Translator: Roberto Minelli Reviewer: Michele Gianella
I am not worried about communication:
indeed, I observe it, I like it.
What am I thinking about right now?
That my two dimensions - space and time - are bounded.
My temporal dimension is bounded
by the countdown showing how much time I have left.
This circle under my feet
is the limit of my spatial dimension.
I cannot step out of this red circle.
If I did, I would step out of camera frame
missing a unique opportunity
of recording an epic moment of my life that will survive me.
So, in these 15 minutes,
I'm leaving something to humanity,
I'm building my personal epics,
in a undoubtedly privileged venue,
thanks to my personal and my professional story.
For luck or misfortune,
I began a career in journalism with a fake recommendation
from an archbishop uncle I never actually had.
It was the only way
to cross the gates of the State Television Building
with its horse at the entrance.
That said,
I would like to debunk a myth:
We live in the era of communication.
No, that's not true at all:
Communication is not the peculiar feature of the age in which we live.
We are not communicating:
we are simply training
for an unconscious phase of our evolution.
Let me clarify.
We, more or less -
my data is completely inaccurate,
but I'm a journalist because I love inaccuracy,
otherwise I would be a scientist -
we started walking upright
more or less 20 million years ago.
Then we took another 15-17 million years
to become a full-fledged mankind.
And what triggered our evolution?
Why did we turn out to be a privileged species?
Why are we here talking in an amphitheatre?
And why are we capable of complex thoughts?
The answer is very trivial: We developed opposable thumbs.
The opposable thumb marks the beginning of our evolution.
Thanks to it, I can do this: I can snap my fingers,
I can screw a bolt and turn my hand into a tool.
And, by doing so, change the world around me.
A simple evolutionary step - the opposable thumb -
makes us who we are.
With opposable thumbs, we started to change the world.
We became the architects of the universe, as the Freemasons say,
and we are so at full length
because we didn't stop at changing the physical world,
we also started creating a wonderful metaphysical world.
Beautiful!
And we proved to be very good at this as well:
We have always dreamed - when we began to build machines.
We started creating machines that could change the world:
the wheel, the lever, and so on
up to, say, the endless screw, and the shaft drive.
All the tools we invented -
which gradually gave life to technology -
changed our world.
We didn’t simply change the world we live in,
but also the world we imagine.
We began to build fantastic architectures
in order to visualize or bolster our inner states.
So we began to acquire sensitivity,
which allowed us to build universes, cosmogonies.
We began to think of gods,
we began to create idols
that resembled us and were metaphors for us,
idols that spoke and gave us the opportunity
to see, through representation and hallucination,
what we believed we were.
This is all part of our evolutionary path.
In this moment, however, we are taking -
perhaps unconsciously,
over the last twenty years -
an evolutionary leap as powerful for us
as the one that in 17 million years gave us the opposable thumb.
We started thinking about the idea
of resorting to "emotional prostheses"
to somehow push beyond the limits of our senses.
I smiled when someone said, before my talk,
"Turn off your cell phones!"
In other words, turn off the device we use to observe our evolution in real-time.
In the same way we started to change the world,
we are trying to change our sensitivity,
to change our perception of other human beings,
and of our space-time dimension,
through this object that each one of you owns.
Each of you having one in his or her pocket
means that it now is an indispensable prosthesis.
It is only for a mere archaism that we, month after month,
check out the new model of smartphone,
limiting our thoughts at the hardware
and the external features of this object.
But the key is its essence.
This phase of our evolution will only be complete
once we incorporate this further possibility
of accessing larger spaces
than the ones constrained by our senses.
Just like this red circle,
or that countdown that reminds me
I have only nine minutes and 18 seconds left.
This means that we must see, observe and be aware
that the world we are experiencing
is encompassing our change - because we are changing.
As we changed thanks to the opposable thumb
and began to change our world,
we are now changing through the perception
that we have a new way of managing social relations.
Socialising means experience:
our brain evolves and changes through the interactions with others.
Once upon a time, a friend of mine who is a scientist,
told me: "I’m going to change you, to change something in you."
She touched my hand with her nails
saying: "Now your synapses are shaped in a certain way -
I’ve changed your brain."
You undergo a physical change simply through a caress.
Now imagine how much we changed, and we are still changing,
due to the stress we were not used to cope with,
of having a social network filled with, say, 20 - 30.000 "friends".
From having an organized database of all our relationships.
From the loss of a hierarchy of relations
except from an alphabetical order of the relations we entertain.
Well, that's great.
It will change the world.
Eventually, we will succeed in incorporating this ability.
It’s like these glasses - which are a prosthesis -
as without them I only see blurred from the first row onwards.
So I have a prosthesis to sharpen my sense of sight,
which wouldn't be enough for me to see 900 people.
But when did a man have to look at the faces of 900 people all together?
I have no physical possibility, as far as my senses are concerned,
to handle the 50,000 contacts
that I might have through my social network.
So I need a prosthesis.
Eventually, I will be bothered by having to keep it outside my body
and I will want it inside me.
It was an amazing prediction by some of the body art performers of the 70s,
like Stelarc, who ate small machine parts saying:
"The human body is full of empty areas: We need to redesign the human body."
And we're doing that!
We are now giving shape to a new dynasty of human beings,
even by modifying our physical features.
The shape of our body, our expression,
they changed in relation of our use of the environment:
When we walk a lot, we develop long tapered legs.
If we sit for a long time, we become sedentary
and we suffer from gastritis.
But we understood, it can be changed artificially.
The idea of incorporating foreign objects in our bodies,
of having technology fitted in our bodies, is no longer taboo.
What's the matter? Does my knee hurt?
They tell me, in a few years you will have a prosthesis.
Yes, I'll put something made of vanadium here.
Who cares!
Is my heart likely to burst?
They'll put some valves in me, we're used to it.
Not only avant-garde people.
Everyone is used to it!
Elderly people know, if they have a heart condition,
they receive a bypass, and they continue to live.
So the taboo has been overcome:
There's no longer any difference between organic and inorganic.
The inorganic is quietly becoming part of our body, of our experience.
There are also other mutations, though.
Mutations that actually occur because of social habits.
Another important mutation we underwent is the loss of the baculum,
namely the penis bone,
which used to be important because we were polygamous:
There were many women so an always on tool was needed.
Then we became monogamous, we changed our habits
and 1.5 million years ago, I guess, we lost the baculum.
Some primates still have it, men no longer do.
Thus, a social habit has modified our body.
And why shouldn't another social habit also change our body -
namely, having an augmented way of relating to others?
In recent years, this has caught my attention.
For many years I studied television:
my task, as the host of the event said, was to be a mass media expert.
A word that I've always found hateful.
Also because I had the impression of observing a fleeting reality
that couldn't be scientifically coded.
Communication? We are constantly changing: you cannot define what communication is!
I laughed at the first faculties of "communication sciences".
What Science?
They studied television,
the lecturers explained what television is.
Today, television no longer exists.
When I observed it, a decade ago,
I would say: yes, it is a medium. But why is it a medium?
It’s a medium acccording to the primary meaning of this term:
a summoner of ghostly entities.
Television is not important, per se.
It didn't show us anything or contribute to our evolution.
It's not the object that will change our lives.
Let the vestals believe it, those who tear off their hair saying:
"Oh, look at how the world changes: bad television, good television"
It doesn't exist - it's a thing of the past.
It is a medium that served a purpose for a while,
showing us an afterlife-like reality we all wanted to be admitted to.
It was a trainer,
preparing us for the notion and perception of emotional prostheses.
All television did was observe humanity.
It didn’t invent anything.
Nowadays, television is not comparable to poetry or storytelling.
When I say "television," I refer to mainstream television.
TV shows are different:
they are a transposition of the theatre, brought to our homes.
Television did nothing but observe reality
and showing that its audience became part of the show.
Well, I did all this for a long period of my life.
I studied communication, I studied the media,
I said: "Look, we have these inbuilt emotional prostheses."
"How cool, we will communicate so much."
"I want to study, understand, imagine."
I wanted to be a step ahead of others,
I wanted to understand what would happen the next day.
Then, suddenly, I became the father of an autistic child.
Or better - I perceived I had an autistic child.
A human being who has a communication problem,
someone who is radically, or totally, unable to communicate.
What was I supposed to do?
I had two choices:
First, I could do what most families with an autistic child do here in Italy,
and there are many such families:
nowadays, the numbers say that one percent of newborns is autistic,
thus something is indeed changing.
I began to observe the world
with the eyes of a person who was unable to communicate,
and I actually understood something crucial.
We are evolving,
and people who don't communicate
are nothing but the forerunners of our future evolutionary phase.
And oddly enough, over these people, a sort of religious war is being waged.
Today autism, neurodiversity, is at the heart of a new protest movement:
What are you doing to our children?!
Do you vaccinate them, make them all become autistic?
They will no longer communicate!
You are depriving us
of this fantastic ability to express an opinion!
We have a smartphone and in social media -
although we are radically functional illiterates -
we can say what we want.
So, the fear is that what is considered
the new frontier of the dull and absolute power that is science -
that modest thing that has made us evolve, that allows you to be here in good health,
that gives us lights, that enables me to speak
that I'll leave this part of my life where it'll keep talking when I'm gone -
has become the great bugbear.
And the subjects of the bugbear are the children:
You make our children die!
Look, there has always been a fear of those who ate children.
The first prejudice against Jews was that they would kill children
to drink their blood, and perform their rituals.
I started studying non-communication,
I began to explain to these people that it’s not because of external causes,
of bad people poisoning you or your children
with vaccines, or countless other things.
No, our children are like that because we are like that.
They are already present in our genetic makeup.
What did I do to prove it?
I spent two months of my life having diagnosed my percentage of autism.
And I have a high percentage of autism, which I manage to handle.
I am autistic, heavily autistic.
So in myself I already see the possibility of this new evolution.
What new society lies ahead?
The autistic society?
Its members won't be people who don't communicate:
they will have different, more selective forms of communication.
They'll get rid of some of the ballast that now limits our existence:
sensitivity, passion, family, all these things.
Of course, there is a negative side to this,
and it has to do with the delimitation of our time, of our survival.
What really distresses me is, I have a child who will survive me.
And this seems paradoxical, but it keeps me awake at night.
It's absolutely unnatural
to be afraid of the idea that your child will survive you.
Why? Because I'll leave a child with a differently wired brain
in a society that only values conforming brains.
So what I will try to achieve in the lapse of time I have -
as soon as I leave this circle that defines my space
and the timer that defines my time ends -
is do my best to create pride for differently wired brains.
It will be a coming-out: I have a differently wired brain.
I'm crazy, so what? What's the problem?
The new society will consist of crazy people like myself.
It will be a different, much lighter society,
less conditioned by traditions, conventions, fears, and superstitions.
It will be more efficient.
(Applause)