Cervinia Spritz Spring 2017

Friends following me, I decided. I want to be viral too. No, Bepi, this is not a nasty disease. Viral is the future. How could we do before? What a unhappy life we had? Toni told jokes to friends at the bar, and the few who tried to record a video of it they ended messing up the tape, who took pictures in public often was beaten up and the few pictures, expensive to print, ended in a drawer. The “chats” were often carried sitting on the fence besides school, or on the benches in the park. No. Luckily today it is different. Today we talk about everything with everyone, even who we don’t know. And we film everything. Videos of Toni’s reflections on football, politics and women, based on profanities, has a vast following.

We can appreciate a Chinese guy falling in a manhole in Beijing and a Cuban passing out while drunk, a topless waiter in Ukraine and a flash mob in Tanzania. Tears of reality shows and fights of talk shows. And jokes, pictures and videos both comical and erotic, continuously. One time we wanted to be firefighters, doctors, someone an actor, football player, film director, maybe a model. All these things required time, dedication, effort. Today we want to be TV showgirls and showboys, coloumnists, bloggers and YouTubers.

We love to broadcast ourselves without much effort. Andy Warhol said that in the future we will all have fifteen minutes of celebrity. He was wrong. Today we are all potentially famous, and the fact that we are followed by 10, 100 or a thousand is a mere detail. We want to say and show much more than listen, gaze and even to do. Who hasn’t seen someone that, in front of an incident, before providing first aid, eternalised everything with his smartphone? We create a backup of our present in real time, a duplicate of our experiences for the enjoyment of others.

We used to preserve our thoughts in a locked diary, and woe betide if mom dared to read it. We were, mostly, dumb, prudish, reserved. Today we still are, mostly, dumb, but we still demand an audience, whether big or small. A liquid stage, where actors and spectators exchange and mix, where to broadcast bits of our lives and thoughts, at times good, but mostly angry and contemptuous. We want to be viral. Moreover, we want to be viruses ourselves.

Now that I think about it, no. No, friends, I think that when I will have a fever, I’ll still prefer to stay in bed and not to infect anyone. Yes, I know, maybe I didn’t get a single thing. But you never know. With all these new viruses, arriving already up to the clouds, and so many few, weak, antibodies, who knows where we will end up.

In bed, after all, I can still watch the Toni’s trashy videos.

Cheers.