CULTURAL AND ALGORITHM RESISTANCE: WHAT MEANS TO BE FREE?

I come home tired, sink into the couch, outside the window the sun is setting. My mind’s foggy—again. It’s been too long since I took a moment for myself. On the shelf to my right, a red cover calls to me: Intellectual Resistance (Nfc Publisher, 2024) isn’t a title—it’s a punch in the face. I run my hand over the cover, “Introduction to Lucidism”, it arrived just a week ago, but somehow it’s already coated in a strange layer of dust and smoke. That’s a sign. I should’ve read it yesterday. The best moment has already passed.

What follows is an apparently unstructured mix of reflections, rants, poems, verdicts, quotes to read and re-read, memories and movie stills. Together, they form a fierce invective against the cultural decay of our time. But this isn’t the usual list of clichés, scientific truths, or boring academic explanations…

The world is burning—have you not noticed? Or maybe because we have noticed, in an effort to save ourselves, we’ve locked ourselves into our social bubbles, alienated from the world around us as if it had nothing to do with us.

“We’ve stopped fighting.” We’re slaves to work, to social media, to fake role models, to algorithms. So bombarded by information and external stimuli that we’ve been reduced to satisfying immediate needs—and forgotten what really matters. While we hybridize with machines and tech, globalization, the internet and social networks are already tearing apart the material world.

We live fragmented into homogeneous clusters of people just like us: speaking the same language, eating the same food, listening to the same music, thinking the same thoughts… We’re erasing language. Thought. Everything different.

“Let’s gather what remains of human thought and piece it back together […] because we, ladies and gentlemen, are the last.”

The last sons of man, raised without machines, free from the singular logic of mathematical rationality and algorithmic determinism. We can’t be translated into numbers and data, can’t be replicated into virtual copies of our identities or nervous systems.

The Lucidist Message

That’s why the words of Moreno Pisto matter:

“Let’s become lucid again. Let’s train ourselves to see reality as it is! That’s lucidism: freeing ourselves from others’ judgment—but also our own. It’s love for ourselves, to the point of forgetting who we are. Because we’re not just human beings—we’re a mission.”

As I read, I think of Martin Buber’s The Way of Man. This is the prerequisite Buber speaks of: to reunite mind and body and fulfill our individual mission—to give meaning to our life.

👉 ORDER INTELLECTUAL RESISTANCE BY MORENO PISTO (NFC 2024) HERE

CYBER DISTOPIC REALITY, CULTURE RESISTANCE AGAINST DIGITAL AGE

A Cry to Be Heard

In the afterword, Camillo Langone (jokingly, I hope) accuses the author of the sins of wrath and lust—but INTELLECTUAL RESISTANCE isn’t just another sterile critique of society or political inertia. It doesn’t just list the problems we all already see. It’s a scream in your ears to check if anyone’s still there, if minds are still inhabited. A mad act of trust. A desperate hope to awaken the human within the human.

A cry that calls us back to life—the one, fragile, unique life that screams just to be heard. Don’t just read the book. Listen to it. Moreno Pisto repeats it often:

“LISTEN!”

Brotherhood and Legacy

Now picture this:
You’re sitting in the dark, warmed by the glow of a fire. Or maybe you’re on a cold bench, your breath misting in the air. Or in a dingy bar somewhere on this spinning globe… And there’s a man with you—your brother. He doesn’t talk much. He never complains. But tonight, he needs to speak. And you—if he truly is your brother—you need to listen.

You already know who those words are for. At the opening, the book is dedicated:

To all hermits
and wanderers
and explorers
to all pilgrims
and peasant-warriors
of every era
and every fate

A beautiful dedication. Maybe—if you knew the author, Moreno Pisto—you’d love it even more. I worked for Moreno at MOW. He welcomed me into his ragtag crew of limping misfits with trust—no questions asked.

You should picture MOW a bit like The Boys—where society’s discarded losers end up saving the world. But I like to remember MOW as the X-Mansion, where Moreno Pisto, like Charles Xavier, shelters rebellious and misunderstood young talents, shielding them from the world’s cruelty… until their time comes to walk alone.