The internet under lock and key in Pisa

For the past sixteen editions, Pisa has hosted a festival dedicated to something that continues to elude it. The Internet Festival fills buildings and halls with talks and installations. Then the question arises: how can you give substance to a network without revealing its infrastructure? The city discusses artificial intelligence, but the servers and backbone remain elsewhere. And in some areas of the city centre, during previous editions, even mobile connectivity was far from guaranteed.

Yesterday, the issue became apparent even before entering the venue. As it does every year, the Pisa Half Marathon passed through the city centre, closing off the banks of the Arno and the bridges, and bringing over four thousand people to Piazza del Duomo. The Internet Festival had concentrated the final day’s events solely in the afternoon: at 3 pm at the Scuola Normale, the discussion centred on democracy and artificial intelligence; at 4.30 pm, yet another licence (the digital one) was on offer whilst AI was being discussed off-screen. At 7 pm, at the Logge, Sarafine’s DJ set brought to a close a day in which the internet was merely a side dish.

And yet the programme had some interesting things to offer. But until midday, the city had belonged to the race. This is not the runners’ fault, nor is it a clash between culture and sport. It is a difference in urban impact: the half-marathon can transform Pisa into an event, whilst the festival still struggles to do the same. The race has a visible route and thousands of people gathered in the same space. The Internet Festival has venues spread out across the city and events that take place mainly indoors. ‘Widespread’ is the term used to describe the format; sometimes it simply means there is no central square.

The half-marathon highlighted the contrast: to occupy public space, one needs permits and a physical presence. The internet, which was supposed to have erased distances, continues to depend on institutions and timetables. On Sunday, in-person events resumed as the streets became available again. In short, whilst the online calendar runs until December, the real city has other constraints.

The best image in this edition was already inside a cage. “Do Not Feed the Animal”, Francesco Moretti’s installation at the Benedettine, encloses a drone within a metal structure reminiscent of the Baptistery. The camera films the viewer and transmits the images to an external screen. The device, designed to observe from above, becomes itself the object of observation. It is not merely the concept behind a work of art, but also an unintended diagnosis: technology appears free until one sees the bars that hold it in place.

In recent days, Ukrainian drones have struck three Yandex data centres in Russia: first Sasovo and Kaluga, then the facility in the Vladimir region, which was declared out of action on Sunday. These are facilities for cloud services and artificial intelligence systems. The suggestion that they were home to Russian bot farms is circulating, but has not been confirmed. The established fact is enough in itself: to disrupt digital services, the drones struck actual buildings, full of servers.

The internet is not a cloud, nor is it a place without geography. It consumes energy and occupies industrial units. It has owners, and therefore also targets. War reminds us of this with brutal clarity; the festival should be able to show this without relying solely on conferences and metaphors.

Over the years, much has already been written about the paradoxes of the four-day event in Pisa, such as celebrating the internet without showing its infrastructure and talking about 5G in a place where the signal struggles to reach buildings. Moretti’s cage has made the distance visible; it remains to be seen how to bridge it. It is not enough to scatter events about and call them a ‘city’: for the internet to become a physical place, the festival must take possession of Pisa at least as much as the city, for one morning, allows itself to be taken over by a race. The runners had the bridges, the riverfront and a square. The internet had only a cage.