It is difficult to determine the main symbolic animal of Modernism. Was it Zarathustra's serpent, was it the fantastic Phoenix of the so many Gnostic complexes, was it Hermann Hesse's lonely wolf, or the Promethean eagle, also present in America's ascension as a global power? Each of them can be considered representative, but none of them can express clearly and without hesitation the intimate, ultimate identity of Modernism, associated with anxiety, loneliness, a social feeling of the absurd and the specific fears of the authoritarian, mass societies. The Counterculture of the 60s and the coming of the Internet have made things easier to define. The dominant symbols of the new, electronic society are the web and the swarming "global village", as defined by Marshall McLuhan and Jussi Parikka: the insect society. Postmodernism and cyberculture joyously herald the utopia of a future global swarm, formed by people technologically deprived of any negativity, and whose only outcome is the universal, shared freedom. As Richard Barbrook puts it (in his Imaginary Future. From Thinking Machines to the Global Village, 2007), "The imminent arrival of the Net meant that people would soon be living, thinking and working in a peaceful, equalitarian and participatory civilization." Interfering with Jussi Parikka's seminal book, Insect Media. An Archeology of Animals and Technology (2010), this presentation will focus on the main cultural symbols and metaphors of the new, global "web society", trying also to demonstrate that the new cultural and social paradigm goes back to the communal, anti-state feelings of the Counterculture of the 60.
