Don't be evil

The project aims to document the incidence of digital code on global youth population existence by exploring its primary activities: gaming, education, sexuality, fight, work and religion.

“It is no nation that we inhabit, but a language. Make no mistake; our native tongue is our only motherland.”

Emile Cioran, Confessions and anathemas

With the adoption of new informational technologies on a global scale the

cyberspace has pervasively entered the lives of more than half of world’s

population, with youth at the forefront in adoptions.

The incidence of digital code seems to have no boundaries and to invest

every aspect of our existence by arranging our behaviours and translating our

innermost desires, as well as fears, into data reserves available for indefinite

uses.

Designed during the Cold War as a communications system intended to be

resistant to a possible nuclear disaster, the infrastructure that underlies the

most capillary surveillance system ever existed, could solely collapse due to

a solar storm.

Is it the digital info-sphere a new model of environment hosting our

interactions in a dimension located outside the space-time coordinates?

Or simply the last technological articulation of the linguistic mammal’s

peculiarity, capable from its very beginning to detach from what is current

and to project itself beyond it through language?

Whatever the answers the evidences of our daily lives shows that by giving

us unprecedented operational capabilities, digital technology ended up

reshaping our notion of real and led us to fully inhabit its syntactic structures.

Currently under studies of experts without previous knowledge about them,

the digital natives are those humans that have developed social and

cognitive dynamics fully formed through the use of connected devices since

birth: living in both offline and online world the two dimensions are no longer

separable for them and constitute a single support in which their life is

inscribed.

We never witnessed in history a generation so deeply involved in such

transgeographic network, nowadays the largest in the world, and

consequently the establishment of the first global linguistic community.

With this project, carried on since 2013 and still going on, I aim to explore

the impacts of digital technology on contemporary global youth population

by focusing on its primary activities - such as, learning, entertainment,

sexuality, work, fight and religion - during the first decades of formation of the

so called homo-digitalis.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Image from the Don't be evil photography project
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Seoul, Republic of Ko​rea, July 2015 - View of the e​ntrance of the Seoul Cyber Uni​versity (SCU). A Cyber Univer​sity is a university in which ​students can take courses and ​receive bachelor's degrees via​ the Internet. In 2000, the So​uth Korean's Ministry of Educa​tion and Human Resources Devel​opment approved what it's call​ed "long distance university" ​through which students can pur​sue higher-level education reg​ardless of time or place.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Russian Federation, Siberia, Novosibirsk, November 2021: portait of Alina.
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Russian Federation, Siberia, Novosibirsk, November 2021: portait of Alina.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Image from the Don't be evil photography project
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Republic of Korea, Seoul, September 2015: students watching a movie in the Multimedia Plaza at the Kwanjeong Library of the Seoul National University.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Italy, Rome, June 2021: young tourists at Piazza Navona.
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Italy, Rome, June 2021: young tourists at Piazza Navona.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Russian Federation, Sant Petersburg December 2021: interior view of a beauty salon.
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Russian Federation, Sant Petersburg December 2021: interior view of a beauty salon.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Republic of Ghana, Accra, October 2016: portrait of Mafi in New Town during the Islamic New Year celebrations.
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Republic of Ghana, Accra, October 2016: portrait of Mafi in New Town during the Islamic New Year celebrations.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Italy, Milan March 2013: a children playing a digital game.
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Italy, Milan March 2013: a children playing a digital game.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Image from the Don't be evil photography project
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Kissufim, Israel, February 201​7 - Northwestern Negev Desert.​ Operation and Observation Uni​t soldiers at the entrance of ​Kissufim Observation Room, loc​ated in the Kissufim IDF base,​ where soldiers can observe th​e opposite side of the border ​via UGV (unmanned ground vehic​le) and cameras placed on Pask​al stations - antennae that ar​e 200-300 meters high. With th​e help of these devices, the u​nit's soldiers can constantly ​control every activity at the ​arab-israelian border. The uni​t belongs to the combat intell​igence corps and it is in char​ge of studying the territory a​nd help the ground forces to u​nderstand the situation on the​ ground. For this reason it is​ also called "the eye of the s​tate".

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Russian Federation, Moscow, December 2021: teen-agers playing in a virtual reality game room.
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Russian Federation, Moscow, December 2021: teen-agers playing in a virtual reality game room.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Russian Federation, Sant Petersburg, December 2021: portrait of a 21 years old naval cadet.
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Russian Federation, Sant Petersburg, December 2021: portrait of a 21 years old naval cadet.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Image from the Don't be evil photography project
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Ukraine, Varash, Rivne Oblast, February 18, 2022: the reactors of the Rivne Nuclear Power Plant (NPP), seen from the kitchen of an apartment in the city. In September 2020, the official website of the Varash City Council was turned by a hacker attack into a source of disinformation and has been used to announce the state of emergency due to an alleged radioactive leak of a reactor at the Rivne nuclear power plant, resulting in the evacuation of the inhabitants from the city at a distance of 30 km. The fake news - later denied by the state nuclear agency Energoatom - quickly spread through numerous social networks causing panic among the population.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Image from the Don't be evil photography project
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China, Beijing, June 2017: Caicai Yang, 20, and Yufen Xue, 21, both Wang Hong (Internet celebrites), in the dorms of Three Minutes TV where they live and work. Caicai Yang has 10,000 followers and Yufen Xue has 90,000 followers. Three Minutes TV is a Wang Hong agency representing more than 2000 artists. E-commerce live broadcasting is its core business, which means that the Wang Hong's serve as promoters for the products for sale on the E-commerce platforms. It offers a studio with 100 live broadcasting rooms for JD.com and 200 live broadcasting rooms for Alibaba's Taobao. Its e-commerce sales volume reached RMB 400,000,000 in 2016.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Image from the Don't be evil photography project
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Republic of Korea, Seoul, September 2015: the national final of Star Craft - one of the most popular massively multiplayer online games (MMOCs) in the world - held in a stadium at the Seoul Children's Grand Park. MMOGs are video games that simultaneously involve thousands of players connected through the Internet. According to data released by the Korean Ministry of Health and Welfare, the extreme popularity of online videogames, also called E-sports, is the source of 90% of the pathological addictions from the Internet that afflict the youth population of the country.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Image from the Don't be evil photography project
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China, Jinan, Shandon​g province, October 2015 - Int​ernees during the military tra​ining at the "Ya Bo center", a​ military boot-camp for reeduc​ation of young people who are ​by the majority suffering from​ excessive online game playing​.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Romania, Bucharest, March 2016: portait of a 23 years old cam model in a room of "Studio 20" before her night shift.
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Romania, Bucharest, March 2016: portait of a 23 years old cam model in a room of "Studio 20" before her night shift.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Image from the Don't be evil photography project
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Republic of Gh​ana, Accra, October 2016: view of Agbogblosh​ie, the world's largest e-wast​e dump. Thousands of kids and teens living here mainly live out by dismantling electronical devices to get​ metals and datas. Due to higly toxic environment most of th​e young residents of Agbogblosh​ie die from cancer in t​heir early 20s.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Republic of Korea, Seoul, September 20​15: security camera in a park.
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Republic of Korea, Seoul, September 20​15: security camera in a park.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Image from the Don't be evil photography project
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Republic of Korea, Gyeonggi, Suwon, September 2015 - Samsung Digital city, the headquarter office of Samsung - Employees coming back to work after the lunch break.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Image from the Don't be evil photography project
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Republic of Korea, Seongnam, G​yeonggi-do, Pangyo, September ​2015 - The making of a videoga​me in the motion room located ​in the headquarter building of​ Nexon, the most important Kor​ean company of online games. T​he motion room is where the re​al body's movements are record​ed by sensors and translated i​n a 3d digital language.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Image from the Don't be evil photography project
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Russian Federation, Moscow, December 2021: a Delivery Club rider on his job. Delivery Club is Russia's largest food and grocery delivery service, delivering daily to 350 cities across the country.

© Lorenzo Maccotta - Photo: Marco Menghi
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Photo: Marco Menghi