The fire and the embers

1. Saturday in Barcelona a poisonous mushroom of tension sprouted: about five hundred young people dressed in black caused destruction around Plaça Catalunya. These are moments of social and political tension with the right-wing forces launched in the reconquest of power and with neo-fascist music throughout Europe, and agitation is the order of the day. The reactionary wave is spreading, duly directed, while democratic parties of the right and left are rather faltering. And the Barcelona unrest leaves signs that suggest that something is moving and the traditional schemes are not working.

“People are sick and tired of being sick and tired,” says Obama, and there is something to that. In fact, with this phrase, what the former president identifies are agitation behaviors that do not respond to the conventional traits of political mobilization, so they are not easy to interpret, beyond the malaise and the need to make noise. Where do they come from, what motivates them, and what makes them tick?

Let us pay attention to the events in Barcelona: half a thousand young people dressed in black –an apocalyptic tinge– begin to cause destruction: they smash shops and kiosks, take everything they can, threaten people; neither slogans nor demands, an indiscriminate looting. Result: about 130 detainees and among them, surprise, about seventy minors, mind you, mostly boys, very few girls. Apparently, no ideological motivation beyond destruction, some with records for other crimes. That is to say: acts of vandalism and gratuitous violence. If that is what they were looking for, they have managed to be news. But, for what? For a destructive impulse in which it is hard to see any meaning. Can anyone imagine that they will mobilize people with this program? Or maybe they just seek to scare? It is hard, from all this, to draw any perspective, let alone a positive one. The riot and the destruction in order to get noticed? But who and why?

2. Inevitably, this singular case, if it were not for the number and aggressiveness of those mobilized –which makes one think that there is someone behind it– would remain as pure hooliganism. Obviously, the gaze turns towards the networks, where these types of impulses are fed, and which are a space to let loose without contemplation. And of course, there is a lot of noise of agitation and mobilization everywhere, for better or for worse. And, nevertheless, this past weekend we saw, far from here, the positive face of the networks: they played an important role so that the list promoted by the student movement in Serbia, headed by cardiologist Ilija Srdanovic, won the elections displacing President Vucic, who for twelve years has led the country down an authoritarian path. Like everything, the networks are the use that some and others make of them, and also depending on the levels of domination and the states of collective mood and discouragement.

Although there are already other calls, we hope that this scare that haunted the center of Barcelona for a while does not snowball and remains just a warning. But one must be alert, because the destabilization of European democracies to push them towards post-democratic authoritarianism is manifest. One only needs to look at France these days, where the failure of President Macron in the face of growing social fractures has meant that, right now, the access of the extreme right to power with Marine Le Pen as president seems inexorable. The president's self-sufficiency has left the country in the midst of a jumble of mobilizations in all directions and a bewilderment that, if the democratic right does not regain its voice and the left does not find its tone amidst so much noise, will complete Europe's shift towards the extreme right. And Spain has every chance of joining in, hand in hand with the PP-Vox tandem.

3. Things are clear: networks are an instrument that favors the logic of good (those I want to adhere to) and evil, of mine and the others. And the filters are not of quality but reward those who have the greatest capacity to make noise. The reactionary wave in Europe does not deceive: we are in the phase of anything goes, the creation of spaces of unconditional adherence, and there is little margin left for the complexity of critical sense. And people with power use networks to make them an instrument of domination that overrides any control. All this, with the understanding that nothing is definitive. Trump rose with the networks and, however, he is now at the edge of the precipice, even thinking about altering the political regime if he loses the midterm elections. And in this framework, last Saturday's ghostly mobilization should operate here as a warning. Networks cultivate and propagate spectacles that seek the destabilization of democracies. And it is not valid to give prominence to what is nothing more than delinquency.