<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Melcior Comes]]> 10 <![CDATA[Borders]]> It seems that King Felipe VI, during his visit to Ceuta after the immigration crisis, literally said that “the sovereignty and territorial integrity of our country are not negotiable: they are indisputable”.

]]> <![CDATA[The demand]]> And now, suddenly, elections in Spain. It seems that we will have to go to vote at the end of November, and all because the Madrid government has gotten its act together late and poorly regarding the housing issue, showing the electorate, however, that perhaps there was a bit of political will at the same time that now the right (especially the Catalan one) can be blamed for the failure of some dubious measures that may not work at all.

]]> <![CDATA[Proletarians]]> It is quite normal for young people to be very angry because of the housing problem. If there is one thing that marks the step towards adulthood, it is the possibility of becoming independent, of fleeing the parents' house and finally being able to lead a life of one's own. When this possibility is frustrated, it can only increase disillusionment, and even rage, as is being seen these days in many capitals with encampments protesting both against speculation and the evictions of vulnerable people.

]]> <![CDATA["A black and/or Muslim and Catalan-speaking Mallorca would not be any substitution"]]>

According to the theses of the European populist and nationalist right, a 'Great Replacement' is being orchestrated: a demographic replacement in Western societies, especially with the arrival of North African and sub-Saharan immigration. All this, according to the theory, would have been conceived by pro-European elites, who would want to accelerate this ethnic substitution, behind which there could even be the Jews, the typical international Jewish conspiracy, which would have nothing else to do now but pull strings, vengefully, to erase European whiteness. It is a theory that has had great success, because everyone fears cultural or ethnic disappearance to some degree, and it owes its intellectual formulation to a book by Renaud Camus. The white supremacist terrorist who in 2019 murdered 51 people in New Zealand while attacking two mosques had adopted this same thesis, and had titled his seventy-page criminal manifesto after Camus's book, in which he considered Muslim immigration an existential threat to Western societies. This terrorist had a European precedent, the fanatic who in 2011 murdered 77 people in Norway based on these same theses, an event about which a Netflix film has now been made.

]]> <![CDATA[AI and fear]]> And now, all of a sudden, AI is going to kill us all. It has not even been four years since this gadget arrived in our lives, and there are already all sorts of voices within the very industry that powers it, warning us that those responsible for it are scared, and that in the face of the power they are setting in motion, they do not know whether to stop or ask to be stopped by law. This AI was quite different from what we had before: it writes, summarizes, translates, argues, and even programs, taking away the jobs, it seems, of the type of professionals who powered it in the first place. But if one informs oneself or does a little research, one sees that AI is already saving lives right now: in radiology and cancer detection, for example, or in ophthalmology, where AI examines retina photos and immediately detects retinopathies in primary care without having to go to the specialist. There are all sorts of systems that also find arrhythmias, cardiac images now treated with AI, data that the system can process in a more accelerated and efficient way than the doctor's intelligence, and it makes it more difficult for even the smallest anomalies to go unnoticed. Just in these last few years, since AI has started to act as a doctor, so to speak, it is estimated that almost 50,000 additional lives have been saved annually across the planet. But now it turns out that this technology is supposed to kill us...: there are people who are taking pills developed thanks to molecules that AI has structured and at the same time fear that, in some way, AI will also be responsible for some kind of apocalypse. AI seems like a threat to us because anything human or moderately conscious already seems like a threat to us. Our neighbors have consciousness and free will, but do they scare us? In the unlikely or difficult case that AI had its own consciousness: how would we differentiate it from an AI that simply simulates having it? And what difference can there be between having consciousness and having a simulation of it that may be more effective or profound than that of our fellow citizens? And why shouldn't it be possible to unplug it? Fears of technology are as old as technology itself: Plato's fear of writing, or more modernly the fear of the printing press, which would spread all kinds of heresies, false ideas, or information that could call into question the relationship one had with authority or with reality itself. Would the people in charge of these companies that are currently developing AI tools spread these fears if they knew that all of this could jeopardize their businesses? They are startups, which are being valued in the millions—in the hundreds of millions—of dollars, and curiously, every time they talk about these 'advances' while surrounding them with this aura of fear, they do nothing but attract larger investments. They are not sinking their businesses: the apocalypse they want to point to on the horizon is a form of lure, already infallible, moreover, because the more fear the more power, and the more power, the more capacity a tool will have to do the illegal things it might perhaps be doing now when it comes to appropriating the software of others.

]]> <![CDATA[The consequences]]> One of the funniest observations I have been told as a writer is that it must have been easy for me to write, even to "write well", because I am "from Mallorca". As if being "from Mallorca" already made everything easy; we already know that sa Pobla is like Baghdad, and that everyone who lives there or passes through is loaded with stories or romances that are always wonderful and interesting, and that the only thing we writers have to do is listen and get down to work. I thought of this anecdote while reading 'Les conseqüències’, by Pere Antoni Pons, which has just been released by the publisher Proa. The author has been demonstrating for years that he is one of the most solid, trained, and lucid writers in our literature, a pen animal that does not shy away from any genre, and who with a diverse, broad, and total-reach body of work has known how to write memorable verses, and interviews, and build a formidable body of articles. Now Pons returns to the novel after that terrible and haunting fresco that was Contra el món. What the reader will find in Les conseqüències is an apparently autobiographical novel, which does not hide that the narrator and protagonist may also have the traits of the author. A novel about the personal crisis of a creator, of a writer who makes a living writing for newspapers, and who suddenly finds himself facing a great mystery, that is to say, a great story, one of those that can bring fame and fortune to a journalist, or to a novelist if he manages to transform it into a good narrative. The book is seductive for almost the same reason we mentioned: it seems that Mallorca –Campanet– and its past of wonders and horrors are enough to give momentum to a tale that mixes classic intrigue with the most ruthless and dirty diagnosis of current events that we could throw in our faces. The protagonist is looking for a specific story, yes, and for it to be true on top of that, but what he keeps finding, like the king who listened to Scheherazade in One Thousand and One Nights, is another story that complicates the first one, or frames it within another larger and even stranger one. With a more or less classic excuse –clarifying the existence of two probable lists of victims, or the reason for the visit of a Nazi couple to Campanet in 1940– the narrator unfolds a devastating gallery of characters, a direct foray into the darkest circles of the Spanish ultraright in Mallorca. The book will not disappoint either lovers of a traditional adventure or those keen on a more poignant or disruptive narrative, and the fact is that, little by little, as we delve into layers and layers of the mystery, everything becomes more mind-blowing and improbable, until this very impossibility ends up convincing us that we are before the last layer of an unknown reality. It takes a lot of craft to make a novel so easy to read, but which at the same time tries to provide an answer to the mystery of life, power, and love. The Consequences tells us about the madness of writing, of living, and of wanting to know on a Mallorca of the thousand and one nights of insomnia, longing, and adventure.

]]> <![CDATA[Ears]]>

Walter Benjamin taught us that works of art, when seen reproduced in a book or on a postcard, lose their ‘aura’. It is obvious that a reproduction can be very good, even absolutely faithful to the original colors and sizes –in the case of a painting–, or that the observer can get a very thorough idea of what, for example, the Mona Lisa is. But a reproduction of La Gioconda is not the original, because the original has the aforementioned 'aura', which comes to it from that theorized 'distance': the original has traversed time, and often also space, and appears before us in a place, without losing either its mystery or its authority. The concept of aura, then, is back in fashion now, it seems due to young people who meet to compete in fascinating and a bit grotesque 'aura battles', which first must be cultivated, or 'farmed', as they say, making an English verb their own, mainly learned from video games. Aura is cultivated because through battles or clashes between different young people, it is achieved that the social perception that others have of one's own charisma, style, presence, confidence, or the ability to show oneself as 'cool'. But young people are sharper than it seems; we must want to go beyond the blind and blunt criticism that many make on social media to end up understanding 'the game', because all of this is too revealing. Often one just needs to take a little care. Because the more aura you want to have, the less you have, or the more it seems you want to act cool and charismatic, the more your true colors show and you lose the game completely. I would not say that within the literary field things work in a very different way: there are those who have aura and those who do not, and no one seems more grotesque or dispensable than those who want above all to cultivate aura, that is, to start pulling strings or pushing buttons to appear to have greatness or insight or grace, when precisely if one had all that, one would not have to do anything, because we would already be there. The game or irony is competing for something for which one should not want the victory, because just by wanting it –or by exhibiting that desire– they can no longer give it to you. The winner must be the one who seems to want it the least, and at the same time the one who does things that, for one reason or another, end up fascinating the public the most. Now the aura is quantified, as Benjamin also taught us to do, who knew how to see which things were or were not 'authentic'. And this is where art returns, because all of it is pure simulation: one must make it look like one is doing nothing, no effort, or that the way of dressing, walking, dancing, or looking are not the result of hours of trial and error. If for Benjamin the aura was destroyed because of technology, these young people have learned that technology is the only way in which they can cultivate it. Art was unrepeatable, but the aura that is now sought to be had ends up being nothing more than a reputation for singularity produced through repetition. Art says nothing to them, surely, but what they do is nothing more than seek, in a more or less showy way, the artistic experience.

]]> <![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.

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