I’m listening. The room is quiet, except for the soft whirr of my wheelchair motors and the tick of the radiator. Out the window in Rimini, the air smells like salt and wet metal after rain. The phone glows like a small moon on the desk, tugging my attention the way waves tug a pier.
What happens when technology stops being a means and becomes our world? Galimberti says exactly this shift has occurred: technique isn’t just a tool anymore; it has turned into the very “world” we live inside, setting the menu of what’s even possible to choose. He calls this condition “spaesamento”—a deep disorientation where past and future lose their grip, and we just keep things functioning because they can function .
That word lands with a thud.
A Personal Start: Wheels, Screens, and Air
I’m Gerd, a science communicator from Rimini, and I write this as a man who navigates streets by joystick and ideas by curiosity. The rubber tyres pick up grit; you can feel it in the shakes coming up the frame. On the promenade, gulls argue like tiny politicians, and the sea smells like old coins.
This isn’t just scenery. It’s a reminder that our bodies live in textures and scents, while our devices smooth everything into screens. Galli warns that when life must become data to access social life at all, we stop being subjects and turn into numbers—the world flattening to what’s processable.
That’s the chill behind the glow.
Three Things We’re Taught To Believe
The first common belief: “Tech is neutral.” It’s just a hammer—blame the hand. Yet Galli’s reading says the opposite. Technique is indispensable, yes, but not neutral; it carries biases, habits, and commands of its own. It can fill our human “lack,” but it can also hollow us out, reducing persons to metrics .
The second belief: “AI is creative intelligence.” We repeat that like a jingle while the laptop fan purrs. In Galli’s frame, this is a new Taylorism—only cognitive. The factory floor is our language and memory; algorithms centralise what we once held in our heads, then spit back remixed patterns, reproducing the status quo instead of thinking anew .
The third belief: “Progress equals freedom.” The sleekness seduces. Yet the “age of technique,” says Galimberti, sidelines politics and ethics by placing decision power where the newest tool points. When means turn into the first and only end, purpose shrivels; we keep optimising because optimisation is what remains .
Pause on that hum in your room.
A Single Story To Argue The Opposite
Last winter, my chair’s companion app updated at 03:12. The screen felt warm in my hand; the plastic smelled faintly like new shoes. By morning, a “safety” patch had locked my top speed until I accepted new terms. No local technician, no city councillor, no neighbour could help. The decision lived in code shipped from elsewhere. I signed. The wheels whined a little softer after that, which was safer on paper and smaller in spirit.
Here’s the takeaway: when access to life rides on data, procedure rules over judgment. Galli names this drift toward a “gigantic diffused automaton,” a society of profiling and control that expands on its own, saturating the real with operational replicas. The system moves to amplify itself—even our dissent becomes another metric to crunch .
If that sounds dramatic, listen for the gentle tyranny of convenience.
What We’re Missing When We Say “It Just Works”
Function is a seductive drumbeat. Galimberti insists that when function becomes global, our old words—freedom, sense, project—must be re-examined from the roots. The past gets downgraded as “obsolete,” the future becomes an upgrade path, and our present shrinks to maintenance. You can hear it in the click-click of updates at night, the cool glass of the phone, the sterile light on your skin .
Galli adds a sharp edge: the predictive aim of AI tends to replicate the present into the future, ironing out surprise. When prediction rules, discontinuity—the place where new thought starts—gets treated like an error code. That’s not reason in full; that’s calculation, which is only one piece of reason’s house .
Surprise shouldn’t be a bug.
So, What Exactly Is The Problem?
In plain language, the problem isn’t “technology.” It’s the governance of technique—who sets purposes, who benefits, who bears risk. Galli describes a revolution “from above,” where digital systems give economic and political power a tighter grip on everyday life, catching us in measurement and evaluation at every turn. The page even has a price tag: €16 for Galli’s Tecnica at Il Mulino—cheap for a map of the maze we’re in, and a reminder that critique is still a public good .
Galimberti calls the cultural weather by its name: spaesamento. When the horizon of sense is set by what works, not by what’s worth it, history and memory blur, and we drift. The air in the room gets thin. The radiator ticks on .
I’m simplifying complex ideas here on purpose—for clarity, not to blunt the force.
What To Do With This Discomfort
First—refuse the false choice between technophobia and technolatria. Galli warns that this ping-pong hides the real task: structural understanding. The goal isn’t to smash our tools but to name their logics, limits, and latch-points, then steer them toward human ends. It’s uncomfortable work, like sand under your shirt on a windy beach—irritating, but proof you’re actually there in the weather .
Second—guard the places where surprise can happen. If AI tends to preserve the present, then we, stubbornly, have to host discontinuità: real pauses, live debate, community projects that don’t fit dashboards. The coffee should smell like coffee, not “productivity.” The room should echo with unrecorded laughter.
Third—bring decisions back to places with faces. Galimberti reminds us that when politics looks to economics, which looks to tech, the “instance of decision” slides away. Pull it back with concrete rules: local transparency on algorithms in public services, slow defaults instead of fast ones, opt-in that’s truly free. Tiny levers, human scale, messy as salt on your lips .
This isn’t nostalgia. It’s maintenance of meaning.
A Scientist’s Promise, Kept Human
Free Astroscience exists to make science popular and responsible. As president, I’ve learned that rigour and warmth can share the same table. We’ll keep translating. We’ll keep saying that reason is bigger than calculation—that critique isn’t refusing progress; it’s steering it. We’ll keep repeating that subjects aren’t datasets, and that the night sky isn’t a screen but a place where surprise lives.
The sea keeps breathing outside my window. The motors purr. The future is still open if we insist on purposes before procedures.
And if we ask better questions, loudly and together.
Looking Ahead
Next time you unlock your phone in the dark and the glass is cool and the light is too bright, ask one simple thing: who decided this for me? If you can name them, you can talk to them. If you can’t, that’s your signal.
Let’s make the machinery answer to us, not the other way around.
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