What Is at Stake
In a matter of decades, the digital has moved from tool to infrastructure — for our lives, our institutions, our imaginaries. It has transformed how we work, debate, love, decide together — in short, it is reshaping our lives and our way of being in the world. This is only the beginning. The transformation carries within it two radically opposed futures.
The first is a promise. Each individual can become an autonomous node in a network: capable of producing knowledge, organizing and carrying weight without depending on a center or a summit that thinks in their place. Michel Serres called this egocracy — not networked egoism, but the emergence of individuals who are fully singular and fully connected. The technical means exist, and they have never been more accessible. The possibility of moving from the collective to the connective is within reach.
The second is a drift, but the same conditions carry another possibility entirely. We scroll instead of observing, profile instead of encountering, optimize instead of deliberating. We live increasingly through models of the world rather than in the world. Vilém Flusser had a name for this trajectory: the program. Not the software, but something deeper: a frame that defines in advance the possible choices, and that works all the better for being invisible. When we scroll, profile, optimize, we are not making bad choices. We are functioning inside a program that has already drawn the map of the possible for us. And the program does not stay confined to screens. It reconfigures the political itself: states summoning blood to hold what borders can no longer contain, platforms covering the world in their models. Between the heat of weapons and the cold of silicon, human warmth risks going out.
A promise and a drift: the same conditions, two futures. Everything is at stake now, and it plays out on a threshold — a liminal space, where nothing has yet been decided, where both futures coexist. Here La Vigilia stands watch.
The Vigiles
In Rome, the Vigiles used to patrol the city at night. They stood watch while others slept, protecting what could be destroyed without warning. La Vigilia takes up this gesture, but what threatens today is not fire but blindness. A transformation most undergo without understanding, that a few instrumentalize, and over which no one stands watch.
We stand watch so that the world to come is not built behind the backs of those who will inhabit it. Because the slope does not take the form we expect. It is not an invasion, not a visible dictatorship. It is a comfortable substitution: systems that mimic choice, connection, and dialogue so well that we no longer feel what they replace. Flusser called those who operate inside the program without perceiving it functionaries — not bureaucrats, but anyone who functions according to a program while believing they are deciding. The functionary enjoys their freedom inside the program. It is the enjoyment that renders the program invisible.
And yet the watch cannot be kept from outside the very thing it watches. Technology is a pharmakon — at once poison and remedy. We refuse both blind enthusiasm and moral condemnation. What we do is forge the means to see the program and act accordingly.
The Constellation
The program has no fixed form. It runs through culture, economy, the political, law, the intimate. Standing watch, too, cannot have a fixed form. This is why La Vigilia is a constellation: a core at the threshold — the question of human becoming in the age of the program — and an expansion into every space where that question plays out. Research, lobbying, cultural production, entrepreneurship, investment: these are not "strategic axes." They are the directions into which the constellation expands when there is room.
An unmapped constellation would be a network of influence. La Vigilia does the opposite: everything it touches, how, with what means, with what results, is visible to anyone who wants to look. Transparency is not a displayed virtue; it is the condition for our watch to remain a watch, and not another confiscation.
And this manifesto itself is proof: co-written with one of the most sophisticated programs of our time, it is either resistance or proof by absurdity — probably both.
La Vigilia is a cheat: it plays from inside the program, with the program's tools, and bets that this is still where there is room to move. The constellation spills into the very space it interrogates.
Joining the Watch
The inherited categories — political, intellectual, moral — were forged in a solid world: classes, borders, legible power relations. That world is dissolving. And these categories, rather than illuminating the world to come, function themselves as programs: they pre-structure thought, filter or falsify what does not fit, and render invisible what is emerging. Believing one masters the program — or fights it — because one possesses the right concepts: that is the most accomplished form of the functionary.
La Vigilia fights what confiscates and what extinguishes. Confiscation is power that concentrates. Extinction is the certainty that spares you from seeing: answers that arrive before questions, grids that run idle on a world that has already slipped past them, the comfort of a program — technical or intellectual — that works so well one no longer seeks a way out. La Vigilia demands a mourning: of the categories that once served but serve no longer. Not out of cynicism, but out of necessity. You cannot see what is emerging by looking through what has already gone.
This manifesto speaks to those who sense that something immense is at stake, and that nothing that exists is sufficient to think it. To those who refuse to choose between blind enthusiasm and technophobic nostalgia. To anyone who prefers the discomfort of an unanswered question to the comfort of an unquestioned answer.
You will not be represented. You will be equipped to stand watch.
The fire we keep is not a fire of survival. It is a fire of joy.
La Vigilia begins.