Italian PiracyShield: An Hermeneutic Disquisition on the Shadows of Digital Control

Antonio Ieranò

Security, Data Protection, Privacy. Comments are on my own unique responsibility 🙂

October 10, 2024

Preface: The inspiration for this reflection comes from none other than our esteemed Italian Minister of Culture, whose lofty rhetoric has brought to light an implicit truth: perhaps the real issue with the Italian government’s understanding of anti-piracy legislation lies not in intent, but in the debased, impoverished language that has veiled this matter. Ah, yes! It could well be that the inadequacy of verbal expression has obfuscated the complexity and the depth of a digital system that defies the simpleminded rhetoric of control. And so, it is in the hope of awakening a sharper critical faculty, that I set forth on this hermeneutic disquisition—an odyssey of thought and signification—on the Italian Piracy Shield, with a view to shedding light where shadows now reign.

Written in English for the sake and joy of Alessandro Bottonelli

1. The Dialectic of Censorship: Between Presence and Absence of Digital Power

Italian Piracy Shield. A thing, a specter perhaps, a mere legislative tool, on the surface, yes, no more than a hand, invisible yet felt, poised to block, cancel, and erase. Yet! In its deeper essence, it is but a symbol of power exercised in absentia, a force unseen, a paradox of control and relinquishment, manifesting in the blink—ah!—of the digital dark. An act of deletion, of dissimulation, that ever-so-slightly betrays the violent hand behind the curtain.

Do you see it? The act itself—no contradiction, no verification—floats, yes, floats in the sea of invisible operations, permeating the entire digital architecture like smoke through keyholes. Italian Piracy Shield does not just negate, it becomes the negation, it is the smothering of critique, the silencing of questions. That which is blocked is not merely the website, but the hermeneutic access itself—the very logos of the network is rendered mute. A block, yes, a blot, as though one were to blot out a page from Finnegans Wake, leaving only the ghost of the ink.

No need, none at all, for justification, for light. What use is light, when power wields the darkness? The power moves, a shadow casting shadows—there it goes—on the sprawling universe of the digital.

2. From “Univocum” to “Prevalente”: The Semantic Mutation of Arbitrary Power

Ah! The slip, the shift, the sleight of the pen! From “univocamente” to “prevalentemente,” we are led, drawn like the unwitting, across the semantic precipice. What once was certain, nailed down—ah, that precise correlate between illicit activity and IP—now crumbles, dissolves into a vaporous “prevalence,” a haze of legal ambiguity. Oh, what a dance it is! Prevalente, the word hangs in the air like a half-uttered secret, a term at once so soft, so vague, that it invites the most dangerous of interpretations.

What now, what now, is the meaning of “prevalente”? Do you know? I don’t. Not with certainty, not in the way the law should know. It hovers, it flickers. Like a moth caught in the flicker of flame, it wavers, leaving in its wake an epistemological chasm, a breach through which the arbitrary might slink unnoticed. And so the regulation—the law itself!—shifts, moves from its regulatory roots and becomes something else, something wild, something untamed. Beware! it whispers, beware the dangerous arbitrariness that comes creeping when precision abandons its seat!

3. Suspended Time: The Atemporality of Permanent Blocking

Time—tick-tock, tock-tick—it stops. Suspended, frozen in its eternal moment. No, my friends, we are no longer in the world of swift movements, of unblocking and resolution. Once, once that domain or IP address is taken, locked, interdicted—ah, interdicted!—there is no return, not easily, not quickly. You see, the law gives us no release, no remedy. It casts its shadow and leaves it there, a block, an interdict in perpetuity, hanging in the aether.

What do we call this? The block is no longer a block—it is an exile. It is the time of the condemned, suspended in space, cast from the fold of access. Not merely a website gone dark, but an entire existence denied, relegated to the forgotten corner of some distant virtual limbo. Do you hear it? The silence, the long, echoing silence that follows when there is no unblocking, no undoing. And so time itself becomes an instrument of control—time blocked, time stopped, time locked in the permanent now. Ah! There it is—no appeal, no revision, just an unrelenting, eternal block.

4. VPNs and DNS: The Symbolic Flight from Authority

But wait! What is that? A ghost, a shadow moving against the tide. VPNs, DNSs, whispering their defiance, their refusal to be caged. You cannot cage us, they seem to say, these fluid, shifting technologies. And Italian Piracy Shield, for all its power, all its might, cannot grasp them. For the network is a wild thing, fluid and mercurial, a thing of mist and light that slips through the fingers of control.

VPNs! DNSs! They rise like the tide, offering passage, refuge, to those who would escape the grip of the block. Oh no, they say, you cannot bind us, not so easily! And yet, the law—it tries, it tries to stretch its fingers around the globe, seeking to block, to restrain, to cage even these intangible whispers of freedom. A folly, a madness! It seeks to block the un-blockable, to fence in that which by its very nature cannot be contained.

But no—VPNs laugh in the face of the block, DNSs dance through the cracks. And so the network rebels, slips free of its chains, a thing forever untamable.

5. The Harmony of the Absurd: Repression Without Resolution

Ah, the absurdity! The sweet, bitter irony that lies at the heart of it all. For here we are, with all the blocking, all the repression, and yet—the piracy remains. No, no, repression alone will not solve it. And how could it? For this is not a question of simple illegality, but of something far deeper, far more structural. The people—yes, the people!—they will not be so easily tamed. They seek what they seek, and if the law offers no remedy, if the legal paths are barren and overgrown, they will find another way.

And so Piracy Shield strikes and strikes, but the problem—ah!—the problem does not disappear. No, it deepens, grows. And those who seek, who search, will continue, for they do not find in the legal offer a solace. The high costs, the poor services—what is there for them? They will turn, as they have always turned, to the hidden paths, to the secret ways, to the pirated streams and the shadowed sites.

Ah, and so it goes! The harmony of the absurd, where repression pretends to solve, but only ever exacerbates the wound.

6. The Exile of Truth: The Network as a Battleground of Power

And in the end—where are we? Ah, my friends, we stand at the precipice, gazing into the abyss of what could be. A network—yes, the very network we cherish—turned into a battlefield, a place of war, not of innovation, not of creativity, but of power, of censorship, of control. Italian Piracy Shield—yes, it whispers its threat. It tells us that the future, if we are not careful, is a place of darkness, of blocks, of silent censorship.

Do you see it? The exile of information, the exile of truth, as entire swathes of the network fall silent, fall into shadow. What will become of it, of us, of this space we have made? A space of freedom, of voices, of endless connections—no more, no more, unless we resist, unless we fight against this creeping darkness.

For the threat is not only piracy, no—no, my friends—the threat comes from within, from the very forces that seek to defend us.

Conclusion: Towards a Future of Digital Darkness?

Italian Piracy Shield is not just a law, no, not merely a tool of control—it is a window into the possible future. A future where the network itself—once a place of light, of freedom, of endless possibility—becomes a battlefield of blocks, of chains, of control. Ah, the flaws, the cracks in its foundation! But deeper still lies the danger, the attempt to tame what cannot be tamed, to bind what should be free.

And so, we must ask—what does freedom mean in the digital age? What does it mean to be free, to have access, in a world of invisible blocks, of silent censorships?

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