Eight years ago I started writing under this name, in Italian, with a small ambition: to keep notes on the strange territory where marketing, content, and the humanities meet — and to do it without pretending that any of these things could be fully explained as systems or processes. They were, I thought then, forms of life. I still think so. What has changed is everything around them.
In 2017, the question was whether the tools of cultural analysis still had something to say to people who sold books, ran campaigns, designed media products. It was a defensive question, asked in a defensive moment: the humanities were already on the back foot, and the people who came from them were learning to apologize for their training in rooms full of dashboards. Eight years later, the question has reversed. The dashboards are still there, but they are now generated by systems that produce text, image, and argument at industrial scale, and the people who know how to read those outputs — how to tell what is meaningful from what is merely fluent — turn out to be exactly the ones the previous decade was busy marginalizing. The defensive question has become an offensive one, and The Abstract would like to ask it again, in a different language and at a different scale.
This is why, starting today, The Abstract exists as an English-language newsletter. The Italian work continues at claudiocammarano.com, which remains the main laboratory — the place where I write about Italian education, Italian publishing, Italian universities, and the long Italian tradition of thinking semiotically about culture. The Abstract, here, is the European angle of the same project, written for readers who do not happen to read Italian but who are asking the same questions: what happens to content industries when the marginal cost of plausible text approaches zero; what happens to media organizations when distribution stops being a moat; what happens to public reasoning when the ecosystem is saturated by machine-generated noise; and what — if anything — the European tradition of cultural analysis can still contribute to the answer.
There are conversations that, today, can only happen in English — not because English is better, but because that is where the relevant interlocutors have agreed to meet. The Abstract changes language because the conversation it wants to join has moved.
A few practical things. I publish when I have something to say that I think is worth your time, which usually means once or twice a month, sometimes less, occasionally more. The pieces are long-form essays, not news commentary; if you are looking for daily takes on the latest model release, this is the wrong place. I work inside the publishing industry — I run marketing at one of Italy’s largest book groups, I teach at university, and I co-founded a small media venture — so what you will read here is written by a practitioner who also happens to read books, not by an observer with opinions. Take that as a warning or as a recommendation, depending on your taste.
If any of this sounds like the kind of conversation you want in your inbox, the subscribe button is below. If not, the archive is open and the door stays open too.
Welcome — or, for those who were here in 2017, welcome back.