The Value of Failure

"To be, or not to be, that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?"

In 1995 Nicholas Negroponte published the best seller "Being Digital": Internet started to spread in the US and in a few years, the Network will become the main media in contemporary society. Digital literacy becomes as important as the traditional one for the cognitive development of individuals and communities. Already a few years before everything is fully revealed, Negroponte in his book sees the enormous potential of digitization, the translation of all types of communication, written, verbal, graphic or video, in a sequence of bits, zero and one. Today you can transfer in digital format also scents remotely. 3D printers allow you to create objects starting from their digital "footprint". You can digitize everything, turn it into a sequence of zeros and ones, in bits, in numbers. In the late '60s McLuhan writes "The medium is the message" to emphasize that it is the medium used to communicate even more content to influence the mindset of an entire society. So according to McLuhan the Internet, email, social networks, are changing the way we think and not just to communicate, to understand things and relate with what surrounds us ... or maybe it's the opposite: it is the way we think that determines the success of a media over another, so maybe the web is the result of our way of interpreting the world, things, people.

Everything is digital. Everything can be represented by a number. Almost a century ago Weber had called it "Entzauberung der Welt", the disenchantment of the world: "Hence,
it
 means
 that 
principally
there
 are
 no 
mysterious 
incalculable
 forces
 that
 come
 into
 play,
 but
 rather
 that
 one
 can,
 in
 principle,
 master
 all
 things
 by
 calculation.
This 
means
 that 
the 
world 
is 
disenchanted". The secularization of Western society has for decades been the main driver of the power of the developed countries on the rest of the planet. Probably now this same secularization is becoming the main weakness of contemporary society. The post-modern man has become a "tired" teenager, guided by the instincts of a young boy without his desire to discover and reinvent the world. In his "The McDonaldization of Society" Ritzer represents the general trend of contemporary society to make everything measurable, calculable and predictable as in the big chains of fast food or the entertainment parks Disney like. So humanity could transform his real identity in a purely digital, virtual, quantitative, measurable identity. The person now takes a "use value" as any kind of goods. Reduced to a commodity loses its humanity, becomes the object and not the subject of History.

The digital being increasingly connected manifests itself in the communication based on shared bit alphabet  but manipulates it in order to build an infinite number of different languages that often makes impossible the reciprocal understanding and the ability to find shared ideals and shared ethical. A distorted individualism that does not value the human being but fragments and confuses him in a variety of senses without sense, meaning not shared, and so without any utility in order to build communities. The disputes increase  and become more rare the agreement points. The development of the society seems to be driven by the interest of few people in the inability of most ones to unite their efforts to combat the trend towards the commodification and profit maximization. People become things and the rights of people seem to become obstacles to pursuing the only valued objective, the economic-financial wealth. When will the stock market listing the well-being? Can this one be associated only to a cold and detached economic value? Corn, rice, flour, water are not considered essential goods, on which depends the survival of a large part of the world population, but numbers that have a value and things on which to speculate. The workers are not people, but the gears of a production system able to create value and rights become only imperfections within financial processes only apparently well-oiled. It is not a problem only of democracy, but of survival. Man survives only as a collective, community, society. The good of few people against the good of many people inevitably leads to self-destruction.
"To be, or not to be, ... Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer .... Or to take arms against a sea of troubles, ... And enterprises of great pitch and moment With this regard their currents turn awry, And lose the name of action".

Who are Malthusians and Cornucopians? They are not one of the people known by Gulliver in his fantastic travels. Thomas Malthus was an English economist, who lived between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In 1798 he published a pretty famous book "An Essay on the Principle of Population". In this essay argued that increasing population proceeded faster than the increase of capacity food production: If appropriate containment policies to counter the increase in population had not been implemented, soon society would be poorer and later started to decline resulting in the complete disappearance of humanity.

This theory was later applied to the sources of energy, first to the coal and then to the oil. The theory gave rise to the philosophical movement of Malthusianism which affirms the use of birth control to prevent the impoverishment of humanity. It's an "apocalyptic" philosophy which influenced importnat economists of the twentieth century as Keynes and Ricardo. To these so-called apocalyptic contrast cornucopians. One of the first to criticize the Malthusian theory was an American nineteenth century philosopher, Ralph Emerson.  It's well known, Americans are incurably more optimistic than the "old continent" people. Emerson affirmed that Malthus forgot to consider in his thinking the wonders that  human mind is able to create and invent. 

Probably in the biblical story of Genesis, which says that God created man in "His own image", just alluded to the mind of man and woman: in them there is a shining of divinity (and not only in their mind ... but that's another topic). The term Cornucopians derives by the name of a mythical object: the cornucopia, the "horn of abundance". The myth says that the horn was lost from the river Achelous in the fight against Hercules for the conquest of the beautiful Deianira. Hercules succeeded in defeating the river-god and conquering the woman who would become his wife.

How many symbols in this story! Hercules, the man generated by the king of the gods. He is a demigod too, image and reflection of the divine shining. There's the river. The water, the symbol of life, but death too. The Christian baptism, a ritual we see in other religious cultures too, is a symbol of passage. Passage from death to life. Baptism means immersion: plunge into water means to die. To come out from water means  back to life. A prophecy of the Resurrection. There is Deianira, the beauty. There is love. The love of Hercules for his future bride. But even the love of the river god for a woman. Both gods. Both fell in love with a woman. It represents the love of God for humanity. And from this fight was born the cornucopia. The horn that produces food and flowers in abundance. Endless. Forever. Yes, I have no doubts. I prefer to be a Cornucopian.

As soon as possible for further details...

According to the United States and the European Union referendum to decide the annexation of Crimea to Russia was illegal and therefore the separation of the region from Ukraine. Do not mean to get into the reasons (I think they are too complex and outside the interests of this post), but it certainly sounds strange that a referendum, where the entire population of a country participating, can be defined as illegal, does not meet the expectations of those who define themselves as fully democratic institutions.

According to theory, the referendum is in fact the most democratic (= Démos people and CRATOS = power) can be imagined. Again, I don't want  write about the political and economic reasons of the denunce of the Western world to the Russian action in Crimea, but this event is useful to reflect about the concepts of nation-state and Democratic Participation. To be able to take it starts early on the science of social phenomena: Sociology. In 1824, the opera "Plan of Scientific Studies Necessary for the reorganization of society" the French philosopher Auguste Comte theorized the birth of a new science, later called sociology, as the last result of the development of sciences, such as biology, chemistry, physics. He considered possible to define rules and laws to explain and predict social phenomena, as well as one could explain and predict physical phenomena or chemical. We know that by mixing two simple chemical compounds we obtain a third with well-defined and predictable characteristics. Similarly, if we have a body with known mass moving with a certain speed, we are able to predict how much space will travel. If we know from where and know the characteristics of the course and its trajectory, we can predict where this object will be. These are physical and chemical laws known since the studies of the ancient Greeks more than 2,000 years ago and completed during the course of history by illustrious names, such as Galileo or Newton, to name just a few. Comte believed something like this was possible to explain and predict human behavior too, both individual and collective. Today we know the social system is too complex to have effective and precise laws as of physics or chemistry.

The dream to predict the development of society, and consequently of the story, and then be able to influence history and society for the collective good, hopefully, we can find in many science fiction stories (eg, Asimov's Psychohistory in the cycle of novels Foundation and Empire, which continue the more famous Robot cycle). What does that have to do sociology with the nation-state and democratic participation? The birth of the social sciences is a direct consequence of two changes in the social panorama of Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth century, the Industrial Revolution and the progressive development of democratic participation of the people to the government and thus the birth of the nation-states. The American and French revolutions at the end of 1700 give a decisive push to the end of the monarchical form of government, a legacy of the medieval world. These phenomena are completed in the West with the two great world wars. The First World War, with the defeat of the European Central Empires (German-Prussian and Austro-Hungarian Habsburg) and Ottoman Empire, marked the final birth of the nation-states. The Second World War, with the fall of totalitarian regimes in Germany and Italy gave a crucial boost to the democratic participation of the people in the government of nations. The industrial revolution instead finished its cycle of development in the 70s of the twentieth century and many scientists define our era as post-industrial or post-modern Age. In today's society, in economy, political and social, increasingly have great influence supra-national organizations, often not democratically elected.

In Wikipedia the term nation state is defined as "a state entity consisting of a common cultural and / or ethnic homogeneous." The English version of the network encyclopedia adds to the commonality of cultural entity and / or ethnic origin, the carachteristic of political and geopolitical entity. Today, it makes sense in a world ever more connected, multi-cultural and multi-ethnic  do we refer to the institution of nation-state? What impact have these considerations locally and on the lives of individuals and communities? What are the consequences of the crisis of the concept of the nation-state on the democratic participation of citizens in public life? They are all difficult questions to solve. In fact, these are some of the objects of study of sociology and, as mentioned previously, sociology cannot give definitive and reliable answers. Max Weber, one of the greatest sociologists of the story, said when asked about forecasts about the change of the society to appeal to magicians and not to him because he was a scientist (although Weber, died in 1920, was able to foresee the coming fascist and Nazi totalitarian regimes that would come a few years later). It is important to understand that the concept of the nation-state is not something pre-existent and absolute. It's a very recent invention, related to the historical events of the last two centuries, but that does not find correspondence in the previous hystory. Probably if we asked the fathers of our grandparents if they felt Italian, or German, or French, we would find rather half-hearted reactions (in general, of course, then there are the obvious exceptions that relate to those people most affected by particular ideologies and ideals). Going to war to defend national borders represented to them a real obligation  and not a moral obligation.

In this regard, I propose an example of how history itself has been cleverly changed (or adapted) to inculcate a concept that in real life did not exist. An event in the history medieval Italian: Ettore Fieramosca and the Challenge of Barletta. We can find characters like Fieramosca in the history of all the major countries of the world. Ettore Fieramosca was primarily a mercenary who fought for money and for the maintenance and achievement of its aristocratic estates. Nothing wrong of course for the times, and probably also had to fight for noble ideals. Only during the period of the Italian Risorgimento his figure was transformed into what we know today as a hero and defender of the nation and of the "Italianity". I remember his story in short: during the disputes between the French Anjou and the Spaniards Aragonese for the possession of the domain on the south of Italy, Ettore Fieramosca fought for the Spanish (and for Italians according to the tradition of the Risorgimento too). During these contentions a French knight, Charles de Torgues, said La Motte, accused of cowardice Italian knights who fought on behalf of the Spanish enemy. Ettore Fieramosca drew himself up as a champion of his country and February 13, 1503 thirteen Italian knights, led by Fieramosca, and 13 French knights, led by La Motte, fought a duel in the famous Challenge of Barletta. The Italian Knights won the challenge returning the lost honor toItaly, divided and dominated by several dynasties, mostly foreign. In reality this story was cleverly reconstructed from the 1833 novel "Ettore Fieramosca" by Massimo D'Azeglio in the middle of the Italian Risorgimento. To this novel followed some reworkings movies. The first in 1915, during the First World War, with the young Kingdom of Italy was building a national identity, and had to convince his soldiers to fight for the king. The second in 1938 during the Fascist regime, starring Gino Cervi (I remember a third version of the 70s starring the "big" Bud Spencer). Probably Fieramosca was mainly driven by personal pride ... "Nobody calls me chicken!", said Marty McFly, played by Michael J. Fox in Back to the Future :-)

To end: The Nation-State is as mentioned above a pure invention of the nineteenth century. This does not mean that it is good or bad. It 'was certainly an important institution throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It brought democracy and freedom to many people. It has been the cause of wars for abstruse claims of government of "pieces" of territory, yoo (see the dispute between Ukraine and Russia in the Crimea). What is instead an inalienable conquest is the DEMOCRATIC PARTICIPATION of people in public life and politics. Human aspiration from time immemorial. Even in the hierarchies of the Paleolithic or Neolithic villages. It was the dream of the poleis of ancient Greece, the cradle of Western civilization. 

The democartic participation, however, is now challenged when technology offers us the most powerful tools have ever existed to link people and connect them into a single infinite and indefinite collective intelligence.

What impact could have this decision?

http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/us-to-relinquish-remaining-control-over-the-internet/2014/03/14/0c7472d0-abb5-11e3-adbc-888c8010c799_story.html

This decision appears to move towards more democratization about the Network use, but might actually not be. The reasons about this debate are mostly of economical nature. The ICANN (Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers), founded in 1988, is an international no-profit organization that holds the governance of the Internet. It is responsible for management the IP addresses and for the first level domain name system (Top-Level Domain, to simplify the suffixes .com, .it, .eu, .net, etc.).

ICANN gets its functions by other agencies, such as the IANA (Internet Assigned Numbers Authority), most of them dependent by the United States government,  but established and administered in accordance with the ideals of the Internet pioneers.  So we must understand what will be the resulting of this organization:  the founding principles of Internet (sharing, cooperation, freedom of access, ...) will be yet privileged?

The choices that will be made will affect not only on the political and economic aspects, but in general the social lives of everyone and their development. The democratic nature of the use of the Net affects social development, and consequently, the economic and knowledge development  of individuals, communities, nations and peoples. So it is a decision that should be taken with a lot of wisdom, picking up the legacy and the dream of the founding fathers of the network and of the WWW.

"To all my contacts: Do not share my pictures on Facebook." How many times did you have find in Facebook , or any other social,  messages where someone ask to tou  to "do" some things in order to protect your privacy or the privacy of your contacte? The increasing use of Internet as key tool for communication, turns the issue of privacy in an urgent topic. But Internet and Privacy are compatible? I don't believe... Privacy and Internet are incompatible, as meaning of computer "incompatibility". A software needs a specific operating system to work . An application designed for Windows system will not work on a PC running Linux (unless you don't modify it or if you haven't a Windows emulator for Linux). An iPhone app will not work in an Android smartphone. Similarly, the word privacy "does not run" (as we say for software) on the Internet platform, unless we don't use an adapted "version" of the term "privacy". Why? It's the proper meaning of the two terms makes them inherently incompatible. Intenet is Sharing, Collaboration, Transparency. Privacy is Property, Confidentiality, Secrecy. The two words cannot be defined antinomic terms, but Internet and Privacy are certainly in opposite sides in an ideal quadrant to represent the way the people relate themselves and with others.

This feature is inherent the creation and development of the NET, as it's proper to define Internet today. 

It is a well known fact that internet was born during the Cold War in the 60s in the United States as ARPANET. ARPANET was a military project to create a communications network capable to resist a nuclear attack .... NO, NO, NO! This is just urban legend. The (almost) true story is that the seed from which sprouted Internet was indeed planted in the ex Soviet Union. Exactly October 4, 1957 in Kazakhstan when it was launched from the Baikonur Cosmodrome the "Travel Companion", better known as Sputnik, the Russian original name, the first artificial satellite orbiting the Earth. The "reds" were conquering space and the free world beyond the Iron Curtain get left behind.

During the cold war were not only important nuclear arsenals and military power, but needed to prove that you had technological leadership in order to scare your opponents more. To keep world equilibrium, the U.S. government was caught by the desire to be able to cover the gap with the Soviet Union and began to distribute  windfall funds, also for not immediately productive research projects. In traditional American liberal mind was given great freedom to private enterprise, both to private companies and public institutions. Thanks to public capital were financed projects where a private company would never invested without an immediate or short-term economic return.  For this purpose it was created in 1958 ARPA (Advanced Research Projects Agency), renamed DARPA in 1972, where D stands for Defense, indicating military purposes of financed research. This fact has probably originated the legend of Internet / Arpanet built as a communications network to withstand a nuclear attack. In fact, until 1972, but even later with a lesser degree, the purpose of ARPA was to create a substrate of science and technology to recover and overcome the technological gap arisen in late '50s with the USSR.

Among the thousands of financed projects, one in 1969 led to the birth of the ARPANET. The main objective of the ARPANET was to share precious computing resources of the first computers (hardly transportable and greatly expensive). The first experiment of remote connection between electronic computers involved four Universities: UCLA (University of California, Los Angeles), UCSB (University of California Santa Barbara), The Stanford Univeristy (in the county of Santa Clara in California, near to Palo Alto where today is located the source of ideas Silicon Valley) and the 'University of Utah. The first form of internet is not military, but was born in academia. The characteristics of the ARPANET, which are inherited by the current Internet, were: polycephalous and decentralized architecture, packet switching and compatibility with different hardware and software platforms.

All principles based on transparency and democratization of communication. The aim is to enable the world to share resources, exchange informations, collaborate on joint projects to get in less time and more efficiently the desired objectives and results. Decentralized and polycephalous means that all nodes in the network can perform the same functions. Does not exist an established hierarchy. Packet switching allows splitting information into smaller elements. Each element can be sent over the network and achieves independently to its destination, where all the elements will be reconstituted to get the original information. What looks like a complicated way to send informations, helps to ensure the informations comes in any caseto the destination, faithful to original message, even in case of failure on one of the nodes of the communication network. Finally, compatibility with all hardware and software platforms enables systems designed by different organizations and companies to use the same communication system and to achieve a high degree of transparency and independent from the logic of market and from particular interests.

From the original core to connect only four universities, the ARPANET began to cover the entire territory of the United States and later by a U.S. government network becomes a public network, including data transmission networks result of other projects (such as BITnet, Compuserve, Usenet, fidonet, etc.). ARPANET became Internet and was wrapping around the globe. To get the Network as a communication tool for everyone, transforming Internet in the appliance of the twenty-first century, household object, but also a personal tool that follows us everywhere on our smartphones and tablets, we should recall  a last great revolution: the birth of the World Wide Web. In 1991, a researcher at CERN (the European Organization for Nuclear Research), a genius of intuition and usability, Tim Berners-Lee invented the Web. Internet can be used by everyone. The realization of the dream of the hypertext that starts with a generation of scientist of information technology, communications, social sciences, such as Vannevar Bush, Ted Nelson, Douglas Engelbart. Today internet has further evolved. From simple first portals www realized with simple graphics and textual content, we got hypermedia, hyper-everything, with the birth of Web 2.0 and 3.0, which have created a new remix and prosumers culture, where everyone can feel itself an active player of communication and creativity. A new model of society, the network society, where information is the main value and the NETWORK is the tool to connect  intelligences through Internet. 

Privacy. Privacy is something as old as time? Something inherent the essence of the human race, or one of his inventions like Internet? "Then the eyes of both of them were opened, and they [Adam and Eve] realized that they were naked; so they sewed fig leaves together and made loincloths for themselves." 

Chapter 3 of Genesis seems to indicate that the seed of the concept of privacy is very old. But is it quite right? The Adam and Eve privacy is the same we mean when we talk about the internet or is it something else? 

Well ... this is another story and another post.