From here I can see the last 20 years

The idea is not to contemplate. The exercise is closer to taking notes while analyzing, with curiosity, what has been happening: when and where it started, and why it happened this way. The balance is not the most positive, but we always have the future ahead of us to try to do better.

The last 20 years began 21 years ago. This new era began when two infamous airplanes crashed into the Twin Towers in New York and brought them down - the colossus fell, and a certain way of life in what we call the Western World fell with it. Yes, it is speculative, but I believe it can be accepted as a starting point: the last 20 years started happening 21 years ago. Because that event, the 9/11 attacks, triggered a series of changes, both in perception and in the way we live (for example - among many other aspects of life - the way we travel was irrevocably changed). The shock to the Western world from the unspeakable terrorist coup was reflected, first and foremost, in the way that people in the West came to fear security. This has resulted in different harmful consequences, ranging - and still ranging - from mass paranoia (but "just because you're paranoid / doesn't mean they're not after you," Kurt Cobain sang 30 years ago) to mass prejudice, from generalized fear to generalization resulting in xenophobia. The collateral damage caused by the 9/11 shrapnel was - and possibly still is - felt well beyond New York and the United States, and certainly long after the event itself.

September 11, 2001, the day the last 20 years began, marks the beginning of what can be called an ongoing Civilizational Backlash. Directly or indirectly, the changes that the event brought about in paradigms caused a certain way of life to change, and often this change was for the worse. Of course, this may be just my perspective, the place from which I see things. But I grew up in an era of ongoing sophistication - so sophisticated that even the Cold War was cooling down at the time. It was a different time. Human rights, social rights, the integration of minorities, and the emancipation of women were much more than flags of struggle or circumstantial trends that could gain likes and followers: They were realities in full fruition - some more rapidly than others, to be sure, but the world was changing for the better, the path of respect for others found balance in the freedom we enjoyed; progress was a positive, logical, and, it seemed at the time, inexorable movement, not a social imposition based on assumptions that were not always clear and were rarely consequent or comprehensive.What is important to keep in mind is the following: things have changed in these two decades and, in a good number of cases, they have changed going against the progressive trend we had been witnessing in the previous three decades, namely, and let us establish this milestone for the sake of comfort for chronological understanding, since May 68. People who understand history will tell me "it's evolution, stupid," and yes, I know, history is full of cycles that follow one another, of advances, of setbacks, of cultural highs and lows, and civilizational collapses. However, I cannot hide my amazement when, in the year 2022, we still often have to come up with such common sense things as "we must not be racist towards each other," to give just one example [note: not incidentally, as I write this text, there is a member of the French Parliament - Grégoire de Fournas, from the National Union, extreme right - who shouts at another member of parliament - Carlos Martens Bilong, black, from the LFI (radical left) - while he is speaking, "go back to Africa!"].

It will be impossible to think about the last two decades without taking into account the technological evolution, which has happened at the pace of the most furious hurricanes and which seems unstoppable. Telecommunications, which are something that humans invented to live a more comfortable life, have evolved in such a way and in such a short time that they have ended up enslaving, in a way, the humanity that invented them. First came the camera phones with built-in Internet - ok, this may seem archaic to people who were born in the last 20 years, or even in the last 30, but yes, there was a time when cell phones were actually for calling people and occasionally sending SMS - then came the cameras in the devices and the social networks, and before we knew it, we had the whole world - a digital world, a virtual world, a non-palpable world, sure, but still, a world of people showing, sharing, opening and debating; to criticize, to vociferate, to persecute, to denigrate and to attack in packs - just clicks away within apps. It was great for those who, like me, are in the habit of eating lunch alone and take advantage of that moment to peek at how things will be beyond the screen. But it was terrible for the democratic sanity of constructive debates, for the healthy skepticism, for the serene questions and answers, for the healthy spice of discussions. People who, like me, had some free time and an Internet device, had fun with strange inventions, ranging from memes to conspiracy theories, and both inventions spread (and still spread) in the networks in a viral way. Incidentally, virality was another concept that spread virally throughout contemporary society in the last 20 years. In the last three years, the world has finally been able to understand what is viral in a literal way and not just metaphorically speaking. If there is any event, phenomenon, disaster, or catastrophe that has profoundly and significantly marked the new century - gee, what's with the modesty? The new millennium! - it was the pandemic of COVID 19, that kind of contemporary plague that has laid bare most of the negative aspects of globalization. And, on the other hand, the most positive aspects of this globalization and all the technological progress have been brought to the surface: efforts from different parts of the planet have been joined, data have been crossed, tests, errors, and conclusions have been shared, and, in less than a year, the world managed to develop several vaccines to face the terrible plague that ravaged the planet. Returning to the more contemporary meaning of the word viral: something gets this epithet when it starts to spread uncontrollably. Like a virus, therefore - and there are viruses and viruses because if some only pass from one to another through blood cells, there are others that travel through the air and only need us to breathe for us to share them or welcome them. This second type finds its figurative mode when, on the networks, something begins to be shared, usually without filter or criterion. This type of sharing occurs a lot - much more than it should - with dubious content, usually containing unconfirmed information, unsubstantiated theories, or extremist discourse, among other possibilities that, before the advent of social networks, were limited to small groups of people in cafes or, in more serious cases, to the solitary shame of each one. The democracy of sharing, reading, and commenting, with all its good things, also add a darker side to reality. And while it is true that freedom of expression is an inalienable right in a civilized world, it is also true that this freedom is often used in a fairly barbaric way.

This is not meant to throw all the blame on the Internet and social networks. Polarized and hate speech, conspiracy theories, and gratuitous insults, among other harmful and mass behaviors, already occurred before we reached this point in technological evolution - and let's accept progress as something that has brought more advantages than disadvantages (I don't know if this is true or not, I would need scientific means and methods that I don't have to affirm or deny it with certainty). What happens is that the ease of communication and the possibility of publishing whatever one wants has allowed certain initially irrelevant phenomena to gain considerable and even worrisome dimensions. From the Flat Earth theory to the rise of the dullest populism - again, why modesty? It's not dull, it's stupid and ignorant, even - there are many examples and several areas where these manifestations of vigorous intellectual inanity have occurred in recent times. Having reached this point, and starting from an event that upset a benign view of the world and the postures that came naturally from it, we realize that the ghosts that were released at that moment gained echo and amplification in the social networks and in the use that people have been giving them. On the one hand, the algorithms that were developed began to herd - the chosen verb is neither innocent nor accidental - users into increasingly isolated groups, limiting their vision and offering them what was different as obscure, unknown, and therefore dangerous. On the other hand, the users, the citizens, in general, were revealing the worst in human beings: increasingly selfish, less and less capable of empathy, and progressing towards extremism. Many people have begun to go against the direction of civilizational progress that humanity seemed to be traveling to before we started this new era 20 years ago. All of this has consequences and reflexes. It would have been unthinkable, a few years ago and in the wake of this progress and the opening of minds and the conquest of fundamental rights, that what happened recently in the United States, for example, would have happened, where 21 states restricted abortion. In other words, there has been an obvious and unquestionable regression in an area that is a right won by women. This is an example of how extremism - in this case, conservative extremism - has devastating effects on society, especially, and as always happens, on the most disadvantaged bangs of society.

At the same time, and with the transfer of the social environment and many of its dynamics to the digital universe, to the communication and interaction platforms - Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram, mainly -, another problem has arisen, which, although not new, has now gained new expressions: censorship. If throughout the 20th century the Western World had to face the tyranny of totalitarian regimes in several European countries, each with its way of imposing the filtering of information and limits to freedom of expression, it is curious, almost ironic, that the most democratic system developed by human beings has resulted in the perfect field for new forms of censorship. Today, we call it "cancel culture". It is a phenomenon that, simply put, consists in boycotting access, consumption, or the sharing and dissemination of something or someone - an individual, a company, an institution, or a group - according to criteria spontaneously defined by masses that get angry online. This is not to devalue the causes, so often correct and justified, for acting or taking a stand towards someone or some entity that causes social harm. That's not what this is about. But we must realize that this culture ended up becoming, rooted in people's subconscious, an insidious form of censorship, often self-inflicted - it is censorship through fear.

All in all, and adding up the past 20 years, fear, in its many forms and to varying degrees, ranging from legitimate fear to extremist paranoia - oh, the vaccines, oh, the masks, oh, gravity, oh, Bill Gates, oh, the Chinese - has become a sad trait in the culture we live in. This was not supposed to be the total to present in the middle of the 21st century, and with our species having the most sophisticated means to make much better the world, humanity, and the individual. But this is what we can conclude. May the next 20 years be marked by the resumption of fluid and genuine progress.

Translated from the original on The 20th anniversary issue, published November 2022.Full story and credits in the print version.