149 Everything, absolutely everything, in the architecture of social media is designed to incite us to press that publish or share button – in the language of symbols, a slightly curved arrow or three circles connected to each other, symbolising a tiny network, sometimes a paper aeroplane. The effect? To make our thoughts public, to inform others about our tastes and preferences, and thus to weave or strengthen a social bond that will, in some way, be monetised. Because beyond sharing information with our friends, we will have also shared it with a database, which in turn will share it with advertisers. In doing so, we will have contributed to the creation of one, ten, a thousand communities: social bubbles made up of people who finally understand our preferences, our needs, our language. If this way of building community strikes you as somewhat artificial, try an experiment: spend an evening with someone who shares absolutely nothing with you. If you love reading, this person has never opened a single book. If you listen to rock music, he or she has all of Al Bano’s albums. You enjoy surreal humour; your counterpart follows the I love my police officer and Dogs are better than people Facebook pages. While your date enjoys keeping up with Italy’s Serie A soccer league, you only care about Florentine historical football. Jokes about sex, food, the weather? Even less so – your regional dialects are wildly different, your sexual orientations are diametrically opposed, your food preferences are a complete mismatch; no common ground even when it comes to talking about the weather. Not to mention political views, which would inevitably spark off a heated dispute if you didn't prefer to gloss over them out of mutual embarrassment. Formally speaking, you belong to the same society, but in essence you also belong to worlds apart, because you share almost nothing. Now you’re in a hurry to get home to your Facebook friends – who, if nothing else, immediately get it when you quote a song lyric. Share! Raffaele Alberto Ventura «Silence! The enemy is listening!»; «Proletarians of all countries, unite!»; «Enlist!»: twentieth-century political regimes accustomed us to the use of the imperative as a means of disciplining the social body. Science fiction has imagined countless parodies of this propaganda, such as in John Carpenter’s movie They Live: «Obey»; «Consume»; «Marry and reproduce». Far different, however, is the imperative of our own society – a command that accompanies us through every interaction on digital platforms: «Share!». Thus, we began to share everything about our lives. On LinkedIn, our real or fantasized careers. On Facebook, our opinions. On Twitter, our anger. On Instagram, our holiday photographs. On Tinder, our sexual life. And then the books stacked on the bedside table, the music we listen to as the soundtrack to an invisible film, the miles we run at dawn to prove our biological efficiency, the aesthetically flawless dishes we are about to eat, the petitions we have signed, the airports we have passed through, the conferences we have attended, even the hours of sleep we have managed to get. The obligation to transparency has blurred the line between life-time and work-time: every emotion, every journey, every indignation becomes raw material to fuel the attention economy. We were under the illusion that we had freed ourselves from the constraints of a disciplinary society, yet we ended up internalizing the overseer. We transitioned from the old iron cage to the digital glass cage. Here, the only mortal sin is invisibility. 148
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