[Deranged passions and scientific illusions in Charles Darwin’s “The Expression of the Emotions”]. Charles Darwin used, in his “science” of the expression of the emotions, various means and sources, chasing above all, in the research on the human expressions, spontaneity and lack of conditioning. Therefore, he opted for publishing photographs of the human expressions instead of drawings: in them the emotional conditioning of observer could more probably be transferred. Among the means which could help in seizing the spontaneity of expression, (...) Darwin indicated the observation of the insane, because they have strongest passions and no control over them. But in the very rich route of Darwin’s research, photography seldom gives genuine fruits. The observation of insane reveals in the end unforeseen faces, and even photography’s limited ability to seize emotions and insanity. (shrink)

[Vico 2018 Celebrations. A report]. This article summarizes the celebrations held in 2018 for the 350th anniversary of the birth of Giambattista Vico, organized by the CNR Institute for the History of Philosophy and Science in the Modern Age along with several other institutions. Lectures, conferences, seminars, conferences, competitions, exhibitions, installations and performances took place first of all in Naples, but also in Pisa, Milan, Berlin, Paris. These events, along with many important publications, ensured a significant impact of the celebrations (...) both under the scientific and under the dissemination aspect. (shrink)

[Network, Democracy and Complexity]. The paper analyzes the different causal factors – technological, economic, political and sociological – that led to the actual centralization of the network architecture, and discusses the current debate on the future of the network as polarized between a “technological solutionism” approach, which aims at a technology-driven decentralization of the network, and a more “constitutionally-minded” one, which deems decentralization as such as insufficient and promotes a new regulatory and anti-monopolistic framework for endorsing pluralism and democratic reshaping (...) of the infosphere ecosystem. (shrink)

[Networks in today’s world: impact on information and democracy of this new form of aggregation]. In this paper we show the basic features of scale-free networks and their use to understand the phenomenon of fake news in the present society.

[The story of a Napolitan botanist. Gaetano Nicodemi between science and revolution]. Gaetano Nicodemi, student of the Neapolitan scientist Domenico Cirillo, spent most of his life collecting natural history specimens and taking care of his master’s famous collections. After taking part, with Cirillo, at the Neapolitan Republic of 1799, Nicodemi was exiled in France and became director of the Jardin des Plantes in Lyon, founded by the physician-botanist Emmanuel Gilibert, greatly contributing to its growth. He died in 1804 in unclear (...) circumstance, and authorities later attributed his death to suicide by drowning. New documented attestations, together with the recognition of his distinctive handwriting in the labeling of Cirillo’s Herbarium conserved in the Museum of Agrarian Science at the University of Naples Federico II, allow a reconstruction of his life and probable death different from what is still officially claimed today. (shrink)

[Digital persona, Big Data and public sphere. What challenges for the democracy to come]. The datification of the society has opened up unthinkable possibilities to improve the quality of our life, but it also poses new challenges. How to ensure that data is not used to enforce invasive control of our lives? How to avoid that the algorithms decide for us even when we don’t want it? How to defend our freedom from cyber-elites as much powerful as they are obscure? (...) In this article, I will illustrate some of the dimensions underlying the relationship between our self-representations in the form of data and the public sphere in an attempt to illuminate that dark side where democracy risk to be confined. (shrink)

[Political representation and interests representation between dis-intermediation and re-intermediation: an initial assessment]. The impact of the digital revolution on democratic systems and on interests representation has been so significant to produce long-term consequences on our understanding and functioning of democratic institutions. On the one hand, in the political system, personalization, leaderization and the revival of so-called “direct democracy” are suggesting new ways to renew the fundamental promise of the democracy. On the other hand, in the interests representation system, the crisis (...) of the interest groups and the overcoming of concerted decision-making as a method for the definition of shared public policies is produceing a progressive weakening of the traditional intermediation in policy making between social, political and institutional actors. Nonetheless, leaderization, disintermediation and “direct democracy” also seem to promote new forms of mediation. An evolutionary scenario is therefore emerging, in which political innovation in participation and representation processes coexist with dangerous pitfalls for our democracy polity. And we will try to take stock of this. (shrink)

This paper claims, in the first part, that the arguments put forth by the Beat Movement, personified by writers such as Gary Snyder, William Burroughs and Allen Ginsberg, have much in common with the positions of Internet pioneers, such as Vannevar Bush, especially in the text of 1945, As We May Think, and with Ted Nelson, with his never quite completed project, “Xanadu”. The second part of the paper explores oral and tribal experiences of contemporary critics such as Walter J. (...) Ong and of Marshall McLuhan, whose claims for the existence of a global village in part has as its basis commonly shared with members of the Beat Movement ideas about orality. Finally, the center of gravity of the comments is explained as originating mainly in a twenty-five year period, from 1945 to 1970 but the discussion of these topics strays to the present. (shrink)

[Notes on Internet and Democracy]. During the Nineties the prophets of the end of history were quickly denied; only in the last decade, the illusions of those who considered the Internet a powerful tool for renewing and expanding democracy in the economic and political sphere have been shattered. In fact, the massive use of Big Data and AI has transformed the new ICT into a powerful tool for conditioning and controlling citizens’ choices and purchases. This article traces some moments and (...) actors that determined the involution of the network. (shrink)

[The Part of Thersitis. Truth and Democracy after Democracy]. This article presents the crisis of governability due to an “excess of democracy” diagnosed by the 1975 report The Crisis of Democracy as a crisis of control and shows how its corrective in the neoliberal transformation of the State coincides with a “revolution of control”. The passage from the traditional bureaucratic control of legitimacy to the automation of control generates what Foucault called the “society of the norm”, marked by the invisibility (...) of the decision. Here the “oligarchic alliance between wealth and science” constitutes the backbone of the neoliberal program of “digitalization of politics” and leads to an “algorithmic governmentality” approaching a “pure governmentality”: the empire of the intangible and inevitable evidence that both Lyotard and Foucault prefigured as the “terror” – the condition where truth paralyzes. (shrink)