QUARTAVEL

  Our senses tell us that fire burns; reason tells us how to control it. Wisdom is not choosing between the two, but using them to stay warm. Now that I master both, I see clearly.   You see clearly, but you know you don't know. The explosion of rationalism through the senses that overturns the Middle Ages mixes reason and senses in an analytical framework: only the verifiable makes sense. The cosmic wonder of the Greeks is obsolete. The intertwining of far and near is evident between the power of gold and the stark realism that kills every eternal theme.   In today's society, where the neon lights of metropolises illuminate tired faces connected to invisible screens, as if humanity were a vast buzzing hive of worker bees trapped in an eternal cycle of production and consumption, a profound paradox emerges: we are more united than ever through digital threads, yet more isolated in our inner solitude.   And at this crossroads of progress and decadence, we ...

  It's time to walk outside, in the real night, under stars that are not pixels.   Sitting on a mountain of silicon, I look down. Beneath me flows the great current of our time: no longer a river, but a digital ocean with no shores, only screens. The waves are made of pixels, the currents of likes, the tides of notifications. We breathe only in this luminous liquid.   Today's society resembles an immense city of glass: transparent, sparkling, yet fragile. From afar, it appears like a perfect crystal, a palace of light raised by reason and desire. Up close, however, every wall is a mirror. We move among reflections: my face multiplied infinitely, your face multiplied infinitely, until we no longer know which is the original and which is the copy.   Every morning we bend over the well of our smartphones and always see numbers: followers, views, hearts red as poisoned apples. But the well has no bottom. The more we look at ourselves in the mirror, the more w...

  We no longer live in a society, but in a dataset. We've gone from the Cartesian "I think, therefore I am" to "I am profiled, therefore I exist." Our social identity is merely the digital residue of an equation written in Python that serves only to build an algorithmic cathedral. Have you ever had the feeling that the comments under a viral post are all... strangely similar? Or that Google search results have become a labyrinth of articles written by a bot that has overindulged in digital caffeine? Welcome to the heart of the algorithmic cathedral theory. This theory suggests that most internet activity is no longer the work of humans, but of a coordinated network of artificial intelligences and bots. A cathedral of artificial thoughts and bots. This cathedral has one purpose: To manipulate public opinion through artificial consensus. To maximize advertising revenue by inflating viewer metrics. To sell products through reviews and automatically generated ...

  The secret to electoral success? Promising sun to the cold and shade to the hot, preferably in the same sentence.   If we map political language, which is inherently ambiguous, onto logical and temporal variables, their seasonal "truths" translate like the expiration date of a yogurt taken out of the refrigerator. Politics is a system in which coherence borders on the thermodynamics of a vacuum, and we can model it as a sleight of hand.   Political art is built with bricks made of dreams held together by mortar: the principle of explosion (ex Falso sequitur quodlibet), meaning that if a system accepts both a proposition and its opposite as true, then any conclusion can be drawn.   It's a magic show where the voter hopes to be deceived again next time. The politician suffering from—fantastic lies—first convinces himself of the lies he must tell and then convinces the electorate.   The illusionist's hat is always empty: the system is made of doub...