A new concept
of distancing

Much has been said about the widespread technologization process that is pervading the world. To try to represent all the implications, we have used picturesque examples and metaphors that are easy to understand. Some have proven effective, others much less. But of all, one particularly fortunate is the one that compares the human path – and technological evolution – to a train that moves along a linear track projected into the future and improvement.

But if on one hand it is particularly questionable that side of the metaphor (born from an evident Christian matrix) that portrays the future as necessarily “better”, “evolved” and “free”, in a broader perspective the example preserves its charm. In this comparison, in fact, the foundations are laid to understand deeply what role technology plays within our system of values ​​and rules.

If we wanted to return to our metaphor, the primary function of the technology would correspond more or less to the lubricant that allows the train to slide on the rails. Technology, in fact, although it does not shift the terms of the movement – that is, it does not alter the basic dynamics of the “railway system” that we have described – represents that element that can make transit along the tracks much easier, immediate and leaner.

The technology therefore – primarily that belonging to the so-called digital revolution – fluidifies and smoothes obstacles, relieves friction, allows an osmotic exchange between the parts taming the contacts and making the borders permeable. The technology is therefore the oil that allows an easy sliding inside an apparatus characterized by a gargantuan inertia.

It is precisely in this scenario of forces, where each element contributes to lightening or slowing down the movement, which places technology and its radical and Ptolemaic power.

Qualitative and quantitative

Until a few years ago, “analog” technology was used mainly to replace humans, when and where it was possible to introduce them. And as far as the promise to exchange technology for freedom – because this was the great enticement made to workers all over the world: to introduce more technology in order to have more free time to devote to themselves and to families – in spite of this promise, I said, has not been maintained at all, the introduction of technology has not been able to change the perception of work and its complex dynamics much.

Today it is different: technology has turned into “digital” technology, becoming pervasive and saturating existence with widespread peripherals and other access tools, there has been a radical change in the environment.

As mathematics and linguistics teaches us well: when a change involves a quantitative revolution, the result is not only the growth of a parameter but the qualitative transformation of the environment itself.

Let’s take an example that concerns forests, a topic that interests us and that we will discuss later for other reasons. If in a forest you uproots a single tree, the forest remains more or less intact even if, strictly speaking, it turns into a more bare forest. But if you uproot 90% of those trees suddenly, the forest changes radically, especially on a functional, linguistic and symbolic level. That 10% of remaining trees can no longer be recognized as “forest” and even fail to perform the function of “forest”. We are therefore witnessing a process which, by increasing quantitatively (uprooting 90% of the trees), transforms the reference landscape in a qualitative sense (different concept of forest).

Technology in the same way. When a single technological unit is introduced into the environment, the final result does not change much. But if this becomes common, omnipresent, so pervasive as to build a new dynamic of relationships around itself, then the entire human landscape changes. From quantitative passage, in fact, to qualitative result.

We do not yet know if this change will have a positive sign for humanity. If it really will be a further station of that train projected into the future of which we spoke at the beginning. What is certain, however, consists in the fact that technology will impose a new dynamic of relationships and the consecration of distance as a factor not only “functional and useful” but intimately connected to the human species of the future.

Humanity of distance

In the short term, we will realize that the isolation of these months has produced evident psychological consequences. Consequences which are not yet diagnosed but which we can begin to verify very soon. We will understand how much this rhetoric of the “the desire to find others”, strongly announced and promoted on the eve of the so-called “Phase 2” (in Italy this term refers with the reopening of the shops and the return to work) is actually more a commercial strategy conceived and applied to convey new consumption and restore a normal order of things, rather than a real one and intimate necessity. As if the peripherals we have used beyond measure in recent months – amplified in their quantitative vertex – had allowed us to overcome a sort of limit point that first cleared customs and then legitimized distance as the dominant and founding factor of civilization.

Of course this does not mean that in the future we can only live “virtually”. On the contrary: the opportunities for interaction de visu and with interpersonal exchanges in the real world will remain (and frequent). But they will be like a lateral escape route, almost a valve that allows you to vent excessive pressure.

The truth is that in everyday life, at any latitude, a new system of rules and the fluidifying function of technology will constitute a combination of vectors capable of bending and distorting our perception of reality until we escort ourselves to the rules of the future (as on of a train, in fact) without perceiving any friction.

This new humanity of distance will require that different scenarios be drawn and new meanings for the words we already know. Within the public debate new meanings will appear for the concept of democracy, equality of people and populations, the value of the individual vote, participation in public life and so on.

The space of family relationships will be redesigned (especially the young/elderly ones), the location of human beings based on personal and health developments, the geography of rights, the perception of common rules, the space reserved for those who choose not to follow the rules.

Language, as always happens, will be the carrier of this change.

Returning to our metaphor of the train: if technology is the oil that fluidifies the movement, language could be the engine of the locomotive. Let’s think – what happened frequently during the moments of greatest social tension in the lockdown – about the immoderate use of metaphors taken on by the military context. The doctors were all “in the trenches”, the virus demarcated “boundaries”, “heroes” fell on the field, the researchers “fought to destroy” the virus and so on with many other possible examples.

This language made of muscular contradictions and rhetorical intransigence was functional to highlight the power and drama of the historical moment. It was useful to create what is technically called a linguistic “frame” within which to put down concrete choices (political, economic, strategic) useful for two purposes. On the one hand, reassure citizens and reduce the state of shock. On the other hand, to delegate to a group of experts (soldiers or presumed: such as doctors, who are not soldiers but in this way they were told) the burden of bringing the conflict back to normal. All this to accomplish an extraordinary reversal of perception.

More: somehow, Covid 19 has managed to do what even HIV has not been able to do. If we think about it, in fact, one of the great side effects of AIDS was to limit or weaken the sexual revolution underway. The liberation of the body, and the liberation of the mind, has always gone through the emancipation from the rules structured on the family, ethical and sexual theme.

To be able to imagine a different society it was necessary in some way to be able to experience and practice this awareness through the destruction of the calcified canons, of the unquestionable totems that found our community. Among these, certainly all that series of moral prohibitions relating to the sexual and erotic sphere. AIDS, with its forced corollaries of diffidence, suspicion and fear of the other, has somewhat weakened or canceled the possibility of bringing sexuality to light as a public element. Conversely, it confined the deregulation of the body to pure private sphere.

In the post-AIDS era, those who possess libertine behavior or in any case not in compliance with the rules recognized as “normal” (for example: the couple made up of two individuals bound by a pact of mutual loyalty), not only is perceived as a repulsive traitor, but also as a potential source of contagion. In the post Covid 19 era, suspicions will intensify in order to move the body dimension further and further away from the sphere of interaction and to make the virtual sphere the main exchange channel. Not only the sexual component, but also that of the normal interaction between acquaintances or strangers will thin until it becomes “inconvenient”, “dangerous”, “suspicious”. In summary, what until a few months ago we considered as the foundation of a human relationship (closeness, interchange, physical proximity, sharing of intimate space) has been reprogrammed in its deep meanings until it appears to us with a diametrically opposite meaning.

More generally, what we see approaching is a new “normalization of the suspect” with a consequent rejection of everything that appears to be non-mechanical, therefore truly human. The human being who inhabits this new dimension of distance – to travel peacefully towards the new future that awaits him – requires that the degree of arbitrariness of all events be removed as far as possible. He demands that words such as uncertainty, chance, mystery, unknowns be silenced. And above all, it requires that all the reasons underlying the problem of the epidemic be removed. Unknowns that, we will see, are many and concern us directly.

Making it a war issue, in this case, has served to mask the lockdown behind the screen of an external attack. The virus is the enemy at the gates that presses to enter our borders and destroy our civilization. We must defend ourselves: adopt extreme practices to fight an equally epoch-making battle. In this struggle for victory we will therefore always be able to look towards the borders, towards the other from us, confining fear and responsibility to the outside. By dismissing the disorienting hypothesis that this pandemic, as we will see later, is a problem of human management and a direct responsibility attributable to our choices, to our behavior.

The pandemic exposed a system of responsibility that could no longer be hidden behind the delicate balance of international politics. The Covid 2019 stressed, inevitably, on the misunderstandings of the past. It ridiculed the clichés we took for granted. It nuclearized the views of those who helped create a “safety culture” made up of rhetorical stratagems and comfortable objects. It has pulverized the illusion of a western part of the world pervaded by immaculate hygiene, similar in all respects to its ethereal technological tools that seem to point to an unreal perfection.

The creation of this humanity of distance – which we still repeat, we do not know if it will lead to an evolution or not – must not become yet another stratagem or palliative used to remove the causes of the problem and make tolerable the new conditions of life and sharing that will await us in the future. On the contrary, it must be the occasion for a reflection that we must face, here and now. Lucidly.