Serena Mazzini’s is such an exact story that, brought to the extreme, it would be the perfect prologue of a science fiction film. In the midst of a world that looks at the smartphone 2617 times a day, she, who has been strategist for 12 years (i.e. the one who designs marketing strategies for social media), decides to put her skills at the service to reveal what she defines as “the dark side of the social networks”, as the title of her first book, published by Rizzoli. “For years I have analyzed the data extracted from the platforms, I used languages ​​and imaginary to conquer the public, I collaborated with influencers so that their profiles appeared as authentic as possible,” he writes in the first pages. Then, during the pandemic, it was caught by a need, that of telling, because “spectacularization had passed any precedent”. These social networks that seem to us “harmless fillers”, now a real “nervous reflection” on our travels, actually hide dynamics of “emotional manipulation” that she analyzes piece by piece in her essay. A truly necessary book in the midst of the many necessary But only for promotion that come out in the bookstore.

Mazzini writes that once, when he was working as a strategist for a furniture company, without realizing it he found herself surrounded by a Nordic -style house, her: it was that the trend of the moment and she had assimilated it without being aware of it, without even the time to ask what her personal tastes were. And this happens with everything, with consumer products but also with political ideas, with gender stereotypes that the platforms have convenient to strengthen for commercial reasons. A few days ago, returned from a shopping session, I realized myself that I had purchased only and exclusively products that had been induced by my Tiktok: unnecessary tricks, useless costume jewelery. Mazzini writes: “If you are a single woman, sure you will buy a brush by the end of the year: your feed is in fact full of Fast Fashion brands”. I am a single woman.

This is the task of the subliminal work that operates as we disappearly shake the phone: what Mazzini effectively calls “an invisible stalker”, capable of analyzing our tastes and insecurities, “a controlling control system”. Something that, of course, becomes further dangerous when certain dynamics touch politics and information. “After the Cambridge Analytica scandal, nothing has changed in our way of using social networks,” warns the writer, warning against the consolidation of power between the political, economic and technological world. In that case – you will remember – the personal data of 87 million Facebook users had been illegally sold to create targeted political listings. The photo of Jeff Bezos, Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk and the other leaders of Silicon Valley, smiling in front of Trump on the day of his election, last February, we still have all it under his eyes.

To those who say that certain fears are a reply of what has already been seen with the ascent of the TV, Mazzini replies that the pervasiveness of social media is different. Has no precedents. “We are not faced with a phenomenon, but to an anthropological transformation,” he explains. And his is certainly one of the most authoritative voices to listen to. In 2020, when we were still all lobotomized by the communication of Chiara Ferragni, she – in these years author for Selvaggia Lucarelli, as well as among the personalities who contributed to the drafting of the bill “provisions on the right to the image of minors” – was among the few to already raise the voice against the commercial activism of the influencer and husband Fedez, as well as against the exploitation of the couple’s children on social media. Public opinion would have arrived much later.

The economy of attention

But how did we get here? Mazzini starts from the beginning, from the dawn of the internet and, with his first work, takes the reader by the hand and accompanies him among the gears that move the large factory of the economy of attention: he explains how the personalized hyper advertising campaigns work; What is built in the artificially authentic communication of influencers, who pretend to be friends to break down every distance and thus sell their aspirational lifestyle. Until we make us from Virgil in the descent into the underworld, in the darkest aspects of the network, where even vulnerable aspects such as pain, disease and childhood, in fact, become goods at the mercy of virality and profit, in that limbo of awareness and unaware of the protagonists themselves, often more victims of the algorithm that architects. (Put the chills the story of Wren, or rather his mother, who continued undaunted to share photos of the girl, even if the little girl had ended up in the sights of the attention of online pedophiles. Because the photos of the children, you know, triple the value of engagement on social media).

From Freak Show to Tiktok

In this intertwining of spectacularization and consumerism, it was above all the pandemic that marked a watershed. And at this point in the story that Mazzini traces a line between the first and the after, between the first and today. In those months suspended, in fact, the manipulative mechanisms of social media have become even more pervasive, insinuating themselves in our daily lives. “The pandemic knocked the barrier between what was legitimate to share publicly and what was not,” he explains. Closed in the house, in pajamas, we in fact began to publish increasingly intimate flashes of our domestic life: everything has become public. We showed pains, protected by the “Sharing is caring” mantra (share is taking care, editor’s note). We have shown our diversity, in the name of inclusion. But there was also another side of the medal, little told: the commodification of social issues. Or, worse still, the voyeurism masked by empathy, the spectacularization of pain for the benefit of the platforms – voracious, ruthless, hungry for increasingly emotional content, increasingly engaged. An inclined plan of sensationalism that seems to know no end. Illuminating, in this sense, the parallel that Mazzini does with the nineteenth -century freak shows, when people with physical deformities were exhibited as baraccone attractions.

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Beyond self -aware indignation

What is written so far is certainly a simplification of a 240 -page essay, which has two merits above all: to use a simple, but not banal language, and therefore far from intended only for professionals; Providing an analysis that goes beyond the self -impressive indignation and end in itself with which, usually, the press deals with social media, often trained in a sensationalistic key, or told through the most extreme phenomena, for the use and consumption of bar chatter. Mazzini, on the other hand, makes the difference: he puts order in a world that “we have not seen arriving” – to use a formula so fashionable in this period – the virtual one, in which we found ourselves living without having time to develop it; And it also offers some solutions to “navigate informed”, to mention another lucky formula. Because giving a name to things is always the first step to govern them, rather than suffering them.

Towards the end of the book, Mazzini wonders: “How many times have I lowered my eyes to a screen, while my mother spoke to me?”. Read this book to be able to look up from the phone, look at the sky and go out again to “see the stars”.

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*The figure relating to the frequency with which we check the smartphone, mentioned in Mazzini’s essay, comes from the study “putting a finger on our phone obsession: mobile touches. A study on How Humans Use Technology” (2018).