Siamo qui per parlare del futuro e lui non è il futuro
Non si ferma il vento con le mani.
l'anacoluto più famoso e terribile di Vasco e dell'intera musica italiana:
«Siamo solo noi. Quelli che poi muoiono presto. Quelli che però è lo stesso».
«Non chiederti che cosa il tuo Paese può fare per te,
chiediti che cosa puoi fare tu per il tuo Paese»
Contrariamente a quanto si crede, Nietzsche è il migliore teorizzatore del legame tra Dio, l'esistenza e la verità. Negare Dio equivale a dire che si nega la verità. Nella visione nietzscheana, gli uomini si limitano a conoscere i propri stati d'animo soggettivi. Ma se ci basiamo sull'identificazione tra il mondo e la sua rappresentazione, le rappresentazioni non coincideranno mai. Un esempio: poniamo che io abbia mal di testa, lei potrebbe dirmi che non è vero, perché il mal di testa lo sento solo io. Ma come ho scritto in un mio libro, se vogliamo essere reali dobbiamo rimanere attaccati all'esistenza di Dio, che è il garante dello spazio della verità, entro il quale il soggetto può recuperare la propria identità oltre l'autocoscienza istantanea.
Il Superuomo ha accantonato la verità, a esistere sono solamente le interpretazioni del mondo. Ma l'Übermensch è pura fantasia.
Gli uomini hanno dimostrato di non volere il Superuomo, bensì l'Ultimo uomo, quello che crede che la felicità sia divertimento, una vita piena di comodità, in cui si consumano le droghe. Ma io dico che ogni sostituto di Dio abbassa l'uomo. È la definizione di Dio l'essere insostituibile.
In realtà, la verità è una sola e non si basa sulla reciprocità. Parlavo prima del mio ipotetico dolore, non condiviso da lei. L'uomo è capace di verità perché senza di essa, intesa oggettivamente, non si riesce a rendere ragione dell'esperienza. Al fondamento di questa garanzia c'è Dio.
Imagine an industry where seventy percent of your products lose money. You knit ten different types of wool socks. Seven don't sell enough to cover the cost of the wool, while the other three are so popular they're capable of keeping the whole enterprise afloat. This is the basic math of book publishing, a business model that's evolved over the course of the last couple centuries and has alternately baffled, unnerved, and outraged the long list of hugely intelligent people who have given their lives to it. The "worst business in the world," Doubleday's cofounder Walter Hines Page called it, and even in flush times, the refrain is usually the same. It's hard to think of another industry so perpetually prone to grumbling and self-hatred. As early as 1896, Publisher's Weekly wondered whether the book business was "A Doomed Calling"—a question that, by the late nineteenth century, had already become a cliché. After the Civil War, American publishing endured a similar upheaval. New technology made paper and printing much cheaper. Railroads, canals, and steamboats improved distribution. Rising literacy rates stoked demand. The result was a reading revolution, as millions of new readers—educated in public schools and libraries, many of them immigrants or former slaves—began buying books for the first time. In 1853, fewer than eight hundred new books appeared in the United States; by 1880, the number had almost tripled. By the close of the century, The Bookman, a New York magazine, was publishing a monthly list of "best sellers." They cared deeply about the idea of publishing as a public service. The books they sold were supposed to be ennobling works of art. What dismayed them about America's rapidly expanding readership—those newly literate masses hungry for the printed word in all its bound and broadsheet varieties—was that the newcomers didn't always appreciate the finer things. Popular taste ran more to entertainment than enrichment. Cheap, sensational books flooded the market, especially those precursors of pulp fiction known as "dime novels," which readers devoured in great quantities. What really upset the traditionalists, however, was the industrywide menace known as "subscription" publishing. Back then, like today, publishers wholesaled to retailers (bookstores), which in turn sold to customers. Subscription houses cut out the middleman—in today's jargon, "disintermediated"—by sending agents door-to-door with samples of upcoming titles. Customers would pay to have the book delivered when it appeared. The model was almost as old as bookselling itself—Napoleon Bonaparte and George Washington both worked as subscription agents for a time—but it returned with a vengeance after the Civil War. An army of subscription men canvassed the country, knocking on doors, hawking everything from encyclopedias to cookbooks, Bibles to self-help manuals—often tricked out with fancy binding and gaudy illustrations to justify steep prices. They lied, overcharged, hustled their wares as if their lives depended on it. "They tried to kill a book agent in Omaha last week," joked the New Orleans Picayune in 1873. "He was robbed, thrown into the river, knocked off the cars, tossed from a high bridge into the river again, and in two hours was around with Cassell's Illustrated Bible, trying to get a subscription from the head of the attacking party." Their persistence paid off. From 1870 until 1900, subscription agents accounted for more than two thirds of the country's book sales. Predictably, the traditional publishers cried bloody murder. These upstarts didn't play by the rules. They were ungentlemanly: rather than putting books on a shelf and waiting for them to sell, they pushed the product directly to the consumer. Worse, one of the most popular authors in the country became a poster boy for the subscription model: Mark Twain. He published his first major book,The Innocents Abroad, in 1869 through a subscription house, and its success made him an obscene amount of money by contemporary standards. Within the first eighteen months, the book sold 82,524 copies. Twain's take was $16,504—or about $217,762 in today's dollars. "Anything but subscription publication is printing for private circulation," Twain crowed to his friend William Dean Howells. Traditional publishers took the hint. Beginning in the 1870s, they built their own subscription departments. They gradually embraced promotion, advertising, and other strategies for making their products stand out in a saturated media marketplace. They accommodated themselves to the new realities of mass America. The industry that emerged from the turmoil of the late nineteenth century was a hybrid: a composite of continuities and innovations, archaic in certain respects and modern in others, like a new house grafted onto old foundations. The industry that comes out of the current crisis seems likely to take the same form. E-books are to publishers today what subscription houses were to publishers then: ingenious, earth-shattering ideas beloved by ordinary readers. Both make distribution more efficient by putting content into the hands of millions of Americans who don't live near bookstores. The fact that someone living in Keokuk, Iowa can download a new novel in less than a minute is indisputably a good thing. But it also entails certain consequences that will be hard to reconcile with publishing in its present state. The inevitable restructuring will, like many previous ones, be painful; but afterwards, the industry will still exist, and among the many timeworn traditions preserved in its next incarnation will be an obsessive need to predict its imminent demise.
Recently, the doomsaying has reached a fever pitch over the threat posed by e-books. Publishers fear that companies like Amazon will erode their margins by setting unreasonably low prices for digital books. Even more frightening is the possibility that the handful of bestselling authors who keep the industry solvent will start self-publishing through digital platforms, leaving publishers out in the cold. The apocalypse of American book publishing, after a hundred or so years of false alarms, seems finally to have arrived.
But there is another scenario. This is the possibility that book publishing, despite its many antiquated practices and inefficiencies, is more adaptive than its critics give it credit for; and that the current convulsions, far from being unprecedented, are only the most recent phase in a centuries-long story of radical reinvention. The production and distribution of books have changed dramatically over the last twenty decades, and whenever they do, the publishing landscape endures another of those wrenching spasms that periodically clobber anyone adventurous enough to build a business on such quaky ground.
Traditional publishers reacted cautiously. They had historically been small, family-owned enterprises, usually linked to a printing or bookselling shop. The company that became Harper & Brothers started in 1817 as a one-room printer's office; by the late 1840s, it was the largest publisher in the United States. Even as modest firms scaled into bigger corporations, they often retained family ownership, and the industry as a whole prided itself on a genteel sensibility starkly at odds with the era's aggressive entrepreneurialism. The great publishers of the late nineteenth century couldn't be further removed from cutthroat contemporaries like Andrew Carnegie and J. P. Morgan. They seemed less like businessmen than "business men of letters," in the words of one historian: members of an elite gentlemen's club tasked with elevating the country's culture and enriching the mind of the American reader.
Monday's New York Times front page article on Amazon's "writing publishers out of the deal" has been much commented-on. But I think it calls for some rage. As someone who really cares about this industry, the simplistic and narrow focus is infuriating; and the message it conveys to people outside the business is misleading at best and damaging at worst. I would have expected more insight and at least some analysis from 'the newspaper paper of record.' Yes, there is something sexy about the "David vs. Goliath" point of view in the piece: Authors no longer need big publishers to give them sales figures; and they don't need reviewers to get the word out; and they don't need book tours in order to have personal communication with their readers. In fact, the Times seems to echo certain writers in asking: do they need publishers for anything? Indeed, if there's any doubt, the Times shows its colors by having the article end with the dramatic quote from an author whose only credential so far was a sale of 600 copies of a book she published herself: "They had their chance!" Right-o, the article is saying: That'll show Random House and HarperCollins and Penguin Group et al, not to mention William Morris Endeavor, ICM, Writers House and smaller agencies like mine. What heartless beast could not root for the success of scrappy Ms.Saville vs. the lazy overstuffed behemoths of 'legacy' publishing who seem to do nothing but turn down worthy writers? And bravo Amazon! They have finally given the power back to all those unpublished authors out there whose voices deserve to be heard. If this Times piece is a David and Goliath story, Authors are David, the publishers are Goliath and Amazon is the slingshot—right? Amazon's Russ Grandinetti points out that 'the only really necessary people in the publishing process now are the writer and the reader.' That's true. But is it really meaningful in the way the Times seems to interpret it? The only really necessary people in the filmmaking process are the viewer and the filmmaker, but does that lead to a general belief that home movies posted on YouTube can and should take the place of films likeMoneyball and The Social Network and The King's Speech? There is enormous value to writers—and to readers—in the professional job that publishers do: the selection, editorial development, packaging, distribution, publicity and marketing of books. Those are the things that turn manuscripts into the prize winners and bestsellers that we all hear about and want to read. In its new publishing venture Amazon may well prove itself to be just as adept at these things as the current crop of publishers, and they will no doubt bring some new and innovative methods into the process. But that's not even raised as an issue worth noting in this piece. And yes, it is sexy to think of Amazon as the great democratizer, and the Times uses that for effect. But of course Amazon could swat any publisher out of existence with a flick of its mighty wrist. If there is a Goliath, it ain't the publishers. You'd think the Times would address that. Publishing folk remember that over a year ago Amazon punitively stopped selling all books, print or electronic, from Macmillan Publishing when Macmillanwas the first to change its selling terms to stop Amazon from pricing e-books below cost. Amazon was choosing to lose $2-5 per copy on the most popular books it sold, which gave it a virtual monopoly on e-book sales. No other book retailer could have afforded to lose so much money on e-books, so Amazon was on its way to becoming the only player in the game. Until Macmillan did a little David vs. Goliath act of its own—and Amazon blinked. The point is: Amazon is so big it can afford to take losses on certain segments of its business as long as the overall business is healthy. They are brilliant strategists. They were very smartly willing to take a loss on some e-book sales to offer great prices and cement their place with consumers as the only e-book store worth visiting. Sadly for the publishing industry, no other retailer of books has such deep pockets and can afford to do what they do. Everyone else needs positive income from the books they sell to stay in business. And the same is true of publishers. Far be it from me to question a brilliant and successful company who wants to publish authors in these lean days: but this is a complex equation. Do we need to be worried that if Amazon woos away the top few authors from each of Random, Harper, Penguin, Macmillan, Hachette and Simon, that those companies will become insolvent and Amazon Publishing will be the only game in town? Do we need to worry that they will underprice books as a way to gain more customers for their Home and Garden and Electronic stores? If they do so, what effect will those lower prices have on authors' ability to earn a living? To what level—if at all—will other retailers support Amazon published titles? As this race to a segmented one-stop publishing model continues, should we be concerned that we will never again see the likes of a big first novel driven by industry-wide 'buzz' like The Help, or The Night Circus or, for that matter, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, published with true national fanfare across all retailers? We don't know. Those are some of the interesting questions that the Times should have explored. Ultimately, the industry has been moribund for over a decade and could certainly use some shaking up, and this is one way it's going to happen. Amazon is making a big investment in books and writers, and that's exciting. They are putting together an interesting team, and I'm eager to work with them and see what they can do. But it's not white-hat/black-hat. There is something much more interesting and complex going on than the one-dimensional article in the Times would indicate. It's unfortunate that people outside our industry got such an incomplete and misleading view of things.
Anche sulle rotaie di un tram si misura il percorso di una crescita civile. Anche un biglietto timbrato può dare testimonianza di un'etica condivisa.
Così si torna in via Roma con la sensazione che niente è come sembra, che le categorie dell'umano e del disumano siano soltanto punti di vista.
ogni sterlina risparmiata sulla spesa pubblica non è altro che un'occupazione cancellata.
In termini ancora più espliciti:
«Una politica di tagli e sacrifici non è altro che una campagna per l'intensificazione della disoccupazione».
L'intelligenza non è qualcosa che si eredita o una risorsa da accumulare, ma piuttosto un'esperienza comune distribuita tra le persone
La Terza rivoluzione cambia il nostro senso della relazione e la responsabilità verso gli altri esseri umani.
Condividere le energie rinnovabili della Terra crea una nuova identità della specie.
Questa coscienza di interconnettività sta facendo nascere un nuovo sogno di "qualità della vita", soprattutto tra i giovani.
Il sogno americano si colloca nella tradizione illuministica, con la sua enfasi nella ricerca del proprio interesse materiale. Qualità della vita, però, parla di una nuova visione del futuro, basata su interesse collaborativo, connettività e interdipendenza.
La vera libertà non sta nell'essere slegato dagli altri, ma in profonda partecipazione con essi.
Se la libertà è l'ottimizzazione di una vita, essa si misura con la ricchezza e la diversità delle esperienze di ciascuno, e la forza dei suoi legami sociali. Una vita vissuta meno di così è un'esistenza impoverita.
Ogni volta che c'è una recessione, facciamo sempre la stessa cosa:
pompiamo soldi nel mercato e diciamo che vogliamo tagliare le spese.
Ma la ripresa si alimenta spendendo, le nostre spese fanno crescere la domanda, i Paesi emergenti ne approfittano aumentando la produzione per moltiplicare l'offerta, e questo fa salire i costi delle materie prime come il petrolio.
Di conseguenza tutti i prezzi aumentano, compresi quelli del cibo, e quindi ci ritroviamo in breve in una nuova situazione insostenibile,
tornando a fare affidamento sul debito per soddisfare le nostre esigenze.
Così non ne verremo mai fuori.
Fuori, oltre il fossato, stanno gli italiani, osservatori smarriti di lotte furiose, ma lontanissime dalle loro più urgenti preoccupazioni. La sera, le tv, moderni cantastorie, raccontano le solite favole. Ma ormai non incantano più.
