Andrea Pennacchioli signs ‘Verosimile’, when the plausible beats the truth

“State hoaxes – he writes in the preface Enrico Mentana, director of Tg La7 – they cannot resist, those put into circulation from below can. And not only since the web existed: for more than a hundred years, anti-Semites from all over the world have been using and exhibiting the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, created by the tsarist secret police. While the constructions for social use of fake images which would like to demonstrate, for example, that while the Ukrainian population resists and the men go on the massacre against the Russians, Zelensky’s wife goes around shops and fashion houses in Paris spending a fortune, documented by false invoices and non-existent assistants, are absolutely of today – and are real weapons of war. Many will continue to believe it – continues Mentana – and will do so for a long time. Why we have entered the era of the unsinkable because plausible fake, of bluff that resists unmaskingof the alternative facts, the ‘alternative facts’ that is the truly great Trumpian patent in political communication: I say this, you prove to me that it is not true, and I continue to say that it is true, as is done with opinions. Everyone has their own. The work by Andrea Pennacchioli that you are about to read speaks of all this and more, and which constitutes, at least for all of us of the old guard of the twentieth century, a challenge to understand and counter an intellectual and technological drift that Artificial Intelligence will make even more profound and dangerous”.

Pennacchioli then tells how reality has become a terrain of manipulation, spectacle and emotional consensus in an era in which objective facts seem to matter less and less than personal beliefs. At the center of the volume there is a crucial question for contemporary democracy: what remains of the public debate when the boundary between true and false dissolves? Pennacchioli observes the role of algorithms, digital platforms and artificial intelligence in the construction of new information bubbles, capable of distorting the perception of reality and transforming every issue, from taxes to the climate, from immigration to the cultural war, into an identity battlefield.