It's not nostalgia, I promise, but the general blackout the other day took me back to the lost time of early childhood, before the age of 8. There's a precise boundary marked in the biography of any emigrant, the point at which the move occurs and all memory is organized around it, between the EA, before the emigration, and what came after. When, as in our case, what we leave behind is a traditional, rural society, the contrast between the two realities turns this point into a fault line. I feel like I can travel back in time because talking about life before the age of eight is talking about a pre-industrial, pre-capitalist, pre-black society, in fact. Vicente Pasqual, a history teacher with extraordinary expository skills, passionate about the subject he was teaching, tried to make us understand the importance of fallow land, and I could remember that at home they did this very thing, even though I didn't know how to say it, of letting the land fallow in my family's language. That whole world, in fact, existed in Amazic, the language of AE, and I struggled, when I tried to translate it into written form, to find the correspondences for each thing. Even now, I'm sold words for utensils or elements of that peasant life that I don't know exactly what they're called in either Catalan or Spanish. That whole universe remained encapsulated within itself, articulated by a language that its speakers have stopped using in a society that has no need for it at all. It's a way of seeing exactly how great changes occur, how we evolve with the transformations brought about by different economic systems. In other words, if someone was born in a rural environment and settles in Europe, it's practically impossible for them not to adapt to it.
Many of the innovations brought about by industrial and technological progress have changed our lives for the better: nature seems to have been definitively dominated by humanity, and we no longer fear it as we did among the so-called primitive peoples, although, given the unfolding of the Pope's death, one would think it still fears me. I'm happy to be able to put on the washing machine and not have to break my back in the river like some of my aunts still do, to be able to write comfortably from home, to have a device wash the dishes and free me from countless tedious and uninspiring tasks. But the more advances there are, the more alienated we feel by its potential, its omnipresence. Having the ability to use a device to process almost everything digitally isn't the same as being forced to do it this way, leaving us outdated because we're told that continuous and constant adaptation is a civic imperative. As if we too had planned obsolescence and it were the objects created by others that decide how we live. When you can't do things the way you've always done them and you're threatened with being discontinued if you don't keep up, technology becomes a threat, an external power that restricts individual freedom. The same progress that makes work easier and our lives easier is what extracts it from us, constantly capturing our attention, trapped on the screen like gamblers in Las Vegas casinos. And large corporations, veritable all-powerful monopolies, impose their worldview and terms of use on us without any possibility of negotiation. We are digital remnants at the service of powerful feudal lords. Perhaps that's why the power going out for a few hours brought some of us a certain relief, as if we had been unplugged and could walk freely, without maps, but without anyone telling us where to go.
