An Open letter to Mister Big F.
This is the edited/staged version of the project “Emotional_Scrollacoaster” that I presented on the 29th of July 2017 for #NEWWWORLDISORDER https://thirdspacenetwork.com/newwworldisorder/
> Video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R1trvNcpePI&t=13s
Emotional_Scrollacoaster is made of…
— emotional_scrollacoaster (everyday emotions on Facebook, the effect of scrolling on our moods)
— an open letter to… (an user feelings about social media/network and algorithms that style, influence and rule our lfe)
— what’s on your mind? (dirty_homeprinting what’s on my mind about Facebook)
— artist’s statement about social network/media
An Open Letter to… + Statement
Dear Mister Big F,
allow me to be sincere from the beginning. I have never liked you and I always tried more disgust and discomfort against you with the passing of time. But, I gave you trust and more than that, just like everyone else, unfortunately.
I prefer to use the polite form even though we’ve known each other for more than ten years, and even if it seems that you, Mister Big F., have known me from a life time because everything that you know about me and, certainly not, for what I know about you. I am not exaggerating if I say that you saw me grow day by day in the past recent years. You know me more than my parents, relatives, friends and even of my partner with whom I share the house and everything I do and everything we do together. I and her met on Facebook but, you know this already. You are a great observer. You know everything, well, almost everything, so please, let me carry on because I have few things to tell you and to take off my chest.
Despite the acquaintance and all this time that binds us, you have always been little transparent in my respect even if you, instead, have always tried to know everything about my life, and you have also tried to condition it in many aspects and in many ways. It is very painful for me to acknowledge that you have succeeded many times in doing so. The worst thing is that you haven’t done this just with me, you have done this with everyone else. It’s not hatred what I feel for you, not at all, actually I feel a kind of pity towards you working there night and day, wasting a lot of human efforts and money trying to figure out ways to spy on us, spoiling and ruining important human values such as friendship and privacy. You are so greedy because you want everything in your benefit and your profit is based about knowing everything about us. What are you really aiming for? Are you trying to clone us? I wouldn’t be very surprised if you are trying to do so. I am sure you would love to have and own billions of obedient and consenting intelligences at your service. Your obsession with truth, that we must be our true self, sincere and transparent all of the time. So, here I am, dear Mister Big F., I will not deny my truth to you this time. You are a great observer, and all this observing and knowing everything have made you very powerful. You entered our life, and many of us since then love you but, I must say that you are also a great charlatan, a liar, you are very intrusive, a sycophant, a cheater, an opportunist and an unscrupulous profiteer. Mister Big F., you attracted all of us inside your blue camp and you hold us inside it with the worst and most petty extortion ever known to human kind. You exploit friendship to keep all of us inside this box like guinea pigs in a laboratory, and you follow us wherever we go like a guardian that follow a prisoner inside a jail, you analyse us like doctors that take notes of their patients to understand and verify the state of their mind. This became a bit of a psychiatric hospital at this stage, the concentration camp for mass consumerism, this is an emotional scrollacoaster. You take advantage of our sentiments and social relations to keep us on a leash and strip us off of our clothes like a depraved that wants the soul of its victims. You are the stalker with the richest bank account in the history of souls traffickers. You are a capitalist monopolist puppeteer and you hold the whole web and every social relation online in a feast and you exploit them only to your advantage. You fool us and you sell our life without a minimum of responsibility to strangers that probably are worse than you are, dear Mister Big F.. You put a price on everything. You put a price on our everyday life, on our memories, on our anniversary, on our values, ideals, wishes and hopes. Of course, we both know that there is even who is worse than you but, I trusted you. I must acknowledge that you gave something back to me but, you have betrayed my trust more than once, and you have always speculated it, so, I must say stop, enough is enough, this relationship cannot last any longer, it cannot last for ever, you are not my friend! You are just another miserable who wishes to profit and take advantage of people giving to those just a mere public stage where to exhibit and show off their knowledge, works, idleness, feelings and vanity, and you take away from those naïve and generous souls, often without consent, everything in exchange. Everybody understood what you are really aiming for but, by now, you have become a necessity, well, not just a necessity. You are an obsession, a compulsory behaviour, an addiction, and like every other addiction, you are part of those lives that you take, trade, sell and resell until you nullify them. Many are fine with this but not for me, not at all. You know that in the past I had some addictions but, you know as well that I have quit with all of those, and this time it is your round, and it is not like always just a health reason, this is a political act, an existential choice, a first step to stay away from you and from those like you who are turning the web into a surveillance machine for marketing, governments and who knows what other terrible plans you have in mind that will surely affect and destroy our freedom. You know that I have been thinking about this for quite a while now, and you have probably known before me that soon or later this day would be arriving. Predictive analysis is called, right? You imagine and care about my future more than I do, probably. You know that before this day I had fear of renouncing and losing everything because the people I met and became friend with thanks to you are everything but now I have no fear any more, I am no scared of losing anything at all because you have already taken everything from me so I might as well leave it to you and move on. The Internet is immense. It is so huge that, actually, I am only scared to still depend from you for the rest of the days to come. If we would really understand about the many possibilities that you are neglecting to us, if we would just be brave enough to change, turn on, log in, drop out, surely we will find another place where to stay. We could create one, and many already tried to build something new and different from you. Something decentralized, transparent, honest and democratic but, you made all of them fail, and you will keep trying to make all of them to fail because you want it all. Obviously, we are helping you in doing so because we have given you in custody all of our memories and affections and we can’t lose those after many years, it’s a terrible thought. We totally rely on you for those ignoring the complexity behind every actions we voluntarily shared and share with you by will, by naivety, by generosity, by force of things and by ignorance just because we had never had to deal with such a reality before and everything seemed so fantastic, the maze that amaze but, you misled us and without ever telling us what your real goal was and with what means you were going to reach it but especially that this game could really mean our life. Some understood your game on time and left you. Some know about it and did and still do nothing but, far too many are totally unaware of what you are doing with every of our actions and interactions, and you have never dared to be totally clear and honest about this huge business monster you are creating and that many are trying to copy, to emulate and to participate in. We became active accomplices of your master plan. We are the digital slaves of the social media era, and digital does not mean that it is no real. Every actions and every content we share and create on your platform, you exploit it and it seems that you will never stop in doing so. You are capitalising on our life and you are making billions out of it. You capitalise on us alive and sometimes even when we are dead. If I think that we have helped you in creating the biggest and most detailed human life and death database ever known in history, it gives me goose skin. But, you went beyond it, and you are going even further. We believed that you just had a mountain of data about us and some formulas to make your analysis to track, to understand, to foresee, to advice and influence our choices a lot but just like every good marketer knows how to do but you, you have arrived to our thinking. You control it, you influence it, you design it leaving us very little freedom of choice allowing us just a partial selection suggested at the discretion and intuition of your algorithms that are working for your interests, and you interest is to own a community, make money out of it and lead us towards your vision of the future. You have built a wall around each of us, we are isolated in our tailored experience of the web. I feel a bit claustrophobic inside it. You have tried in so many ways to take on our thoughts after you had already taken our affections, memories, moments and emotions, and you have succeeded. You know everything about us, and we still know nothing about you. We grin and bear it for what we know, and we know that you have a clean face but you have a guilty conscience. I believe that by now everybody have understood that, sincerely, I do not feel much empathy and sympathy towards you, and you have known this already for some time for sure. So, I am not going to waste any more time in showing you my heart. You have everything but everything is never enough. You still want to keep us glued on that screen in front of that camera like flies on a piece of shit. What do you want to know more than you already know? You know my name, the place and date of birth. You know where I live and places I go to. You know my old friends, you know my relatives, and you know my new friends and acquaintances of course, because you chose them for me. My travels and my passions. You know my political ideals and spirituality. Education and work and career. You know everything I like and dislike. Affections, memories, thoughts, fears, paranoia, anxieties, joys and pains, successes, failures, regrets, sorrows and pride. You know if I am mentally sane or insane. You know if I am rich or poor, and you know if I will ever be rich or poor. You have a perfect detailed map of my face that you have made from every photo I posted and photos I have been tagged in that you could recognize me among billions of people, and you probably know already what I will look like in 50 years’ time. You know about my health, as well, and you probably have an esteem about how long I will live for. You know everything I know, you know who I am, and you probably made me this way, you made me who I am. You surely know what I am thinking about right now, correct? You have a neurosis about knowing what we are thinking about all of the time. It’s your business, it’s your law, it’s your mania, it’s your dictatorial tendency. You want to know what I am thinking about now, right? Well, let me tell you what’s on my mind but this time I choose the channel and modality of communication. This will happening in video streaming, on your video streaming service and this is part of new world disorder. So please, go on, ask me again as always, “what’s on your mind, Domenico?”, ask me one more time again, “what’s on your fucking mind, Domenico?” and I will print for you what’s on my mind.
An artist’s statement about social network/media
I think it is the time now to speak our mind out and take action. After ten years of Facebook, things are not looking good for us users and netizens. I believe that is a very critical time for the web and the internet. Cyberwar, surveillance, digital labor exploitation, fake news, invasive technology that are affecting our mind, body, life. We need to be educated about these software, devices and the technologies and politics behind it, we need information, we must know what we are actually carrying in our pockets. A smartphone is the black box of our life and cannot be turned into weapons of mass control, and it’s already happening for many aspects of our life. There is not more difference between away from the keyboard and online, the two have merged into one, there is reality, that’s it. We must act before it will too late to be aware of the danger and even recognize the effects. As users and consumers we have always been lied about the products and their damages on our life, from asbestos to tobacco and now portable internet devices. It’s time that we take action, spreading information is possible, and get people’s participation is possible too, It is just a matter of will, We just need to act as individuals. The mass protest must start from the individual that has taken awareness of his, her, their condition and act in defense of their, her, his rights, and not just be part of the viral campaign of the moment as happens on Facebook with flags. Art could help to stimulate and awake consciousness, and also inform people and inspire actions. Get people involved. I feel betrayed by Facebook and the rest of those web giants that are speculating, exploiting, alienating and enslaving us instead than embrace us, respect us, protect us and I feel cheated for everything we give away to them just to be connected and be online for free. This is not free. Free is not about giving something and take everything in return. The name for that is extortion. We learn free in online capitalism has a huge price, We cannot afford to pay with our freedom. They have important responsibility towards us but they try to hide from it or lie about it. They cannot fail us but, we and only us have the greatest responsibility, We should ponder our choices with more care about where to register, what to use, what to share, who to trust and reclaim respect for our life. Consumers are people and people are not on sale! We must be careful, we cannot fail ourselves. Take action. Turn on, log in, drop out! Reclaim your space, reclaim your freedom!
