Imagine living in a city completely normal (it has certainly streets and squares, shops, markets, brothels, amusement parks, everything you need, really) except for its strange characteristics.
Every move you make, every decision you make, every step of the path and met every person, every dish eaten in every restaurant visited every shop window and admired each dress tried it, all your outgoing with friends or her friends, in short, everything - your whole life is miraculously transcribed by an unknown scribe, who, alone in his tiny office, follows all your movements and record them accurately.
not mistake a comma. He knows all about you: his job is to write the story of your life in the words of your actions, such as working on one huge novel, indeed, a biography: yours.
writers who say that there are many citizens of this strange metropolis (I have not talked about his size? Massive), and that they are so fast and so good at finding their information, to be able to write down your movements in real time.
They work simultaneously with your life, as if they were chroniclers of your silent hours.
So, thanks to their efforts, you can know everything about every single person in the city, what did the hour x, y with the speaker in the minutes of the day z.
is - now imagine that all that I have just described a hellish parallel universe and unbearable, is already around you, ready-made. And we already live.
small differences: the writers do not exist, you yourself, network users that, as you might think they are invisible in this virtual world, in reality it is as if you walked on the snow.
The problem of control over the Internet is one of the great Gordian knots of our time. A dilemma of paramount importance that we must be ready to melt in some way.
As a new Benthamite Panopticon, on the network we are all prisoners, and we check each other and we all also tested, without know who and where the controller. The detention perfect.
- What do you mean holding, it is at the bottom to hold a virtual life as a virtual subsidiary. Not to worry too much. Shut down your computer, problem solved. Do not fall into the traps of Facebook and Twitter, you no longer have to complain about, so stop complaining now with this highbrow. And then, after all, a little 'control never hurt anyone.
Never problem was less abstract and highbrow than that.
The crucial point is, in my opinion, you have to stop thinking about real life and virtual one as two completely independent and separate lives . No longer.
Bittanti writes in an essay contained in Year Zero [Charles Antonelli, ed, ISBN Editions, 2009], at the end of the process socialization of the Internet, "[life virtual] ultimately affect my behavior in real life."
(Which one is more real than the other end, we let the readers decide.)
If so, at least in theory, should be consider the virtual life in the same way of life being lived, then admit the legal equality of the two.
Just as we have rights and responsibilities in 'real life' we have rights and duties similar if not equal, in the 'virtual life'.
Therefore, further deepening:
a) consistency, as it were, ontological virtual is not a mitigating factor that could induce stand the suffocating control and Bentham that govern our social relations on the Net;
b) also, and above all, who does not use the web services is drawn into question: primarily because it has less chance defense of privacy with respect to those who know use, and secondly, because today there is no western of my generation who can be called out of the digital phenomenon.
c) the possibility of a 'virtual moral', pass me the bad combination, is swept away by the merger of the control which we are subjected. Because be under control does not make us moral, the all-pervasive surveillance network is outright immoral , perhaps even harmful to our relationships and our habits - surely dangerous and disturbing.
(It would take another paper to explain this last point, which was suggested to me from reading an article by Emrys Westacott "Morally Does surveillance make us better? " [Philosophy Now, Issue 79, 2010] and a now famous speech by Nick Harding , written in 2008.)
If you think about it, the problem I have outlined in these lines, is a classic dilemma of political philosophy: the dichotomy between justice and freedom .
We have the guidance of the immortal texts to better understand this intractable problem: on one hand the necessary freedom of the individual to rise above all law, not the other less necessary laws that rise above all individuality.
Today we talk about privacy and security, and the dilemma is not yet fully understood (see under: wiretapping and the fight against anti-Mafia).
The Busillis is that, for the first time, is proposing a similar problem in an area not previously exist, and that only recently (just over six years) has started to investigate seriously: the scenario virtual.
How to untie the knot? The old texts of political philosophy are still relevant today? Their arguments are also applicable in these cases (totally unexpected and improbable at the time of publication) or not?
I think just yes - with some of the distinctions big ones - and lean, a choice dictated by anything other than from my upbringing and my character, to give priority to the empowerment of the individual (or rather, the user) with respect to efficiency and the pervasiveness of the apparatus of control.
Perhaps the key problem lies in being able to bring further virtual life to that experienced, so that even without the deterrent of control, the user moves in the virtual environment in a 'moral' - perhaps relying on concept of identity, and provide a virtual identity at all, completely unrelated and independent from the real one, but absolutely unique, to be used as a document on the Net
Instead of control, responsibility.
From this it does not, in any way, which would be required to match the two lives. It would be dangerous for our sanity.
Although Bittanti always reminds us, " (...) schizophrenia is the conditio sine qua non of the digital . "
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