On her WhatsApp profile, she has a photo of the Flamisell River, in Pallars Jussà, and in the status text, it reads "Against the current". Cristina Farré has lived her whole life against the current. And what a life! A former militant of the Communist Party of Spain (international), the political struggle led her into clandestinity, to suffer torture, to prison, and to exile; a story that she has collected in the memoir book We gave it all.

He has no WhatsApp photo, it's not clear whether due to strategic artist opacity or natural shyness. Quim Carandell (Barcelona, 1997) sits on the terrace where we met and curls up inside a sweatshirt that signals the arrival of autumn. I celebrate this, because the lead singer of La Ludwig Band, the band's frontman and the brain behind the lyrics, could not grant interviews until after the summer. After years growing on the margins, with their latest album and the corresponding tour, Ludwig has broken through its ceiling.

I think his profile picture must be a contemporary sculpture. Then I zoom in: it is the mountain wall of Siurana, in Priorat, which he climbed years ago, and which looks like a human face in profile. It makes me laugh because Marc Domènech likes artists who work with organic forms, and at the gallery he directs (the Marc Domènech) it is not hard at all to imagine a painting of those that dissolve the line between humanity and nature. An art historian and second generation of gallery owners, Domènech has specialized in 20th-century art and works to recover artists who have been left on the margins of the great narratives.

The fact that Lamine Yamal has not won the Ballon d'Or gives the feeling that it simply postpones the inevitable. We know that the award granted by France Football is always both sporting and extra-sporting at the same time, that footballing criteria are rewarded and at the same time there is room for a certain 'je ne sais quoi'. But the charm of Lamine is that when it comes to him, that 'je ne sais quoi' is the core of the matter. After a few years in which the ups and downs could be read in a prosaic key depending on whether the ball went in or not, Lamine embodies one of those cases in which an individual ceases to be just that and becomes a metaphor. The Ballon d'Or merely delays what sooner or later will end up happening.

In her profile, she has the typical strip of passport photos taken in a photo booth: she says she loses her ID card very often. And it is very easy to imagine Carme Arcarazo (Barcelona, 1996) so passionate about something that she forgets her wallet. An economist specializing in urban policy and spokesperson for the Tenants' Union, the whole country has seen and heard her enough on the radio and on television sets in recent weeks, and has captured the energy she radiates. We had arranged to speak before what happened with Maricarmen, the calling of elections, and the call for a general strike, and we almost had to cancel because Arcarazo does not want to divert attention from the cause. We saved it with the idea that certain personal experiences help to concretize political ideas.

One of the pearls of wisdom from Baruch Spinoza's Ethics is the idea that "An emotion can neither be hindered nor removed unless by a contrary and stronger emotion than the emotion to be hindered". I believe this is the phrase I will repeat most to orient myself in this confusing electoral campaign that awaits us. Because it will soon be a couple of decades that the system's only response to the breakdown of the social contract is to frame the political debate as a struggle between the rationality of experts and centrist parties and the madness of extremists. And, naturally, the extremes have not stopped rising. Following Spinoza, the only way to save democracy (or, rather, to restore it) is to stop identifying it with dismissive rationality and to recover its scandalous and radical core.

On WhatsApp, he has the kind of profile picture that also serves him for LinkedIn: "It's one of the few where I look good." But Joan Solé has accumulated more than one hundred and fifty thousand followers on Instagram and TikTok and videos with tens of millions of views precisely because he doesn't put his face in front of the camera, but rather documents the rituals, history, and culture surrounding Futbol Club Barcelona. He has launched Cultura a la Grada, an initiative "that defends a way of experiencing Barça far removed from modern football".

I believe that, right now, the great obstacle in the struggle for housing is cultural, and the paradox is that the problem is precisely the culture that has formed around what it implies to be the owner of a house. Because, as all the readers who try to understand the problem every week and commit to a solution must already know by now, we will not succeed with economists alone. I remember perfectly the squabbles following the 2008 crisis, and that was nothing compared to the mud we are seeing in the housing debate, in which experts of one stripe and the other throw at each other data and theories so opposed and incompatible, and with such bitterness, that the very meaning of the word expert is emptied of content and one feels on an exhausting rollercoaster and changes certainties and opinions after each reading.

On WhatsApp she has a frame from 8 1/2, by Fellini, because it is a film full of self-references: Mastroianni is at the same time a character and the director of the film; he holds auditions for actresses who then appear in it. Gemma de les Coves (Barcelona, 1984), theoretical physicist and ICREA research professor at UPF, studies the limits of what we can describe, calculate and understand, and she likes how art dives headfirst into these paradoxes, without the fear of conventional logic.

Albert Serra (Banyoles, 1975) does not have WhatsApp or any social network because he does not want to waste time on what does not interest him. This brings his cinema and his life together: to combat boredom, he imposes a military discipline on himself to fight against clichés. This way of working has led him to be one of the most recognized artists in the world and the kind of interlocutor with whom you always have a good time and get interesting ideas, while at the same time worrying about whether it is all a farce.What made you who you are?

On his WhatsApp, he has a photomontage of the landscapes of Cappadocia, in Turkey, where the caves that served as a refuge for the first Christians are located. Gabriel Ventura (Granollers, 1988) is a poet, and although he has never had a mystical experience, or precisely because of that, he is drawn to the kind of practices that help to escape the weight of reality. This flirting with the beyond has led him to write books, curate exhibitions, and conduct a study on mysticism for Lux, Rosalía's album.The clothes, the hair, the performances, the rituals… what are we supposed to do, those of us who are too normal, when we are intimidated by an eccentric poet?

I joke with him saying he must have the Parthenon as his profile picture, but it turns out it's no joke. In the one he chose, we can see the temple's facade in the process of reconstruction, which already allows us to refine the metaphor of his passion a bit: recovering Catalonia's connection with the classics. He has translated into Catalan and for young people the Odyssey and Greek Myths.

The afternoon begins dully with a heat that only seems tolerable because the permanent state of exception of the climate has forced us to lower our standards. It is a public holiday Friday and Catalan politics has accumulated so many years of apathy that I admit I arrive loaded with preventive pessimism at Plaça Universitat, and I sink into prejudice when I find the ANC stalls full of white hair. Then I cling to the lifeline of a group of teenagers with estelades who pass by me. They are shy, they explain to me that they have come down by train from Os de Balaguer and say they don't know much about politics. To shake them up a bit, I ask them to compare this Diada with the previous ones they have experienced, and they all agree on one point: "There are more young people than ever." As I get closer to the heart of the matter, I realize they are absolutely right: I haven't missed a single protest since 2012 and I had never seen so many young people. Although the rational part of my brain knows that the absolute number cannot be compared to that of the epic years, the impression of seeing a proportion of young people higher than that of older people completely changes the emotional color of the Diada.

Her Instagram profile is represented by a photo of Audrey Hepburn in Breakfast at Tiffany's, a film that she assures me she has seen more than seventeen times. Karanezi began to stand out by commenting on current events through tweets and short videos, and has ended up being a scriptwriter for La competència and a member of Nexe Nacional, a group of left-wing nationalists born after the Procés.How did you become politicized?

On WhatsApp he appears prominently, serious and institutional, and in his status he has an owl emoji: "They are silent, they see everything and they do their job effectively." President of the Society for Military Studies (SEM) and author of New Flock. Re-establishing Catalan Naval Power, he works to correct the lack of knowledge of defense policy in the service of Catalan national interest.Where does your passion for military matters come from?

Argentines don't watch the match, they surrender to it, following the rhythm of cumbia as if football were going to save their lives. The Hyat hotel in L'Hospitalet, the designated place for the institutional gathering of Argentines exiled in Barcelona, is an UFO in the middle of nowhere. But if you put an empanada stand and a couple of Maradona banners in a carpeted hall, it's enough to build a country. Almost all the shirts are Messi's and all tattooed skins include some reference to Maradona. The percussion and the lololos are tireless, it's impossible to hear your own voice or understand the lyrics of the chants which, as a die-hard Barça fan as I am, seem too festive and calm for a World Cup final. I understand this by interviewing Argentinians who have taken the opportunity to dye their hair blue and paint the albiceleste on their cheeks: Alicia and Rosana, from Mar del Plata and Buenos Aires, have been here for over 15 years, and, like everyone I speak to, they tell me that their emotional voltage was sublimated against England, and that they feel so grateful because Spain has welcomed them that they would even be happy in case of defeat in the final. "Win or lose, then we'll go to the [Arc de] Triomf to celebrate". I don't think the boys dressed in Catalan national team shirts or Barça's quadribarrada think the same: it turns out there are a handful of young Catalans who have decided to come to the Argentinian gathering to feel at home, an insurmountable metaphor for the country that will need to be prepared for those who say "football and politics must be separated".

Just as it happened with the summer of Barbie and Oppenheimer, when a couple of films become a mass phenomenon, one cannot resist the temptation to interpret them as a symptom of collective unease. Even more so when we talk about horror cinema: the more it hits the nail on the head in exposing a hidden malaise, the scarier the film will be and, therefore, the more successful it will be. That's why it has always been said that every horror genre is born from social unease: vampire films represent the fear that the rich will suck our resources, zombie films confront us with the impossibility of controlling the masses, haunted house stories exploit the dark side of the nuclear family, and so on. Well, with Obsession and Backrooms, two horror films made by very young directors that in recent weeks have broken all kinds of box office records and have dragged crowds of young people, whom cinema had given up for lost, to theaters, we can say that a new generation is beginning to put a face to its monsters.Although they are very different films, I think both should be read uninhibitedly as an expression of the unease that digital natives feel when relating to the real world in screen time, and that if they have been so successful among young people it is because they have managed to incorporate the anxieties of the internet into the medium of cinema. In other words, neither of the two films explicitly deals with the theme of adolescents hooked on the algorithm with the alarmist tone of a Sense ficció, but rather incorporates the anxieties into the texture of the artistic artifact, achieving that strange privilege that allows metaphors to reach places impossible for explicit language.

The algorithm often suggests content that it itself labels as masculine, which, in the current state of culture wars, means I have direct contact with the most uninhibited expressions of the new right. And this week I had a good laugh with a meme of Ábalos that went viral following the court ruling. The montage consists of mixing a collection of statements by the former PSOE Secretary General and accompanying them with the sad music of Skyfall, the song from a James Bond movie. It alternates Ábalos's phrases expressing helplessness –"I have no one. I feel like I'm facing political power alone"– with the account of an extramarital affair –"She blocked me, and there I discovered the word ghosting, she explained to me what it meant. It hurts, because I had a real romantic relationship with that person. I lost everything, forgive my boldness, for someone I loved"–. The volume of the piano rises, we hear Adele singing "This is the end" and we read some variation of the text "If loving is a crime…" accompanied by the broken heart emoji. It is absolutely impossible not to laugh a little or feel a certain tenderness towards Ábalos.However, how is it that all this sympathy is flourishing in a right-wing cultural ecosystem? Naturally, part of the explanation has to do with the fact that, by humanizing Ábalos, the pressure can be redirected towards Pedro Sánchez, who is the real enemy. But the phenomenon is so organic and the meme spreads so much in apparently apolitical spheres, that I find it a perfect symptom of the left's cultural problem with the language of male desire.Traditionally, the right and the left have offered two complementary ways of channeling enjoyment, those tickles that go beyond reason and that are also an essential part of politics. Simply put, the right provided the pleasure of identifying with authority, and the left the pleasure of fighting it, which are two impulses present in the human soul that constantly compete and that may or may not make sense depending on the situation. However, the institutionalization of a form of progressive power, one of the most particular novelties of modernity, has opened a window for the revolutionary conservative, a new figure who is capable of appropriating both forms of enjoyment at the same time. Unlike the conservative we all have in mind, who calls people to repress excesses, the revolutionary conservative is capable of presenting the fight to return to traditional values as a risky and exciting crusade against progressive tyranny, a masterstroke that confers upon whoever knows how to execute it the monopoly of emotionality and leaves rivals in the burdensome position of the censor.

At the height of Gran Via, I cross the teachers' demonstration, which recharge me with a type of faith in the collective that I'm not sure rhymes with the faith that's the protagonist of the day or if it chatters. I head towards the cathedral, the temperature is as it should be for the time of year, and Barcelona's Gothic Quarter is as full as ever with tourists and absurd shops.

It is impossible to understand the loss of credibility of journalism and experts as a conflict between the rationality of an elite and the stupidity of the majority, an incomplete and sterile framework that only exacerbates the problem. Faced with the obviousness that the far-right distorts facts to create the narrative that best suits it politically, one cannot respond with the idea that the center, the left, journalism, or academia are representatives of a neutral reality without biases and that people who do not accept it are malevolent and/or stupid. The reality is that we can distinguish between truth and lies at the elementary level of facts, but in social and political matters there is always a necessarily partial view that implies value judgments and taking positions that permeate everything, from the wording of a headline to the order and weight that an expert gives to each element of their supposedly impartial explanation. The crisis of journalism must be understood from a much more paradoxical and counterintuitive perspective than the narrative of good versus bad.