This is an era where the triumph of science, technology and technique prevails unceasingly. All this does not mean that we are in a science fiction or visionary world, but that, in the crude reality, science after having faithfully only served politics (the State) and economics (capital), has now become the driving force of the new productive and economic order.
Until the middle of the 20th century it provided the propaganda means (TV, radio, press), the repressive ones (weapons) to the State and the means of industrial production that reduced the workforce. From the middle of the last century onwards, the power of science has grown more and more to invade every aspect of our lives and through bio-nano technologies, of life itself.
The monopoly of truth seems to have made science all-powerful, as with the state its historic monopoly of violence.
Science, Church and State in the past have clashed in contending for power or for the division of powers. Now it is science and technology that determine and influence state policy and economic, social and repressive strategies: they are therefore not neutral.
Capitalism finances armies of technicians dedicated to research and creation of new products and “resources” manageable only by specialists, as well as products that once made available to the masses shape the world around us becoming “indispensable” and sometimes indestructible as nuclear power.
This process is as rapid as the growth of technology and has restricted individual freedom.
Algorithms decide the rhythms of production, large data collection servers, geolocation, applications reduce us to subjects/objects of consumption. If the restriction of freedom implemented in the past by the state and capital provoked fierce resistance from the exploited, this does not happen with science. In the collective imagination it remains neutral and, moreover, in the West, its products have increased the comfort and well-being of most people. In the face of this well-being, the lack of freedom, the exploitation of resources, the enslavement of entire populations, the unlivability of entire areas of the planet, the migrations due to war and climate change, are of no interest.
Managers, researchers, technocrats, media, spread in unison the message of “don’t be afraid of technologies”, of artificial intelligence and of everything connected to innovations and automations that are imposed anyway.
Let’s not be distracted by the false debate about the use of tools in everyday life or the rhetorical divisions between “good” or “bad” technologies.
In the “National Recovery and Resilience Plan” an economic restructuring will be implemented between capital, business, technology start-ups and hi-tech giants. Capitalists and the industrial sector welcome the injection of liquidity of public and private money with open arms.
The Recovery Fund is another gold mine. Among those who will benefit from capital investments are the “poles of excellence” of techno-scientific research, universities and the IIT Institute for the expansion of the technology park where the Hi-tech Center “Energy and Environment” will be built, which will receive about 80 million euros as an initial investment.
In April 2021, Italian Prime Minister Mario Draghi announced the creation of yet another committee of technicians and experts. A “task force” that will deal specifically with the Recovery Found, bypassing and speeding up bureaucracies and any possible issues on permits, constraints and concessions. In this way, for example, they will cover the “delay” with respect to the plan to digitize and install fiber throughout the country.
On April 1, 2021 there was the financial agreement Fibercop, the company that collects the two most important pieces of the internet network. TIM will also take care of the infrastructural supply of the optical “cabinets” in the street up to the houses, the fiber will be developed by Flash Fiber (TIM owns 80% and Fastweb 20%). Together with these large companies in the digitalization market, the financial fund KKR Infrastructure has collaborated and will pay TIM 2 billion euros (with assets that will reach 7.8 billion).
Compared to the procedures that will be accelerated, a major engineering work, the nuclear waste repository, the installation of endless antennas and repeaters will have the road paved for their implementation: electromagnetic fields, cancer, radiation, environmental devastation are considered acceptable consequences.
With an ad hoc decree on the efficient “new management” of Draghi’s government, the so-called “Genova model” will be introduced, that is the derogations to the rules on contracts that will allow to avoid the stop to the construction sites for this or that problem, for this or that authorization: the green light for building businessmen, clientelism and corruption.
In the light of this, in Genoa itself, the work site for the construction of the freeway viaduct called “Gronda” is restarting despite the fact that there are not even authorizations for the work site or presumed concessions for the work. So Autostrade per l’ Italia (the same speculators responsible for the collapse of the Morandi bridge) will continue to enrich its murderous managers.
The management of the Recovery Fund will therefore be entrusted to an inter-ministerial committee of technicians composed of former Vodafone top manager Vittorio Colao (digitalization), Enrico Giovannini (infrastructures), Maria Cristina Messa (research), Roberto Cingolani (ecological transition). The ministers who have been entrusted directly by the European Commission with the most substantial flow of money are Cingolani and Colao, who will be able to spend more than any other ministry. The much renowned “ecological transition”, sponsored by the ex-director of IIT will fill the pockets and bank accounts of the “club of friends” of investment and technological-industrial development.
The “ecological transition”, apart from its “green” definition, is not an operation for the safeguard of the endangered panda or for the reforestation of the Amazon Forest, but a political and economic operation aimed to always and however stimulate the industrial system and not to magically eliminate or replace it.
In every economic transition there is always a power class that gets rich, in this case it will happen by accumulating a large public debt that tomorrow the exploited will have to repay, with devastating consequences obviously on the poorest.
While many are sufficiently distracted by the press to talk about responsibility, safety, masks, vaccines, behavioral norms and sacrifices there are those who continue to get rich.
In the last year, the Covid-19 viral pandemic has further accelerated the process of technicization of society. The State has abdicated political power, going along with the Scientific and Technical Committee that, based on data and numbers, forced millions of people into the home; mobility was allowed only if one participated in the production cycle. Production and consumption were assured, these were the only freedoms granted.
It should make us reflect on how the conditions of exploitation in which we live in Capitalism have made greater “freedom of movement” coincide with the opportunity or the need to go to work. Mobility granted, so the virus is no more dangerous in the workplace than it is walking in the street or in a forest, even more dangerous if you strike by standing in the street to protest or demonstrate.
The trend towards digitization, technicalization and efficiency will continue even after the pandemic is over. The latter an event that the state, science and technology have made the most of.
Faced with this, the individuals, the exploited, if they do not want to find themselves in a not too distant future to live in a world where they are crushed in a “freedom” correlated to the productive utility, it is necessary to fight without second thoughts even this new transformation of society.
For this reason, on the night of June 19, 2021, we destroyed by fire 5 server-data cabins and the 5G repeater of the Erzelli Polo Tecnologico in Genoa, and the adjacent Terna high voltage pylon.
Internationalist fighting solidarity with the prisoners of social war! Permanent struggle against the state and capital. For Anarchy!