/INTERNET WAR

“INTERNET WAR” is a piece of conceptual writing by Marco Mazzi. It contains a collection of newspaper articles, interviews, interventions by journalists and writers, and fragments of creative writing. The theme of this conceptual text is war, as it has been narrated from 1990 till today. Starting from the Gulf War and its numerous repercussions, the text touches upon the major wars and humanitarian crises of the last 30 years. This careful reconnaissance focused on the theme of armed conflict is flanked by another narrative, this one made up of shorter fragments. It is a micro-structure that deals with topics that are only apparently unrelated to war as a scenario. This narrative examines the changing forms of psychological distress in the West–ranging from mental illnesses that have nutrition as their theme, new addictions, and school shootings, to the birth of increasingly radical ideologies, the crisis of free thought and free debate, and an intolerant nihilism that pervades and dominates the cultural scene. Through the interweaving of these narratives, war–historically described as a result of hatred–becomes only a marginal epigone, in a reality that has stifled the free development of ideas and of critical sense, and has created sophisticated ideological barriers to the circulation of knowledge.

The text was written in Italian and English and translated with an automatic translator. The automatic translator has been employed for conceptual reasons: machine translation is an important element of the internet’s function–specifically for the dispersion of information in a global context.

MATERIALS 00 (pages 1-57)
by Marco Mazzi.