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Facts and disfacts
Finimondo - January 2014 - Italy

As an intellectual not touched by any subversive virus
said it: “News are the event, and the events do not exist without news. A news report is thus what a press
agency writes about an actual and/or invented fact, because a fact in itself only becomes one through the news
report which updates it and only acquires the precise
importance the news report is – literally – giving to it.
We can deduct from this that without press agencies,
there wouldn’t be any news: for the man in the street,
nothing would be happening throughout the world… But
on this earth, every second in a theoretically simultaneous moment, an immense number of births and deaths
are taking place, of projects and defeats, of actions and
inventions, of speeches and awareness. For the public,
their quality as “facts” depends on what the press agencies decide. In the infinite mess of what is happening
(or is not happening) throughout the world, the press
is choosing day and night a restraint number of themes,
manipulating them, dramatizing them and according to
a tacit agreement, putting them to the attention of the
peoples and their leaders… The irreality of our century
depends on the fact that the “reality” in which each one
of us believes every morning is solely constructed by
press and radio, and often exclusively for its own use.”

progress realized by the mass media in terms of fabrication of facts. Thanks to the new technologies, the
contemporary production of reality got a swiftness and
a deepness which were unimaginable only a few years
ago. In a certain way, the one who creates facts determines daily life. He doesn’t only manage to regulate the
votes of the voters, the politics of the parliament and the
shares on the stock markets; but also our states of mind,
our worries, and thus, in the end, even our own actions.
Because the biggest part of our decisions are based on
facts which were reported or administered to us, it is to
say, on a reality which manages to divert our attention,
to modify our tastes, to print behaviors.

More than half a century has passed since these lines
were written, and their veracity unfortunately strikes
the eye as it is so easy today to guess the enormous

Let’s drop here the gatherings and all those “as an answer to” activities, and let’s limit ourselves to the example of direct actions. Which are the actions happening?

To what extent do the human beings resemble to this
birds captured by poachers, attracted by a bait inside
of a flowerbed surrounded by wires to catch the fowl?
Don’t the citizens permanently swing between right and
left, and the consumers between Coca Cola and Pepsi?
And we, all of us, who have subversive desires burning
in our hearts, are we really any different? Aren’t we also
continuously chasing a reality in which the events only
exist under the form of news reports? Aren’t we filling
our diaries based on exterior calls?

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