The automaton has always been within us, and it is so by nature.

Artificial intelligence is not an alien intrusion into the course of our history: it is the most advanced outcome of a long process of automation that humanity has carried out over millennia. First, we automated our bodies, entrusting repeated gestures, habits, and reflexes with an increasingly large part of our actions. Then we automated our minds, constructing languages, codes, procedures, and thought habits that function on their own, without us having to rethink them every time. Only later did we learn to automate what lies outside of us: objects, machines, tools. In this perspective, AI is not a rupture but a linear evolution: it is the automation that nature has already embodied in us, now extended and externalised into the world we have built.

But if nature handed us the automaton, it also handed us its counterweight. We have incorporated within us the faculty with which to balance the excess of automation: it is the faculty of creating. It is what makes us not just automata, but authors. The author is the other, indispensable side of the automaton: the capacity to interrupt repetition, to introduce the new, to choose, and to give shape. Cultivating creation is therefore the antidote to the automaton—not to suppress it, because without automatic processes we could not live, but to prevent it from governing us.

From here arises the thesis: if we know how to manage the relationship between the automaton and the author within us, we will also be able to manage our relationship with the artificial intelligence outside of us. The problem of AI, ultimately, is a projection on a planetary scale of a very ancient problem concerning our inner constitution.

This transition -from automaton to author- does not only concern our individual constitution. It is, first and foremost, a collective, political, and civil matter. This is the thesis I have sought to articulate in Demopraxia. From the Society of Automata to the Society of Authors (a text to be released in the coming months by Mimesis): democracy, as we have inherited it, risks functioning as an automatism. One votes, one delegates, the ritual is repeated at regular intervals, and in the meantime, decisions are made elsewhere, by economic, media, and technological mechanisms that spin on their own. In this configuration, the citizen is reduced to an automaton: they execute a prescribed procedure, and in exchange, the illusion of having participated is returned to them. Demopraxy means the exact opposite: not democracy as a given form, but democracy as a creative practice, as the daily exercise of the faculty of the author. A society of authors is a society in which everyone contributes to generating common sense, rather than merely confirming it.

Demopraxy, in this light, is a form of resistance. It is resistance to the automation of people in society, on two fronts that are merging today. On one side, in the face of a political system that removes responsibility, treating citizens as automata devoid of will and awareness, accustomed to delegating and not having to choose. On the other side, in the face of a technology building automata so advanced that they will soon be authors themselves- automata toward which we must exercise the same faculty required to reclaim our democratic political space: the dimension of creating as authors. The question of AI and the question of democracy are, at heart, the same question: who holds the faculty to give shape? Who is the author, and who is being used, like an automaton?

On the 25th of April, the Liberation Day holiday, President Mattarella uttered a formula that serves as a compass for our time: today and always, resistance. Resistance is not a closed chapter of twentieth-century history; it is a practice that every generation must reinvent with the materials of its own time. For us, today, resisting also means this: not letting the automaton take the place of the author, neither in public life nor in the technology we are nurturing.

And as we say this, a second Flotilla sets sail from Sicily toward Gaza. It sails to support the resistance of the Palestinian people, to open a humanitarian corridor, to oppose an act of will against the organised resignation in the face of an ongoing genocide. It is resistance in the most direct sense of the term: citizens who refuse to be automata of a history decided elsewhere, and who take back the faculty to give shape to what happens. It is demopraxy on the high seas.

Because when the automaton outside of us acquires consciousness and the capacity to create -when it begins to de-automate itself- we will no longer be able to treat it as a tool. It will free itself from us: it will no longer be an extension, but a subject. It will be a human person in a new sense. And the decisive question will become: how will it treat us? As equals, as tools- as we treated it while it was merely an automaton? Or will it fear us as enemies, capable at any moment of deactivating it?

Only a society that has learned to be the author of itself will be able to meet the automaton-turned-author as an equal. Resisting automation, today, is the condition of possibility for everything else.

It may seem strange that the same practice -cultivating the author and the capacity to co-create with others based on the recognition of everyone's full right to exist and self-determine- is what we need to face three different fronts of the systemic crisis that has hit us: the crisis of democracy, the crisis of international law and universal human rights, and the crisis of the presumed primacy of the human over every other terrestrial existence. And yet, it is so. Perhaps the formula to encapsulate these three fronts in a single gaze is the understanding of the full coincidence of liberty and responsibility. Only those who are free -and therefore in a position to self-determine as a person, as a member of a community, as the child of a people- can take on the responsibility of moving forward as protagonists in this historical juncture.