Massimiliano Brolli : 6 August 2025 07:45
For decades, we have celebrated digital as the promise of a more connected, efficient, and democratic future.
But today, looking around, a subtle and disturbing question arises: What if we have truly entered the era of digital decadence? An era in which technology, once the engine of progress, is turning into a heavy burden, leading to misinformation, dependency, and above all, dehumanization—where digital promises us everything, but slowly takes away what makes us human.
In this article, I want to share some “signals” that I have been observing for some time and trying to contextualize. Subtle but increasingly evident clues show how the digital dream is losing clarity, leaving us spectators of a transformation that affects us all—and that perhaps we are undergoing rather than driving.
Billions of pieces of content are published online every day. But how much of this production has real value?
Information has turned into noise, text into clickbait, images into attention-grabbing mazes.
In-depth knowledge has been sacrificed on the altar of virality and speed. Quantity has overwhelmed quality. In this scenario, what is true is buried under what is viral, and the average user, bombarded by input, loses their critical capacity.
AI was supposed to enhance our cognitive abilities, freeing us from repetitive tasks. Instead, a disturbing scenario is unfolding: texts, images, videos, and even synthetic emotions produced at inhuman speed, making the real indistinguishable from the simulated.
Authenticity is losing value. Human creativity is being overshadowed by an unstoppable flow of machine-generated “digital products.” What was once rare and precious is now replicable, indistinct, “statistical,” and devoid of soul.
Social networks, born to bring people together, have become places of alienation, narcissism, and polarization.
The very concept of “friendship” has been hollowed out. Human interactions are filtered by algorithms that decide what we should see, think, and desire. There’s a lot of talk about “engagement,” but what’s growing is loneliness. And we who work in cybersecurity see this. Romantic scams, pig slaughter. Digital technology has multiplied connections, but it’s irreparably weakening bonds and authenticity across the board.
In digital capitalism, the most precious resource is not money, but our attention. And to obtain it, anything goes: endless notifications, endless scrolling (which is lobotomizing young people), and all this with dopamine rewards.
Platforms no longer simply offer us services: they observe us, influence us, and keep us glued. Surveillance was once at the heart of the Internet’s business model (as the great Bruce Schneier explained). Today, something more subtle and pervasive is happening: addiction has become the new business model.
Individual freedom is being dissolved by algorithmic compulsion. We are no longer users, we are commodities—profiled, dissected, and resold to the highest bidder, while we believe we are exercising free choice in an ecosystem designed to be manipulated.
Every action we take online leaves many traces. Every device is a gateway. Total digitalization has made us vulnerable like never before. From mass surveillance to personal data leaks, from ransomware paralyzing hospitals to deepfakes undermining public trust, we live immersed in an era of systemic digital insecurity. Digital technology, which was supposed to make us safer, has instead opened up new and unpredictable frontiers of risk.
Privacy, once a pillar of individual dignity, is now a chimera: promised in words, but unfortunately systematically violated in practice. An illusion sold to us while we are observed, profiled, and monetized.
Is there a sense of tiredness in the air?
New devices, apps, and updates seem more like consumer routines to keep that big wheel of consumption turning than cultural revolutions. iPhone 17? But what’s really so revolutionary about it compared to the iPhone 12?
Big companies no longer innovate to change the world, but to consolidate their domination over the world.
The market is concentrated, creative energy is extinguished. Startups, once laboratories of the future with a handful of enlightened people, today chase the ephemeral: making food faster, dating more superficial, notifications more invasive.
Innovation has lost its compass. And we, perhaps, have lost the ability to distinguish progress from its caricature.
In our time, the great global conglomerates are no longer simply corporations. They are supranational powers, economic giants that move capital greater than the gross domestic product of entire nations. They have headquarters in skyscrapers, but deep roots in the fertile soil of politics. No international summit, no global agenda can ignore their influence and interference. They have redefined the rules, transforming democracy into a public relations exercise and sovereignty into an administrative formality.
Feeding on data, resources, and consensus, these new technological Leviathans have created an ecosystem where business is the supreme value, a new mercantile ethic that supplants the human one. Humans are no longer “citizens of the world” but users; no longer subjects of law, but “objects of profiling.” And while we delude ourselves into thinking we’re connected, they build silicon cathedrals and algorithmic labyrinths for our minds, exploiting unprecedented amounts of energy.
Artificial intelligence, with all its promise of progress, is also the product of an uncontrollable hunger for energy. And this hunger has reawakened ancient appetites: private nuclear complexes are rising as new powerhouses. The vision of a cleaner world, enshrined in the dreams of Agenda 2030, is dissolving in the radioactive heat of reactors to fuel the learning of artificial intelligence models. And this is a race that silently burns away ecological principles and human values.
The Earth is no longer perceived as a mother, but as a quarry. And like any ungrateful child, humanity continues to violate it, plunder it, and ignore its limits. There is no respect for the home we live in, and even less for ourselves and our children.
We’ve convinced ourselves that value is measured only by capital, profit margins, and perpetual growth. We’ve mistaken continuous expansion for a sign of health, forgetting that in nature, what grows out of balance, without limits, destroying its surroundings and ultimately itself… is called a tumor.
We can’t know for sure whether we’re at the beginning of the digital twilight or in a phase of transformation.
Digital decadence isn’t just technological: it’s anthropological. It is the slow decline of our ability to distinguish the real from the simulated, the true from the plausible, the human from the algorithmic. It is the progressive erosion of critical thinking, intimacy, and reflection, in favor of speed, reaction, and superficiality.
It’s true, every era has had its moments of excess, crisis, and intense reflection.
But what is clear is that the current paradigm is unsustainable. We need a new vision: a digital world that doesn’t consume, but builds; that doesn’t manipulate, but emancipates; that produces not only profit, but also common sense.
Decadence, after all, is not necessarily the end. It’s often a call for change. A signal that something must evolve.
It’s up to us to decide whether to witness the collapse or be protagonists of a “digital renaissance.”
Massimiliano Brolli