A cura di @s1m0n4 e @Carlj2000.

In un reportage molto dettagliato il giornalista di Wired.com, Darren Loucaides, ripercorre tutta la storia del Movimento iniziando dalla storia personale di Gianroberto Casaleggio fino ai giorni nostri.

In particolare pone attenzione all’infatuazione del fondatore nei confronti di Adriano Olivetti e il suo pensiero, sull’interesse a come Internet avrebbe trasformato le organizzazioni dall’interno e come il discorso online potesse essere guidato dall’alto generando consenso.

Fin dagli anni ’90, spiega Darren, dedicava parte dell’attività della sua prima azienda, la Webegg, ad esperimenti sociali nei forum aziendali, applicando i principi della programmazione neurolinguistica per aumentare il consenso verso opinioni prestabilite.

Casaleggio explained that the aim of this new project was to experiment with communication dynamics on the company’s intranet. Casaleggio would select topics from the firm’s internal forum and assign members of the group specific roles to play in each discussion. Say he wanted a forum debate to reach conclusion X: One member of the restricted group would suggest X, a second would argue for contradictory conclusion Y, and over time a third would post a variation on X—and so on, subtly driving the rest of the unwitting employees toward the preordained conclusion. Baffè and the other experimenters worked a few hours a week on the project and met with Casaleggio once a month to evaluate progress.

The original stated aim of the project was to observe how internal electronic communications worked, and then to sell the findings as a consulting service. But the experiment also had more far-reaching implications, Baffè realized. Casaleggio was interested in learning how consensus—on, say, whether people should be happy to work long hours—could be manufactured in a way that looked organic. Twenty years before trolls working for Russia’s Internet Research Agency would use similar techniques to steer debate on Facebook and other online forums, Casaleggio seemed to be using his own company as a laboratory to figure out how online discourse could be guided from above. “I’d just started working and was excited to be part of a project like that,” Baffè says. It wasn’t until years later, he says, that he “realized it was the beginning of a long-term experiment.”