2020 represents a symbolic threshold: an arrival and a departure. A double-digit year and leap year, as in a game of mirrors it has amplified problems and solutions, up to the peak marked by the coronavirus emergence. We have come to the end of a decade that has impacted our lives in a decisive and sometimes traumatic way. Discontinuity and the advent of new paradigms have marked Italy and the whole world: big data, sharing economy, fake news, and influencers have made a difference, in politics, business, and everyday life. The first decade of the third millennium marked a turning point in the name of a digital way: subjective, contagious, innovative, instantaneous, but also unaware, evanescent, pervasive, driven in a powerful and non-transparent way by an artificial intelligence controlled by the few, by a political thought that is as impoverished as unprejudiced, by the aggressiveness of so much communication. All this has created new possibilities and vital connections, but has also indicated the high risk of a badly distributed future, nurturing individual, civil and social forms of action and reaction, for the better or the worse.
The time has now come to reaffirm the symbolic ability to affect the future, and to underline the taking of responsibility that this implies, proposing a path of growth towards a more balanced world, made of activism and desire to count and be counted, to place oneself at the centre of the scene with one’s own authentic presence, complementary to the digital. The 2020’s will have to develop under the banner of augmented ethics that look to citizenship rights, protect the physical world from that of health and the environment, to value people in flesh and blood and their dignity, also using the power of big data but without giving up uncritically and irresponsibly to the power of the algorithm. The 2020’s could become a time and place for cultural rebirth and social innovation, on the condition that they know how to face the challenge with courage. The rebirth of the situations described in the book take advantage of the values of service and sharing, truth and trust, sustainability and intelligence, depth and negotiation, uniqueness and universality that have always represented the authentic qualities of Italy.
 

La Rinascita dell’Italia – Una visione per il futuro tra etica ed estetica aumentate
Publisher: Egea (June 2020)
Language: Italian
Price: € 16,00
Buy Online: www.amazon.it