<![CDATA[Ara Balears in English - Melcior Comes]]> 10 <![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. 

]]> <![CDATA[The million]]> The endowment of a new literary prize in the Spanish state has caused some controversy. In theory, according to the rules, the books that can be awarded one million euros by Aena have been published the previous year in one of the official languages of the State, although, now that we know who the five finalists were (all will receive 30,000 euros, except the winner, Samanta Schweblin, who will take the million) they are in Spanish. Catalan authors could opt for it, provided that the work has a Spanish translation, since it seems that juries do not necessarily have to know how to read in Catalan, Basque or Galician. I don't know what happens with works written in other official languages that are published in Spanish but not in the same year as their original publication: we can assume that they are no longer eligible for prizes. This enormously hinders any author in Catalan, for example, from ever being able to aspire to this award, even being a finalist is already a pipe dream. In this first call, which could be programmatic, all the books have been in Spanish. When an author wins the Planeta prize, now endowed with a million, they don't really win any prize: they receive an advance on sales, so that if the book sold more than a million copies, money would still have to be added (which I don't think has ever happened…). The Planeta is for an unpublished work, for a typescript that authors submit to the award; but not this new Aena prize, which recognizes a work that is already published, and which, as we can see, has a more literary profile, or more of a personal and 'risky' literature, beyond formulaic novels or more or less successful successful strategies that sell well and tend to feed the publishing business. But the endowment of this prize –so large– is raising a certain controversy, for its nouveau riche character, for the brutal ostentation of power (the company Aena is half public) and for the imbalance, I would like to add, with the finalists, or with what has been done –ignoring them– with other books published in also official languages. It is very likely that none of the current finalists will ever sniff such a sum of money again (not even by winning the Nobel, as Vila-Matas, another finalist, is said to be able to do). Such an award can put an end to a writer's literary career, needless to say: it can professionalize them, if that is what they desire, but it will also draw a spotlight on their work that can be counterproductive, or even unnecessary. Because one thing is to make a living selling books to readers who appreciate you, and another is to be able to retire because an institution – an airport one – has chosen you more for the benefit of its cultural prestige than for yours. And all in a week in which we have learned that a lot of Catalan publishing houses see their survival in danger because it turns out they don't have I don't know what seal that certifies the environmentalism of the paper they print with… And when newspapers publish less serious literary criticism than ever in their history, criticism that should arbitrate taste much better and much sooner than the juries of writers who judge other writers (who will judge them in the future).  

]]> <![CDATA[To die when you want]]>

The obsession with death that exists from certain interpretations of religious creeds and now from the so-called ultra-agenda – more or less stale conservatism – is indeed worrying and revealing. According to Christian religion, we would be told that our life does not belong to us, and therefore it is not right to want to die or end it when we sensibly wish. Life is a kind of divine gift, of which we are only custodians, like a wonderful book that is not ours and which we must return more or less intact to the Librarian Above. This may be so, or it could be, but the truth is that we have no certainty that things respond to these parameters. In the end, God does not manifest himself, but priests do. 

]]> <![CDATA[Dining rooms]]> It would not be wrong to say that, in principle, the initiative is worthy of praise… That a web portal wants to inform us about how public money is spent is just another step towards democratic transparency, the one that pushes us not to hide anything about matters that concern us all. We pay taxes so that these satisfy collective needs, but in what way money goes to certain things and not to others is debatable, that is, pure politics. A gentleman may consider that museums are full of irrelevancies, and that money should all go to healthcare and education, and not to things as ethereal as art, be it in a museum or a theatre. It is debatable, but collectively we have decided that public money should also go to things like these: paying musicians at local festivals, the 'capgrossos' (big heads), the 'colles castelleres' (human tower groups), popular culture, and not just the aid received by industry or subsidies to agriculture. Not to mention military spending. Judging who should receive public money, and who should not, is not so simple. Designing a fair tax system is the work of specialists —it is extremely complicated—, not a bar or social media debate. The citizen without much political training or knowledge may feel compelled to be outraged just because they see that they pay taxes, or don't make ends meet, and then a man receives half a million euros for making a film that, moreover, is bad or hardly anyone ends up watching it. Or that the minister in charge goes to see the Oscars live and in person in Los Angeles at the public expense. To the website that seeks to scrutinize all this in the Catalan sphere, they have christened it 'menjòmetre', meaning that there are 'feeders' to which too many people are clinging. The disposition with which these things are to be evaluated is already a form of politics, of course; and above all, it must be known that the objective is not so much to rethink where the money goes as to mock and put—famous—heads on the block. As if discovering that a writer, for example, takes thousands of euros in contracts with the media, or at reading clubs, or in grants for creation, would somehow discredit them. Public media also cost us a whole lot of money, but it's good that they exist (but if you want to rethink their size or expenditure, they already consider you 'right-wing'). Without them, the search for objectivity would be even more complicated, but they also shouldn't be afraid to be transparent with themselves. Very often these figures are published for demagogic purposes, to make the electorate feel that we are governed by manipulators, cronies, and engineers of trickery, but it is not explained that behind these contracts and subsidies there are also families, salaries, jobs, and money that do not disappear into a void, but rather are later transformed into consumption in the economy of all. It seems that money that does not go directly into our pockets is always wasted.   

]]> <![CDATA[Art and parity]]> Following the recent awarding of the prize for best novel of the year, the controversy surrounding the underrepresentation of women in the shortlist of ten nominated novels has resurfaced. Although the winner was a woman, Antònia Carré-Pons, she made sure to point out in her acceptance speech that there were only two novels written by women on the list of ten finalists (which included a novel by the author of this piece). Did it include me, or did it include my novel? Those who seem to have a certain notion of parity are the very juries that compile these lists. If women publish four out of every ten books, at least this proportion should be reflected in the awards and distinctions, unless we are being told that they do a worse job—which we perhaps cannot deduce if they are ultimately the ones honored…

]]> <![CDATA[Foreign women]]>

Men, generally speaking, care very little about feminism. Some are outright opposed, saying that women are exaggerating, or that the grievances and inequalities they claim are no longer justified in an egalitarian and democratic society, or that it's all just a charade to look good or to collect subsidies by playing the victim. Others try to understand it beyond International Women's Day and attempt to bring some sense to a set of demands that, in my opinion, make perfect sense, especially when we see the statistics on domestic and sexual violence, or the glaring economic inequalities. However, it's difficult for a man to feel directly involved in these demands. It's as if the women around us were a foreign country with its own wars, miseries, and injustices, which we can understand, but we're not expected to do more than sympathize from afar and not show ourselves to be too supportive—or complicit—with the oppressors. Even among younger generations, this issue seems to have a bad reputation, as if it were a settled debate, or as if women don't need any help or support, or as if feminism itself creates the problem by highlighting a set of inequalities that should already be invisible. There are also some women who feel more comfortable thinking of the battle as already won, or as unnecessary or awkwardly framed. Or who find the traditionally domestic role of women liberating and wonderful, a promised land lost. However, even if we were to approach the solution from a left-wing perspective, it's often unclear what kind of policies could be implemented.

]]> <![CDATA[Pumps]]> In the extraordinary series Tehran (Apple TV) we see all the horrific machinations the Israelis engage in to overthrow Iran's theocratic regime. The fiction is Israeli, and we might think it's a politically charged message aimed at the Iranian regime or people, exposing the immense failings of their government, which it largely is. But at the same time, what's revealed is the unscrupulousness of Israeli intelligence itself, the Mossad, the way it uses and abuses its agents, and the horrific and tragic excess of its methods to destroy a regime that wants to arm itself not only to dominate the region but also to devastate it.

]]> <![CDATA[Like dogs]]> Perhaps the only thing we can say about the phenomenon therian It's a phenomenon. That people go out dressed as animals, that they identify with them to the point of confusing their personality with that of a beast, or that they go around on all fours making animalistic noises, is no small matter. But that it's being discussed all over the world as if it were something to be concerned about, or a danger, or a sign of collective madness, or yet another piece of evidence that we live in 'the decline of the West,' is even more revealing.

]]> <![CDATA[Artificial fiction]]> Things seem to be moving very fast. In the field of AI, the devastating impact of technology on employment is becoming increasingly apparent, especially among the tech companies' own workers. It's within the companies that are driving AI development that AI itself is usurping the jobs of programmers, who realize that what they were helping to create was a competitor that would do the same thing they do, but much faster, better, and cheaper. I don't know what might happen to these professionals, although we know that certain technical profiles are highly sought after within tech companies. But all the experts are predicting it, some apocalyptic, others fully integrated into a system they now lament not knowing how to rein in: AI will be a revolution that will turn everything upside down.

]]> <![CDATA[Bad Rabbit]]>

Obviously, the worst part hasn't been the music, but the reactions it's provoked. Bad Bunny sings in Spanish at the Super Bowl, and Spanish nationalism is choking on its own drool, all because this happened right in front of Trump.

]]> <![CDATA[Prohibition]]> The idea that access to social networks should be restricted to those over sixteen years of age, as is being discussed in our country, or as is already being legislated in other countries in the area, raises a whole set of questions about why these tools have come to be considered so harmful, or whether what should be done is to regulate their content and not their users.

]]> <![CDATA[American]]> "I believe in America!" said the gravedigger Bonasera in Vito Corleone at the beginning ofThe Godfather (both in the novel and the film). However, the scene seemed to suggest that America, the United States, had disappointed this man; its justice system had failed him when it hadn't been able to punish his daughter's attackers. That's why he was now asking the head of the Mafia family to deliver 'justice,' to punish the violent young men because the legal system hadn't been able to (one of the young men was from a 'good family').

]]> <![CDATA[In Praise of the Baton]]> Movistar premiered a series about the repressive state police. It's called Riot police And it's quite good; Rodrigo Sorogoyen is a very good director and screenwriter; with this series, he did an excellent job. He portrayed a whole group of individuals who work for the Spanish state security forces and who, when necessary, must put down their batons and attend to whomever the command tells them to. These men weren't extraordinary: they were fallible, weak, sometimes exhibiting all the tendencies of that 'toxic masculinity' that the director had already portrayed in other works of fiction. But thanks to the cinematic vision, you connected with them, you ended up liking them, and you followed the hypothetical story of their corruptibility; ultimately, it validated Hannah Arendt's idea of ​​the 'banality of evil,' which perhaps wasn't applicable to the Nazis, but certainly to 'democratic' security forces that simply enforce the law without asking too many questions, however much this might mean infuriating the public.

]]> <![CDATA[In a bikini]]> For the past few weeks, social network X has had new interaction options. There's a form of artificial intelligence that can search for information about what's posted there, telling you if it's factual or not, or helping users provide context or question the veracity of what's being said. But the algorithm also has another application: undressing young women.

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