The algorithm that knows us better than our portfolio
What will happen if ChatGpt also decides to become a specialised shopping assistant?
3' min read
3' min read
One of the masterpiece films that helped make Charlie Chaplin an icon is undoubtedly 'Modern Times'. Almost a century has passed since the first screening, but that 'unease' in the face of technology and advancing time seems not to age. In today's time, it is less true that we are the ones chasing the rhythm of the machines, but it is increasingly true that the machines, in suggesting our next steps, help to scan the time we live in.
For centuries, the tempo of human life followed a cyclical rhythm, marked more by nature than by technology. Changes were gradual, almost geological. A 1st century Roman stonemason would probably have been able to use the tools of a medieval craftsman without difficulty a thousand years later. For many generations, everyday objects - the plough, the inkwell, the quill - have remained virtually unchanged (albeit with some significant exceptions), and with them the practices of producing, consuming and living.
Then came modernity. And with it, what Zygmunt Bauman has called the '*compression of time*': a new condition in which historical changes are no longer measured in centuries or decades, but in months, weeks, sometimes days. Time has become liquid, impatient, compact. Cultural continuity between generations has broken down. What was taken for granted yesterday is now incomprehensible: just think how objects and cultural codes that have become familiar in one era can appear remote or even mysterious only a few years later. A language, a technology, a habit can disappear faster than it takes a generation to truly understand them.
But it is not just about symbols or habits. What is changing are the very ways in which we access the world: how we inform ourselves, how we work, how we buy. Consumption is no longer a discrete and intentional act, but a continuous, guided, interactive experience, where physical and digital worlds mingle in a chimerical phygital dimension and where the experience is O2O (online-to-offline and vice versa).
