How
did we go from public intellectuals like Pier Paolo Pasolini to
publishing and social media gurus and influencers — without even
noticing it?
Premise:
This is a completely personal reflection on publishing, journalism
and the role of intellectuals today. It is not intended as an
attack on anyone in particular, even though I will mention certain
public figures as examples. I do not wish to demonise any
activist, communicator or expert who uses social media to share
knowledge, news or opinions — nor those who consume them. My aim
is to analyse the mechanisms that generate some of the
contradictions we experience today, and to offer some food for
thought. The inspiration to address this topic — though it has
always been close to my heart — comes from the article “The
death of the public intellectual”,
which I encourage you to read.
We
all know — and have probably hummed at least once — the famous
song Video
Killed the Radio Star by
The Buggles, released in 1979. The song tells the story of a radio
pop star supplanted by artists using music videos as a new form of
artistic expression, completely transforming the way music and art
reached the general public, and forever marking television’s
primacy over radio, which became relegated to a second-class
medium. Even Queen, one of the most important bands in music
history, spoke of the decline of radio in Radio
Ga Ga.
Freddie Mercury, in that song, sang “Someone still loves you…”,
setting to music the nostalgia and deep melancholy provoked in
those who had made radio and music the pillars of their art. These
two songs, conceptually so simple, actually put to music the
analysis of a change that would forever upend the mechanisms of
communication and, as a result, society itself.
Why
am I talking about the collapse of radio in the ’70s, Queen and
the birth of television in a newsletter devoted to geopolitics and
international crises? In reality, the link is not as far-fetched
as it may seem. It is precisely in this age of international
crisis, conflict and general disorientation that we must answer a
fundamental question: what happened to the intellectuals? Where
are the leading figures who dominated Italy’s socio-cultural
scene in the ’70s and ’80s — those who took positions, who
offered tools for understanding reality, who stood alongside
workers in demonstrations and who took part with fervour in public
debate on the great issues of the day? In short: where have the
people gone who can help the public navigate the chaos of an
increasingly burning world, who pose questions, unpack complexity
and above all, take a stand?
The
answer is simple: Instagram
has killed the intellectual,
just as video killed the radio star.
Once,
the intellectual was indeed a highly cultured and authoritative
figure, but often also rebellious, provocative, contradictory,
full of light and shadow, and at times controversial. The
intellectual was not especially concerned with pleasing the
public, embracing majority theses or expressing comfortable
positions. They had no ambition to be “likeable”: on the
contrary, by participating actively in political life and public
debate, and by engaging in parties and movements, clashes between
positions and opinions were almost always fierce, and dialectical
confrontations were entered into without pulling punches. Concepts
like neutrality or impartiality didn’t even exist: these are
categories peculiar to our contemporary Western society — deeply
depoliticised and post-historical. A society where politics, where
taking a public stand, is conceived as intrinsically negative,
rather than, as it was classically understood, the active
participation in the life of the city — polis;
the activity that transforms a man into a citizen, into someone
who takes part, because freedom is participation, as Giorgio Gaber
sang. Participation in social life, and therefore political life:
because politics — including international politics — and
society are inextricably intertwined.
Today
we live in an entirely different reality. Faced with the ongoing
genocide in Palestine, citizens have shown themselves far more
able to take a stand, express outrage, organise and connect with
one another than the intellectuals who supposedly serve as
cultural reference points in Italy. I think of people like Roberto
Saviano or Chiara Valerio. After two years of indiscriminate
slaughter — mostly of women and small children — and in the
face of a horrific famine, those who were expected to be the
loudest voices in defense of shared values and principles have
withdrawn into an almost embarrassed silence. How did it come to
this?
Here
we must take a step back and understand how publishing and
cultural production work in today’s world. We have moved from
culture as a vocation (from
the Latin vocare,
which like the German Beruf denotes
an almost theological “calling”) to a market culture, where
publishing contracts, publishing houses and “friends of friends”
have completely replaced the intellectual’s role as a voice of
dissent — and that of the journalist as watchdog of power.
Today, for an intellectual or journalist to safeguard their
privileged position in the contemporary cultural landscape, they
must do exactly the opposite of a Pier Paolo Pasolini or a Carla
Lonzi: they must be as inoffensive as possible, step on no one’s
toes, express no dissent.
Taking
critical positions — for instance, to denounce the massacre in
Palestine or on any other matter of national or international
significance — automatically makes the intellectual a pariah
within the contemporary information-cultural system, which is
instead based on uniformity and the total depoliticisation of
thought. The intellectual or journalist must not take a stand. But
to be “impartial” means precisely not to take part, to render
any issue, discussion or problem aseptic. The intellectual, who
once put their intelligence and talent at the service of others,
now puts them at the service of their own personal and career
interests, to maintain their position of power — and thus to
maintain things exactly as they are. And so the intellectual, once
the cultural and political vanguard, has been overtaken by their
own public, becoming the rearguard: their condemnation of Israel
came more than two years later than that of the tens of thousands
of people who, in October 2023, marched in Rome to demand a
ceasefire, openly speaking, even then, of genocide.
The
collapse of the intellectual’s public function has gone hand in
hand, unsurprisingly, with a marked general cultural decline. Not
long ago, out of curiosity, I looked at the list of the
best-selling books in Italy: one of the most purchased on Amazon
was The
Ketogenic Diet.
I asked myself two things. The first: what am I even writing for,
if no one reads me? The second, far more important: how did we get
here? The answer, as your mother has probably told you at least
once in your life, is always the same: that damned phone. In the
’60s, ’70s and ’80s, intellectuals operated in a very
limited media landscape, with only a few TV channels, newspapers,
magazines and publishers. Today, anyone with a phone can express
their opinion and make their voice heard via social media. The
birth of social media has had several profound consequences:
The
huge number of voices available on social media has made it
genuinely difficult to distinguish an intellectual authority from
a mere news influencer or book influencer. Anyone with a more or
less large following automatically becomes a cultural reference
point: if so many people follow them, there must be a reason. In
the past, before establishing oneself as an intellectual and
earning the right to the stage and the microphone, one had to
publish books, take part in conferences and public debates with
other intellectuals, and also participate in political and social
life. Today the process is reversed: books are published and one
enters public life because one already has an audience. Publishing
has thus become a cultural industry: talented but unknown writers
are published with meagre advances (or, most often, not published
at all). Academics and researchers even pay publishers out of
pocket to see their work in print. By contrast, web personalities,
news influencers, or people who are simply well-known on social
media sign publishing contracts worth tens of thousands of euros
with major houses. Because publishing is a market, and like any
market, it cares about sales: if X has tens or hundreds of
thousands of followers, the book will almost certainly sell, with
little promotional effort and low risk for the publisher.
Consequently,
influencer books are often throwaway products, talked about —
usually only on social media — for the first three months, then
disappearing entirely from both Instagram stories and bookstore
shelves. These books, like any other consumer good, have an
expiration date. Lacking the ambition — or the possibility —
to become political or cultural reference texts requiring study,
research, expertise and analytical depth, they become ephemeral
phenomena, destined for the same oblivion as the cheap T-shirt you
bought online last year in a burst of compulsive shopping. Their
function for the market is identical: to fuel capitalism through
the promotion of consumption — in this case, cultural
consumption.
And
here we come to the second point: social media privileges speed
over complexity. Social news influencers and commentators are
obsessed with “explaining things simply”. Complex political,
social or international issues are spoon-fed to the public like
baby food. From Covid to migration, from the Russia–Ukraine
conflict to voting procedures, to the war between Iran and Israel
— everything is reduced to a few infographics or a daily reel in
which people are not asked to think, research, or read books, but
simply to consume that specific piece of content, usually on the
week’s trending topic. Social media chases the news rather than
analyse it, in a self-feeding mechanism that drowns the public in
endless stimuli — stimuli that, by their nature, are
incompatible with critical thinking, which requires time,
analysis, and cross-referencing of sources. This extreme
simplification is closely tied to the publishing market. Shiny
reels, colorful infographics, the brand-new book that sums up all
human knowledge in 200 pages — this is what is meant to be
consumed. And so the influencer becomes an author, leaps into the
public and cultural debate, participates in book launches, is
invited to public debates and conferences. —almost always
without any scientific or academic expertise on the subjects they
address. The only rule is not what to talk about, but what people
are talking about now — what’s trending today, what’s hot
right now.
The
rise of social media has brought another important consequence:
the end of the mass public and the birth of “bubbles”. The
mass audience died alongside the intellectual. Today, with social
media, every figure — more or less well-known — belongs to a
“bubble” that usually does not communicate with others. These
bubbles are tiny compared to the old mass public: the lowest
ratings of any TV program still exceed the size of the largest
bubble. You can hear it in everyday conversation — on the
street, at restaurant tables, on public transport: almost nothing
that happens on social media has any impact on the daily life of
tens of millions of people. And yet, each of these online figures
is in constant competition to capture a bigger slice of their
bubble, churning out infographics and reels — because more
followers mean a bigger advance for the next book, and more
chances to get into the right circles.
That
said, we must avoid the trap of demonising social media outright,
which have also given a voice to scholars, activists, journalists
and writers who would otherwise have had no place in public
debate. And, especially during the massacre in Palestine, social
media has been — and still is — the primary means of spreading
otherwise censored images and news, as well as organising public
dissent. The point is not to “abandon social media” — a
useless and regressive form of Luddism — but to “inhabit the
contradiction”, using the medium simply as a tool, never as an
end in itself.
I,
too, as someone who began my own work in international politics —
which I have studied for years — precisely on social media, now
use them only when I feel I truly have something to say, and to
point toward meeting spaces outside the platforms.
Because
it is precisely in this climate of international crises that we
must, more than ever, rediscover critique, analysis and
understanding — of things and of their causes. It is essential
not to give in to this commodification of culture: to delegate to
this or that social media personality the task of explaining any
event to us in thirty neat seconds of a reel, in four Instagram
slides or in a few pages of a book that is often nothing more than
a collection of stories or posts already published. Just as it is
essential to understand and dismantle the mechanisms underlying
the publishing and cultural market, and to confront intellectuals
with their own silence. We must seek intellectuals in the places
where they are still to be found: in political movements, in
academia even in the much-despised parties, and above all in the
classics, which by their very nature — no matter how often they
are read and studied — remain inexhaustible.
And
finally, we must take away the intellectual’s sceptre from
anyone today who is unable to take a stand: because that betrays
what should be the very essence, the public function, and the
indispensable trait of the intellectual — today as in the past.
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