Twenty years of Blogging
I know you probably haven't kept track, but I started my first blog about 20 years ago. I say about because I remember that it was the first months of the year, and I remember that several sites, newspapers, and sites of various kinds (if I remember correctly I started on LiveJournal), but I did not take into account the exact date, I mean the day .
Maybe I didn't think I was going to hold on that long, and in fact a couple of times I was so exasperated that I closed the blog completely. But then I came back, because I learned that resilience often outweighs power itself.
Maybe I should make a speech, or some kind of speech, but the truth is that in twenty years I have learned a lot about the functioning of the internet, and precisely from some events of this blog.
You may remember the HOAX (in those days it was called a fake news) of rapeseed oil that you can put in the diesel engine . I invented it myself. The problem was that at that time it seemed to me that some newspapers were copying the peer-to-peer editorials from my blog. Inside me there was a little voice that said to me "come on, do they really copy from you?". So I did an experiment.
I invented the news of rapeseed oil. According to the news, Lidl was struggling to stock up on rapeseed oil, as everyone was buying it for fuel. The next day, the news was (as well as on all the "counter-information" blogs) on Grillo's blog, which had just opened and accepted everything. From the cricket blog he jumped to the Resto del Carlino, and then spread to almost all national newspapers, until the usual debunkers decided to deny it.
This taught me that yes, at that time the newspapers copied the news from blogs on an equal footing. I wasn't the one who had the trappings. And not only did they copy evenly: they did it badly, because while I had specified that it should not be done on common-rail diesel engines, the newsagents did not write it. Result: a number of damaged common-rail vehicles.
But it taught me a lot. He taught me how many angry there were, that in order to overthrow a system where they were sick, they were willing to believe in everything and do everything. If so many cazzolologists had understood this, you would not have the problem of Fake News today. You could have acted earlier.
Not for nothing did I not struggle, when Grillo later took to the streets with V-Day, to understand that he would have collected an enormous amount of votes. There are plenty of people who are sick in this system. That they are frustrated and angry was clear to me. That they are looking for a leader, even more. That they have no chance of making it, even more clear.
But the most important lesson I learned is that only thanks to the legitimacy (more or less veiled) of the traditional press does fake news become reality. Social networks are not enough. Journalists are bastards, and they have many techniques, from framing to sandwitching and more, to prove you right without taking the responsibility for doing so. They did it with cricket, and they did it with Salvini. If they do, fake news becomes reality. If there are novaxes it is because the newspapers have worked on them, even with subtle techniques, but it is also their fault.
On the other hand, this thing taught me well how to "sow" ideas.
And the community. Many noted that there are no comments on this blog. And that's right. The cazzologists who claim to be experts in social networks continue to say that a blog must have a community, but they have not yet understood that communities can be more than one, they can be elsewhere and that the author of the blog does not have to write to us. . Indeed moderate them.
Moderating communities becomes a duty when and if the community is on your blog. But it doesn't have to be. If you take sites like Reddit or Ycombinator, you find that you go there, post the link to a page or article, and then the discussion happens below.
I therefore removed any possibility to comment on the blog, and observing the referers I immediately noticed that groups on facebook have been created (some in favor, others against), and discussions have arisen in many places.
I don't spend a minute moderating them, which also leaves them more free. Their existence does not cost me any effort. I don't have to come into contact with toxic personalities, like narcissists, depressed, paranoid, obsessed, demotivators and so on.
Social media managers are probably right: it takes a community. But I would go further, and let many form. Even of adverse opinion. As someone said: if you talk about it well or badly, the important thing is that you talk about it.
They are right when they say that a community is needed, they are wrong when they assume that it must be only one, that the author must take care of it personally, that it must be on the blog.
Forecasts. I enjoy noting that so many things that have happened have happened exactly as I had foreseen. Some think that this derives from the possibility of predicting the events that are about to happen, but it is not so.
Obviously, no one can predict future events.
What I'm good at predicting is the unfolding of a narrative. Which are not "the facts", but "the story of the facts".
You know those dystopian Z-series movies where there is a good hero who fights against the bad guys who have taken power, meets or saves a passerine from the bad guy, and then kills the bad guy? Obviously, when you have identified the genre, figuring out how the plot will end is almost trivial, right?
And that's right, because when it doesn't happen you have a masterpiece in front of you, something that amazes you, and therefore it's not the Z series. Here.
The problem is, none of us know the reality that we read in the newspapers. We don't know it directly. We know it through the mass media, which transform it into narration. This does not exclude that they are also true facts, let's say selected to be consistent with the narrative. Here, this is the point: you build a narrative, THEN you look for the points of contact with reality, and only at that point is it disclosed.
The fact is that journalists and politicians are not very good and they don't have a lot of inventiveness. So the vast majority of their narrative is mundane and predictable.
When I see that newspapers are full of novax dying from covid, for example, I know I am faced with a narrative. In reality, the virus does not have a very high mortality, so it will still be a minority. So it's a narrative.
The truth is that, especially when it comes to politics, so many things are very predictable. Because parties are made up of idiots, because they choose bad narratives, because they always choose the same ones.
I've never had the ability to predict the future.
But having also written fiction books, I can predict bad books. Normally, those written by journalists.
Historical blogging.
Blogging, in historical terms, follows the history of the spread of the internet. Before 2007, the internet was done with a computer. It was therefore almost the exclusive prerogative of those who owned one at home (along with a connection) or used it from work. Although they seem like a lot of people, in reality we are talking about an elite. It was certainly not the aristocracy of society, but we can still call it an elite.
At this stage, being a blogger is fun for the writer, even with a certain complacency when writing in a provocative or idiosyncratic way, and reading is a widely tolerated exercise in open-mindedness.
From 2007 to 2010 two things happen: the first is that the internet arrives on mobile phones. From the first smartphones, which were the prerogative of a few and were very uncomfortable, we arrive at a widespread diffusion, which however does not yet impact the very young and adolescents.
But from 2007 to 2010 the credit crunch arrives, the economy becomes artificial (a branch of the central banks) and the Italian society collapses completely. And when I say completely, I mean completely. A pile of rubble, made up of past mistakes and further disasters.
At the end of the crisis, the situation is this:
- primary schools, as well as high schools, are useless and counterproductive. They no longer teach to socialize but just lock the students in a room, they delegate the disciplinary function to bullying, the quality of learning is simply pathetic, to the point that a simple invalsi test terrifies teachers.
- the family meets a quick euthanasia. The wedding day today marks the end of love, the death of libido, the extinction of happiness, and it all boils down to an economic society, made to optimize rents and current expenses. Parents panic shouting "and what do we say to children" just for a simple topless on the beach, they are so afraid of having to educate them. "Educating" becomes synonymous with "forbidding something to children".
- television implodes. The purpose of national popular TV is to empty any group identity. "Piemontese" becomes an empty container with a label on it that contains football teams, bagna cauda, boiled meat, Savoyard pseudonostalgia. The same for "Italian", "entrepreneur", "left", "right". The trouble is that it all served to force the Italian to identify with family, work and some ritual.
- religion, for lack of funds, becomes a joke. the political agenda of the right takes the place of spirituality. Christians are simply fascists. These atheistic Catholics do not even know the written message, and the same goes for atheistic Muslims, who are also politicians, and all other cults disappear in shame. By now the Satanists seem like the new Buddhas, and at least they still believe in the books they read.
- work collapses. The wages become ridiculous, slavery is the norm, the humiliation of the worker is taken for granted, and the new biblical punishment is administered by bogus entrepreneurs who are actually covered in debt and live off some banking indulgence. The colleague is an enemy, or another nihilistic and / or narcissistic slave. You can no longer have a job and be happy when you do it. Suffering and fatigue are the tool with which the entrepreneur measures productivity.
- the social fabric is a simple shopping center. There are no longer any free social places, and the only way to find new friends is to spend: pay for a gym, pay to go out for dinner, pay for shopping, with the excuse of fighting homeless people they have even taken off their benches for the elderly, with the excuse of fighting drugs, the places where kids and children can play have been canceled. You have to pay to play football, pay for karate lessons, pay, pay, pay, otherwise you won't leave the house because there is nothing to do. Those who cannot pay end up "in the suburbs", or rather in a kind of circle of the damned, who will never get out of it, and will condemn their children to a fate of drugs, unemployment and crime.
- politics remained the only social elevator. Unfortunately, requiring no practical skill other than fair advertising skills, and with the rest of the country a dead carcass, parties restructure themselves like the dominant worms devouring the best parts of the corpse.
- having disappeared the mirage of happiness, success is proposed as an alternative, but having disappeared work, success is transformed into an empty container, with the label of a beautiful body, a beautiful dress, cool photographs on it. “Cool” is the new “important”.
- masculinity is a simian, violent and senseless pose or a complete surrender of dignity. Femininity is divided between an ill-concealed ambition for prostitution (the sale of the body, even in the form of images: Instagram is the new peep-show) and a ferocious controversy driven by existential failure, which is modern feminism.
- The world of culture, which was already the sarcophagus of culture, remains as it is, that is, a meaningless mummy. He is silent. It has nothing to say as a mummy in a museum doesn't. The right aims to control, with Berlusconi, the media. The left, following the Stalinist tradition, tries to keep control of art. Even more, "culture" and "boredom" are the same word, to the point that Harry Potter will become the absolute masterpiece of the period.
In this modern hell, in this dystopian (but aesthetically valid) horror, Italian society avoids civil war in this way:
In this situation, the “blogger” becomes a problematic individual, because he might say “no, it's not fine. Is not fine AT ALL! ". And that's what I do.
After two thousand and ten, my blog begins to grow in readers, until it reaches the crazy figure of ~ 300,000 per day in 2012. I have to move to blogger because selfhosting is to be excluded.
Beppe Grillo makes even higher numbers. Anyone who opens a blog saying "is not fine!" makes crazy numbers. Politicians fear that from the fuck off day we will go to revolt, as happens with the "pitchforks". They know they are sitting inside a powder keg, and the bloggers seem to them like monkeys playing with a grenade.
And for this there are two types of organization: the religious and the politicians.
"The beasts" begin to be born. We enter the era of the "beasts", like that of Morisi.
Anyone who thinks that Morisi's "beast" was born recently is wrong. Already around 2010, there are many entities that deal with demotivating, threatening, doxing, stalking and provoking bloggers, to the point of closing them down or pushing them to extremism.
But they are amateur entities, created mainly by some internal sect of the church (CL operates from a small group located in the Lombardy-Veneto region, a group of Freemasons from Palazzo Vitelleschi arrive from Lazio, which revolve around the Tivoli prosecutor's office, and other losers) , then there are the sub-groups of the Digos and the Post, police unions fans of Evola, groups linked to social centers, and the grillini trolls already existed.
The trouble is that since 2010, these people are needed like bread. It is necessary to close as many blogs as possible, because someone has the perception that Grillo is only the beginning.
Money begins to rain, tactical help (to find bloggers, identify them, stalk them at home) and threaten them, provoke them, make them nervous. A tactic that I will recognize later, when I am on the side of the persecutor.
I made the mistake of using a Blogger widget for the purpose of setting the number of hits. A blog like mine, held by a maverick dog, difficult to reach at home because he lives abroad, becomes a target. Doxing and stalking become so heavy that at some point, just before the US elections, I decide to quit to avoid Burnout.
In the years from 2010 to 2016, a blog, any blog, is idiosyncratic ONLY BECAUSE IT EXISTS. Because the Italian is unhappy. And he gets more and more angry. The dominant sentiment in society is hatred. All I have to do is write that I didn't like a movie, and hundreds of people pop up who would be ready to launch into Hollywood with an explosive belt. It's no use saying "hey, I just said that movie sucks, I didn't declare a crusade!" : hate wants blood. Hate asks for blood.
But he is also satisfied with pain.
Fortunately for me, THREE hate collectors arrive: Grillo, Salvini, Meloni. The wicked old man from Genoa clearly acts as a collector of the disordered hatred, that of the peons with the pitchfork who make the revolution and then are killed by any Robespierre.
Among the Robespierre candidates we find Salvini and Meloni. Their alliance is the summary of the Italian family: absent love, no libido, only she cares about the children, mere economic convenience. If they got married, no one would find anything wrong with it.
To these gatekeepers, to these collectors, is added the press that begins to acclaim and magnify harmless bloggers, such as Zerocalcare: it speaks of some Sarkazzistan, of Rebibbia, and has a dialectic that seems a mixture between the rotten carcass of Sid Vicious, the same carcass after mom put it in the washing machine, a whine from Kurt Kobain and an emo teen righteously raped by a Ballrog while Gandalf-Cuckold films it. The blog of the cuckold husband dialogues in Italian , but without pornhub: sad, depressive, amateur and boring.
This apparently takes a little bit of pressure off my blog, but it remains an absurd period, in which I just say that I don't like Roman pizza to have hundreds of people proposing to found the Alaric Movement and set the capital on fire. There are no harmless arguments. You can talk about whatever you want, and somebody comes along and says “right! let's burn the world! ”. Anger is palatable.
IN this situation, with a devastated society, made up of ruins that stand up only if propped up, blogger is a monkey playing with a grenade inside a powder keg.
The whole of Italy of the period is immersed in a gigantic form of mass psychopathy, in which the concept of reality is dead and buried, and those who tour with the mask of V for Vendetta do not even realize that their sloagans are the equivalent of "Norse fire". And that their leaders are easily interchangeable with Chancellor Satler.
I admit that at that time I did not believe I had different "beasts" of Morisian memory against, more different state apparatuses, and some even parallel to the state.
It is in this situation that I decide that "communicating is useless" and I close the blog: now the public is made up of bloodthirsty beasts. There is no point in writing for such readers.
But closing a blog is not enough. As Olmi said, “today's society has hate capital that is just waiting to be invested to bear fruit”. And someone is collecting idiosyncratic writers to polarize American society ahead of the elections. His name is Bannon, and one of his in Italy is a reader of mine. And contact me.
At that time Clinton wanted to do what Biden is doing today, which is to play with fire in Ukraine. Except that if Putin can accept Biden as his equal leader, and seek a compromise, he can't do it with a woman. It would have been the end of his virility touted on Russian social networks.
Since I have a prejudice towards the atomic bombs that explode in Europe, I enlist, accepting the offer. In fact, I was a blogger, writing for them. Except that my writings were first pre-digested by an editorial staff, corrected, and then adapted to the characters who said my words.
But in doing so I frequent the chats of Bannon and his officers. I'm inside the equivalent of Morisi's Beast, only it's an American thing. Well funded, and with no self-imposed limits. To my surprise, I discover that the whole operation to support Trump is not supported so much by Russians as by Israelis. The Russians are there, but they honestly look like Chernobyl propagandists. They are masters of character assassination, but we see little of modernity. However, I also learned a lot about character assassination. The Israelis, on the other hand, are something different, and they are much more modern.
And here I learn what their provincial Italian counterparts have done to me. I learn how they drive left-wing bloggers and influencers to exhaustion. I am impressed by the end of Lena Dunham, who is triggered until she utters phrases which then, extrapolated from the context, transform a serious Clinton argument (abortion) into a fight between fans. easy, but it was "triggered" on purpose to come up with a similar sentence: https://time.com/4608364/lena-dunham-wish-abortion-comments/ (however the complete sentence was 'I Wish I Had' An Abortion To Further Understand Women's Rights, which the press then cut off for propaganda.) I was there, and I saw how they had done it.
And the result is that in the ranks of Bannon's troops I learn all the tricks that have been used against me. I learn how you can lead a blogger or influencer to burnout with triggering and other fantastic beasts.
When the 2016 meme war ends, I decide that now I know how to do "the beast" better than Morisi, and I go back to opening the blog. This time, however, I already know what awaits me.
When I reopened, after two years, the first few months were fun. Those fools of the various "beasts" have put the whole repertoire into play. They were trying hard, and they were still at 5% of what I had seen during the 2016 meme war. This experience helped me tremendously. But it was easy to deal with them now.
Also helping me came the birth of the fediverse, which looks a lot like a network of BBS, with which I have a familiarity that is hard to beat. The average age of those who work for "the beasts" is too low.
This blog does not have a comments section, and the sections are born on other social networks, I don't frequent them, at most I observe them as a spectator.
But I must say, today I consider Morisi as the latest arrival who has copied something from the masters. An amateur with some interesting insights, or if you prefer a bright but self-taught junior. And he's not that good at copying either. Also because it's copying from the wrong masters. Russians are soooooo overrated. Casaleggio Senior was also not the guru of the networks, let's say he was the Mastrota of the Network.
Except that Mastrota has a sense of self-irony. Casaleggio was missing. And the son is also missing, a cheap ad who lives off his father's name. Like all advertisers on the web, he comes from those who made the site to pizzerias, only he does it to Briatore's clubs. Or similar people.
All this quickly brings us to the period of Covid. And the period of Covid has a peculiarity: forget the fact that "it has accelerated existing crises". Italian society had already gone through all these crises. What do you want to accelerate?
The problem with the covid crisis is that it has forced many Italians to leave orbit, re-enter the atmosphere and touch the ground. Of course, many are under the illusion that there will be a "return to normalcy", but many more have understood that normalcy was shit.
Who lived in a small and insufficient apartment. That the city is a shit place. That the suburbs are the shit. That the office is the ingrown nail of human existence. That the family was a prison they want to get out of as soon as possible. Which are underpaid. That they NEED the state, and that if it had been for the liberalists the whole country would have gone the way of "Lombard health care", with its bloodbath and deaths taken away by the army.
Not all, mind you. BUT… many have dropped out of their orbit and returned to earth. Today, a blog is no longer idiosyncratic. Only small tribes linked to the parties remained active, but they no longer have strength . The beast of morisi is now useless. Characters like Renzi are just an itch on the dick of politics. Grillo is just a stingy old Genoese, bad and ugly.
The pressure on the blog is slowly normalizing. You can say your opinion and you no longer have all the ferocity that comes from the extreme polarization that resulted from a mass psychosis, deliberately injected by “parallel to the state” apparatuses, and amplified by Facebook.
The paradox of normality.
It is possible to say that after the covid normality will return. But the problem is "what is normalcy?". The years from 2007 until before Covid were not "normalcy", they were "mass psychosis". People lived in a parallel universe where things like "invasion of immigrants" or "the minister works from a tent on the beach, what could possibly go wrong?" other fantastic animals and where to find them.
Since it was a geological era for the days of the Internet, I would say that you have all taken to calling a situation that was of mass psychosis "normality". Those who live in other less polarized countries will find it extravagant. Those who live in other polarized countries, such as the UK, will think that their virtual reality is different from the virtual reality elsewhere.
So it is true that Italy will be able to return to normalcy. Trouble is, your idea of normality refers to a mass psychosis. Also because years have passed, and technology has changed.
You will never convince those companies that have saved money in office management to abandon the Home Office, but especially you will never convince new companies that are born to rent offices for 100% of the staff, for example.
Normal will be a new normal. And mass psychosis will have to deal with it.
Obviously, the new normal will not come there painlessly. First, because it's not coming anytime soon. There are those who say that the covid will end this year. Certain. And 2022 will be the year of the linux desktop. Didn't you know?
This normalcy is critical, not so much for politicians or trade unionists. The problem is that young people are growing up and growing up with a cell phone in their hand. While the old are still bigoted and bad, as always.
If you remember, I wrote that the family is useless because "and now how do I explain this to my son?" it's a babau. The school does not educate and does not train. Traditional TV and media are calibrated for an old viewer, and as if that weren't enough they still aim at the "national popular", which today is as applicable as the Lex Cornelia de sicariis et veneficiis.
The trouble is that the emptying of identity that the popular national has been dealing with no longer works. Young people grow up attached to the internet, which bypasses all limits and censorships. In the newsstands the porn is boxed in. On the internet it is available to everyone. On TV there is the contradictory. On Discord, groups don't do it. Justifying "the contradictory" in front of a young Gen Z, or later, is impossible. You're trying to explain the use of socks to a snake. He doesn't understand it.
The old national-popular society, a point of reference for the Italian province, is now a slowly decomposing mummy. It decomposes slowly, but it decomposes nonetheless. It falls apart, year after year.
The Internet, thanks to mobile phones, has arrived on the old national popular society like an asteroid. But while the K-Pg asteroid took little, this society dies at the speed of the death of the old. Slowly.
The slow agony of the old society and its progress towards the models propagated by the internet will produce anger. The dying old world is first of all angry. To understand this, he has the face of Pillon and his angry, angry and ugly way of speaking.
The old world reeks of smoke and cheap aftershave. Smells like cheap whores and high wedge heels. It stinks of pedophile entrepreneurs and cocaine addicts, it stinks of Gasparri and Gregoraci. And it's dying. He sees himself dying. It is seen falling apart, piece after piece.
They delude themselves that they can create "the valley of the dinosaurs" somewhere, but better if in the valley where they live, and they complain because it gets narrower every year. And they have not understood what they are fighting against.
The League, like FdI, as well as Berlusconi the Mummified who wants to become President believing he will become Pharaoh, are the old world that falls apart but does not give up. Ditto for the Catholic Church and its Frontman Francis, who believed two little words were enough to make the church look modern. And it only looked modern to those who long for the old world.
Italian society is a heap of sarcophagi on which a new generation of young people is growing like grass. The sarcophagi believe that weed is the problem. They don't realize the problem is they're dead. Pillon will spend the rest of his life noticing that young people laugh at him. Okay, Boomer.
For a blogger, there are two choices: to support those who want to survive in the valley of the dinosaurs, or to point out that the arrival of smartphones was the asteroid.
Will I keep writing? Certain.
Blogs are alive and well, and blogging platforms keep seeing new users. And they have pretty good accounts. The ghost foundation is doing fairly well, even WordPress is not doing badly, Write.as has its accounts in order, medium.com idem, despite the holocracy.
Quite simply, these twenty years of blogging have been interesting. They taught a lot about the society we have in Italy, and I must say that the German blog has helped me a lot to understand the world of Germany. (If Pillon knew how divorce works in Germany he would be very, very badly.)
But today I will no longer commit the ingenuities of the past: of course, perhaps I will commit new ingenuities. But the sappers and attackers of yore must understand one thing.
Greetings, and see you in 20 years.
And in the meantime, my regards to the mummies: