Here be spiders.

                               

As this post bears witness, I find the Web and the digital world in general very useful. They are integrated into my daily life, whether it be reading the Corriere and the Guardian on my iPad, emailing and texting family and friends, shopping on-line, navigating, accessing British television via VPN, seeking out information, or setting my Sky box to record a programme using the Sky Guide Italia iOS app. They are also destroying democracy as today's Italian general election results bear witness.
    The problem with instant communication is the way it insidiously blurs the boundaries between the real and the spurious. Let's begin with friendship. Only a few of my real friends belong to Facebook, and the majority of those who do rarely use it. If they want to contact me they send an email. Their attitude to Facebook is neatly encapsulated by this post from Matthew: "First look at facebook for about a year. Must be because Charlie has been away for a week looking after her sick mother and I'm starved of human interaction. Hi everyone". But I have Facebook "friends" - people I barely know who sent me a friend request which I felt it would be impolite to refuse - who post frenetically every damned day. Here are is a selection from one of them (original punctuation): 15th Feb, "grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr am soooo fed up", 12th Feb, "I suppose when the pope leaves he will have to stop wearing dresses!!!", 10th Feb, "what agreat sunday guests for sunday lunch then curled up watching another great film.every which way but loose..........right turn clyde!!!!love it", 1st Feb, "are my ears playing tricks on me????am i hearing things????a cuckoo already......."
    Like this blog, they're simply a sign of our fear of death - a desperate cry to the world that we exist; but, unfortunately, unlikely to engender any response in the reader other than a boost to his sense of intellectual superiority. Far more worrying was a post from an Italian "friend" I read  a couple of days ago. A well-educated man, with a couple of academic books to his name, he posted with approval the following verse:
 
Rifiuterò la scheda.
Perché non si può far altro,
Perché scelgo di non esser preda
Del nostro comune assassino scaltro.

Perché hanno compiuto il crimine più orrendo,
Strappandoci dai passi ogni futuro;
ed è come uomo che pretendo
di non vivere fissando un muro.

Perché hanno distrutto la scuola, il paesaggio, la bellezza
che per secoli hanno reso la mia Nazione viva,
tutto riducendo delittuosamente alla tristezza
di una stupidità televisiva.

Rifiuterò la scheda, perché non ho speranze.
Perché non credo al sistema democratico,
Schermo di chi agisce in buie stanze
grazie al grande inganno partitico-mediatico.

Rifiuterò la scheda perché hanno ammazzato
Giovanni Gentile e PierPaolo Pasolini,
e quello che oggi dicono Stato
è solo la combriccola dei loro assassini.

Rifiuterò la scheda.
Non perché io ceda.
Ma perché, quando tutto è perduto,
diventa civiltà l'atto del rifiuto.

In essence it's saying, 'I'm going to refuse to vote because the politicians are all crooks and are destroying society and - here's the rub - because I don't believe in the democratic system'.
  Unfortunately, as the steady decline in the percentage of the Italian electorate voting shows, he's not alone in his views. In 1992 87.2% voted, in 1994 86%, in 1996 82.3%, in 2001 81.4%, in 2006 66.5%, in 2008, 62.5%, and today just 55.2%. And from those who did vote, Beppe Grillo the demagogic leader of Il Movimento 5 Stelle, garnered 23.8% of the votes for the Senate, and 25.5% of those for the Chamber of Deputies, more than those gathered by any other single party. A vehicle for the general anger with the corruption of Italian politics, Grillo's movement is completely devoid of ideas for implementing his manifesto. He sees his success as a "scappellotti a tutti" - a box on the ears for the politicians, and his movement as "una guerra di generazioni" - a war between generations. Despite his 64 years, I assume he sees himself as a paladin of the younger generation not the one to which he actually belongs. And in many ways he's right. He represents the generation which deludes itself that social media can overturn tyranny - tweet and you can bring down Mubarak - only to find he's replaced by another despot. The leader of the Movimento 5 Stelle communicates with his followers via his blog. He not only refuses to be interviewed on television but forbids his followers to do so, expelling two of them - Federica Salsi and Giovanni Favia - who dared to challenge his diktat. Purporting to eschew the mass-media - no subjecting himself to a grilling by an Italian equivalent of Paxman or Humphreys - he held a series of mass-meetings in city squares all over Italy, haranguing his followers in a fashion reminiscent of Hitler's diatribes against the Jewish people. All of which, of course, were reported by that same mass-media he affects to despise. The movement's parliamentary candidates weren't chosen at constituency meetings but voted for on-line, à la X-Factor or Big Brother.
    In December 2007 he attempted to present parliament with a petition that no one should  should be elected for two successive parliaments, people with a criminal record should be barred from standing for election, and candidates should be chosen by constituency parties rather than being nominated by their party leaders. Despite being signed by 350,000 people - seven times the minimum required by Italian law - the petition was completely ignored. The outgoing government led by Monti imposed a series of measures to deal with the financial crisis - a rise in VAT and fuel duty for example - which hurt ordinary people. Cuts to parliamentarians' exorbitant expenses and a reduction in the number of provinces and local district councils which would have saved billions unsurprisingly failed to get through. They would have hurt the self-same parliamentarians' pockets and power of patronage.
   All of which has quite rightly fuelled the electorate's anger and deserves a positive response. Instead, by indulging themselves in a teenage hissy-fit, either abstaining or voting for Grillo, the Italian electorate risks imperilling the survival of the EU - their sole, if frail, bulwark against rampant globalised finance. Last Saturday's Corriere carried an article about Amazon housing temporary  immigrant workers from crisis-hit European countries in shacks, controlling them by security guards supplied by a neo-Nazi organisation, paying them a miserable wage, and failing to pay any social security contributions. The future for all of us if we're not careful.
  To actually change society requires a time-consuming analysis of the roots of its ills, and a long slog constructing an alternative system, rather than using the ballot as a form of trolling. 'Liking' ideas from the safety of our egotistical digital bubbles is no substitute for physically engaging with real people rather than their virtual selves and joining a party and labouring to reform it from within. We need to begin by recognising that politicians aren't a uniquely corrupt breed - an 'other' - but like the rest of us have a Yahoo lurking inside them which only constant vigilance can restrain. I pointed this out in my 'Comment' on my Italian 'friend's' post. I also quoted Burke's remark that 'All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing' and Churchill's famous remark that 'Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time '. I failed to add Lincoln's equally famous saying that 'You can fool all the people some of the time, and some of the people all the time, but you cannot fool all the people all the time'. Because it's only relevant in a democracy: in Grillo's world you simply shoot the people you fail to fool.