Durante la chiusura al pubblico dell’Istituto, in questa pagina vi proponiamo testi e riflessioni di amici e scrittori, talvolta scritti per l’occasione, scelti ogni giorno per voi. Un modo di rimanere vicini, anche nella distanza.
‘Post-coronial studies’
What is “smart working”? Doing nothing, “far niente”, that is, living, cultivating one’s hobbies and interests, studying, writing, exercising and eating. Each of our acts, today, is recorded and produces value, precisely because it instructs the automata that live by imitating souls.
This value must be redistributed, but first of all it must be acknowledged. Think of the groups that are most exposed today, namely all those who are employed and poorly paid. What can be done for them? Those who fought against automation, in their case, may have done so for the noblest of reasons, but ultimately caused their misfortune.
And what will support the souls once they have been replaced by automata? Digital welfare: the taxation of the enormous surplus value that souls, by the mere fact of living, generate in their interaction with automata. The great Internet platforms have never earned as much as they do today, and if we think about it, the answer to the questions “who will pay Coronabonds?” and “what is the EU doing?” is very simple: Coronabonds will be paid by the platforms, and the EU will collect the taxation and redistribute it in terms of welfare.
Welfare means freedom from material needs, but also from ignorance and prejudice – therefore, it also means culture, i.e. a resource that seems particularly valuable in these weeks of quarantine.
If the virus, as is to be expected, ends up accelerating the ongoing processes, then so much blood will not have been shed for nothing.
But for this to happen we need to be able to think of the future not as the projection of the past (that’s what “smart working” amounts to) but as a radically new era that is coming forward unceremoniously, but that will really change the world, and change it for the better.
Maurizio Ferraris, President of the Laboratory of Ontology, University of Turin
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