing about the "number": what interests me, however, is its practical implications, that is, the possibility of having exclusivity of the structure, that is, of being able to truly be "at home". I only want my own idiots, not other people's!

And let's move on to the other points.

Someone asks me: "Are you satisfied?"

The question is not clear to me. Satisfied with what, with what? From the menu? Of the speakers? About the turnout? But then maybe it's not clear! I do not wag my tail nor have I ever wagged my tail for "consensus", for "concurrence of the masses". Of course: as some experts have noted, today it is difficult for anyone to bring so many people into one room. But if one understood why I do it, one would also understand why it leaves me indifferent. I do it for you, not for me. Clear, right? Therefore, the satisfaction, if any, should be expressed by you, not me.

In fact, many, I would say all, have expressed, to me directly, or to other members of the management or staff, great satisfaction: I can, possibly, notice two things, which perhaps you have not noticed not due to negligence but because you did not have the data to evaluate them: in addition to a significant presence of new faces, especially young people (6% under 25 years old), testifying that the public is renewing itself, that the community is actually growing, an equally significant presence of non-trivial exponents of the ruling class , all very happy to be there and very impressed by the quality of the relationships. We have lost some zero-comers but we have gained some board members: exchanging people who are certainly irrelevant with people who are probably influential seems like a positive thing to me, if the aim is to make it known that there is a different way of seeing things! Because those who have something to do need an alternative vision, of lateral thinking, as much and more than those who rant about conspiracies and betrayals entrenched in their sofa…

This satisfaction has translated, in many cases, into a question: "How do you make an edition better than the others every year?"

I see at least two reasons, both non-trivial.

The first is that finally, after so many years (it really took a lot because it takes a lot, and any entrepreneurs in the room can understand me), I have a team with a very high intellectual profile. Two people who hate, as I do, the "it's enough that we understand", the sloppy Roman approximation (after all, in Rome "doing 'na romanella" has a very specific meaning…), capable of practicing the difficult, for some unattainable, art of before and after, capable of respecting others, everyone else, starting from the most poisonous (me) to get to the most pain in the ass (you: we also had the idea of ​​holding a competition for let you vote for the most absurd letter received from the staff, but then we gave up on it for next year). I hope that they want to travel another part of the way with us, and that the support (this time not of ideas!) for a/simmetrie will not be lacking, creating the conditions for its activity to continue.

The second reason is that every year the level of others lowers and sinks, so that it takes very little, less and less, to appear prominent on the increasingly mephitic horizon of informational rubbish. I'm not saying this to belittle the excellent speakers we had, I'm not saying this to belittle the work that was done to create a logical thread between the different interventions, I'm not saying this to belittle the professionalism of those who hosted us and those who broadcast on the web! I simply say that the increasingly oppressive, increasingly explicitly claimed cloak of censorship (the prebunking that Benedetto spoke of), makes every tiny, imperceptible gust of freedom precious. If we want, it is one of the many possible ways of "exploiting the adversary's strength": the more information operators, prosecutors, European and non-European agencies work to censor us, the more we will appreciate the spaces of freedom that we have managed to build for ourselves, we will live as a moment of identity and regeneration, as the only possibility of fueling a flame of hope.

We wanted to meet those who couldn't be there for many reasons: I'm thinking of Alessia, but I'm also thinking of the parents (or children) of children (or parents) who are difficult to manage, like the one who, in a message, thanked me by telling me "I'm under house arrest without having done anything…". I don't know if we will always make this decision, but I'm happy to have made it this year, also because, always remembering that the former Italian social network (Twitter) is a bubble of methane in the swamp of information waste, being on the podium of the trending topics is in any case, it is an objective that (perhaps) makes sense, and it has always been clear to me that the involvement obtainable with streaming was a prerequisite for achieving this objective.

You can watch the streaming here:

and here:

(or directly on the a/simmetrie YouTube channel , where you can find many other interesting things).

I conclude with an observation.

Many of you have expressed regret at having to leave your common home to return to everyday life. And this surprises me a little, and makes me understand how well I did in clarifying some points in my introductory report, because your common home, in everyday life, is here, it is this, even if I realize that this fact has been lost sight of, and I understand the reasons for this loss of contact. The difference was made by the intuition of offering a virtual community a moment of gathering and physical communion: the so-called "community" that many talk about (even Wikimm…, as you know) was born from this intuition, which however had a premise, which it would be wise and healthy not to forget: the blog's birthday exists because the blog exists, trivially…

But does the blog still exist, some might ask?

Well, in fact it is up to us, starting with me, to return to living in our common home during the year. Of course, mother Albertina (as Mauro calls her), in addition to serving up her delicacies on your birthday, will also have to make an effort to set the table more often. We've talked about why and how this task is increasingly burdensome, but there is one thing I can do, that we can all do, to free up our time, and that is, quite simply, not waste it down the drain. black sewer! Speaking this morning with Elisabetta, who has never wanted to enter social media, I expressed to her my intention to leave aside the social network, which was already a blue toilet, now a black sewer: a source of waste of time, a receptacle for a handicapped humanity, controlled by one that it is anything but our companion on our path to liberation, and frequented by a noisy but negligible minority.

The space of contents, the space of reflection was and is this, and here I will return to share with you, because this is needed.

To the happy few .

(… in the next few days I'll be busy with another project, but I'll still come back here regularly. I hope you do too: I've learned from you at least as much as you've learned from me, and it's here, not in the foam of microblogging , that things remain on record. I have something to share with you, starting from my slides at #goofy13 …)


This is a machine translation of a post (in Italian) written by Alberto Bagnai and published on Goofynomics at the URL https://goofynomics.blogspot.com/2024/10/goofy13.html on Tue, 29 Oct 2024 13:41:00 +0000. Some rights reserved under CC BY-NC-ND 3.0 license.