What My VIC-20 Taught Me

In 2015, Umberto Eco famously stated that social media had given the right to speak to “legions of idiots” who previously only spoke at the bar. He hadn’t seen anything yet. Today, those same idiots have the tools. The problem is not democratization. Tools being available to everyone is not the enemy. I took my first steps into the digital paradigm with a Commodore VIC-20, and that machine didn’t ask for my resume. The problem lies elsewhere.

The computer is probably the first multi-purpose tool in history, a universal machine. Mind you, this doesn’t simply mean we can use it in multiple domains. With a hammer, I can drive a nail, break a stone, or forge iron, but its core nature doesn’t change: it is meant to strike. It requires a posture, a force, a physical limit applied to matter. Not the computer. The computer adapts entirely. Through the exact same interface, you write, paint, make music, photograph, and design. It mutates its identity based on your command.

Before, every medium imposed a journey because it opposed a specific resistance, tied to the physics of the world. If you wanted to make music, you had to clash with the mechanics of an instrument. I taught myself to play the piano, and I know what it means to build knowledge through trial and error against the stiffness of the keys. If you wanted to take photos, you had to understand light, chemistry, and exposure time.

That resistance was formative: it forced the mind and synapses to adapt to matter. The only resistance the computer asks you to overcome is not physical, but logical:a paradigm shift. You must accept the required abstraction. Accept the idea that the complexity of the world can be reduced to single pieces of binary information feeding into one another. The digital realm is like a parallel reality shifted in time, a newborn universe undergoing its own evolution. Just think of the distance separating the first home computers of the ’80s, like the VIC-20 or the ZX Spectrum, from today’s artificial intelligence. We are merely organizing those same units in increasingly complex ways. But it is an almost ethereal reality, bound to electricity. If the power goes out, poof, it’s gone.  Our atomic reality doesn’t vanish like that.

Modern interfaces and AI have eliminated friction even further. The tool no longer opposes any resistance, neither physical nor mental. The result is that the democratization of tools has not produced a democratization of knowledge. It has produced a democratization of production, which is something entirely different. It has legitimized the idea that direct, immediate experience replaces study, the online equivalent of boasting a degree from “The School of Hard Knocks.”

This flattening, combined with universal access to any platform, has generated a colossal background noise. In this undifferentiated overload, messages overlap and blur. Bar-room opinions, scientific analyses, emotional outbursts, and propaganda all travel on the same visual and conceptual plane, stripped of any hierarchy. Everything is content. Today, we increasingly see the definition of Content Creator. Not describers of the world: producers of content. The phrase itself says it all. Eco threw out his brilliant punchline, but who, then, is the “idiot”? Anyone who produces without describing?

Eco’s quote is often used to draw a snobbish line between the cultural elite and the masses.  But the issue is neither cultural nor about status: it is about intention. It’s about what sets the process in motion.

Those who create to achieve a result, like visibility, approval, positioning, or mere existence on social media, use the process as a means. Often, they simply mimic pre-existing mechanisms. On the other hand, those who create because they are haunted by an urgency use the process as an end. Even Charlie Parker mimicked his idols at the beginning, but his imitation was a desperate attempt to reach something he couldn’t yet see. He was at the service of a question.

The content creator, in their emptiest form, stops at the answer. Not because they lack talent, but because they inhabit a frictionless world where the format, the trend, and the algorithm are already laid out; they just have to fill them.

Eco defined culture as the ability to know where to find information the moment you need it. It is an operational, open, non-aristocratic definition. But it presupposes that you know what you are looking for. And to know what you are looking for, you must first have a question.

I was at the VIC-20. It showed me the digital paradigm, and I accepted it immediately, because I could see it would give me more forms for my questions. Not answers. Forms.