I might be told: it’s very simple to put it out in those terms, the story is complex, and it’s quite frivolous to subsume a phenomenon like this one to just an element. People could state too that globalization has really different dimensions, i.E. an economical one. The one made by big capitals that started, at Cold War’s end, wagging their tails and slobbering like dogs when they saw meat rests in a global, naïve bone. Those capitals used technological development to move as quick as light: Tokio closes, New York opens, a bank eats another bank, a dog swallows its fur and a bank germinates in its guts, all that in a day, just in a couple of hours, with just some phone calls, with a click. We could say, capital came first and jobs didn’t follow its pace. We could say, as quick as flesh started disappearing from the bone, people just went off to look for something to eat. We could say, we ourselves, the Superdemokraticos, are just vagabonds, pariahs in this brand new globe. I will say: yes, it’s true, but now I want to talk about the humans, about a race that is self-conscient for the first time in thousands of years.

Maybe everything started when a guy (who usually sold seeds in a little village of an imaginary past) had an idea: to look for new customers some kilometres away. O maybe it started with a girl who couldn’t stand more violations, beatings, blood in the mouth, all from her primitive father, and ran away from her home. Walking through unknown tracks, through the woods and the mountains, sweating in endlessly seas, crying in solitude. And then she found a man, let’s say a Chinese man, and he treated her in a delicate way, he knew how to look into her rounded eyes and how to find the magnetic erotism that comes from things that are different. She settled herself down there, they were happy ever after, and she had yellow and blue children, and she felt what love is for the first time. Another one: a guy with dirty nails, intense smells from his body, decided to leave it all behind and to part to Poetry, to Utopia. He saw in strange places exotic animals, giant women and cyclopes that massacrated whole villages. In his pilgrimage, he learned the most strange customs and skins, he learned hospitality and war, and surely, he learned what love is.

None of this is new, nothing human can be so. We sniff each others asses trying to know each other better, as if we were dogs. Trying to recognize each other! We search in other people what we have and what we don’t, with different levels of pleasure, understanding, tolerance. Sometimes we do feel comfortable with those differences, and sometimes we just want to be homogeneous. But, unlike other times, we have now this new wheel, which takes us much faster than our feet to somebody else’s mind heat. Heat intermediated through a tool that changes everything into zeros and ones. An abstract institution, that levels us somehow through a new universal language. We’re flesh, organs, breath, heartbeat… and more than anything, conscious brains. “Air is free, I don’t touch you”, is what kids say to bother each other when they move hands in front of somebody else’s face, without contact. How much people do we know and how many of them have we ever embraced or stroked? How necessary is the material world to love somebody?

I am different things, many of them as abstract as words, ideas or dreams. And this thing that blends senses, levels and symbols, called Internet, helps me getting near to a great number of people to exchange what happens to me, what I feel and believe. Thanks to the net, I know many people (I even love some of them), and I’ve never touched or smelled them. So much so, that sometimes I even have the idea of digitalizing reality, mine, my city’s: to digitalize those from Buenos Aires, the porteños. I don’t really want to picture them, to film them or to describe them in a systematizable language as pictures, films or words. Neither would I want to state any conclusion, or even less a journey made to relate it to strangers. I would just want to digitalize them to feel them closer, to be sure that we all are a part in this new common language construction tale. A language, that appears to me to be infinite.

Translation: Ralph del Valle

Tema: English
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