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Beloved readers,

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Reality, as you all know, imitates art and sometimes even surpasses it.
By a twist of fate while we are here to write the preface to the English
edition of this little book of ours, we find ourselves immersed in a
scenario not too dissimilar from that described in the pages which you
are going to read.

Like any exceptional event that disturbs the peaceful routine of our
daily lives, this COVID-19 emergency gives us the opportunity to observe
the past and present from a different perspective and to open new
glimpses on the future.

In taking this opportunity, we will first explain how and why we wrote
Internet, Mon Amour, then, in light of today’s facts, we will analyze
how it fits into the present.

* Why Internet, Mon Amour
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/Internet, Mon Amour/ was born from the desire to understand our
relationships with the machines that are part of our daily life. We are
aware that too often we are embroiled in chains of command that are
invisible to us as they are covered by layers of make-up. The distance
that separates us from understanding hardware and software is hiding
under comfortable and smart surfaces. We are alienated from the tools
that we use.

It is very difficult to unhinge behavioral automatisms. A lesson, in
which I explain how /profiling/ works or I explain what /gamification/
is, does not really generate new knowledge or awareness in the
listeners. Instead, during workshops and experiential trainings, where
it is possible to expose your vulnerabilities in a protected space-time,
I can observe creation of new knowledge: each new understanding is a
discovery for both participants and educators.

We asked ourselves how to report this experience in a book. How to write
a book that is not the usual essay to read and easily forget, perhaps an
interesting read that does not affect daily habits, in short, how to
avoid writing that kind of essay that is understood on a cognitive level
but that basically slips over us like a river of words. The solution was
simple and it was already in our hands: to tell stories.

Stories that had happened to each of us or that had happened to people
close to us. Stories in which we can find ourselves, stories where we
feel called into question. Stories that can stick in our memory through
their simplicity, stories that are emotionally engaging, allowing us to
activate an understanding that goes beyond the cognitive level.

This is /Internet, Mon Amour/: a hybrid between an essay and a collection
of short stories framed in speculative science fiction. We play
simulation models to foster transformation. It is a call to the exercise
of collective imagination, a call to play together.

A story cannot be disputed, it can be liked or disliked, but it makes no
sense to claim that it is false: pleasure is not true or false, it is a
neurological, emotional, socio-psychological and even technical
interaction that makes no sense wanting to identify and criticize, under
threat of destruction of pleasure itself. Stories should be told and
listened beyond prejudices and idiosyncrasies. A story requires an
empathic predisposition to welcome the unknown: “suspension of
disbelief” said the poet Coleridge. A moment in which it is decided, in
full awareness, to play the game: it’s not about believing (the truth?),
obeying (science? authority?), fighting (for the Good?), But to take a
breath of air and, with a pinch of confidence, open the doors of the
imagination. Imagining the incredible, the impossible, the absurd is a
fundamental exercise of freedom.

A story allows you to lower your critical defences for a moment; it
refuses the oppositional dialectic and concentrates, for once, on
cooperation for the weaving of a common sense, of a shared imagination,
in which history is “understood” together. It is a game of
interpretation rather than an intellectual work. And the game is passion
and freedom, in mutual respect for shared rules. The possible seed of
peer alliances.

* What Happens Today in the Italian Red Zone COVID-19
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Today the Great Plague of the Internet is here. Not the one feared in
Internet, Mon Amour, of course. In reality it manifested itself in a
slightly different way.

In the scenario imagined in Internet, Mon Amour, the Great Plague was
born from the bad habits perpetrated by /human beings/ in their
unhealthy relationships with technological devices, /technical beings/;
mutual abuse and oppression led humans to isolate themselves and destroy
the social bond that held them together.

During the /lockdown/ for COVID-19, large digital platforms apparently
stand as guarantors of social cohesion: “We are all in the same boat!
#IoRestoACasa” (#IStayHome) users proudly posted on social networks regardless of age
or political belief.

You have to stay at home for your own good, you don’t have to meet
others to protect public health, we are taking care of you, here look,
we give you free access to endless libraries of films and TV series…
an unlimited choice… is it difficult to choose? So let’s choose an
algorithm for you, so you relax and just click on play. You will be
spectator of the game! How relaxing it is, you are free from the effort
of choosing, you are free even from freedom!

We are all in /lockdown/, thank goodness Facebook and Instagram exist,
we can use them to make live videos of the lessons for kids forced to
stay home. We can use them to share our recipes, to do yoga classes, to
tell our version of the facts to the world. Luckily there are the big
/streaming/ video platforms! We can entertain our children, we can
escape the dreaded boredom: “Ah Great Entertainment Corporation, grant
us our daily entertainment today, give us the grace of an early free
subscription, save us from the darkness of our fears.”

Connectivity providers offer unlimited gigs, Amazon, Google and Cisco
offer their /clouds/, as long as productivity doesn’t stop, as long as
entertainment has no end, as long as nobody gets bored. It’s true you
can’t touch, embrace, meet, freedom is under the threat of moral
blackmail, but who cares? “Everything will be fine”, “We are in good
hands”.

The physical space of human relationships, the roads, the countryside,
have become places unsuitable for us. Early spring is exploding in its
glory of smells and perfumes but this is no longer the space for humans
to meet and exchange. Do we live on an infected planet? Yes: infected
for humans, and infected by them!

Let these dangerous virus hosts stay at home! At least one meter away
from the others, go out as little as possible, don’t meet, talk only on
the phone or by video conference on our kindly offered platform!

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/Digital solidarity/ is the name of the dedicated page on a government
site: telephone companies adhere to the campaign to meet the needs of
smart working, distance learning or entertainment for citizens
(/culture/ has become /leisure/).

They are doing it for our own good! Our good as a worker at home, as a
student at home, as a teacher at home. Obvious consequence: those who do
not adapt to the production of video, audio and materials to be
delivered remotely are considered contemptuous of the common good.
Anyone who stresses that it is not a good thing to use proprietary
tools, that making decisions in an emergency is not wise, is accused of
not being attentive to the important thing, to the content: that is, the
health emergency. But the health emergency will pass. Instead, the
introduction of proprietary tools to carry out work and educational
tasks, with all the corollary of data collection, metadata,
manipulation, cognitive and behavioral training, risks remaining.

Digital solidarity we said… the great social experiment had just
begun.

* A Look into the Future
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And when the situation will return to normal? Obviously there is no
turning back and in the meantime it will have become even more difficult
to eradicate the technologies of domination from our lives, addicted as
we will have become to the platforms of /e-something./ In the meantime
the capitalism of disaster, joyfully rubbing its hands at the
unanticipated opportunity, collected an enormous amount of data and
metadata about our behavior. 

It will be difficult for us to unsubscribe from the /streaming/ service offered for free for two months just as we
are watching that exciting TV series. We wouldn’t want to stop working
from home now that we have installed all the apps for /smartworking/,
who cares if Zoom shares my data with Facebook even if I don’t have an
account, it’s so convenient for video conferencing. Every now and then a
red area, a confinement, a quarantine… it is for the common good! As
always, automatisms and inertia will take over our active choices. Less
effort, less contact, less friction, less freedom of choice: everything
changes because nothing changes.

Now that we have relied on the prodigious help of these networks to
communicate with other humans and machines, to find what we were looking
for; now that our /relationships/ have become so vulnerable, what will
we do when we want to get our heads out of our comfortable /filter
bubble/? Who will we turn to when we no longer have access to our
accounts?

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/Enough with dystopia! You are the usual catastrophists/, the optimists,
the hopeful, the frightened will shout loudly. It is true, it is so
comfortable to abandon oneself to the magnanimity of the masters of
today… as the serfs looked at the great goodness and justice of the
tsar, as the slaves looked at the divine magnificence of the pharaoh as
they built his grave, so the gears of the Megamachines, human and
non-human, continue to run today without any apparent friction. But we
like to peek inside the gearbox, if we scan carefully there are always
interstices where it is possible to intervene, where it is possible “to
do recreation”.

In Italian the word /recreation (ricreazione)/ means the time when
children at school can finally play and move freely. /Recreation/
however also has another meaning: technologies are not neutral and
therefore it is necessary to /re-create/ tools for convivial
interactions that are not subject to the logic of the domain.

We want to imagine that once out of the emergency some of us will have
treasured this experience, observed the vulnerabilities and started
recreation to transform us starting from the weak points. A path that
begins looking at non-gamified tools and conscious choices.

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That’s all from the Red Zone. You, readers from the future, should know
the rest. It depends on you.

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/Zona Rossa, Italy, March 2020/ - Agnese Trocchi

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I want to thank Donna Haraway because with her collection of articles in
/Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene/ (Duke University
Press, 2016) she gave the words to our experimental and experiential
practices and made me understand that we are not alone in building day
after day the worlds we imagine.

Thanks to Natasha D. Shüll for her deep immersion in /the zone of the
machine/ and for how she describes the world of /gambling/ in Las Vegas
in /Addiction by Design./

I thank Lewis Mumford, who in telling the story of these poor /sapiens/ in
/The Myth of the Machine/ has always been able to capture the incarnations
of the Megamachine in filigree. It would be interesting to have him here
today to read about our time together.
