Here's what they want you to believe: Young people with Palestinian flags represent a radical break from the past. The digital revolution has fundamentally dismantled old power structures. We're living in an entirely new civilization that's rejected the nationalist, war-obsessed thinking of the 20th century.
I'm going to tell you why all three of these ideas are seductive myths—and why the truth is far more unsettling.
Let me start with where I was when I first read these pieces. It's Friday morning here in Europe, and I'm sitting in my wheelchair, coffee cooling beside my laptop, reading two of Italy's most brilliant writers arguing about whether we can trust the century we're living in. Alessandro Baricco says yes, we're on a new continent breaking away from the disasters of the 20th century. Michele Serra says no, the old monsters are just wearing new masks.
And then there's this third article—almost comically brief—about Donald Trump brokering peace between Israel and Hamas. It's the kind of headline that should make your brain do a double-take, like seeing your grandfather suddenly breakdancing at a wedding.
The Fault Line We're Standing On
Baricco describes it perfectly: there's a geological fault running through our civilization . On one side, you've got the 20th century—nationalism, borders, wars, the belief that violence solves problems. On the other side, something new is emerging, supposedly liquid and transparent, where old hierarchies dissolve like sugar in water.
Gaza, he argues, is where these two tectonic plates are grinding against each other with maximum friction. It's not just a political conflict. It's the dying animal of the old century lashing out one last time .
The metaphor is so elegant you can almost smell the ozone in the air, hear the grinding of continental shelves beneath your feet.
But Serra—and I find myself nodding along with him here—isn't buying it.
When the Revolution Doesn't Revolutionize
You know what strikes me about the digital revolution? For all its talk of dismantling power structures, it's created some of the most concentrated wealth and influence in human history. Elon Musk didn't democratize communication—he bought the town square and turned it into his personal megaphone. The algorithm doesn't liberate information—it decides what you see based on what keeps you scrolling .
Serra puts it bluntly: "The structure of the web, if you just scratch the superficial patina of 'total assembly,' is from the ancien régime" .
I'm reminded of sitting in university physics lectures, learning about phase transitions. You know what's fascinating? Sometimes a substance can look like it's completely transformed—solid to liquid, liquid to gas—but at the molecular level, the fundamental forces haven't changed at all. The atoms are still playing by the same rules. They're just arranged differently.
Maybe that's what's happening with our supposed new civilization.
What Those Kids in the Streets Actually Understood
Here's where it gets interesting. Baricco noticed something I noticed too: young people, the ones between 15 and 25, were the first to pour into the streets for Gaza . Not for climate change—that was too abstract. Not for traditional left-right politics—that was too boring. But for this.
Why?
Baricco thinks it's because they instinctively recognized that Gaza represents the old world trying to steal their future. It's the 20th century's war machine demanding one more sacrifice, one more acceptance of violence as inevitable .
And you know what? He's partially right. But I think there's something else happening too, something neither Baricco nor Serra fully addresses.
Those young people weren't rejecting the past because they'd built something better. They were rejecting it because they'd inherited something worse—a world where the old brutalities persist but the old certainties have vanished. Where wars happen but nobody can quite explain why they're necessary. Where information flows freely but truth becomes increasingly elusive.
They're not citizens of a new continent. They're refugees fleeing a sinking ship with nowhere to land.
The Uncomfortable Question Nobody Wants to Ask
And then there's Trump.
Look, I support peace efforts. I'm European. I want peace in Ukraine now. I condemn violence from all sides. So when someone—anyone—actually brokers a ceasefire, I should celebrate, right?
But here's the cognitive dissonance that's making progressive heads explode: the guy they've spent years calling a fascist, a warmonger, a threat to democracy... just did what all the sophisticated multilateralists couldn't do. He stopped a war .
What does that tell us about our categories? About who we trust and why?
Serra worries that the digital elite—Trump, Musk, Putin—don't produce culture, only "consensus and power, consensus and billions, consensus and weapons" . And he's right to worry. But what happens when that ugly, inarticulate power achieves something the refined, cultured elite couldn't?
The View From My Wheelchair
Here's my aha moment, sitting here in my wheelchair, thinking about all this.
The debate between Baricco and Serra isn't really about whether we're in a new century or an old one. It's about something deeper: whether human nature itself can change.
Baricco wants to believe that new tools—digital networks, transparent information flows, the dissolution of hierarchies—can create new humans who think differently about war and violence . It's a beautiful hope.
Serra suspects that we're the same old humans, just with faster computers and more sophisticated ways to justify our ancient impulses .
I think they're both right and both wrong.
Yes, the tools change us. How we communicate shapes how we think. The printing press didn't just spread ideas—it created new kinds of minds that could think in paragraphs and chapters. The digital revolution is doing something similar, rewiring our cognitive architecture in ways we barely understand.
But no, the fundamental drives don't change. We still want safety, belonging, meaning. We still fear the other. We still, in moments of terror or rage, reach for violence as a solution.
What's different—and genuinely new—is the speed. Everything happens faster now. Ideas spread faster. Mobs form faster. But also, potentially, peace can happen faster too. Maybe that's what Trump's Middle East deal represents—not wisdom or diplomacy, but simply moving so fast that the old resentments can't keep up .
What Actually Matters
So can we trust this new century?
Serra's answer is no—"I don't feel able to say I trust the new century any more than I trusted the old one" .
Baricco's answer is yes—but with the caveat that we're not guaranteed the new civilization will be better, only that it's trying to escape the traps that made the old one so disastrous .
My answer, from my perspective here at FreeAstroScience where we try to make the complex simple, is this: it's the wrong question.
Centuries don't have moral qualities. Tools aren't virtuous or corrupt. The printing press enabled both the Reformation and Mein Kampf. The internet gives us both Wikipedia and conspiracy theories that literally kill people.
What matters isn't what century we're living in. What matters is what we do with the time we have.
Those young people in the streets with Palestinian flags—they weren't making a sophisticated geopolitical calculation. They were making a moral one: this level of suffering is unacceptable . That's not 20th or 21st century thinking. That's human thinking.
Trump making peace in the Middle East—that's not a victory for one ideology over another. It's just people temporarily putting down guns. We'll see how long it lasts .
The European dream of moving beyond nationalism and war—it's not naive because it's old-fashioned. It's naive because it underestimates how hard humans have to work to override their tribal instincts .
Looking Forward While Sitting Still
I'll tell you what I see from my chair. I see a world that's neither entirely new nor entirely old. I see young people who intuitively grasp that something has to change, even if they can't quite articulate what. I see old power structures wearing new digital clothes. I see surprising moments of progress from unexpected people.
Most of all, I see that the struggle Serra and Baricco are describing—between war and peace, between closed and open, between the consolidation of power and its distribution—that struggle is permanent. It doesn't belong to one century or another. It belongs to being human.
The digital revolution didn't solve it. And the next revolution won't either.
But maybe—just maybe—it gave us slightly better tools to keep fighting the good fight. Slightly more ways for people to see each other's humanity. Slightly faster ways to coordinate around shared values.
That's not nothing. That's actually everything. It's just not a guarantee.
And maybe learning to live without guarantees, to build something good knowing it could all collapse tomorrow—maybe that's the real difference between our century and the last one.
This is Gerd Dani, writing from FreeAstroScience, where we believe in explaining the complex simply—whether it's quantum mechanics or the tangled web of human civilization. We're all living through this transition together. The least we can do is try to understand it clearly.
What's your take? Are we really building something new, or just rearranging the furniture in the same old house? I'd genuinely love to hear your thoughts.
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