1. On the first Thursday of July, I have breakfast at the usual bar. There are fewer people than usual, and the waiter, at the moment when he shouldn't be serving espressos or washing spoons, takes his cell phone out of his pocket. Until a customer asks for saccharin, he doesn't take his eyes off the screen. From my terrace, I watch a professional vacuum the bottom of a communal pool. Before rolling back his sleeve, he stops working, takes out his phone, and stares at it for a while. He doesn't answer messages. His finger flips down, page after page, nothing interesting him longer than a sneeze. At the bus stop, the seven people waiting in the full sun curl their necks to look at their phones. The same thing happens in doctor's waiting rooms, at airports, on the subway, at the gym... Nothing they don't know. This is just another day, anywhere. It's the global addiction that has us all hooked.
2. This Thursday, at the Liceu, we saw the most impressive ballet performance in recent times. Hammer, by Alexander Ekman, was the Gothenburg Opera Dance Company's haunting production that shook the audience and the consciences of the spectators. Beyond the beauty of the choreography and the hypnotic music, words were unnecessary to understand the work's message. The dancers go from living in a harmonious, altruistic, and disciplined community to living an increasingly hippie, more playful and boisterous, until the limits go to Pistraus's house and society adopts increasingly individualistic behaviors. In this crescendo Vital, each person ends up becoming a bubble as solitary as it is absurd. This recalcitrant selfishness ends up making the protagonists jump off the stage, and suddenly, they climb over the stalls, provoking the spectators. The audience, stunned, becomes even more frightened when the dancers ask them to take out their phones and take pictures. At the height of collective madness, the Swedish dancers grab the spectators' phones and take selfies with them. The social critique is sharp and, above all, pertinent for the current times. The show holds up a mirror to the foolishness to which we are globally trapped. We have fallen for it.
3. No one will be able to prove that this screen addiction was planned. No one could foresee the extent to which it would become a global disease. Nor can anyone predict the emotional, social, and relational harm that such consumption will bring to its complete ruin. In England, where there are reliable studies on the subject, they say that a teenager who, up to five years ago, watched three hours of television a day now spends three hours on their cell phone screen and hasn't reduced their television viewing. You don't have to be a genius to deduce its consequences. It's not a question of the new sedentary and alienating leisure management, but rather how we will break this vicious cycle of human stupidity.
4. We find ourselves in the great smokescreen of banal distraction. How many years will it take for us to realize that on the other side of the Mediterranean there was a genocide for which we didn't lift a finger? When will we pull our hair out for not having cared for the planet that hosts us? How long will it take us to be ashamed of having allowed the invasion of Ukraine while we went about our normal lives? At what point will we see the wave of the far right, regressive and repressive, once again hunt down anyone who is different, because of their origin or their sex life? The world is turning upside down, we are being manipulated like never before, and we, social voyeurs, are doing scroll infinity on the little screens. Hammer, a dancer with a large cartoon cat head, walks across the Liceo stage.
