The Labyrinth of Daedalus

Contemporary boredom is no longer the younger sister of emptiness; it is the firstborn daughter of excess. It is a full, compressed boredom that leaves no room. While the current debate often laments the disappearance of boredom as a "fertile emptiness" necessary for invention, here we face an opposite and more insidious phenomenon: a political boredom. It is like time devoured by Cronus, who in myths swallows everything he generates. Today, every experience arrives already chewed and suggested; the new dies even before it is born because the environment we live in is built to anticipate every move. We are not truly exploring the world; we are merely selecting options on a screen. Life has become a dashboard, an interface where reality is packaged and shipped in the form of trends or low-intensity stimuli. There is no more room for the shock of the new, only for minor system updates. The boredom of excesses signals a collapse of knowledge prior to its own exercise.

Politically, this luminous hyper-labyrinth generates disorientation through the accumulation of signals, surpassing the logic of their absence. Today, saturation has become an actual strategy of dominance: governing no longer means managing scarcity, but submerging us with continuous offers and stimuli. It is a form of control that finds its strength in programmed abundance, far more effective than old regimes that prohibited or hid things. Let it be clear: I am not saying that prohibitionism is dead or that governments have stopped hiding the truth from us; we are still deprived, all too often, of our most basic rights and freedoms. But what I intend to emphasize—and what we often underestimate—is how today saturation has become a parallel and silent strategy of dominance. It is a form of control that finds its strength in programmed abundance. In such a system, freedom is not always denied through violence, but it is rendered inert: a muscle that no longer responds, neutralized by an excess that transforms us into spectators instead of citizens.

But let us take a step back. I am convinced that this paralysis of the citizen is the reflection of a deeper crisis affecting the very nature of our existence. Even before being a strategy of dominance, this saturation is the condition of being that suffocates the breath of life. We find ourselves, in fact, enclosed in an existence completed too soon; and what is already complete, inevitably, cannot breathe. Contemporary boredom germinates precisely in this overlap, at a point where the horizon of possibilities expands disproportionately while the field of real experience, conversely, narrows to the point of suffocation. It is the perverse logic of overabundance: lived experience does not fade due to a lack of stimuli, but drowns in their uncontrolled proliferation. Ancient narratives had already touched upon this truth. Ulysses, in order to wrest a forbidden knowledge from the Sirens, accepts immobility; bound to the ship's mast, he embodies the paradox of a knowledge that opens worlds but, at the exact same moment, paralyzes the body. Epicurus too, moving within a saturated context, suggested that multiplying desires does not serve to intensify life, but only to disperse it. Paradoxically, it is the limit of restoring weight and density to pleasure.

The multiplication of desires triggers a sort of centrifugal force that threatens to empty the self, reducing it to a mere transit point for flows coming from the outside. Against this drift, Epicurus does not propose an escape, but a form of resistance based on concentration: he anchors pleasure to the stability of the body and to the certainty that the absence of pain is already, in itself, a pinnacle. Here, measure ceases to be a punitive limit and becomes the tool to restore weight to what we live. The instant becomes a unique event again, real precisely because it does not need to be exceeded or augmented to exist. It is a red thread that ties modern philosophy to that of today. Heidegger had already glimpsed in the total technical availability of the world the origin of a new, paradoxical destitution of experience. It is the same affective aridity that Simmel traces in the indifference of the blasé, stunned by the saturation of the metropolis. With Baudrillard, the question shifts to signs: their proliferation is such that reality evaporates into the hyper-real, while Byung-Chul Han describes how the obsession with an infinite potential of the self ends up generating a weariness that paralyzes. The way out, the salvation of lived experience, lies in choice as an act that gives shape and density to the world. What remains is an ontological weariness: an exhaustion that does not stem from doing, but from the immense effort of filtering a flood of data that overwhelms us. Here, the problem is no longer what we live; the problem is the fact that we are losing the very capacity to experience anything at all.

I am convinced that all this is producing a genuine mutation of the psyche. I have the impression that interiority is ceasing to be that deep place where impulses are transformed or where symbols take shape; I see it sliding toward a purely selective, almost algorithmic function. The feeling is that the mind no longer metabolizes the world, but merely sorts it. It seems clear to me that dreaming and sublimation have given way to an aseptic activity of cataloging: it is the metamorphosis of the unconscious which, from a theater, turns into an interface. In this new layout, the internal space works as a filtering device obsessed with exclusion, aimed only at avoiding collapse under the weight of data. We have forgotten how to welcome an experience to make it flourish. Our labyrinth is the victim of a blinding illumination, an overexposure that dissolves every shadow zone—the very shadows where desire would need time to settle. If for psychoanalysis the shadow is the vital space that allows desire to exist, the immediate availability of everything today decrees its failure. We are stuck in what I would define as an eternal infantile present: a world without interdictions or waiting, where however, precisely because of this, the very possibility of becoming subjects vanishes.

The heart of the paradox lies entirely here: in the unbridgeable distance between what we could do and what we actually live. Expanding the spectrum of possibilities to infinity almost always ends up sacrificing the depth of lived experience. It is as if the infinity of options ends up freezing our will; the image of a map so total that it overlaps with the territory until making it disappear comes to mind. If everything is available, surprise dissolves, and with it vanishes the essential condition for truly encountering the world. The contemporary horizon should be rethought from scratch, through what I would call the category of curvature. We do not need a circle that widens to infinity, but a field of resonance capable of becoming deep. Freedom, then, is no longer the vertigo of being able to do everything, but the quality of our presence in what we do. It is only with this twist toward what is situated and resonant that we can imagine a new, and finally authentic, way of dwelling in existence.

Saturation becomes dehydration: the human does not die of lack, but dries up from overexposure. It is what I call the paradox of abundance: the more the supply of possibilities widens, the more our real strength as individuals drains away. The event ceases to be an impact and is reduced to a piece of information to be cataloging; in this way, the threshold of the unknown ends up folding in on itself, closing into a ring. In this ultra-mediated modernity, experience paradoxically triumphs and dies at the same time: it is an excess of form that freezes its every vital movement. A psyche so emptied becomes, almost by inertia, politically docile. Our compliance, therefore, no longer arises from the fear of being punished or repressed. It is a resistance that vanishes simply because the strength to sustain it is lacking. We find ourselves unable to distinguish what truly deserves opposition from what is merely noise, a constant factor of dilution. In place of fear, only a mental fatigue remains that blocks us: conflict disappears, hidden behind a background hum that never stops.

If we rewind the tape and return to the logic of dominance we started with earlier, it is possible to understand then why today's politics has renounced its normative function to become pure, frantic entertainment.

The modern promise was simple: politics as a technique of the real. Today, that promise has literally evaporated. Leaders no longer deal with things, but with the "feed." Politics has stopped deciding; now it merely emerges as a trivial phenomenon of attention. Examples are not lacking: we saw it clearly in Italy during the pandemic: the priority of many governments was not just the management of a health emergency, but narrative management. Who spoke first? On which platform? Which phrase would become a meme by evening? Politics reduced itself to producing a signal every twelve hours, obsessed with occupying short-term time and sacrificing any long-term vision. It was a frantic succession of flash conferences and micro-announcements that served only to saturate the screen, to leave no gaps for opponents. Narration replaced the norm, and the political goal was no longer to define a strategy, but simply not to disappear from the radar of public opinion.

This politics of the feed has accelerated polarization, not so much on facts, as on the narrative that accompanies them: one finds oneself being "pro" or "against" a slogan, even before a measure. The complexity of problems (whether health-related or economic) has been, and still is, sacrificed on the altar of a message that must be simple, immediate, and chewable. I view with concern how the role of Parliament and committees is fading, overshadowed by flash-announcements and live social media streams that bypass any real confrontation. A perverse mechanism has taken hold where appearing does not just precede doing, but ends up obscuring it entirely. Post-pandemic Italian politics now seems like an ecosystem that feeds on media saturation: it doesn't matter if the action is coherent, what matters is that the signal is loud enough to cover the silence.

---

The Mattei Plan for Africa, for instance, has become an emblematic case of leadership announced before being implemented. It was presented amid maps, summits, and solemn slogans, but its real operational effectiveness remains entirely opaque when compared to its hammering rhetorical visibility. This dynamic repeats itself identically everywhere, whether talking about energy crises or the migrant emergency: we witness a ritual of flash conferences and urgent briefings that are not mere updates. Even recent referendum cycles have turned into what I would call a semiotic theater: symbolic gestures and images designed to become clips or memes, where democracy ends up in the background. The rule has become ironclad: the announcement devours the norm, and the image replaces the process. Narration ends up replacing judgment on facts. If we are submerged by continuous updates devoid of context, we lose our compass. We no longer know what has actually been done, because the surplus of information does not create awareness.

The pattern is global. In the United States, the logic is even more explicit: presidential approval ratings stop fluctuating based on public policies and act based on visibility peaks, whether positive or negative. To emerge in a saturated world, an explosion is needed to catch the eye. Hence the birth of event-leaders and absolutist-positions. I find that the apocalyptic tone of recent American campaigns, that crying out that "the system is collapsing," should be read as a cynical and rational attention strategy, far from being a simple pathological delirium. In Europe too, the game follows the same rules: identity movements and digital extremisms have understood that interrupting processes is much more effective than governing them. A viral video or a symbolic gesture is enough to produce that peak of collective adrenaline: radicalization has become, to all intents and purposes, the political form of dopamine. The problem, in my view, is that democracy requires slowness, pauses for compromise, and dead times for reflection; the current technical ecosystem, however, loathes delay. From Bukele in El Salvador, with his real-time dashboards, to promises of institutional shortcuts in France or the United Kingdom, the voter today punishes patience. If a decision does not arrive within twenty-four hours, the system immediately dismisses it as a failure.

I often have the impression that democracy has become a software with too much ping, too slow for the times of the network. Many governments have now elevated measurement to a moral imperative, convinced that everything that is quantifiable is, by definition, governable. Yet data is only surface. Think of Asian smart cities: they use predictive models to anticipate everything from traffic to crime, down to social flows. The problem is that this functioning "too well" ends up sealing those interstices where dissent could still breathe or take shape. The European Union is also sliding in this direction, delegating the management of migrants or climate to technical models and risk assessment algorithms. In this way, politics ceases to be the space of conflict and is reduced to a trivial optimization operation. I am honestly frightened by the automated welfare systems we have seen in action in Northern Europe or the United Kingdom: blind faith in the algorithm has not eliminated inequalities; it has simply made them more efficient, rationalizing injustice under a veneer of technical neutrality.

This is technopolitics: the illusion of managing a world as if it were already perfect. The voter today has stopped processing electoral programs; they prefer to scroll through them, and this completely changes the very nature of consensus. The political micro-identities that explode and vanish on social media within a few weeks are now mere phenomena of attention, devoid of any real political root. One only has to look at Italian elections from 2013 to today: that absurd volatility, with parties jumping from 2% to 30% only to collapse again, suggests to me that the problem lies in the fragility of our attention rather than a real change in ideology. Even the war in Ukraine has been consumed in emotional waves, with peaks of anguish followed by sideral silences. Yet the war has not changed; the feed has changed. Political culture no longer has time to sediment; it merely updates itself like the software of an app, while politics stops designing the future to reduce itself to a maintenance of the existing. European electoral programs have become cold technical manuals, devoid of vision and obsessed with measurable parameters. In this vacuum of the future, the global right has an easy game retreating into the past, among identity myths, national nostalgias, and those rhetorics of return that are so popular today, like the famous "Make America Great Again." It is bitter to admit, but it is an unequivocal sign of our time: the only utopia left to us, paradoxically, is return itself. In a world that no longer knows how to design tomorrow, the only possible escape becomes refuge in an idealized yesterday.

In a world where everything is hyper-transparent, the conspiracy theory becomes an anthropological resource, the necessary shadow to breathe. If we look at phenomena like QAnon in the United States, it seems clear to me that we are not dealing with a simple political pathology; it is rather the symptom of an environment so illuminated that it becomes blinding. It is the same logic that drives part of the far-right electorate in Germany: the appeal does not lie in a real political proposal, but in the promise of a backdrop, in that "they are hiding something from us" repeated like a mantra. Ultimately, it doesn't even matter to know what they are hiding from us. What truly matters is the idea that an elsewhere still exists, an invisible place that the algorithm has not yet managed to map.

The conspiracy thus becomes the only residual form of transcendence. The sign of a crisis that, even before being ideological, seems to me almost endocrine. In this sense, ontological weariness is the true hallmark of our time: a deep exhaustion that arises not so much from producing, but from the effort of having to continuously choose between scraps produced by others. We live in a world where excess has stopped being a promise and has become a rigid protocol. It seems clear to me that late-connective society has performed a sort of surgical operation on the real, sterilizing every opaque dimension to maximize the efficiency and readability of everything. If we accept the idea that emotion is an embodied form of knowledge, the way our body interprets the world, then this boredom of excesses is not a simple whim. It is a genuine cognitive symptom: the collective reaction to a world so full that it turns out flat, where there is no more room for the impact of the unexpected.

I see desire disappearing in this scenario, precisely because it has been deprived of its every form. What was once a transformative force today seems exhausted. Boredom, then, emerges as a vital paradox: it is the subtle pain of a world that has become too clear to still be fertile. I consider it the diagnosis of an impeded vitality, the sign of an energy that keeps pushing but remains blocked. More than a simple state of mind, boredom acts as a spy-affect: it signals to us that our societies have become environments of permanent maintenance. Monitoring has taken the place of exploration, and algorithmic prediction has saturated every space. What we feel is a geological emotion: a heavy deposit generated by the compact layer of the obvious, a crust of predictability that technology has sedimented over our lives.

The issue lies entirely here: in the fact that we have confused the reduction of uncertainty with the increase of happiness. The boredom we carry with us is precisely its structural impossibility within an architecture of the world which, for the sake of eliminating the fatigue of the unexpected, has ended up suffocating the energy of the possible. The way out, however, cannot be a nostalgic return to the indeterminate, nor a naive and romantic praise of emptiness. I believe something deeper is needed: restoring real risk to experience. That space where instead of anticipating results, we accept being transformed by the impact with things. Against this geometry of prediction, we need a re-literacy of the unexpected, understood as the minimum and necessary condition of living. The Labyrinth must not be torn down; it must be punctured. We need uncertainty to give weight back to what we live, to make the possible return to being something alive and not just an option on a screen. It is the only way to restore to desire its strength—the kind that does not settle for a click but demands an impact. Perhaps a new philosophy of the human begins here: from boredom as a symptom of a saturated environment, from desire as resistance to automation, from meaning as an event that happens—finally—outside the already foreseen.

---

The Labyrinth of Daedalus