Future belongs to the avant-garde. That’s why we should surround ourselves with art every day. Artists have that kind of sensitivity that allows them to see beyond our daily lives and understand the trends before anyone else. In this perspective, only an artist can be more visionary than another artist. While, during the seventies, the king of pop Andy Warhol used to say that in the future everybody will be world famous for fifteen minutes, nowadays the king of street art Banksy is warning us that in the future everyone will be anonymous for 15 minutes.
Anonymity will be the celebrity of the twenty-first century. The idea of being completely anonymous, far from any spotlight, search engines, database, registry office will be the golden dream of the future generations. Nowadays the old paradigm of what we used to call «The Big Brother» is getting bigger. It has become a part of ourselves. We are our Big Brother. We, ourselves, have become the essence of Big Brother. Everyone can build his own celebrity. We moved from art to movies. From movies to television. From television to reality shows. From reality shows to the Internet. From the Internet to all the social media. The democratization of celebrity has created a new concept of reality. An immanent reality that has become filtered and unnatural.
In June 2013, as the world condemned the PRISM scandal, the number of Facebook users in Italy increased by 47% and the number of smartphone users increased by 28%. Globally, the number of Twitter users increased by 44%. This might appear contradictory – on one hand we are scared and we feel under control, while on the other hand we contribute to the widespread popularity of the very same instruments that are being used to control us. It’s a bit like when people complained about trashy TV shows, forgetting that we were the ones in charge of the remote control.
Clogging up the Internet by sharing every single thing we do with every single person we pretend to know is not the right direction. Posting publicly all our photos, videos, texts and documents is not the right direction. Giving Google or Facebook all our data, our preferences, our preferences in terms of music, movies, politics, philosophy, food, publishing, art and travel is not the right direction. Saying everything to everybody, writing even before thinking, spending hours on the internet just looking at what others people are doing is not the right direction.
Sharing the knowledge so that we can increase it, is the right direction. Giving everyone the right to free speak is the right direction. Spreading art, history and culture, is the right direction. Creating a network of information free and independent, is the right direction. Using the Internet as a medium of information and propaganda is the right direction.