Plato Was Not Enough

From philosophy to code, through the world — meeting sophists, grounding thoughts.

I have spent my life asking one question: why do we accept not being allowed to open the hood?

I did not invent the question. I found it, fully formed, in Plato. Later, in Dostoevsky — the words he put into The Idiot: I am going into the world of men. I don't know much, perhaps, but a new life has begun for me. I read those books the way a last-ranked amateur trains alongside champions: knowing the distance, refusing to let the distance become an excuse. Taking a book seriously is not admiring it. It is letting it send you out.

It began in Paris, with a thesis on Uglyness in Art, and a Russian émigrée who turned out to be the point of convergence between two worlds sworn to destroy each other. I was baptised, as an adult, in the cathedral where Bunin and Turgenev would later have their funerals.

I directed migrant centres, Roma camps, an emergency reception network during the North Africa crisis. I learned, twice, that a single right word — distorted by those who profit from distortion — can sink you. Plato had described the sophist. Plato had not been enough.

I founded Lemma Press. I published the life's work of Dostoevsky scholar Konstantin Barsht — the only Western publisher in the history of the Alexander Nevsky Prize. I published Strage di Stato, the first critical study of Italy's COVID mismanagement, and watched the machine turn — the blocked page, the wave of identical articles, the accusation that collapsed when someone finally read the book.

I was also a poor businessman. I chose texts over markets, and the house closed. I will not pretend the system alone sank me.

Now I write code. dropQbsd — compartmentalisation without virtualisation, built on OpenBSD. Not an escape from philosophy, but its continuation by other means.

I row Venetian style: standing, facing forward, throwing my weight onto the oar. The blade that takes your force is the blade that keeps you from falling.

This site is the hood, opened.

The Hood

I did not come to philosophy and then descend into the world. I was already in the world when philosophy found me — and the world I was in was the one most people look past.

I have spent my life asking one question, and it has never changed shape: why do we accept not being allowed to open the hood?

I did not invent the question. I found it, fully formed, in Plato. Later, in Dostoevsky — the words he put into The Idiot: now is the moment for you to face the world. I read those books the way a last-ranked amateur trains alongside champions: knowing the distance, refusing to let the distance become an excuse. Taking a book seriously is not admiring it. It is letting it send you out.

Out there, books are not enough. I learned this in the places where the hood is welded shut and guarded: in the refugee centres I directed, in the camps I walked through in a suit and tie, in the publishing house that nearly destroyed me, and finally in the code I now write.

It began, as such things do, with a woman I was not looking for.

I was in Paris, researching a thesis on the ugly in art for the University of Milan. I had found two small French texts from 1947–48, written by a Russian émigrée of the 1905 exodus. I thought she was a minor figure. I was wrong.

She turned out to be the point of conjunction between two worlds that had sworn to destroy each other. On one side, the "White" communities of the Silver Age of Orthodox thought — Berdyaev, Shestov, Merezhkovsky. On the other, the Bolshevik and Menshevik exiles in France — Lenin, Trotsky, and above all Lunacharsky, who was godfather to her own son.

The extremes touch. I saw it with my own eyes, at twenty, and it has never stopped being true.

That research led me to the Institut Saint-Serge, and to the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral in Paris. There, in the church built under Alexander II, where Bunin and Turgenev would one day have their funerals, I chose to be baptised — as an adult, the way it was done in the time of Christ. Boris Bobrinskoj, of the Institut Saint-Serge, received me.

Decades later, a book I published — the life's work of the Dostoevsky scholar Konstantin Barsht — received the Alexander Nevsky Prize. The first and only work published by a Western editor to be so honoured in the history of Russia's principal national literary award.

I will not connect those two sentences for you. Some correspondences are meant to be felt, not argued.

What I can tell you is what I did with the life that opened there. I tried, in every field I entered, to do one thing: keep thought and responsibility together. In the social sector, in publishing, in data protection, in code. And I learned, each time, that opening the hood has a price.

I have paid it more than once. I would pay it again.

The Ship

In Paris, I directed the Tillier Centre, then the third-largest migrant reception centre in the city — thirteen hundred guests in a structure built for three hundred. Two populations, half the building each: Malians on one side, Algerians on the other. If the building had been a ship, it would have capsized.

Every electrical socket carried a multitude of multi-plugs — hotplates, heaters, kettles — that made guardian angels a rational hypothesis. The full-time electrician chased cables fused into the walls and switches short-circuited by decomposed cockroaches.

It was a staggering observatory. Hierarchies that did not match the official ones: Diara, who led my orderlies, commanded respect though he was not a delegate — he belonged to a higher-ranking family. Elders in Mali decided who would occupy a bed in my centre. The African binman employed by the city of Paris stood at the top of the invisible ladder; the boy just off the boat at the bottom. I learned that individual identity — the idea that each person is unique and unrepeatable — is a Western invention. "We need to speak with Mr. Traoré." "Which one? I have seventy-four." "Mamadou Traoré." "In that case, twelve."

There was a butcher, a giant with a machete who sold lamb on a table — in summer. There were goldsmiths who worked geometric forms that had nothing to do with twentieth-century abstraction. There were cooks preparing industrial quantities of mafé. Staff, residents, transport workers, airport employees — all of us ate together.

And there was the constant negotiation, the permanent fuse that had to be defused. My predecessor had taught me to speak ever more softly when voices rose. I learned never to interrupt — to note the logical steps, to answer everyone in turn, to make it understood: I heard you. Philosophy became a sextant for navigating real life.

I lost that centre over a single word. The Joola ferry had sunk off the coast of Gambia, overloaded with passengers. I used its name to make a delegate understand where the unchecked growth of numbers was leading us. The phrase was seized upon, twisted, repeated with intentions opposite to mine. I touched an exposed nerve. I touched interests. In the distortion, everything fit, and maybe that suited them.

I returned to Italy. In Paris, the season of fires began. Several structures like mine caught fire, as was inevitable. Funds were unlocked to renovate them. The dead did not return, and perhaps neither did the managers.

The Knives

I did not come to philosophy and then descend into the world. I was already in the world when philosophy found me — and the world I was in was the one most people look past.

In Italy, I ran the Roma camps. One day I found four extra caravans. Remembering the Tillier, I moved immediately. I obtained the families' consent to remove them. I informed the local leader of the party whose volunteers had managed the camp before me. He agreed. The next morning, a dozen police in riot gear arrived with the deputy prefect. The Roma themselves showed us which caravans to remove. The municipal crane lifted two away. The police could not believe their eyes.

A week later, we returned for the remaining two. This time the wind had changed. The party radio had broadcast an appeal: "Comrades, come quickly — Mr. Baudo is dismantling the camp." The Roma surrounded me and the deputy prefect, knives drawn. We got out. The operation was over. The camp was lost.

I went back to the party leader, furious. He looked at me and said: "Well, yes — but we need to create a national case."

That was the second lesson. The sophist does not attack you because you are wrong. He attacks you because he needs an enemy, and the truth is irrelevant. Plato had described him. Plato had not been enough.

In Bergamo, during the North Africa emergency, I coordinated roughly eighty percent of the reception centres in the province. I directed a school of Italian for migrants with a thousand students a year. And I kept going to the camps in a suit and tie. When the astonished Roma asked me why, I meant my answer literally: "If I am obliged to dress this way for the mayor or the police chief, then I must do it for you too. You deserve the same respect."

I was not being kind. I was being consistent. Dignity is not something you extend downward from a position of comfort. It is something you owe equally, or it is nothing.

The Publisher

I founded Lemma Press in 2015. If I am honest — and I have learned, at great cost, that this is the only way to tell the story — I was never a good businessman. I chose texts over markets, every time. That is not a boast. It is the reason the publishing house ultimately closed. But before it closed, it did things that justify its existence.

The first came as a call. Konstantin Barsht, the great Dostoevsky scholar of the Pushkin Institute in Saint Petersburg, entrusted me with the work of his life. He chose an editor who had published a single book, because — he said — in Italy, the country of Manuzio, books are still made well. I felt like the director of a small theatre handed an unpublished manuscript by Shakespeare. There was only one possible response: to stand at attention.

The book — The Drawings and Calligraphy of Fyodor Dostoevsky — was published in three simultaneous editions, Russian, English and Italian. In 2017 it received the Alexander Nevsky Prize. The award belonged to Barsht and to his work. But the jury also recognised the quality of the edition itself — and that recognition belonged to Lemma Press: the first and only Western publisher in the history of the award to have produced a book so honoured. It cost me half of what I owned. I would spend it again.

The second book came in 2021, in the middle of the pandemic. Strage di Stato — State Massacre — the first critical study in Italy of the mismanagement of COVID, prefaced by Nicola Gratteri, Italy's chief anti-mafia prosecutor, heir to Falcone. It became a national bestseller. Then the machine turned.

Amazon blocked the page. I spent two weeks arguing with customer-service centres on the other side of the world, and it was unblocked only when I wrote that the preface was by Gratteri. Not when I explained the book. When I named the name.

Then came the wave. Hundreds of articles, all of them violent, all of them repeating each other word for word. The attack rested on a single confusion. One of the book's authors had said unforgivable things in public — on the radio, to crowds — things that had nothing to do with the book. Those words were attached to the book, and the book was condemned for them.

Gian Antonio Stella, in the Corriere della Sera, did what no one else had done. He read it. His article was merciless toward the man, and it had to be. But then he wrote the sentence that changed everything: the obscene phrase everyone was quoting was not in the book. The words they claimed were there simply did not appear. He defended the work by condemning the man — the only move that could save it. The rest of the book, with its ten hundred and seventy-two footnotes across three hundred and sixty-three pages, was left standing.

A reader who had bought the book believing the accusation wrote an open letter. She had read all four hundred pages and found, in her words, "an almost aseptic essay, clear, precise, with over a thousand footnotes." She demanded a public apology for the calumny. It never came.

There was a parliamentary question. During the session, Prime Minister Draghi distanced himself. Gratteri distanced himself — and then lost the appointment as prosecutor general of Milan. And every door closed.

Here is the part I will not hide: the contents consumed me and the container collapsed — not only the house, but also the market that was crumbling around it, the major publishers swallowing what little remained. The clash with the mainstream was real, and it marked my life. But it is not the whole story. I will not pretend the system alone sank me. That would be one more comfortable story, and I have spent my life refusing comfortable stories.

And yet, before the doors closed, the circle had already begun to close on its own. I published Bunin, whose funeral was held in 1953 in the very cathedral where I was baptised. I published a volume on Turgenev — not from above downward, but from below upward, as he wrote against Wagner — whose funeral was held there too, under a cover bearing Dostoevsky's own drawings. I did not set out to close a circle. The circle closed itself, as circles do when the choices are true.

Tech

When the publishing house closed, I did not retreat. I changed field. Because I had understood something that the previous decades had been preparing me to see: the battlefield had moved.

Censorship no longer needs bonfires. It needs closed source. The antivirus that surveils you while claiming to protect you. The operating system that cannot be opened. The feed that regresses you while it feeds you. The machine that narrates to you while pretending to be neutral.

I trained as a Data Protection Officer, and I served as DPO of a foundation that runs psychiatric facilities. I lasted six months. I will not make accusations I cannot prove. I will say only what I saw: that when compliance became uncomfortable, the organisation preferred a DPO who would not look too closely. I was kept on as internal privacy officer, at a distance. I learned more in those six months than in any course: the first thing an organisation fears is not the fine. It is the person who actually opens the hood.

And I began to write code. Not as an escape from philosophy, but as its continuation by other means. The project is called dropQbsd — compartmentalisation without virtualisation, built on OpenBSD. A few thousand lines of shell and a handful of C. The idea is simple: if you cannot verify what you cannot see, then build systems that can be seen, audited, understood in an afternoon.

I did not start building because I wanted a product. I started because I had spent my life watching people surrender the hood to whoever promised to protect them — and I had finally found the place where that surrender is engineered, line by line.

Method

When I leave the screen, I row. Venetian style — voga alla veneta — which means standing, facing forward. You do not turn your back on where you are going. You throw your whole weight onto the oar, and the same blade that takes your force and your weight is the one that, at the end of the stroke, keeps you from falling. You do not stay upright despite the oar. You stay upright because of it.

It is the only honest image I know for the way I have lived. You advance facing forward. You keep your balance on a boat that never stops being unstable. You go against the current, and you learn that the current does not care whether you are right. A single hole in the hull can sink you. A single misplaced stroke can throw you into the water.

I have leaned on texts, on truth, on tradition, throwing my weight onto them. They did not spare me the fall. They gave me something to hold onto while I fell — and, in the end, they held me up.

The tradition I keep looking back to is the one that named things before the names were stolen. Perret, who in 1955 saw that the machine's deepest function is synthesis, and called it synthétiseur — a name we discarded in favour of one that flatters the machine and indicts the man. Aristotle, who knew that a thing is known by its causes, not its appearance. Dante, who knew that you do not leave the Inferno by avoiding it — you pass through its lowest point, and only there does the road turn and begin to rise.

I have passed through the lowest point more than once. I have lost money, reputation, and more than once the sense that the road would ever turn.

It turns. It always turns. Not because I am owed anything, but because a man who keeps thought and responsibility together — who refuses to let the system name him, who opens the hood even when it costs him — is a man the current cannot finally drown.

This site is the hood, opened.