We are also the first country that got rid of fascism 😉

I’m talking about a private individual invading the physical and digital spaces of public institutions with the president providing political cover and stopping other parts of the state to intervene. That’s a self-coup. Nothing like that happened in Italy and so far the government is operating within legality.

anywhere outside Milan you won’t be able to rely on English for anything. Bureaucracy and services are going to be a nightmare without conversational Italian.

No self-coup happened yet, most constitutional freedoms are still respected, there are no political extra-judicial arrests (or at least not that many). Except for some repression of communitarian spaces and public protests, it is not sensibly different from any center/center-right neoliberal government.

It’s obviously an open topic of debate in philosophy, but genes have agency for some definition of agency.

In a cybernetic sense, they have agency in the sense that the information within them transforms the world way more than the world affects their information. They are more players than chessboard.

For people like Dennet, which I’m not necessarily a fan of, you can think of agency (and therefore freedom) as the ability of any unit of matter to prevent its dissolution in the face of threats. Life can be framed as a strategy of DNA to reproduce itself in the face of entropy. That is agency.

Agency is not will though. For sure genes have no will and neither does sand

While genetic agency is often appropriated by reactionary politics, it’s a quite established scientific perspective.

ITT: very little pseudoscience. It’s pseudoscience only when you try to pass something non-scientific as science (understood in the modernist sense). There are plenty of systems of knowledge that are outside of science and don’t really care about passing as science when making statements about the world: metaphysics, theology, cybernetics, open systems theory, and so forth. Those are not pseudosciences.

Science cannot even prove itself as a method. Science is just spicy epistemology.

Memetics is not really pseudoscience. It was science, there there were compelling evidence and arguemtns that ideas have no agency on their own, contrary to genes, and the whole field died for good.

but then it’s a social force, and social force can be turned into a physical force. I would say any cybernetician would agree with this. Social signals are part of the same system of physical signals. Then we can argue cybernetics is not science but rather its own paradigm, but that’s a different conversation.

You cannot escape social norms. The act of rejecting them doesn’t free you from them. You will be judged for rejecting them and others will adapt to it, either by rejecting them too and creating a new social norm, or shunning you and attaching a certain rejection to a specific social signal. There’s nothing artificial on it. The logic you describe is very oblivious to how social norms and social actors work.

Also here we are talking about webcams not really as technological artifacts, but as social tools. Obviously it’s not a technical requirement to be presentable, but a social requirement, that’s implicit in the discussion.

“Virtual backgrounds as the norm” is an interesting practice, pretty much like school uniforms erasing difference in class by dressing everybody the same.

virtual and blurred backgrounds still signal a lot. Not only they let the viewer know that your environment is not nice, but they also become aware you’re somewhat ashamed of it, enough to be willing to hide it.