Somnium invictum

School ends, university ends, and something begins that nobody had told you about: you stop meeting new people. Work fills your days without occupying them. And little by little you scale back: first ambition, then desire, then the memory of having had it.

They told you that you’re a generation with no drive. It isn’t true. You’re a generation that nobody has asked for anything hard enough to be worth it.

And it isn’t a new condition either. In 1744 a Neapolitan philosopher described what happens to civilisations that have reached their peak: people live in them, he writes, “in their greatest throng or crowd of bodies… in a supreme solitude of souls and wills”. The greatest crowding of bodies, the greatest solitude of souls. Giambattista Vico wrote it three centuries ago, and he is describing us. Knowing that it has a name changes only one thing, and it’s the one that matters: it isn’t your fault.

And in the same sentence he says what civilisations die of, which is not what we were taught. They don’t die of ignorance: they die of refinement. He calls it the “barbarism of reflection”, and judges it worse than the barbarism of the earliest times for a precise reason: the ancient kind “laid bare a noble fierceness, against which others could defend themselves”; this kind works “within flattery and embraces”. They are, he writes, “the ill-born subtleties of cunning minds”: the intelligence that has a reason for everything, that can explain why every undertaking is naive, and that no longer builds anything.

· · ·

The first European satellite. The first mass-produced desktop computer. The web. They were born on this side of the sea, and grew up on the other. Not because we didn’t know how: because we never built the business around the invention. The discovery was ours; the capital, the channels and the production, we let others build.

Talent is spread everywhere. The means are not.

And what is happening now is happening regardless: the technologies that are rewriting the world will keep rewriting it, whether we take part or not. Nobody is keeping a seat for us. We are behind on computing, on semiconductors, on access to space, and we will stay behind for a little while yet. We have not the slightest intention of staying there.

· · ·

The frontier is real, and it is closed to you. Not because you aren’t capable: because it’s expensive. Labs, machines, years, mistakes paid for in full. Anyone with family money behind them can try. Anyone without it stays on the quay, and almost always convinces themselves it was their own choice.

In 1156, in this port, two men put an agreement in writing. Their names were Ingo da Volta and Ansaldo Baialardo. One put in the capital and stayed ashore; the other put in his craft and himself, and set sail. On return, they shared the profit. And if the ship sank, the one who had put in only himself owed nothing to anyone: the loss fell on whoever had put in the money.

That agreement is called a commenda, and it is the oldest contract of its kind whose text we still have. It was not charity and it was not welfare: it was the ancestor of all the venture capital in the world, and with one clause it solved the problem that is holding you back right now. We had it at home, and we forgot about it.

So we don’t promise you a calm sea.

We build the ship. No one will take the risk alone: if it sinks, you don’t pay.

· · ·

We choose to attempt the greatest undertakings, not because they are simple, but because they are difficult. Because a finish line like this is the only instrument that marshals and gauges the best of our energies and our abilities. Because it is a challenge we take up, that we do not want to put off, and that we mean to win.

And here is ours, stated in full, so that anyone can hold us to it:

Ten years from now, any young European aged twenty-three or even younger, without a single euro behind them, will know for certain that if they pursue their dream, choose the right direction and keep persevering, they will not fail through disillusionment or lack of resources. The new generations will be aware of their abilities and confident in them, and will see pursuing their dreams as the most obvious way to build their future.

· · ·

No one is to blame when an era burns out, and looking for culprits has never rekindled one. Things always begin again, and those who begin them again are always few, simple and practical: people without titles and without permission, who one morning get to work.

The only question is who begins. Sine fine.

· · ·

It all began here, and not because it was the right place: there is no right place. Every point is its own centre.

You don’t sail towards the firmament. You sail beneath it, and you reach the other side by following the stars, and you come back. Cynosura, they called it. The sea is out there, and we will cross it. The things nobody has built yet are out there. A ship is only useful if someone decides to set sail.

The world you live in was made by people, and that is why you can remake it.

No dream is defeated until you decide it is.

Persevere for the stars.