The stalking of porn among teenagers, the writer’s fear of ridicule, the weight of Greece in our minds, or the inappropriateness of amnesty for the independence movement. The Hay Festival of Segovia is a winding road, a changing landscape, where writers, journalists and intellectuals come together.
On the central day, this Saturday, with Javier Cercas, Ray Loriga, Carlos Zanón, Lydia Cacho or the humanist Andrea Marcolongo.
Javier Cercas focused attention at the end of the day, with some expectation after publishing an article in El País in which he proclaimed himself against amnesty for the independence movement.
Induced by the journalist Vicente Vallés, Cercas began by defining what an intellectual is (“He is someone with the capacity to intervene in the public debate, and since there are social networks, anyone is an intellectual”), but from minute 1, and announced several times by Vallés, the audience awaited the narrator’s explanations for his recently published article “There will be no amnesty.”
Cercas protested “against impunity.” “A man who has embezzled millions – in reference to Carles Puigdemont -, who with full conscience has violated all the rules, who has even repealed the Statute, let us remember that plenary session of the Parliament on September 6 and 7, cannot be amnestied. Because “amnesty is not forgiveness, it is eliminating the past.”
Yes, he was in favor of such a measure for those accused of actions such as “standing in front of a train” or others of this caliber, but he was vehement in his radical opposition in cases of greater political significance. “A fugitive is deciding what concerns all Spaniards *,” he lamented.
He recalled an analysis by the “pro-independence or pro-independence” historian Josep Fontana, who defined certain moments in the fall of 2017 as “close to the outbreak of war, some were expecting a death, that is written.”
Cercas – from Extremadura but living in Catalonia since he was 4 years old – had placed the starting point of the Catalan crisis in the economic crisis of 2008, which represented a global cataclysm. In this framework, “the sudden growth of Catalan secessionism must be interpreted as the most violent manifestation of national populism in our country.” He compared secessionist sentiments to those of Brexit.
For all this, and beyond the current situation, with Pedro Sánchez (“he is neither Churchill nor Pericles”) needing the support of ERC and Junts for an investiture, Cercas advocates “changing the mental framework.” Simply the mental one, and assuming that “Spain is already a federal state, even if it is called autonomous.” And he added: “I’m going to give you some news: Spain is a federal state, and we just need to proclaim it. What nationalists fear most is federalism.”
The writer said he voted for the PSOE because he was “a supporter of boredom in politics, a Scandinavian boredom, and the most boring thing in politics is social democracy. I want my country to be Norway but with sun and tapas,” he joked.
Before, the narrator spoke about the figure of the intellectual and about literary genres, disagreeing with those who consider journalism as the necessary step to “wrap the fish” with newspaper, and praised the figure of Miguel de Cervantes, celebrating the gift (the novel) that made humanity. That artifact in which the truth does not exist and that only exists when someone opens a book and reads it. “A novel is a score and the performer is the reader.”
The writers Carlos Zanón and Ray Loriga also spoke about this entire process, introduced by the journalist Luis Alemany, who first questioned them about the artist’s fear of ridicule: “When you write you are alone, and you only do ridicule in front of someone, The risk is condensed when you read it. This job does have a clown part to it. The promotion, the photos, talking about your stuff, that is not your job. The writer writes alone and in silence. I have made a mental parapet for myself. and to the promotion I send another, who coincidentally is me, I send this other idiot and in my head I stay at home,” Loriga reflected. “For me,” countered the Barcelonan, “the one who makes the most fools of himself is the one who has a great idea from the start, if it turns out well it’s genius, but that doesn’t usually happen.”
Don’t blame the teenagers. They are not looking for porn, but porn is looking for them. And he finds them. The algorithm detects them and seduces them. In video games, for example. Through them they easily end up on pornographic pages. The investigative journalist Lydia Cacho explained it yesterday in Segovia, where she presented some of her latest investigations and presented her latest books.
Cacho painted a devastating picture, but he sprinkled it with some notes of hope. It is the tone of the Hay Festival of Segovia, a swamp in which for three days writers, philosophers, engineers, designers, poets or journalists pour their knowledge and wisdom, and everyone who splashes themselves in its waters returns home with a list of purposes for the course that has just begun. Perhaps that is why it is celebrated in September.
Technology experts Ihklaq Sidhu and John Maeda talked about another kind of risk. The latter has a degree in Computer Science from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the famous MIT, as well as in Fine Arts in Tskuba (Japan): an explosive mix of ingenuity, creativity and teaching ability, which warned of the questions posed by artificial intelligence ( “it is a danger if we apply it without critical thinking”). It is an advance that “will force us to be even more creative, to stay ahead of it,” he said.
Maeda is the author of the influential The Lights of Simplicity, which is not a new book. Already in 2008 he opted to submit the complexity of computer technology to the hand or level of the user. He is considered one of the architects of the multimedia world. Almost nothing. Yesterday he raised the audience in Segovia.
He also did it, but speaking of the cutting-edge wisdom of 2,000 years ago, the philologist and classical world expert Andrea Marcolongo, a factory of headlines or haikus: “We are not looking for answers but questions; that is Greece.” Or the classic texts are always like the newspaper of the day, they are always valid.” Or “we like to say that our grandparents built the Segovia aqueduct but we are immensely lazy to read the classics.” Or “Greece did not need a flag or a religious dogma, had the ideas.
