Years ago, I was kicked out of a WhatsApp group for suggesting that we were turning complex tourist destinations like Venice into theme parks for millionaire and billionaire adults — a form of Disneyfication stripped of cultural depth.
The response? A permanent ban and a thick, uncomfortable silence. The kind produced by what Michel Foucault described, with remarkable precision more than fifty years ago, as “docile bodies.”
Today, with Daniela Santanchè no longer occupying tourism’s spotlight, the underlying issue remains as unsettling as ever. Because the problem was never really about one individual — however controversial she may have been. It was, and still is, about the grammar of a system that keeps producing exactly what it is incapable of imagining differently.
A system that can turn Botticelli’s Birth of Venus into a pizza-eating influencer and call it tourism marketing.
Within this logic, we witness phenomena that swing between the absurd and the Kafkaesque: the CIN code treated like a cheat code in a video game nobody is actually playing, online reviews elevated to the status of legal documents, and mandatory in-person identification making a comeback in an industry that has already digitized nearly every other human interaction.
Meanwhile, the real operating system runs elsewhere.
It operates through infrastructures that share neither our language nor our jurisdiction. It exists on a different plane altogether.
Tourism, in practice, follows an entirely different trajectory. It evolves through global platforms, through flows that cross borders without negotiating them, through systems that have little interest in our administrative categories.
Yet, in the upper floors of political fantasy, we continue playing Risk in our bedrooms, convinced we are rewriting the rules of the world.
And so my thoughts inevitably return to that WhatsApp group and the revealing expulsion that followed.
The real question isn’t what has changed.
It’s whether nothing has truly changed at all — whether we’ve merely updated the interface while leaving the source code untouched.
For those interested in the longer version of this rant, it’s available here:
The Power, Corruption & Lies: Thoughts on Santanchè’s Resignation
See you next week,
SIMONE PUORTO
