The first press article I published (1992?) was commissioned to me at dawn in a bar, I finished sketching when the morning was already noisy reality, and around eleven o’clock I had to dictate it to a secretary over the phone. He wasn’t the only one in my fledgling writing career that I sent in this way. Then the fax would come successively and almost immediately the email. One strange thing about getting older is that any time of your own, however distant, doesn’t seem so far away. Obviously, this is an illusion designed to support the fictional story of our identity. This time of which I speak is far away, not only because of the past 30 years; it’s mostly because most of my life, with its losses, gains, and realizations, falls in between. Am I the one who bought the newspaper the next day before returning home in the evening, or who uses public transport to do my daily routine on my cell phone? The weekly moviegoer in original version cinemas or the one who rejects dense films with one click? Who has cut off each of their appearances in the press with the vanity of a whiplash, or confined themselves to relying on the random storage of unknown servers? And by the way: until when? Will there be archaeologists in the future who specialize in reconstructing cloud outcrops?
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I’m old now, but that doesn’t make me a rare specimen. More out of laziness and humility than any conscious decision, I’ve managed not to have a Facebook or Twitter account (they have one on Facebook with my name on it, but it’s apocryphal). Tinder excites me as an experience, but I live happily as a couple. I opened one from LinkedIn although I did it by mistake when downloading some files and since then my only activity has been accepting the friend requests I receive, 452 to date without ever caring, my feed profile. I’ve also been running an Instagram account for two years, which my painter father’s gallerist recommended that I open in his name. I post photos of their paintings, report on their exhibitions and try to make them visible by liking other people’s pages, not randomly, but let’s say the range of my approval, my little hearts and my applause is as broad as it is diffuse . I guess almost everyone acts the same way.
During the last camp my son attended, for five days at the end of June, I received more than 350 photos in the WhatsApp group opened by the organizers to communicate with parents. Hasty photos, of children engaged in nautical activities or relaxing in the hotel, which of course I looked at impatiently. My son only came out in two pieces and off the side, but I didn’t protest. There were parents who did, and there were even those who asked the monitors to focus them better. At any given time, on the streets of every city, there are teenagers posing Kardashian-style in front of their enslaved parents. Dark, stereotypical images. People used to come home from a trip with something to tell, now they squeeze it onto their networks before they finish it. Have we gone insane? The billions of photos taken on the planet every second have perverted the very meaning of photography, which seemed to be to preserve moments of life. We are fed up with them, and yet we continue to capture and consume them, knowing that they will hardly leave the memory of our phones. The image has become the message, and everything that isn’t has to imitate its immediacy: doctor’s appointments, scholarship applications, press releases, expressions of condolence. This constant, jerky flow has usurped the space of discourse. Subject to constant disruption, we live at the apex of the urgent, of the breakout; in the realms of exhibitionism, of emptiness. Who cares? Although we try not to see, not to open, not to pay attention, the effort denial requires is enormous. Not even the few who defy the smartphone and still cling to antediluvian cellphones are not safe. vain hope. The whole of society – including politics and journalism – seems to have been populated by the fugitive. We ride waves that break on the cliffs of boredom beyond our sight. Our thinking has become fragile and discontinuous, stammers. Our library shelves are full of books that we can no longer read, and since the superfluous often makes more noise than the important, we tend to think that nothing is. But that’s not the worst. The worst thing is that when we live in the constant present, we become forgetful and therefore don’t prepare for the future either.
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Who still remembers the lasting destruction of the last Gulf War? Who remembers unresolved conflicts like the one in Palestine? We’re constantly looking the other way, at the screen of our cell phone, chatting about little things. Now that war is shaking part of Europe again, we forget that until recently its main culprit was a strategic ally, forgiven for its authoritarian excesses, its murders. Did we care about the Russians who went from want to extreme poverty with the collapse of the Soviet Union? We cared more about gas and oil and the money the oligarchs brought to our shores and soccer fields. Climate change is stronger than predicted, but next winter half of Europe will go back to coal for heating. Wasn’t there time to prepare? And when this war is over, will we learn from our mistakes? Doesn’t matter. There are those who get rich by making the weapons of the next wars. Politicians have a habit of being late because they’re always after money, and money, you know, is interested in sleepy people. I’m referring to the politicians trying to be fair, the others belittling the debate directly with childish slogans like communism or freedom.
I would like to close with an anecdote to weave a hopeful metaphor. I do not have it. I look into my son’s eyes and the love I feel matches my fear. It is likely that the pendulum of stupidity will swing back at some point. It happens that the times of history are slower than those of human life and that we will certainly not see. how will we live what do we keep How will we learn? what will we be
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