IL PROBLEMA DELL'ITALIA SONO ACQUA E CIBO, NON MIGRANTI E SICUREZZA
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Italia, abbiamo un problema. E no, non sono i migranti. E nemmeno la legge elettorale. Molto semplicemente, abbiamo sempre meno acqua e sempre meno cibo. Abbiamo il 60% del territorio in siccità e coi raccolti decimati, con rese che in alcuni casi arrivano a lambire il -70%. Abbiamo bacini idrici in sofferenza, con il 30% di acqua in meno rispetto al normale, laghi semivuoti e il Po in secca. Abbiamo gli incendi che sono più che raddoppiati, arrivando a bruciare circa 75mila ettari di boschi e pascoli dall’inizio dell’anno – e da ieri su Fanpage abbiamo una mappa che ve li mostra in tempo reale. E abbiamo il cuneo salino che continua a risalire il Po, bruciando campi un tempo fertili e rendendoli progressivamente deserto.
Ora, magari tutto questo vi lascia indifferenti, e un po’ lo capisco: non c’è persona che legga questo articolo, credo, che abbia mai associato il concetto di scarsità a cibo e acqua in vita sua, nemmeno per un giorno. Ma, se va avanti così, e se lasciamo che la crisi climatica dispieghi i suoi effetti senza fare nulla, questo è quel che ci toccherà in sorte, senza nemmeno dover aspettare troppo: un Paese senz’acqua per coltivare campi sempre più aridi e sempre meno fertili. In altre parole, un Paese che non è più in grado di produrre cibo.
Mal comune in questo caso non è mezzo gaudio: e sapere che anche in Francia, ad esempio, la produzione di mais è inferiore del 35% rispetto al 2025, e che a fine anno il raccolto sarà il peggiore dal 1980 a oggi non ci può e non ci deve rassicurare. Perché la Francia è, insieme alla Germania, l’unico Paese europeo tra i quindici Paesi al mondo che da soli, contribuiscono al 75% del fabbisogno alimentare globale. Perché vuol dire, banalmente che il cibo ce lo dovremo andare a prendere sempre più altrove. E altrove non se la passano bene, tanto quanto noi.
(...)
E ok, forse una critica all’attuale governo può sembrare fuori luogo di fronte a tutto questo, quasi strumentale. Però, avete notizie dal nostro ineffabile ministro della sovranità alimentare? Avete notizie di decreti d’urgenza, richieste di intervento in Europa, di lettere promosse e firmate da 22 Paesi? Di patti europei per il cibo e per l’acqua? O anche solo contezza che qualcuno, di grazia, se ne stia occupando?
Quando chiediamo che il governo si occupi della crisi climatica, banalmente, intendiamo questa roba qua. Non un condizionatore per ogni italiano, ma una politica che metta in sicurezza gli standard minimali di benessere di ciascuno di noi – uscire di casa, nutrirsi, bere – e che agisca sulle cause, impedendo che le cose peggiorino velocemente, di anno in anno.
Quando dicono che questa sarà la migliore estate del resto della nostra vita, non esagerano. Come non esageravano anni fa, quando ci dicevano che se non avessimo fatto nulla, avremmo presto vissuto estati come questa. Quanto aspetteremo ancora, prima di fare qualcosa?
“A te che hai vent’anni e mi chiedi cos’è il fascismo, vorrei non doverti rispondere.
Vorrei che la risposta a questa domanda la sapessimo già tutti, ma se me lo chiedi è perché non è così.
So perché me lo domandi. Credi che io sia intollerante se dico che il fascismo è reato e deve rimanerlo sempre. Credi che “se il fascismo e il comunismo hanno causato entrambi tanto dolore nel corso della storia devono essere considerati reato senza distinguo”.
In un certo senso è dunque colpa mia se me lo chiedi.
Colpa del fatto che non ti ho detto che il fascismo non è il contrario del comunismo, ma della democrazia. Dovevo dirtelo prima che il fascismo non è un’ideologia, ma un metodo che può applicarsi a qualunque ideologia, nessuna esclusa, e cambiarne dall’interno la natura. Mussolini era socialista e forse non te l’ho spiegato mai. Non ti ho detto che si intestava le istanze dei poveri e dei diseredati. Ho omesso di raccontarti che i suoi editoriali erano zeppi di parole d’ordine della sinistra, parole come “lavoratori” e “proletariato”. Non ti ho insegnato che anche un socialismo che pretende di realizzarsi con metodo fascista è un fascismo, perché nelle questioni politiche la forma è sempre sostanza e il come determina anche il cosa. Per questo il fascismo agisce anche nei sistemi che si richiamano a valori di sinistra e anzi è lì che fa i danni più grandi, perché non c’è niente di più difficile del riconoscere che l’avversario è seduto a tavola con te e ti chiama compagno.
Dire che il fascismo è un’opinione politica è come dire che la mafia è un’opinione politica; invece, proprio come la mafia, il fascismo non è di destra né di sinistra: il suo obiettivo è la sostituzione stessa dello stato democratico ed è la ragione per cui ogni stato democratico dovrebbe combatterli entrambi - mafia e fascismo - senza alcun cedimento. Tu sei vittima dell’equivoco che identifica il fascismo con una destra ed è un equivoco facile, perché il fascismo è la modalità che meglio si adatta alla visione del mondo di molta della destra che agisce in Italia oggi. Ma guai se questo ti rendesse incapace di riconoscere i semi del pensiero fascista se li incontri quando sei convinto di guardare da qualche altra parte.
Può esserti utile sapere come riconosco io il fascismo quando lo incontro: ogni volta che in nome della meta non si può discutere la direzione, in nome della direzione non si può discutere la forza e in nome della forza non si può discutere la volontà, lì c’è un fascismo in azione. In democrazia il cosa ottieni non vale mai più del come lo hai ottenuto e il perché di una scelta non deve mai farti dimenticare del per chi la stai compiendo. Se i rapporti si invertono qualunque soggetto collettivo diventa un fascismo, persino il partito di sinistra, il gruppo parrocchiale e il circolo della bocciofila.
Nessuno è al sicuro, se non dentro allo sforzo di ricordarsi in ogni momento che cosa rischiamo tutti quando cominciamo a pensare che il fascismo è solo un’opinione tra le altre.”
Non capisco: il caro Don Quixote è affetto da psicosi, vede i giganti e non scambia i mulini per essi, trova una "ragione" per il suo fallimento (il perfido mago che gli ha fatto sparire i libri): forse il mio livello di lettura è superficiale ma le varie interpretazioni della "lotta contro i mulini" più che appartenere a un secondo livello di lettura sembrano delle forzature. Di sicuro pecco di ignoranza, devo studiare di più il romanzo e Cervantes.
If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:
Hardly a day goes by without my getting an email from someone looking for a way to do good with technology. From computer science students thinking about post-grad careers to seasoned coders with decades of experience, there's an army of hackers looking for a way to turn their expertise into public goods.
There's a name for this movement: it's called "Public Interest Technology" and the people who work in it are called "public interest technologists." There've always been techies who understood the link between tech and public wellbeing and who committed themselves to working for the betterment of society, but their numbers swelled as Big Tech companies saturated their markets and switched from growing by making products people like, to locking in their users and then extracting more value from their technological prisoners:
It was the era when (in the words of Facebook's Jeff Hammerbacher) "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads":
https://quoteinvestigator.com/2017/06/12/click/
For organizations like the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the growing cohort of hackers who wanted to hack for good was great news. Our staff technologist group swelled from a couple of overworked computer scientists helping lawyers and activists with campaigns to a series of increasingly ambitious software projects, from Privacy Badger (a tracking-blocker that every web user needs):
https://privacybadger.org/
To Let's Encrypt and Certbot, projects that forever changed the internet's default state, so that today, nearly all online communications are encrypted and resistant to mass surveillance:
https://certbot.eff.org/
Other opportunities for public interest technologists proliferated. Bruce Schneier created the canonical resource page for Public Interest Technologists, including career opportunities for would-be public interest technologists:
https://public-interest-tech.com/
But the motherlode of public interest technologist opportunities wasn't the nonprofit sector – it was the public sector. It started with the UK's Government Digital Service, a group of public-spirited hackers (many of them ex- of the BBC, where they'd been tempest-tossed by endless internal power-struggles over the role of the internet in public service media) who retooled many of the UK government's most important administrative front-ends. For several glorious years, Britons delighted to the daily marvel of having their routine interactions with their government transformed from clunky, broken web-pages to slick, superbly thought through online processes that had all the polish of Amazon or Google, but without any of the gamesmanship, manipulation or privacy invasions:
Despite many attempts at official sabotage by a string of increasingly shambolic UK governments, the GDS still exists, and it still does amazing work, even though it operates today with a fraction of the official support that it enjoyed at its inception. The last time I renewed my UK passport, I was gobsmacked by how easy and sensible the process was. Local authorities have gotten in on the act, too: I renewed my absentee voting registration with Hackney Council last week and it was as simple as scanning a QR code, affirming my details, and clicking "submit."
Around the world, a generation of public sector technologists duplicated and improved on the UK GDS's work. In Taiwan, a rogue public interest hacker named Audrey Tang led a group of digital guerrillas in creating shadow versions of every Taiwanese government website that scraped and remade the entire digital presence of the Taiwanese state to make public information and services accessible, legible and useful to its people. After the next election, Tang was named Taiwan's first ever Minister of Digital Affairs (today, she is a Taiwanese "Ambassador-At-Large"):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Audrey_Tang
In the USA, Jen Pahlka went from running a ragtag "civic hacking" org called Code For America to helping to found the United States Digital Service under Obama, bringing some of that UK GDS spirit to America's dreadful online presence, which had been largely built and maintained by beltway bandits who'd billed handsomely and delivered some of the internet's greatest crimes against usability:
But the USDS's legacy is bitter. In 2025, USDS was effectively dismantled and replaced with DOGE, Elon Musk's handpicked team of tech-bro cultists who set out to dismantle as much of the US government as possible, deliberately sabotaging the usability of America's governmental systems to make it harder for the public to access the services they are entitled to and pay for with their taxes.
My own run-in with this was my attempt to get a certificate of citizenship for my daughter when she turned 18: all I could find was an online form that started by requiring me to list the dates and flight numbers for every trip I'd taken to the USA from the time I was born to the day I became a US citizen, a 50+ year period that started with a trip to visit my snowbird grandparents in Florida when I was six months old. The entire support and advice service for the US Customs and Immigration Service has been replaced with a DOGE chatbot that repeatedly emails and texts links to the form, no matter what question you ask, and no matter whether you call, email or use the website's chat interface:
Many of the DOGE kids were monsters. The most chilling DOGE story I've heard was the anonymous testimony of NIH officials who begged the DOGE children who were dismantling their work to spare some long-running cancer research projects whose great promise would be vaporized if they were interrupted. The DOGE kids laughed at these entreaties, saying that once Musk had perfected "General AI" we wouldn't need cancer research, because their tame AI god would cure cancer.
But not every DOGE operator was a digital arsonist. Take Dan Berulis, a DOGE staffer who came out of the private sector and later turned whistleblower over the group's activities, who now faces assassination attempts:
Berulis joined DOGE to improve America's digital infrastructure, not to dismantle it. When he talks about his motives, he sounds like an early GDS pioneer, one of Audrey Tang's direct-action government data scrapers, or one of the Code For America hackers who followed Pahlka to USDS:
DOGE was a catastrophe. It left America's government digital presence in far worse shape than it found it, and even the modest savings it claimed to have made from all this destruction turn out to be lies:
But as Berulis demonstrates, there is a bipartisan group of skilled, ethical technologists who are desperate to do meaningful public interest work. Their numbers swell every day, as Big Tech continues to curdle – no longer merely sclerotic and enshittifying monopolies, now active participants in Trump's authoritarian dismantling of democracy itself:
Tech bosses' gleeful mass layoffs mean that tech workers can no longer count on good treatment and stable, high-earning careers; at the same time, tech bosses' betrayal of democracy makes the prospect of working for a tech company far more ethically dubious than mere ad-tech optimizations. The result is a bumper crop of geeks looking for ways to do good with their lives and skills – as all the emails in my inbox asking for advice about this attests.
Enter NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani, who has made "public excellence" the cornerstone of his politics, hiring the most skilled workers he can find and then giving them all the authority and resources they need to fix 100,000 potholes, bring New York's worst landlords to justice, and deliver every day for all the people of New York:
Mamdani has just unveiled his Public Interest Technology (PIT) Crews: five "game changing" teams of public interest hackers who will remake NYC's digital services:
I'll go farther than that: the PIT Crews – and Mamdani's project as a whole – is delivering the entire failed promise of DOGE. Unlike Musk and Trump, Mamdani is actually rooting out fraud and waste. The reason Mamdani can do this – and the reason billionaires can't – is that the fraud and waste that undermines governments at all levels come from the super-rich, with their tax-dodging, their no-bid contracts, their addiction to public subsidies.
Musk owes his riches to federal bailouts and contracts: if he wants to "eliminate government fraud and waste" he should turn over his files to an IRS inspector (if he can find a survivor of the DOGE massacre) and surrender himself for a lengthy prison sentence. For Musk, "government fraud and waste" is a single mom on food stamps who misses a box on a 600-page form because she's exhausted from working three jobs to make rent – not a no-bid contractor trousering billions in public funds for projects that overcharge and underdeliver.
Mamdani's PIT Crews are "small groups of engineers and designers will strive to change the hidebound and confusing nature of current city services by using state-of-art skills to rapidly whip up specialized apps that solve real problems." Mamdani says that they'll "raise expectations on what government can deliver, because we really can deliver."
As Levy describes it, the big difference between the Obama-era USDS and 2026's PIT Crews is "a skeptical, almost adversarial, stance toward Big Tech." NYC's PIT Crews explicitly recruit top-tier hacker talent who want to "make software that doesn't serve advertisers, the military, or the pocketbooks of centibillionaires."
Their inaugural chief is Lisa Gelobter, a veteran of both tech firms and the USDS, who says that "Without technology, policy is just words written on a piece of paper." The first project on her roster is implementing "Click to Cancel," a policy inaugurated by Lina Khan, Biden's FTC Chief – and then dismantled by Trump. Under Click to Cancel, companies are required to create one-click workflows to cancel subscriptions and memberships, ending the pernicious, incredibly profitable practice of trapping people with impossible-to-halt recurring billings. Today, Khan is running Mamdani's Economic Development Board, and her Click to Cancel rule is back – for New Yorkers, at least:
NYC PIT Crew's new Click to Cancel site will be live when the policy takes effect on Oct 1. It's a whistleblower site that will make it easy to report merchants who make it hard to get shut of their online Roach Motels (users check in, but they don't check out). It's estimated the Click to Cancel rule will save New Yorkers $160m in the first year alone – but only if Mamdani can enforce it, which is why this website is so critical.
This focus on meat-and-potatoes service delivery was once dismissed as "sewer socialism," an unserious form of progressive politics with an undue focus on improving people's daily lives at the expense of high-flying political change. Today, Mamdani is at the vanguard of an army of proud sewer socialists, who say that once you deliver for people in their day-to-day existence, they will trust you and back you when you fight for deep, structural changes (and the corollary: if you can't deliver for people in their daily lives, why should they trust you when you claim that you'll make everything better?):
3,000 techies applied for 35 jobs with NYC's PIT Crews, and, as Levy writes, many of them are high-flying senior coders who are willing to take a massive pay-cut and forfeit their stock options to do something that's both technically excellent and meaningful to their users' lives.
It's a clear message to other leaders, at every level of government. Many of the most skilled, ambitious people in every field want to make the world a better place. Every city, county and state could use a squadron of PIT Crews, and there's an army of coders who would give anything for the chance to give everything to make a better world.
Viste le recenti visioni, potrei anche illudermi di aver sviluppato una specie di sesto senso che mi guida nella scelta dei film. È il caso di Feels Like Home, film ungherese visto ieri (lo trovate su @twittacinema-archive. No non si tratta di un palloso film balcanico, ma di un thriller psicologico in cui la situazione surreale è già inquietante di suo. Per intenderci, mi ha ricordato le atmosfere di Dogtooth e Miss Violence.
hey white people . if u dont know how to pronounce an ethnic persons name *google it* or if its someone ur talking directly to *ask them*. dont fucking do that "erm i dont know how to pronounce but __" or "im gonna butcher this haha" or "im not even gonna bother trying" . ur not funny. do u know what poc think when they hear u saying that ? u sound like a loser asshole and we dont want to spend time with u . im so fucking tired of watching youtube videos about media from my country and hearing those phrases. im tired of people saying that to my face . i respect someone who clearly looked it up and is tryong but says my name wrong over someone who just goes with whatever bad first guess they had without trying. u have too many resources at ur disposal to keep doing this. for the love of god just Fucking Try. if ur confused Just Try.
I highly recommend Forvo.com, the website where native speakers of a language contribute their time and voices to read words and names in their own language. It is a fantastic way to expand your world, open up your ears, and it's way more likely to nab a hit than just googling.
2087
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origamiaround
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gracieabrams
turnnoffyourmind
vaporwave
