in Público, August 2021

In our youth, we, and our small group of friends, knew a great deal about cinema, music, art and literature. We read extensively about films since we had to wait months, if not years, until we could watch them at the Cinematheque or after midnight on television. It was not then like today, where all the movies and music in the world are just a digital move away. People of my generation say that this unruled access leads to a "dangerous" homogenization: without curation, all knowledge becomes non-knowledge.

Today, the young consume things, they don't truly listen or read, as we used to do back in the time. I question if a small group of exceptionally educated people is preferable to a large majority of sufficiently educated people. Ah, but the problem is that today's young people are not cultivated; on the contrary, everything escapes them because they are always on their mobile phones.

What eventually scares my generation is that the era of the niche, exceptionality, and curation, is being succeeded by an era of unrestricted possibilities with new rules and preferences. We regret that so many profound and remarkable things we used to know well are now disappearing, replaced by others that, inscribed on the great digital surface, appear too accessible to matter. This is why many of us have rejected or postponed info literacy in a supposedly critical attitude. At this rate, as we grieve for lost things, the world can become a better place – right under our noses.

The sharing of systems and information supplied by the computers that live in our pockets may eventually result in the production of collective, diverse, and collaborative intelligence, made by humans, for humans, ensuring fairness and transparency – in its genesis, concepts close to our youthful ideals. Yes, it is not easy to see beings with their whole lives ahead of them spending as much time on their cellphones. Still, it becomes less scary if we think that an essential part of their future depends on the skill, intelligence, and imagination with which they know how to use current technologies. We fear that they will lack other fundamental skills – in our eyes, but not in theirs. It has always been this way: if we travel back to our own youth, without romanticizing it, we can see how much we all grew up contrary to our parents' precepts. And our parents from theirs.

It runs on the Internet a quote from a 1999 article by Douglas Adams, in which the writer and humorist say that there are three brief rules to describe the relationship of generations with technology: "1. Any technology that exists when you are born is commonplace and just a natural part of the way the world works; 2. Any technology invented between 15 and 35 is new, exciting, revolutionary, and a possible career opportunity; 3. anything invented after age 35 is against the natural order of things." These comical rules, without statistical rigor, are perhaps right on this: young people, albeit all their ignorance, are the only genuinely revolutionary force in the field. They have on their side the greatest and most legitimate motivation of all, that of living a long and good life on a habitable planet. To roll up our sleeves and join them would be so polite and good-hearted on our part.