WORLD WORLDWIDE ITALY SICILIA News Journal Update - (en) Italy, Sicilia Libertaria: A very slow revolution (ca, de, it, pt, tr)[machine translation]

 We forget that the brain is a slow machine and this desire to emulate

rapid machines created by ourselves becomes a source of anguish and
frustration while, as Goethe wrote, the supreme happiness of the thinker
is to probe the fathomable and venerate the unfathomable in peace (L.
Maffei, In Praise of Slowness, Bologna 2014) ---- We often find in
common language profound philosophical principles that inform our time,
and they are often so pervasive that we end up no longer paying
attention to them. "Time is money" reveals much more than it seems to
imply and reveals the two sacred totems of our daily life: speed and
productivity. The faster you are, the more you produce, the more you
produce the more you earn. Our entire existence is therefore trained on
the track of speed and productivity. It is no mystery that the machine -
a potential liberator of working time - has been used exclusively to
speed up production and, rather than free it, cage and compress workers'
time. The time of the machine, which could be fast in our place, has
become the time to which we must aspire and conform. All this leads,
inevitably, to terror for everything that is slow. "Why study for many
years if I can immediately find a job with a professional course?", "Why
read a long essay if I learn the same things in less time with a YouTube
video?", "Why respect the safety constraints on construction sites that
only slow down jobs?"

One could say that slowness is a monster to be fought, something to be
defeated. And this is done from the earliest years. Everything that
requires slowness is pushed away and avoided, even the education of
children itself. It's faster to put them in front of a video on the
tablet than to play for hours with them. And at school? Nowadays,
knowledge for knowledge's sake, the "slow" discipline par excellence
(whether literary or mathematical, it doesn't matter) is transformed
into "skills training". Knowing in order to know how to do, perhaps in
an increasingly faster way. And in fact everything that is slow is
banned from education: the downsizing of all humanistic and scientific
disciplines is a clear example of this. Even in the field of art we are
witnessing something similar: painting (a very slow activity) has been
completely replaced by digital painting (faster and more productive) and
recently the latter has also been replaced by works of art created by AI.

The mechanization of the world could take two paths: draw a clear line
between what is human and what is machine, in order to free us from the
burden of mechanized work and toil, to enhance our being human, or make
us equal to machines , and like these, we must always be faster.

The stock market runs wildly, one click is enough to move enormous
quantities of money and ruin states, economic transactions follow one
another without stopping, small electronic components are produced in
the Foxconn warehouses at a frightening speed, and from the macrocosm to
the microcosm, even we are forced into ever faster, ever more
productive, ever more efficient cities.

But by thinking like machines you become like machines. The emergence of
AI has brought fears that machines could become human, and replace us.
Rather, it seems to me that we are witnessing exactly the opposite
process: the mechanization of the world does not coincide with the
humanization of machines, but with the mechanization of human beings. On
the other hand, what distinguishes us from the machine is not only the
power and speed of calculation, there have existed and still exist
brilliant chess players capable of giving machines a hard time (and they
are beaten by computers only due to biological speed limits of cognitive
processes) . Therefore, it is not speed that we must focus our attention
on, but rather the specific difference that the difference in speed
implies: critical ability is the result of slowness, study, experience,
imagination, creativity, the possibility of thinking. alternative
realities in a new way, the possibility of escaping from the dogmas of
efficiency economics. Without slowness there would be no utopia, because
there would be no aspiration to another world, to something different
from our efficient and very fast daily life, different from the frenetic
rush of the subways, of the cars, of the numbers on the monitor, of the
clocking out of cards at work, weeks of professionalizing master's
degree to immediately find work in the company.

Slowness therefore becomes a revolutionary principle because it is the
very basis of alternative thinking, it is the very possibility of the
rational existence of a different world. Taking back slowness means
taking back the possibility of saying "it doesn't suit me" when faced
with a world that is more similar to a gear than anything else. You have
to be very slow, very slow and implacable, because there is no other way
to defeat a world that always runs, too much, faster.

Zoro Astra

https://www.sicilialibertaria.it/
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