I don't know if you happen to talk to those people who are old, but not in the personal sense: those who are old as Lemmy meant when he said “If you think you are too old to rock'n'roll then you are”. Here, those there. Those who "Marx had foreseen everything".

So, one day in the 1980s I was in my bedroom as a teenager and on my teenage boom machine I was listening to a Sepultura record, if I remember correctly Schizophrenia. It had just come out but everyone was talking about it, and the reason was that the record opened a rift with that timed shit that the Slayers had invented (nothing bad, indeed) and that everyone imitated (all bad).

Okay, so I'm listening to the music lying on my sofa, and my father passes by there by chance, stops at the door, listens a little, and then says

• "This stuff was already done by the Rolling Stones at the time, listen to old stuff".

Now, since I was "vaguely conflicted" I took it as a kind of gaslighting (it was a very popular technique in my home) and I didn't give it any weight.

But these days I'm starting to hear a lot of these talks. A few days ago there was Augias who continues to sell books that Charlemagne already considered obsolete as a "compass for the future", _and then he cannot defend himself from a clear case of phishing .

But Augias is also quite dignified, because at least he stands as the oracle of something he knows . He believes that artificial intelligence is described in the Code of Hammurabi, and the problem is that it really is: with a little drug or senility it is possible to add any meaning to shit tablets. I think they were just bathroom tiles, so to speak, but if they think there are things written on it, who am I to make them miserable? After all, every motorway restaurant teaches us that bathroom tiles ALWAYS hide writings that are really difficult to interpret. The Babylonians were certainly not the first people to write on bathroom tiles, I mean: it could be true that a lawyer who liked to suck cocks had written on the tiles of the Babylonian bathrooms all the corpus juris of the time in the toilets of the Euphrates Autogrill , and then he added that he likes cocks in his veins and put his number of any beating around it. Lawyers are weird, we know.

But I repeat: Augias's is not an ideology. And this is why if Homer doesn't talk about Phishing we can forgive him if he believes that Homer is the compass for the future. Moreover, Ulysses did not seem like a master of finding his way home. ( Homer only describes the Trojans, that is to say it all, only "Hippos" was the name of a type of ship used for transporting troops and not a fucking wooden statue of a horse. And it wasn't even a conception ship. Greek, but Phoenician. )

Those that are on me are the ideological ones. Because I think, yes, that ideology is the main road to ridicule. And so the Augias Marxists make me laugh a little, for example.

Take for example when, in every financial crisis, they come out with a knowing air, saying "Marx predicted this collapse." Imagine such a dialogue. We are in the midst of the subprime crisis, and the Marxist on duty arrives, with a knowing air.

---

• Marx had foreseen everything, as always. It is written in the capital. I have read it. For this I am better than you.
• you mean you bought CDS two months ago and are now a billionaire?
• No, I don't mean "expected" in that sense, but …
• No, wait. Italian is not a foreign language: "foresee" means that you knew it before.
• Well, of course, Marx knew that too in his day.
• Ok. So you bought CDS to fuck off and today you own your own island, I know Japan or England, right?
• No.
• Wait, thing. Are you saying that you KNEW about these crashes, but didn't buy a CDS either? Didn't you sell your house and everything you had to buy CDS and become a billionaire?
• Um… no.
• I mean, you live in a shit hole, thirty-five comfortable square meters for a family of six, in Quarto Oggiaro but a stone's throw from the means, you don't know how to break the end of the month, you could have become overcharged, and you didn't?
• No, but it's not that Marx really predicted-predicted, it's that what he wrote sooner or later comes true.
• So is Marx a fucking horoscope?
• No, it's pure science, but you realize AFTER she had it all figured out, like.
• Okay, it's a horoscope.

---

You will ask me what difference the situation makes between Augias the Senile and the Nevio Marxist. The difference is that Homer never said things like "Hippon is the destiny of post-apocalyptic humanity, in a future where Trojans will be apparently harmless programs containing malicious code". He just described a fucking boat that the Trojans pulled into port, without really checking what was in the hold.

Marx, on the other hand, was writing an ideology, and therefore the road always had to lead to ridicule. So he started doing horoscopes forecasts on historical phenomena. since that time all Marxists seem to know in detail the date, cause and time of each financial crisis, (as well as the inevitable collapse of capitalism) except that they never buy the shares, bonds or CDSs that one would expect to buy. if they REALLY knew those things.

Getting rich sucks them.

But even leaving Marxism, there are many other examples, and to return to Augias many "cultured" are also ideologized, for which they cover themselves with ridicule. I just heard that Sterling and Gibson predicted EVERYTHING about the modern world, so they predicted that Twitter had silenced the president and "cyberspace" and all. So I imagine a dialogue like this:

---

• Gibson and Sterling had predicted everything that's going on. And I already read it when it came out. For this I am better than you.
• And so now you're overflowing because you invested in stock of Intel, Arm, Apple, Facebook, Google, right?
• No, I'm not very rich. I'm just saying that anyone (like me) who read Gibson and Sterling decades ago knew how it would go.
• Ok. So you bought the stock because you knew how it would go.
• But no, in the sense that Gibson and Sterling hadn't talked about exact dates or company names. It was an abstract thing, a reflection.
• Ok. But it doesn't take long to understand that if that is the future, as soon as you see that Facebook is taking off it's better to buy, right?
• Well, no. I mean, you know that something like facebook must become a global domain, but it's not like if you see facebook born …
• Go on
• I mean, you don't know that if you see facebook born that is just the thing like facebook that will become a domain. It's just identical, but you don't recognize it.
• oooook. So, it's kind of a horoscope, right?
• But no. The predictions are suitable, only that they come out as fun and you don't give them weight at the moment. After you realize they got us, understand how?
• A horoscope, in fact. You don't even believe it, but then you say "if only I had believed him".

---

And here comes the key point. Because I still remember that Sepultura episode. I remember almost everything from my adolescence. So I remember well the time Sepultura copied EVERYTHING from the Rolling Stones.

So on New Year's Eve this year I tried to do an experiment. Since the two girls of the house love K-Pop, and on New Year's Eve they spent the afternoon watching Korean New Year (basically all bands were streaming and sold 30 million tickets for this thing), before the start I placed in front of them, I took a deep sigh, and said:

• but you know that Sigue Sigue Sputnik invented all this stuff in 1983, right?

They looked at me, but since gaslighting is not in fashion in my house, the reaction was not hostile. One of the girls offered me a can of "Monster", and off we go. And then they went back to watching the show.

What does this tell me?

tells me that the future is not written in the past. Nor the present.

No one is special because they have read a book before the others. Nobody understands the future more because they have read Homer. Nobody has superpowers because they know who Llull was.

And those who say the opposite are traveling, at great speed, the highway that brings ridicule.

And if you don't believe it, remember one thing: Charlemagne invented Punk.