THE GENERATION OF THE FUTURE

Many have tried to divide recent generations, based on the habits and the ideologies that have been noticed on a large scale in social groups made of people born in limited and circumscribed periods, highlighting thus the natural differences that run between these, ghettoising furthermore the already divided and unlimited paths of the human essence.

THE USE OF THE NETWORK IS NO MORE A CRITERION OF ANY KIND OF SOCIAL GROUP BELONGING

What if the next generation is now? What if the next generation is now? What if the next change is already operating and it’s so radical that we don’t have to separate humanity anymore in groups based on age and sociality?

By now each one of us use daily modern technologies and this invisible net operates no more the function of a social divider. Today it is not a mark of youth to shop online nor to have a presence on social media: the whole population now relies on it and it’s also possible to find someone advance in years to be able to juggle between the digital information mazes better than some of the so-called “natives”.

History teaches

This hypothetical cultural generation already shares certain values well-beyond naif customs and traditions that can only on a surface level characterize the exteriority of an individual.

We can’t deny the existence of some chore principles that we have acquired back from the heaviest of the modern lessons: ww2.

Since then we all want to believe in freedom of speech, we all believe that social equality can be possible, we all believe in the unstoppable evolution of progress and we want to believe these things so hard that oft, even in front of evidence, the lamp of hope dazzles and blinds us.

These three grounds have been involved in making possible since the mid 40’s the restoration of something new not in the institutions, but in the heart of the people.

The spirit of cooperation for the first time, regardless of personal twists, like a self-fueled fire, has marched between cultures and spread in the actions and the feelings of those who had revived from the total ruin, then seemingly the definitive one too.

In the 60’s again, groups of gathered youngsters went over the fear for their own individual fates bringing to life a vigorous chant of protest against the war in Vietnam: the american government has slowly started to understand that it wasn’t the folks of the past that they were facing: you couldn’t convince them anymore to give their own lives for someone else’s business nor to fight a vulnerable country for conquering cravings but, above everything, that they wouldn’t have believed anything anymore. Our generation is also this one that never grew old: it’s the generation that doesn’t want to make war, that doesn’t want to take over the world: it is and must be the generation of the confrontation, not the one of cut tongues and, even though the leaders of all lands will always keep on trying to push us into that direction, we have understood one thing: “l’esclave qui obeit a choisi se même d’obéir”. A nobler alternative is always possible, a higher justice, and we’ve been given the tools to always seek for it so we would never let a different destiny happen to our children. Because, without those tools to evaluate, to get to know things, we don’t have the tools to defend ourselves: the real predators, more than those who take everything from you, are the ones that take away your right to know because, as long as we will follow the one that screams the loudest or the one with the most persuasive rhetoric,as long as we will keep on doing this way, we will never choose anything! We will always only be the ignorant beasts that follow the hand that fed them until that same hand takes them to the slaughterhouse, without being able to make a discrimen between the beautiful promises that kill and the ugly challenges that forge.

With great powers comes…

We have created a medium of the revolutionary weight of the invention of writing, a network capable of cataloguing all human wisdom and of distributing for free and everywhere any kind of information, but it’s up to us to decide how we want to use it: the same knife with which you cut your bread could cut you a finger…

As for the library of “The name of the rose”, this one also contains every truth and every lie, each of the most fundamental knowledge and each of the lowest jests but, as for any library, it may not contain life itself. And only from living can we gain the faculty of judging and discerning: if we were a mere Artificial Intelligence really built up only by data, then we wouldn’t find any difference between what can come out from an average sunny day or from a page of The lord of the rings. They both would be a bunch of data. We wouldn’t be able to develop moral ideas with all the data in the world alone for there’s a fundamental step between knowing and doing that transcends every number and every calculation and that step is our stance, it is our will.

Sure, I’m aware of the fact that what I’ve written may seem a trivial and futile motivational message polished with glass-cleaner, but I assure you that it is not and I have only one method to show you: look backwards (don’t mind how far back you’ll go, it may be ok also if you think what you’ve done this morning) and tell me if everything you’ve done was the result of a calculation: tell me that you’ve done everything only because it had to be done, because you only wanted to be efficient, or if there’s something in the middle of those actions, even a single pale sunray infiltrated in the closed shutters of the room you sleep in, that, as that ray, you believed had to infiltrate your life; you believed in it because you felt it and you didn’t preoccupy to ponder, you didn’t think about the risks it could have unleashed, because your day, without that miserable sunray, wasn’t worth living.

So, have you found that sunray in the end? Or are you sme AI that from morn to evening, every day, every month, every year, only executed their functions?

I don’t even have to wish for it, I know you found it, otherwise you wouldn’t have wasted your time on this notes; what I meant is that, yes, it can be good to self define and to create a sort of community with those we feel close to but, maybe what gets you closer to someone else is not about your shoes, your slang or your phone, maybe it’s instead something like an idea you can’t shut up, like an emotion so strong to overcome the limits of centuries.