<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Melcior Comes]]> 10 <![CDATA[Local character]]> I suppose that when one is away from home, one pays more attention to people's character. A few decades ago, a book called Queridos mallorquines was circulating in Mallorca, attributed to an author named Guy de Forestier. The author was actually a Catalan architect, I believe, who had been living in Mallorca for years and claimed to have discovered the peculiarities of the local character, which he presented with more than questionable grace, but with enough success and re-editions. However, reflections on what marks the local character of peoples or the indigenous people of a certain place are as numerous as the history of anthropology. Thus, Hippocrates, five centuries before Christ, was already trying to think about how climate determines the temperament of peoples. Aristotle wanted to think of the character of the Greeks as a middle ground between the brave people of the north and the Asians, rapacious but without spirit. And since then, we have seen ourselves as the 'good ones', in contrast to the barbarians, or those who have violent customs, but at the same time are austere and reckless. All reflections on 'national characters' are more than questionable, especially because they teach us to see others as clichés, no matter how much statistics or an outside perspective may end up finding common traits. If one travels through Galicia, for example, one might end up agreeing with those who speak of a ‘Galician character’, which would not necessarily be very different from the Mallorcan character, or at least in some of its most notable traits. The famous ‘retranca’ or irony, reserve or tendency to never quite say what one thinks, we can say we also share; the cliché says that if you find a Galician in the middle of a staircase, it’s hard to tell if they are going up or down, partly because they themselves tell you that ‘it depends’. Nor do you need to be an anthropologist or a historian of cultures to realize that the character formed in smallholdings or in very isolated rural communities can end up being very different from that of large urban concentrations. But the fog, the woods, the sea and the shipwrecks, living facing the Atlantic, or the special relationship with death end up defining the character in a very particular way, especially opaque to outsiders, and all this plus the own language make a country elevated on a memory and understandings that are difficult to access. Perhaps the character of a people is not, after all, an essence, but a way of protecting oneself. There are communities that have defended themselves with walls and others with a language, some silences, an irony or a certain distrust of the foreigner. And perhaps it is here where mass tourism is most transformative: not because it brings outsiders, but because it forces insiders to become accessible, friendly, and translatable with Google. A touristified country ends up constantly explaining itself to others and, by dint of explaining itself, runs the risk of simplifying itself to the point of cliché. Perhaps the last privilege of a people is to preserve something that the visitor cannot buy or fully understand: the right to continue being, to some extent, opaque to the eyes of those who are only passing through.   

]]> <![CDATA[Xenelasia]]> One of the factors that most likely tips the scales when determining whether a region of the planet has a future or not in tourism must involve determining the degree of self-esteem or more or less marked identity that its natives have. It cannot be easy to 'touristify' those places where the natives are closed off and surly, among themselves and in front of others, or those places where the local language is so deeply rooted and so impenetrable that foreigners never manage to find a place for themselves, even if they want to. In Sparta, there even existed the institution of 'xenelasia', or the right to expel foreigners who might corrupt local customs. Mass tourism implies, first of all, that people are willing to travel, and have the curiosity and resources to see other parts of the planet, but above all it implies that a large part of the locals in a given place have to change, not only their jobs but their morality and attitude. Perhaps this is why when an area is very touristy, those who manage it are no longer local workers but immigrants, people who have come from outside to work, and who may have that degree of uncommitted, empty, and stereotypically friendly courtesy that is expected almost everywhere. The tourism sector tends to replace personal and rooted relationships with the professionalization of customer service. There are many places in Japan, for example, where tourists are not welcome, and are even denied a table in restaurants, no matter how much space there is for local diners. Elsewhere, for example, they will never put restaurant menus in English or any 'international' or foreign language, and whoever wants to eat there must adapt or learn the language of the country, which contrasts sharply with what we have done in the Islands, for example, where we have systematically taken it upon ourselves to suppress and hide what is our own, from the cuisine to the language, not to mention those who have done this corrosive work from a Castilianist perspective, putting everything at the feet of a Spain that does not adapt to them when the journey is made in the opposite direction. But a healthy society should allow itself the luxury of not always being liked. Having peculiar hours, an unpresentable cuisine, or cumbersome bureaucracy for outsiders. But now everything is becoming a product that must adjust to visitors' expectations; 'turistification' is not just the arrival of millions of people, but the psychological transformation of a community, which ends up looking at itself through the eyes of the visitor and modifying itself to satisfy that thirsty gaze. It is a very deep mechanism because when this happens, renunciation no longer seems imposed from the outside, but is experienced as a free decision, almost as a virtue: that of always being kind, always available, and always understandable. This is, probably, the most subtle and lasting form of cultural transformation, the hole through which a corrosive liquid enters that ends up killing everything.  

]]> <![CDATA[The Temple of the Sun]]> In the middle of the Pobler marsh, the eclipse was seen awesomely. Days before, I had tried to gauge what the Sun would be like at that hour, and the truth is that according to the forecasts and the area, at that moment the Sun would be behind our Serra, lost beyond Búger and Campanet. Most likely it wasn't the best place in Mallorca to appreciate the thing, but I wanted to do it from atop the wall of my grandfather Joan's washhouse, whom the thing would have greatly amused. It is quite true that the temptation to look at the Sun is as old as Daedalus, and that, saturated with spectacles, we had nothing else left to consume but a cosmic spectacle. If one thing characterizes capitalism today, it is that it is based on attention, on the ability of any stratagem to attract people's eyes and keep them on it. What creates wealth is not selling things but buying and selling attention, because whoever achieves this can build any commercial trick on top of it. The eclipse, however, has democratized attention, and has made available to everyone in these parts the possibility of seeing how the fireball of the Sun, behind the glass of safe and affordable glasses, was being covered by a black ball that was bursting in from the left and from below, like a hungry balloon. It is a banality, and at the same time a marvel. What were we looking at but a concealment? Don't things become more present when they are made to seem hidden? No one wanted to miss it, or say they hadn't seen it, although, in this too there have been their snobs, their scatterbrains, their armchair scholars and those who kept worrying about the eyes of the young. I am more interested in sociology than astronomy, and that is why what happens on Earth is more illustrative of the world we live in than what happens in the sky. We have seen that almost everyone has taken it like New Year's bells, or those who, when it's all over, have asked aloud what was next, as if the stars were in the sky to make fools of us. Behind the dark plastics, however, it was all just a play of light and shadow, let's not kid ourselves. Nothing compared to the first eclipse we 'lived through', which wasn't televised but in a comic, when Tintin saved himself from being burned alive by invoking the Sun on a day marked by the eclipse before the Inca idolaters. Nowadays, the episode would be qualified as eurocentric, or white arrogance, the colonial domination of those who know over those who don't and can be – must be – manipulated to be taken out of 'barbarism'. The eclipse has also served to bring out our paranoids again, who now didn't trust the approved glasses, just as before they didn't trust the masks or the truth about covid. It's enough to make you want to pull your hair out, it's true, but looking at the horizon, where our beloved Sun goes to lie down, today well covered by a nosy Moon. Let's see if the Sun returns tomorrow, to crush us until we become more foolish. Until August next year, because the wise say there will be another one – a partial one, at least in our corner of the planet.

]]> <![CDATA[Shipwrecks]]> One of the favorite pastimes of intellectuals, as we are seeing, is to go against what the masses like. What is least forgivable about Christopher Nolan is not his cinema, but that it is liked, that it makes money, and at the same time enjoys the prestige of a good part of the critics and the Academy.

]]> <![CDATA['Go home']]> The debate surrounding tourism, now transformed into a citizen's demand mobilized in the streets, goes back a long way. For decades we have known or debated about the tourism-based economic model, very often without having fully understood the implications of it all, what the deep root of the problem is, or what the possible viability of the solutions is. From environmentalism, it has always been told to us that tourism destroys the environment, because obviously where there is a hotel there could be a pine forest, and wild goats instead of a Dutch couple. My grandparents' entire generation, for example, saw how Mallorca transformed from a land of orchards and villages into an environment of hotels and apartment blocks, and some knew how to take advantage of the momentum of all this and became very rich, and began to see old Mallorca as a rat's nest, or of bewildered peasants who did not know how to adapt to the heated times of a gold rush.

]]> <![CDATA[Triumphant]]> These days of patriotic celebration in honor of the Spanish footballers who have won the World Cup, we see how there is no form of nationalism that is not made against a good part of the 'nations' involved. Spain can beat Argentina or whoever, but what should be the symbol of sporting superiority of one human group over another becomes the emblem of the supremacism of a group or an idea of the Spanish nation above the other peoples of Spain. They are victories that are celebrated mostly internally, and not at all externally. They serve for the inside; those on the outside don't even look at them or pass by them completely, either enraged or indifferent. Those who say that football should be separated from politics should admit, at least, that it is impossible to separate sporting results from it, because they are immediately used politically as instruments of symbolic imposition, as emblems of an identity that erases or sidelines others. And needless to say, they are instrumentalized by the power of the moment, whether it be the monarchy or the progressivism of the Madrid government, which will make good use of it to interpret everything in view of its electoralist squabble. Spain could be a plural, multilingual, diverse, and inclusive project, needless to say it is theoretically and intellectually possible, but in practice it is a project of dissolution, assimilation, and erasure, or which even lives with discomfort, not the Catalan identity of some players, but their different skin color or their faith in Islam. There has been no World Cup celebration party that has not been erected into a party of mockery, where chants against the minorities of the Spanish state itself are common, without any mockery for the fallen rivals on the way to the final. States are made against nations, not against other states, which are also political machines of mass destruction of languages and differences, which, needless to say, are gladly renounced, all to be able to participate in the triumph without worries or bad conscience. We are seeing how it is especially children who are assimilated in this kind of collective euphoria explosions, because it is above all a form of infantilism, this nationalism based on ignorance or contempt or even self-hatred that leads you to forget your identity or language and to want to integrate into the 'victorious' mass. 

]]> <![CDATA[Babel and the nation]]> The curse of Babel – as Joan-Lluís Lluís reminds us in a magnificent essay, Balla amb Babel– is based on the mistake of supposing that linguistic variety is a divine curse, a punishment, when, in fact, it is quite the opposite: a gift from God, or from a Humanity that enriches itself when it addresses the problem of communication and memory and personal and collective knowledge from thousands of different perspectives.It was the monolingualism of the biblical myth that led to the idea of building the tower. A single language means a single way of understanding the world, a single narrative, a single culture, a single authority. And it is precisely then that the imperial project appears. We live, not in the ruins of the tower, but in the continuous project of building new ones and eliminating the other thousands of ways of representing life and the world. Call it a tower or a nation-state. Call it whatever you want. Each language deposits not only grammatical categories, but metaphors, classifications of nature, conceptions of time and forms of courtesy, relationships between the individual and the community. It is the linguistic uniformization of the planet that makes it a more violent and uninhabitable place. It is the desire to erase languages that leads to the desire to erase the people who speak them and who still insist on wanting to speak them and pass them on to their children. J.M. Coetzee says that while we kill animals we will kill people, and that slaughterhouses are the antechambers of mass exterminations among humans. It is not slaughterhouses, however, but linguicides. Policies and attitudes of cultural assimilation that lead to linguistic marginalization are the antechamber of genocides. This is historically documented: the examples of this assertion are innumerable. There are no superior languages to others; there are no languages that fail to express love and knowledge and abstractions.Each language could offer us a redemptive, winning concept, an illumination of meaning that we lose forever. Because just as Greek shed light on the concepts that still feed a large part of our philosophy; Latin, the legal categories; medieval Arabic, scientific vocabulary, and now English gives us technological language, the other languages of the world could make their contribution, if we do not let them die in ignorance and silence.

]]> <![CDATA[The boomerang]]> In this world, more than 7,000 languages are spoken. Unfortunately, however, more than 3,000 are threatened with extinction. And I'm not talking about our Catalan language, which no matter how much it suffers attacks every day, is still far from suffering the circumstances that languages will face in a few months that no one will speak. Because we are letting languages die at a furious pace: every two weeks a language disappears in this world. This, in the 21st century, when it seems that AI performs miracles, and that the moralization of society had reached higher levels than in any other period of history. Because the vast majority of people on this planet speak languages that are demographically large, a few hundred languages spoken by 90% of the global population.

]]> <![CDATA[Obsession and consent]]> The premiere of the film Obsessió has coincided in our corner of the world with a remarkable –sexual?– controversy. A politician over 30 years old has finally been expelled from a national-populist political party because he maintains affective relations with a minor, even though the girl is already 16 years old, the minimum for sexual consent (remember that it used to be 14). Between the two there was a student-teacher relationship, which further complicates matters.There has been a tremendous uproar on social media, motivated by the need or not to position ourselves as a society in the midst of a relationship of this kind, or whether it is enough to simply stick to the law and accept the bond once it is admitted that the girl's consent is valid. But there is a too obvious confusion of terms here: the law speaks of sexual consent, and that relationships from then on can be consensual and, therefore, there is no longer a crime of abuse. But what does this have to do with a relationship? We don't even know, nor do we have to know, if there has ever been sex between the two, apart from the love story ("sentimental relationship", says the professor in a public statement) that has motivated the fuss.Although we can assume so, the sexual act takes a backseat, because what is interesting to evaluate is to what extent a man over 30 plays fair when he seduces a woman – a woman? – so young, who moreover was ‘educating’. To start evaluating this is not for puritans or snobs, nor for moralists heirs of the Church, which has always married people even younger. The point is that love can be very beautiful, but life is long, and everything that seems like love to us, in the end may just be emotional dependence, and even abuse, which, beyond being criminally punishable, cannot be overlooked when people are not very aware of what they are doing or feeling. The writer Vanessa Springora has made an admirable book about all this (The Consent); it is the same ‘in love’ girl who then turns to society and asks: Why did you allow me to?In the recently released film Obsession, we see something similar: a boy makes a girl fall in love with him with a magic spell, and from then on he can't get rid of her. The film is becoming a phenomenon, and I'm not surprised, because it's magnificently shot and acted, especially by the actress (Inde Navarrete) who plays the 'in love' girl. The consummation of the young fool's sex-affective dream transforms into a major horror story, because there is nothing more terrifying than a forced love. Or a true love in a world where it no longer has a place, or when the lover doesn't know how to live up to what is given to him. Some have wanted to see in the film also an allegory of forced consent, or of those relationships based on deceit, or of the emotional dependence of young loves, which are always painfully unhealthy. And who is the monster, then, the fatally 'in love' girl or the one who has forced this love with wicked arts?

]]> <![CDATA[Motorcycles]]> A common practice in certain supermarket chains has been to offer, at first, products of all kinds, to finally discover what the customer truly wants. Once this 'discovery' has been made, however, these products are no longer sold to start selling identical or similar products but only from the same supermarket's brand. Where there was a 'branded' product, there is now a generic or 'private label' one, perhaps cheaper and of more or less identical quality. Thus, there are supermarkets (and large online retailers) that have almost ended up selling only products of their own label, even for things as basic as water or eggs. There are bookstores that basically sell books – they have them more visible or well-placed – from the publishing houses that belong to the same business conglomerate to which the bookstore belongs: everything stays in-house. And a very similar thing has happened with so-called social networks. At first, people signed up to see friends and acquaintances, or people from their field of activity, or those figures of interest: sports journalists, film critics, people whose contact was convenient for one reason or another. In the film about the birth of Facebook (The Social Network), winner of an Oscar, we saw that the success of the invention came from the ability to unite people and create bonds, facilitate acquaintances, connect, etc. That this came hand in hand with an unsociable person and through the account of the lawsuits his friends had filed against him was just another of history's great ironies. But then there was talk of solidarity and even democracy of communications in a new era that the internet had just begun. But now the 'networks' are not that, not by a long shot, because they have done like supermarkets: they have become repositories of what the owner is most interested in selling, and which are not precisely the products of others but their own. Content that is no longer what our friends sell, but what a series of very well-known personalities create, whom everyone follows passively and without true interaction. It is curious how they have transformed into what televisions were, but personalized after the algorithm's study of each of its users. They are no longer debate and surprise arising from each person's interests, but entertainment and capturing attention for resale with commercial and ideological intentions. That is to say: the primary invention of mass culture. And all because it has been the way to make profitable an invention that was free, but that in the end we paid for with our attention, our time, and our data. All of this is obviously not new. But it is often necessary to stop and reflect on how they sell us a motorbike only to later transform it into something else, when we have already ridden it too much. I would not be at all surprised if the same ended up happening with AI, because it repeats the same pattern as other digital inventions that have reached us in recent decades.

]]> <![CDATA[The dream scenario]]> In the movie Dream Scenario they explained to us what happened when a normal person, a professor played by Nicolas Cage, became the most famous person on the planet. And not because he had done anything special: he simply started appearing in everyone's dreams. All the people in the world claimed, really or to not be left out, that they had seen Professor Matthews in their dreams, for others, a gray and forgettable character. Fame arrived in a way as gratuitous as it is currently arriving for Tim Payne, a football player from New Zealand participating in the current World Cup. Payne has done nothing to be famous; precisely, he is famous now because he wasn't. Or because he was the one with the fewest followers on social media in a team not very promising for victory (he has never won a match in a final phase). But Payne was the chosen one by an Argentine content creator to make him famous; he simply chose him and asked everyone to sympathize with him above the explosions of patriotic pride that usually underpin footballing passions. And yes, in a few days Payne went from being any footballer to having more followers on social networks than his own country has inhabitants, simply by a whim or idea of an influencer from the other side of the world, and in an even more arbitrary way than the professor in the film. In the current economy of attention, however, this is not an anecdote or a curious story. Just like in the film, the first thing the professor thought was how to take advantage of it, since nowadays having people's attention (knowing who you are and listening to you) is the main capital from which personal and collective economies can grow. So, needless to say, the footballer has gone all out; he has addressed his millions of new followers and has "thanked them for their support". Here's how the attention economy works: everything is based on capturing and maintaining people's attention, in whatever way possible, thanks to social networks, of course, which create new fame almost every day, with the same arbitrariness as dreams. Now that Payne has the attention of the masses, or of certain people on the planet, he will be able to capitalize on it: he will do advertisements, paid posts that millions of people will see, fame creates more fame and money will make more money. And it all starts from a whim or a gamble of the new digital gods, or from the frantic idleness of the new networked masses, who train themselves with the game of attention while yearning for something similar to happen to them. Or that, by a stroke of luck, some of their content goes viral; or they even do things, or live them, according to the performance they can get from them on the networks. But just like in Cage's movie, the tables can turn at any moment. The professor began to appear not in dreams but in nightmares, surrounded by blood and pain, and the infamy of being hated as gratuitously as he had previously been admired began.

]]> <![CDATA[Believe and practice]]> The CIS figures say that the percentage of people who attend mass in Spain as a whole does not even reach twenty percent of the total population. In Catalonia, the percentage drops to less than half. The number of believers is higher, as we know, than those who actually practice. If we are talking about Roman Catholicism, this must oblige us to do something; the simple rhetorical manifestation of faith should not be enough. Almost half of the population defines themselves as atheist, agnostic, or indifferent. And perhaps the most noteworthy thing would be to know if it is more in the common good's interest for us to be Christians or not, or if things would collectively go better for us if there were an agreement, of Christian roots, among all of us. The visit of Pope Leo XIV to our country serves to make us ask many questions, especially seeing once again the fervor that a Holy Father arouses, far above what a pop star or any other civilian figure can motivate. All this passion has a point of stridency and comedy, even ugliness and posturing, and it forces us to ask ourselves why, while seemingly so devout and good people, we live in a society so unequal, unnecessarily violent, selfish, intolerant, and dismissive of differences. And it reminds us that the Church has been a den of criminals and pedophiles, protected by the curia, still an authority that seeks more to protect than to collaborate with justice and side with the victims. It is absolutely abominable. Because faith and morality must be one thing, and deeds another, and sympathizing with a pedophilia mafia (and art collecting and real estate speculation) must be yet another. I tried to listen to the pope's speech to politicians, but the first thing I thought was that it should not have happened, or not in the seat of popular sovereignty. A religious leader should not give political speeches in a parliamentary chamber, because we are not in an Islamic regime but in a liberal democracy that has separated the state from the Church. Obviously, he did politics there, or expressed his ideas in defense of 'human life', understood as a criticism of abortion and euthanasia. But nevertheless, not even the pope himself must believe what he preaches; he is well aware that neither here nor anywhere else will abortion be prohibited again, and the right to die with dignity is being implemented everywhere, because our life is ours, and not God's or the vicar's. All in all, it gives a rather pathetic whiff of intellectual and political decadence, or of a faith that is not authentic, but rather a faith in faith itself, or a belief in when beliefs used to work. Meaning is the longing for meaning. Even the Pope knows that God is dead and that deep down he lives on nostalgia. Paolo Sorrentino, with his series about popes, has understood all of this in an admirable way: everything is sustained by aestheticism and the will to believe that belief still has a strength that can no longer be drawn from anywhere, because we all know that it only has the entity of comedy or guilty hypocrisy. 

]]> <![CDATA[Master failure]]> For decades, the prestige and recognition of teachers in our society have been in steady decline. A high school teacher is no longer more than a poor wretch in the eyes of too many people, it seems, who are despised by both the intelligent students, who finally realize the farce, and the lazy or dull ones, who oppose everything that involves rolling up one's sleeves. From politics, the profession has not been provided with tools and values, with the excuse of the budget or that high schools were just transit zones between university, where the capable would finish their education, and vocational training, where the others would learn a trade to avoid starving. There have also been, certainly, accommodating spirits, who have lived up to the cliché of the lazy and evasive civil servant, who only seeks to do the minimum – distribute photocopies – and run away for the weekend. But the majority are people passionately dedicated to knowledge and the transmission of knowledge, who enjoy explaining themselves and making knowledge what it truly is: an adventure. The rest of society, however, has been left with the image of the useless and condescending professor, who has two months of vacation, double pay, and who takes sick leave when they can, doesn't explain much to the kids, and deep down wouldn't want to be there. But what has worsened the profession has not been the teachers but the students; if they came with a real desire to work, learn and improve, the teachers would be the first to be amazed; if the students had a real desire to work and study, things could become unbearable for the entire system. What has declined and made everything even more complicated has been the failure of basic home education, which sends to institutions – the law requires it – children who have no desire to do anything other than look at a screen or lie around. If young people do not believe in the future, in knowledge, in the progressive improvement of themselves and society, in the fact that by knowing things they can have a good future and a good life, any educational reform, even of the conditions of teachers, is useless. But the world they think they know speaks to them of millionaire footballers and YouTubers, of irredeemable people who get rich with nonsense and without knowing anything. They are not surrounded by a reality where knowledge seems to have any importance or prestige, and herein lies the problem. Often, the same teacher they have in front of them is nothing more than a warning, not an example: as if the best that could happen to them from getting good grades was to become a secondary school teacher, with all that it implies in terms of frustrations and more or less economic miseries (now accentuated by strikes). Society, the world, does not give them the necessary information for them to end up understanding all the options and realities that exist in a vast and complex world like the one outside the classrooms. A world that despises teachers, that laughs at them, just like the national police officer who went viral for arbitrarily beating a sixty-eight-year-old Valencian teacher.

]]> <![CDATA[Automatic literature]]> Following a recent case of plagiarism of an article in the Catalan sphere, which the forger attributed to a mishap caused by AI, and a rather important Anglo-Saxon literary prize, which an author allegedly won also using AI, there has been renewed discussion in the world of literary creativity about what we will do from now on with texts that wish to circulate in the world, the authorship of which may be questioned by virtue of their possible algorithmic origin. For someone to use AI to write a literary piece can only be due to reasons related to their shortcomings as an intellectual or as a writer. For a true author, using AI to write would be like using skates to play football, when precisely the grace of the game is running. For me, having the machine write for me is equivalent to having a machine make love for me, or sending a robot to bed with the lover, simply because I'm lazy or I fear that this way I will look better in front of my beloved. It makes no sense to entrust a machine to do what gives us pleasure and lucidity, what makes us feel alive and intelligent. Furthermore, I doubt that any machine can currently write with the accuracy that good writers continue to have, but even if that point were reached in the near future, what the bot might tell us would also be of no interest, since it is literally no one and what ends up being interesting about literature and journalism is what a flesh-and-blood person thinks—or feels or sees—about it. A machine cannot tell me what I think about things, because it does not know. Thanks to AI, we might end up simulating an erudition that we do not have, or pretending to have read books we have not actually read, but that would not be a new imposture either. Cheaters are older than the printing press in this trade, and it was precisely the printing press that democratized writing and knowledge. AI is nothing more than a kind of automatic printing press, which produces text at the consumer's whim, which is not what writers end up doing; the role of intellectuals is precisely to remind us of what we do not want to remember, or to make us think about things that can give us a headache. When I see an AI questioning the fundamental ideas of the tribe, I will begin to get scared, but for the moment it is only the voice of the master, because we should not forget that all AI is nothing more than a form of business for those who give it a push. “We were clever enough to invent AI, and foolish enough to need it, and stupid enough that we can't figure out if we did the right thing…”; this was said by none other than the comedian Jerry Seinfeld in a recent interview. And we can think about whether he's right or not without AI. I, for one, still prefer to keep reading people who make mistakes, who doubt, who obsess, and even who self-destruct while writing, rather than a machine that simply calculates which sentence fits best with the preceding ones. Literature is not just text production: it is vanity, it is contradiction, it is a human consciousness trying to understand itself. And this, for better or for worse, cannot yet be automated. 

]]> <![CDATA[Troy trans]]> Before it has premiered, everyone is already talking about it… I'm thinking about the version of theOdyssey that Christopher Nolan has filmed, which will be seen on the big screens next July. We already know that before this director, one of the most in-form cinematic artists of recent decades, had signed the story ofOppenheimer and before the adventures of Batman. The controversy is being generated by all those on social media who oppose certain roles being played by certain actors. Thus, the rumor – which seems to have been confirmed – that Helen of Troy will be played by a Black actress, Lupita Nyong'o, and that Elliot Page (formerly Ellen Page), a transgender man, might end up playing, no less than, the warrior Achilles. Recently, a new version of Mozart's life has premiered on television –Amadeus, on Skyshowtime – and I saw that the Salzburg genius was (magnificently) played by Will Sharpe, who is half Japanese, and that the Jewish and Italian librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte and the Austrian musician Süssmayr, who finished the Requiem, were played by Black actors. All of this might have been laughable a few years ago; right now it is motivating parodies on X, in which, however, a supposed injustice is highlighted: that we would never allow a historical Black character to be played by a white actor, like for example an Obama biopic embodied by Simón Andreu. If skin color doesn't matter, how can we defend ourselves if we are anti-racist, why is it concerning that Helen of Troy is played by a Black woman (even if she's very beautiful)? And it is evident that behind this there is a lot of guilty conscience and that from the cultural industries there is a desire to bet not only on diversity in jobs – and to give everyone a role in global productions: to satisfy quotas – but to compensate for the invisibility of race in past films. Even though this leads us to show a Mozart's Vienna with more racial diversity than today's New York, distorting the historical narrative, just as Clint Eastwood distorted it when he didn't include any black soldiers in the films he shot almost twenty years ago about World War II, it is also not well regarded that there are no women in the plot, even though a war or gangster film might force us to (think of Scorsese's filmography). It is no longer about representing 'reality', but about making a mirror that projects not what we are, but what we would like to be, and that no matter how much it questions our weaknesses as a species, it does so at least without forgetting that we are different, plural and supposedly fair in castings, no matter how much this form of justice now leads us to falsify a past that yes, for art has always been an excuse. As Hitchcock said: “Cinema is four hundred empty seats”, that is to say, more than an art, it is an audience above all else, and it will be this audience that decides whether or not to accept these liberties. And I think that not only does it accept them, but it asks for them, or celebrates that the work also obliges it to take a stance even before buying the ticket and enjoying it. 

]]> <![CDATA[The cake]]> If a society is aware of what demographic changes cause, this is island society. It has been said many times and it is very true: Mallorca, for example, has been a kind of social laboratory where many of the economic ideas that have ended up shaping many parts of the West could be experimented with. A small, closed society, immensely devoted to a survival or agrarian economy, suddenly entered into a cycle of expansion, construction, demographic change, massive arrival of immigration, tourists, etc., which undid old ties, hierarchies, and cultures. Literature has made enough echo of this problem, while politics was responsible for either denying that anything too serious was happening, or for trying to steer it for the greatest benefit, in theory, of everyone, but in practice, of the political and economic elites.A society that is not capable of guaranteeing its basic survival structures is doomed to suicide, or to a perpetual identity crisis, which is beginning to be noticed as a continuity crisis, and also obviously, as an economic crisis. It is now in the rest of the Spanish state that a brutal population growth is being experienced, especially in this last decade. The economic model needs a lot of labor, and an aging population, dependent on care and with a very low birth rate among us, have finished fixing the pie.The 2008 real estate crisis slowed expansion, but from 2015 it began to grow again, now with more Europeans, Ukrainian refugees (more than 300,000), digital workers, etc. At no point has there been an explicit manifestation of the political desire to increase the population, however; citizens have seen the wave arrive without having been consulted, or without it having been clearly politically planned.However, the reforms of the immigration laws in 2022, and the facilities required at the same time by the EU, which is aware that Europe is aging and that the economy needs new blood, have now led to a point where one gets the impression that collapse is imminent, and not just in communities with non-Spanish languages, but everywhere. Such a wave required planning, as well as the capacity to integrate people and make them speak the language of the host country. From Spain, they know that people end up speaking Spanish out of obligation, what choice do they have, while Catalan speakers bow their heads and give up their language, which in the long run only increases the number of Spanish speakers by millions. It is one way among others of putting an end to non-Spanish languages, diluting them, and denying that demographics is a tool to achieve this objective, more than recurrent in the history of Spanish nationalism, it is a way of playing into its hands or whitewashing it. Spanish nationalism itself throws its hands up in the air when it finds that Spanish is no longer heard in certain neighborhoods or areas of the big capitals, a scandal that when it came from Catalan speakers was always mocked and stigmatized. Now it will be seen more than ever in favor of which language – not of which languages – the Spanish state is. Money has always spoken the language of those who handle it.

]]> <![CDATA[The sirens]]> Perhaps the best metaphor to understand what is happening to us has been put into writing by Chris Hayes, the American journalist, whose essay, The Song of the Sirens, has just been translated into Spanish. It is a serious, informative, and at the same time very critical work of the current attention capitalism society, when we live immersed in a sea of continuous noise and have learned to pay attention only to what makes the most noise —what stands out amidst the continuous bustle—, or to the song of the sirens. But Ulysses chained himself to the ship's mast to avoid succumbing, he imposed limits on himself to avoid falling into what could distract him from the life he wanted to lead, something we find ourselves unable to do, always looking at screens. Although in principle it is not 'the screens' that are the problem, but rather the applications designed to capture and hold our attention in a enslaved manner and then make a profit from 'our eyes', reselling our attention to advertisers who insert advertising in the midst of the content that the algorithm has discovered fascinates us. This is how we spend our hours, attention time that we could dedicate to matters that are truly useful, or that give us some measure of happiness. If the average in Spain is three and a half hours per person per day of mobile phone use, how many things could we do to recover this time in our lives? How many languages could we learn? How many instruments could we master? How much love could we give to others instead of watching strange videos or participating in useless controversies? And how could everyone's culture improve if, instead of looking at a screen, books were read; therefore, people consumed more literature, which would also benefit the publishing market? The progress of humanity was based on the idea that a day would come when, beyond work time and night rest, we would have time to dedicate ourselves to our true interests, to our inner freedom. But now that we could finally have some leisure hours: why have we uselessly given them away? Let's focus on this: the ‘masters’ of this lost time are the richest men in the world, the owners of X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, etc. Networked capitalism has been built on the time we were supposed to emancipate ourselves from, just as industrial capitalism did on the time we were supposed to go to factories and mass production centers. Now we find ourselves even incapable of reading a short text, like this article, and let alone a whole novel, much less if it is long and perhaps a bit demanding. The only way, now, to read certain things is to ‘tie yourself’ to the mast of the ship, that is, disconnect the phone, even turn off the modem to avoid temptations to connect and check the screen every fifteen minutes. The fact that we are in this state, so interfered with, should worry us, because this is, literally, the alienation that Marxism intended to denounce. Your life is no longer yours if even the time of your freedom is blocked.       

]]> <![CDATA[AI Ping-pong]]> A news item informs me that the ping-pong playing machine has been invented. Table tennis players already had a kind of robot that served to train them and that placed the balls with force and precision, but the current device is something else entirely. The machine can play a continuous match; it has a large platform behind the table and a mobile arm with a paddle, and a whole host of cameras that film the game and the opponent and, thanks to AI, can know where the ball will go and respond with maximum forcefulness and malice. Right now, the machine is playing at a high level, and they want to make it compete against the top players in the world to see if it can beat them. The thing is, as is perfectly plausible, this whole mess of arms, cameras (new), tons of AI, and a paddle could manage to defeat champion Wang Chuqin or one of the Lebrun brothers (the only French players to reach the global elite of the game), but once this feat is achieved: what would change? Would we stop playing table tennis? Would there cease to be competitions, Olympics, clubs and fans, schools and masters of this sport? It is very likely not, as common sense tells us. If AI and associated technology can do something that we already know how to do, why do it? I don't doubt that such a tool can be used for training –it doesn't get tired, it can help work on weaknesses–, but, does it help to learn? What can the machine teach us about the game and how to play it that a high-level player cannot teach us? Nothing. Don't we see that the machine moves and decides what to do in the game thanks to a series of processes that have nothing to do with the human mind, perception, and body? It is evident that we do. Why, then, when AI is not playing ping-pong, can it still seem exemplary to us? What does the functioning of AI have to do with the human mind and the way we learn and improve in our lives? Why can we come to consider that an AI can help us improve, for example, in writing better, when what AI does to create text has nothing to do with what writers do when shaping a page? We are giving AI an exemplary power that it can never have, because the way AI solves problems has nothing to do with the way humans think and make decisions. That technology can become extraordinary is undeniable, but the old technology of the human brain has been working, for millions of years, in the same way, and it costs us as much as millennia ago to learn new things, incorporate new skills, or reach some form of intellectual excellence. AI does not make us smart if we do not know how to think for ourselves and evaluate what we really need. Just as we already have a machine that washes our clothes, it seems we would want a machine that spares us from thinking or learning, or from doing things for ourselves, as if we had sold to a conglomerate of companies the possibility of doing something that we knew how to do perfectly, but that they will now do, because we are lazy. 

]]> <![CDATA[Saint George or the great illusion of the book: much ado about nothing in literature?]]>

After Sant Jordi, it seems appropriate to take stock. The book world seems to be heading, in recent years, towards a celebration of cultural commerce in which a good part of the annual turnover is concentrated on a single day. It is still good news that the festival of the rose and the book continues to be so well received, and that there are so many people who still have the desire to give a book and a rose to their loved one. A few years ago, things were such that men bought the rose and women the book, but the macho undertone of this exchange has tended to dissipate (nobody wants to remember that detail). It is evident that if everyone buys a book for Sant Jordi (which also doesn't happen, let's not fool ourselves) the business can do very well, because selling two million books in one day is no small feat (but there are more than two million Catalan speakers; little desire to spend, and even less to read). But, if we look at the number of books the best-selling author can place on that day alone, we see that it will hardly reach 30,000 copies (their title does not represent even 1% of total sales); in other words: the most important thing is of no importance. All those books we call ‘best sellers’, books that adapt to popular tastes, only represent 6% of the total books sold that day. Nor should it be added that only a little more than half of the books sold are in Catalan, with percentages that tend to equalize, unfortunately, year after year. And if it's about selling popular books, we can't expect that, once certain books have become 'mass culture', these works will be the ones that stand out most for their aesthetic or literary values –or for their intellectual merit. There are still people who are surprised when they see how bad bad literature can be, and it is even admirable that high culture dedicates more effort to sinking what the market has elevated than to lifting what, being excellent, goes more or less unnoticed and doesn't bring in any money. It goes without saying that this phenomenon shows more resentment and snobbery than genuine concern for the state of culture. That Sant Jordi is a celebration of commercial or popular literature should not scare anyone, because the next day (Sant Fidel) we can continue going to bookstores and take home, without queues or crowds, the true wonders that are still being published by editors who have not turned into pimps for ideological propaganda disguised as 'for everyone' narrativity. What we know as literature, or good literature, will never die, but it will have an increasingly reduced role and place in culture, a phenomenon that each passing day moves further away from what it should be ( an exhibition and learning of possible excellence) to become a simulation of cultural or ideological integration: in the celebration of the cliché, or of that which is most sweat-soaked and predictably innocuous, of what we already know reinforced with propaganda and trinkets. 

]]> <![CDATA[Spring had a price]]> It seems that these days we have once again had a bit – too much – of cultural controversy following the publication in Spanish of what we now consider to be Mercè Rodoreda's best novel. David Uclés, the recent star of Spanish literature (he has sold thirty editions of his first novel, and the second, winner of the Nadal prize, is selling quite well) writes an epilogue and even illustrates, rather unattractively, the cover of the work. Some opinion leaders have decided to criticize the proposal, as if Catalan literature could not be prefaced by Spanish authors, even though it is Uclés' success that makes it tempting for his name to accompany Rodoreda's novel for Spanish readers. Uclés, whether one likes what he writes or not (and it must be liked, because it sells) can serve to attract readers, in a country, Spain, where neither Rodoreda nor any Catalan has had much literary fortune writing in Catalan (but not the Catalans who have written in Spanish, from Gironella to Cercas passing through Mendoza…). Uclés, however, is still a symptom, and now a symbol. It doesn't matter if his literature is weak –as the best critics point out–: it sells. And because it sells, he is then given a prize like the Nadal, because he had already made a name for himself, even though it is known that when he was nobody, he tried to win it several times. We already know how it works, then: a prize is given to someone because they are already somebody, not because they have written a good book (everyone says it's nonsense). Before, however, things didn't work like that. Publishers intended to direct the public's taste, not to satisfy it or blindly conform to it. Literature, or rather the world of commercial books, is just one more branch of the attention economy, which right now is also shaping culture. Who grabs attention? Who is being talked about? Who manages to attract glances and focus conversations, or articles, even if it's to oppose them? Well, those we talk about manage to translate that attention into money, be it through literature or politics. This is trumpism, but it is also Rufián, who states these last days that he prefers to be on TikTok rather than in libraries; it is on TikTok where people spend more hours right now. And we know he is right, but at the same time we know he shouldn't be. There are very skillful people at knowing where to place themselves: they grasp what to say, what to do, with whom to relate to in order to capitalize on dispersed attention. Mendoza did it this week by speaking against Sant Jordi, and Uclés does it by approaching a reference that has never stopped being talked about: be it Rodoreda or a city of Barcelona reduced to a museum of cultural folklorisms, to t-shirt images, like the one he himself has created for the cover of La mort i la primavera. That all this be controversial or criticized favors him, curiously, needless to say much more than if it were excellent and, therefore, did not make anyone lift their eyes from the screen… Long live culture. 

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