Pirelli Annual Report 2020

Sometimes, we forget that life without the positive contribution made by politics, science and technology soon becomes “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short”, to use the famous phrase from Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan. The COVID-19 crisis has tragically reminded us that nature can be ruthless. Only human ingenuity and good effort can safeguard and improve the lives of billions of people. Today, much of this effort is being made with the aim of achieving an epochal revolution: the transformation of an exclusively analogue world into an increasingly digital one. The effects are visible everywhere: this is the first pandemic in which a new habitat, the infosphere, has helped overcome the hazards of the biosphere. For some time now, we have been living onlife (both online and offline), but the pandemic has made the onlife experience a common, irreversible reality.

The crucial factors in this momentous revolution include the enormous and increasingly affordable power of computers, increasingly pervasive connectivity, colossal quantities of data that keep growing and, finally, ever more effective artificial intelligence (AI). According to a classic definition, AI is the engineering of artefacts that can do things that would require intelligence if we were to do them ourselves. This means that AI is not a marriage between computing and intelligence but rather the unprecedented divorce of agency from intelligence, that is, between the ability to complete tasks or solve problems successfully in view of a goal and any need to be intelligent when doing so. To play chess, even just to follow the rules, I must exercise some intelligence, but my mobile phone can beat me, even if it is as stupid as a toaster.

This divorce has only become possible recently, thanks to the factors mentioned above – above all networks, computing and data - in addition to increasingly sophisticated statistical tools, and the transformation of our habitats into places that are more and more compatible with AI. The more we live in the infosphere and onlife, the more we share our daily realities with artificial agents that can successfully perform a growing number of tasks.

The only thing that may limit AI is human ingenuity. Today, AI can help us to know, understand, predict and overcome, more often and more effectively, the many increasingly pressing challenges facing us: climate change, social injustice, global poverty and the need to update liberal democracies. The effective management of data and processes by AI can accelerate the virtuous circle of innovation, business models, more successful enterprise, more advanced science and more farsighted policies, including those that form the basis of legislation. However, knowledge is power only if it is transformed into action. Here too, AI can be an extraordinary force for good, helping us to tackle complex, systemic and global problems. We cannot solve these individually. We need to coordinate our efforts (not get in each other’s way), collaborate (each one of us must do their bit) and cooperate (work together) more often and more effectively. And AI can help us develop these 3 Cs more efficiently (more results with fewer resources), effectively (better results) and innovatively (new results).

Yet there is a “but”: when not steered by good purposes human ingenuity can be dangerous. If the digital revolution is not controlled and guided in an ethical, sustainable way, it can exacerbate social problems, from prejudice to discrimination; erode human independence and responsibility; and worsen problems of the past, from the unfair distribution of costs and benefits to the development of a culture of mere distraction. And AI itself risks becoming not only part of the solution but part of the problem too. So, good international laws, starting with those of the European Union, are essential for ensuring that AI remains a powerful force for good.

When used for the creation and distribution of wealth, the good of society and environmental sustainability, AI is part of a new marriage between the Green of all our habitats - natural, synthetic and artificial, from the biosphere to the infosphere, from urban spaces to cultural, economic, social and political conditions - and the Blue of all our digital technologies, from mobile phones to social media platforms, from the Internet of Things to Big Data, from AI to the quantum computing of the future. The pandemic was the general test for what appears to be the human project for the 21st century, a successful divorce between agency and intelligence and a successful marriage between the Green and the Blue.

In light of such a Green & Blue marriage, the information society is more easily understood as a new manufacturing society in which raw materials and energy are replaced by data and information, the new digital gold and the real source of additional value. So, in addition to communication and transactions, the creation, design and management of information is key for correctly understanding the age we are living in and developing a better and more sustainable environment. This understanding requires a new vision of who we are today and of the human project we want to pursue. Previous revolutions in the creation of wealth, such as the agricultural and industrial revolutions, led to macroscopic transformations of our environmental, social and political structures, often without significant levels of farsightedness and with long-term and profound conceptual and ethical implications. The digital revolution is just as far-reaching. In consideration of this important historical change, the aim is to formulate an ethical and political framework that can treat the infosphere as our new environment. And philosophy as the conceptual design can further this bid to update our perspective.

Galileo famously suggested that nature is like a book, written with mathematical symbols and to be read through science. In a world that is increasingly composed of 0’s and 1’s, today this no longer sounds like a metaphor. Digital technologies are increasingly successful in this world because, like fish in the sea, they are the true natives of the infosphere. They are more capable than us of performing a growing number of tasks because humans are analogue organisms trying to adapt to an ever more digital habitat, just like deep sea divers. As such, artificial agents, whether soft (such as apps, webots, algorithms, and all sorts of software) or hard (schu as robots, driverless cars, smart watches and all kinds of gadgets), are replacing human agents in areas that seemed inaccessible to any kind of technology only a few years ago. These include cataloguing images, translating documents, interpreting X-rays, extracting new information from enormous databases, and writing newspaper articles, to name but a few. Brown- and blue-collar workers have been subject to the pressure of the digital revolution for decades: now it is the turn of white-collar workers. It is impossible to predict how many jobs will disappear or be drastically transformed, but in all contemporary scenarios where people work as mere interfaces - for example between a GPS and a car, between two documents in different languages, between ingredients and a dish, between symptoms and illness - their jobs may be at risk. At the same time, new jobs are emerging - I like to call them green-collar jobs - because new interfaces are needed: between the services provided by computers, between websites, between AI applications, between the results of AI, and so on. Someone will have to decide whether a text needs to be translated and check that the approximate translation is sufficiently reliable, for instance. Many activities will remain too costly to be managed by AI, even if it were feasible to do so. But if we do not provide better legal and ethical frameworks, the digital revolution will further polarise our society. Think for example about the digital divide or the gig economy. And legislation will play an influential role, also in determining which jobs should remain “human”. Driverless trains are a rarity, also for legislative reasons, yet they are much easier to manage than driverless buses. Of course, it is important to stress that many of the tasks that are destined to disappear will not eliminate the jobs related to them: now that I have a robotic lawn mower, I have more time to look after my roses. And many activities will simply be reassigned to us, such as the automatic tills that let us scan our own goods in the supermarket. The digital revolution will definitely involve us doing more jobs for ourselves in the future.

And in all this, our intelligence will continually be tested by the success of AI, and our autonomy will be challenged by the ability of AI easily to predict and manipulate our choices. Our sociality will also be tested by our artificial counterparts, represented by artificial companions, mere voices or androids that can be both attractive to humans and sometimes hard to distinguish from the real thing. It is not clear how all this will end, but one thing is certain: there is no chance of Terminator turning up, and the scenarios presented by science fiction are nothing but irresponsible distractions. Smart technologies will always be as stupid as a pocket calculator. The problem will always be how we use them.

There is one last challenge facing us: maintaining our “exceptionality”. After the four revolutions brought about by Copernicus, Darwin, Freud and Turing, we are no longer at the centre of the universe, the animal kingdom, the mental sphere and the infosphere. The time has come to accept that our exceptionality lies in the special and perhaps irreplicable way in which we are successfully dysfunctional. As we would have said at high school, we are a hapax legomenon (meaning “a word that only occurs once in a text”) in Galileo’s book of nature. Or, to use a more digital, contemporary metaphor, we are a beautiful glitch in the great software of the universe, not the most successful app. A glitch that must take more and more responsibility for the history it is writing and the nature it must look after ˙

The exercise was deliberately aimless, rather than accidentally pointless, as so many things had begun to seem to me; the sunset log was just a structure to encourage myself to stop moving for long enough to take in what was happening in the sky. In Brooklyn, on September 14, 2019, the sunset was blue-gray like an oxford shirt, striped with slate clouds that were lit up from under with glowing burgundy. In Toronto, a week later, the sunset was radiant peach, with a vanishing flare of chartreuse, a dark cloud crossing the vista like a battleship, flamingo-pink feathers melting into the blue. At half past six in Kauai in December, there was a band of parakeet gray just above the water, topped with lemon meringue, hazy mauve. In Cedar Rapids, in February of 2020, the sunset at 5:24 PM looked like a shaved-ice gradient of apricot and banana and grape.

Almost immediately, the sunset log became an exercise in the pathetic fallacy. One night I noted that the sky looked strong and melancholy, on another playful and lavish, on another gentle and resigned. I had to remind myself that the earth was impervious to whichever of my quasi-buried emotions I was projecting onto it at any given moment. These displays of passing radiance were meaningless—or, more properly, they spoke of scales and systems that rendered me meaningless. Nothing resists capture like a sunset, and nothing so insistently invites the folly of trying. There are two hundred and seventy-six million sunset photos on Instagram; there are nearly five million still living on Flickr; there are two and a half million for license on Getty Images. Sometimes, while taking notes on a sunset, other people would notice the sky and stand next to me, and we would form a little knot of strangers, open-mouthed, phones pointed at the horizon, as if this time, finally, we might actually outrun the grand cliché. We tend to conceive of sunset-watching as an experience of unmediated bliss—just us, and perhaps someone we love, watching the clouds catch cherry-red and delirious—even as we know that almost inevitably we will break our reveries by trying to record what we see. I began to think that sunset-recording came partly from some subconscious craving to remember the smallness of our efforts, the way they melt away so quickly, that what we actually want can be experienced but not possessed.

I stopped keeping my sunset log at the beginning of the pandemic, in the early days, when it was not appropriate to linger for long minutes in public. The future was suspended, the present was terrifying, there was little to do—at least for me, with my coddled employment in the knowledge economy—but to bake things and check the ever-rising statistics of global suffering and death. There was no more travel, no more hustling to meetings, no breathlessly running in late to a friend’s birthday dinner, no conferences, no weddings, no riding a packed train while typing out emails on your iPhone, no visiting family, no talking to strangers, no lingering over produce at the grocery store. There was nothing but the elastic, elusive expanse of each confounding day.

In this state of suspended animation, I waded deeper into a quiet reckoning with my relationship to work. I have often felt so lucky to write for a living—to have the luxury of striving after personal fulfillment in the process of keeping the lights on—that I sometimes forget that it is possible to stop working, let alone desirable or necessary. At times I’ve internalized a misguided idea that I should attach myself to my work with ever more fondness because so much work on this planet is underpaid and demeaning. But the pandemic showed me, with finality, the wrongheadedness of that response. Every day, elsewhere, the gears of the world were grinding: teachers were staging full days of Zoom kindergarten, nursing home attendants were changing diapers for lonely and confused senior citizens, Amazon warehouse workers were packing two hundred boxes per hour, grocery store clerks were wiping down conveyor belts, delivery drivers were breaking their backs so that people like me could enjoy their new quarantine slippers, emergency room doctors were driving home in numb despair. Against this backdrop, the idea that I ought to work more out of recognition of my privilege seemed plainly ridiculous. The only way to honor these workers was to act in whatever ways I could to support conditions in which work would acknowledge rather than deny the humanity of the worker—to push toward a world where everyone could have the security to, in one way or another, stop and look at the sky.

I found myself grasping toward different units of time and measurement, toward the things that were here before us and would outlast us. I tried to remind myself that even this horrifically high-stakes year was just one of hundreds of thousands of years of human existence, a period which itself encompasses a tiny fraction of a percent of the time since the universe’s birth. We were so tiny—we were nothing except the things we could do for one another. I started trying to pay more attention to the natural world than the digital world for the first time in my adult life. I couldn’t see the sunset from my shelter-in-place location, but I started taking notes on the trees and the weather, letting the practice be another reminder to slow down and look around me. I wrote about how dusk over snow made everything glow like blacklight, about the buds emerging on a maple tree in spring, about the cottonwood blossoms that swirled in the wind outside the window, about the day that the sky turned gray-green like a cat’s eye and an hourglass cloud assembled itself in the distance and I hurried the dog inside before it started to hail.

And I kept reorienting my relationship to the internet, which on the one hand had nudged me, with its incentives toward maximum efficiency and profitability and productivity, toward my subway crisis in the first place, but on the other contained a million skies’ worth of reminders of our wonderful smallness in the world. I watched wildlife cams of buffalo in South Dakota, aquarium cams of moon jellyfish pulsing. I spent hours looking at WindowSwap, the website that let me see Maria’s view of downtown construction in Dallas, Ricky’s cat looking at the driveway in Melbourne, Yvan’s blue twilight in Paris. I started making my way through sunset YouTube. A NASA video showed simulated sunsets on other planets—yellow for Venus, cold blue for Mars. There were time-lapse sunset videos, greatest-hits sunset compilations, zoomed-in videos of the elusive green flash that can occur when the sun slips below the water. “PERFECT SUNSET 60min 4K (Ultra HD),” posted in 2014, has nearly three million views: it shows an unbroken hour of a dazzled sunset on the ocean in Kagoshima, Japan, a white-hot yellow core melting into tangerine over iridescent water. “I’m looking out the window looking at the sunset right now, because my parents had another loud, heated argument,” writes a user named Crusty Egg. “The sunset calms me down.” Another user named Akira writes “This is so beautiful and it makes me sad at the same time. I know you are too.” Many users wrote about watching the sunset during the pandemic. Toward the end of 2020, a user named djl2206 writes, “I’ve always wanted to go somewhere away from everyone else, not having to worry about anything or anyone. I could finally be myself and not be carrying the weight of the world on my shoulders anymore. I’ve always just thought that sunsets are the prettiest thing in the world.”

A recognizable combination of grief and hope recurred in these comments—a sense of quiet loss and transience, a tugging desire for more love, more space, more ease. Even in the virtual worlds people escaped to during the pandemic, the sunset was there, representing something irreducibly human: in the video game Animal Crossing, the water turns purple during sunset, and the skies light up in hues of tomato and plum. “I was enjoying a dramatic sunset IRL yesterday which reminded me of a specific sunset in a video game,” one user wrote on an online forum, “namely when you’re at Soldier’s Field in BioShock Infinite, and everything is sort of luminous lavender. It is a static sunset, but still one that sticks with you, not the least because that warm glow fits with some of the fleeting moments of peace and hopefulness in that section of the game.”

As I write this, a prospect of an end to this seemingly everlasting pandemic era is peeking through the dirt, like a spring crocus. In the future we will move around again; we will brush up against one another; the gears will accelerate as fast as we let them. It’s my hope that we remember to retain more stillness than we’d known was possible, that we grant this stillness to one another. I return some days to the Reddit message board that’s exclusively devoted to sunsets, where users post photos from Russia or the Philippines or Germany. “How wonderful our earth is,” they write, over and over. “Breathtaking.” A few days ago, a user posted a fiery sunset from New Jersey. “Was this last night by chance,” another user wrote. He had been working at a supermarket in the area, but by chance, he had seen the same glow ˙

Rest assured, arriving in Milan used to be somewhat frightening. It was a grey metropolis (grey because of the fog, before global warming); and it was full of people, busy people to be exact, who came to Milan filled with hopes and dreams, people who were in quite a hurry. The “Pirellone” (the Pirelli skyscraper) towering in front of the Central Railway Station welcomed the new arrivals like an Egyptian or Assyrian-Babylonian temple and it has always been a beacon: a beacon and a landmark for the newcomers needing to find their bearings in the city of progress when it was still foggy. On 2nd July 1956, the two brothers Alberto and Piero Pirelli broke ground on the site of the existing factory. Designed by Gio Ponti and featuring a reinforced concrete core by Pierluigi Nervi, two Lombard exports. The oft-imitated skyscraper (see the Pan Am building in New York for instance) that took just four years to build, was described by Ponti in Domus as “finished form, understated elegance, representativeness, expressiveness, illusiveness, technical updating, a tribute to labour and incorruptibility”. A winning combination that constitutes an ode to Lombardy.

And it is still worth remembering the other appointments with history associated with the Pirellian beacon today. For instance, in 1970 when the Italian regions were born, Piero Bassetti was elected the first president of Lombardy (he was the region’s “President” as opposed to the current-day “Governor”, and the word “Region” took the definite article in Italian) and set out to find a building in keeping with his region, which bore more importance than any other from the get-go. With the region’s distinctive flair for design, the choice fell on a logo, a brand, that did not feature coats of arms, crowns or towers like the others, but instead bore a simple symbol, the “Camunian Rose”, that became a symbol of hard-working people, designed by a consortium of Milanese and global minds, including Bruno Munari and Bob Noorda among others, who represented the Milan of those years.

Back in 1957, construction began on Italy’s first underground in Milan: the “Red Line”, designed by Franco Albini and Franca Helg, with matching graphics and lettering by Noorda, and ingenious inventions better to transport people: an alphabet was invented for the occasion, with a matte finish to ensure maximum visibility; a continuous red band follows the entire route guiding travellers to the trains and towards the exits. The idea was copied in the subways of New York and Sao Paulo (“I was always studying underground; my co-workers nicknamed me ‘The Mole’,” explained Noorda). It was in the same year that the Milanese started shopping in Italy’s first ever supermarket, Esselunga, which had opened in Viale Regina Giovanna. Because people produce, earn and consume (as the old adage goes: “I work, I earn, I pay, I demand”). Those were the years of the Carosello TV advertising show (also ‘57) that announced it was bedtime for many Italian children and Milan’s Piazza del Duomo was turned into a commercial dream by massive billboards. In Steno’s film “Susanna tutta panna”, the opening credits scrolled across Piazza del Duomo and its billboards. The film was also a tribute to Milanese humanity: an industrialist fails to sleep at night because he can’t figure out the recipe for a famous cream cake. Every city gets the dreams it deserves. The Pirellone also became a huge showcase for Pirelli products: not just tyres, but also hot water bottles, inflatable dinghies and tennis balls, among others. A beacon, a showcase and dreams: this is Milan in a nutshell.

In its shadow lie dreams for everyone, both for those born and bred in Milan as well as for outsiders, such as the young Apulian sex workers putting down roots under the skyscrapers of the yet unbuilt Porta Nuova district in Dino Risi’s 1973 film “How Funny Can Sex Be?”. And they must have unwittingly trodden on Pirelli rubber in their heels in the brand new underground as well. Indeed, the bubble-top rubber floor is another Pirelli discovery. It is still there, at every stop of the “Red Line”. It was the first case of rubber flooring used in undergrounds across Europe. As the story has it, a sample was placed in front of the entrance to the Pirelli factory to test the strength of the new compound. It was immune even to women’s heels.

Indeed, heels hold a special place in Pirelli’s albeit very manly identity. Effortless avant-garde in much less easy-going times were the red heels worn by Carl Lewis, the fastest man on earth, walking on water in Annie Leibovitz’s photographs for the famous and scandalous “Power is nothing without control” campaign in 1994. It was at least twenty years ahead of today’s identity and rights issues. Equally avant-garde was the Pirelli calendar that over the years morphed into a truly chic product for devotees. Created in 1964, the famous nudes abandoned in 2018 for a retake of Alice in Wonderland interpreted by models of colour only, starring Whoopi Goldberg, Ru Paul and Naomi Campbell.

In short, from the heights of the Pirellone to the depths of the underground, the Pirelli brand has accompanied and monitored the dimension of Milan, the city of human beings par excellence, throughout the 20th Century. After all, “Power is nothing without control” is a claim that would work just as well for all the Milanese.

Milan is no New York, but its sheer flow of human beings is quite similar, and someone may remember that when the city was advancing and enterprising before Covid, young people were rushing to go there, Rome was a little resentful and many Italians were in two minds whether to admire or envy the city which the Expo had helped to recover economically, but which appeared to be “bullying” the rest of Italy somewhat. This was also due to that particular attitude, that touch of presumptuous self-confidence that the Milanese tend to exude when everything is going well.

Then Milan was knocked out completely by the pandemic and it seemed almost like a divine punishment, the wrath of the gods. Even its development model was put into question. Fewer skyscrapers and more greenery, they say nowadays, and Pirelli’s headquarters in Bicocca look like a kind of dystopia come true, like the office of the future surrounded by plenty of greenery. I was reminded that this is solid reality and not a dream by the swab I got in a very efficient clinic before being allowed in. “What if it had been positive?”, I asked. “In that case, we would have sent you out from the other door right away,” the diligent nurse informed me. It was a trapdoor worthy of Scrooge McDuck. They told me that the clinic was open to all employees, who could be treated and tested at will, and this is something else that one wouldn’t expect. Or maybe it is what one should expect from a major Milanese-global corporation. But Milan is not Silicon Valley, although it may look like a Google and Facebook-style campus, with all that greenery, its transparent buildings, even mindfulness and yoga courses and a canteen overlooking wide pastures (but in the garden of the old and glorious Bicocca degli Arcimboldi, the Italian word for “Duty” printed throughout the canteen reminds us that this is still Milan and not Palo Alto after all).

Here, among the sparkling futuristic buildings and the Mediaeval castle, is where the Pirellians flourish. Only a handful of great business stories have given rise to a neologism and a tribe. There were “the Olivettians”, that sound like a Cistercian order, and then there are the Pirellians, perhaps less famous, but defining a certain type of humanity nonetheless, one that is Milanese yet international, linked to tradition but also to innovation, with its gaze set on foreign countries and yet firmly rooted here in their own dimension, one which is human above all. The Masters, the people who teach their experience to the younger generations, stand out in the Order of the Pirellians. And of course, in this mixed cathedral of ancient and modern, there is a library, one that is open to all employees, containing novels, art catalogues and children’s books as well as business texts.

Instead of a dog, it is guarded by an enormous rubbery cat called Meo Romeo, designed by Bruno Munari, who also invented toys while he was busy creating the emblem of Lombardy. “An artist must leave behind all romantic aspects and become an active man among men, informed on current techniques, materials and working methods”, he wrote. Munari designed a host of creations for Pirelli, including armed foam toys, the cat and the monkey “Zizi” that won the Compasso d’Oro award. In 1952, he was named the artistic director of “Pigomma” toys. The artist himself was amazed by the sheer size of Pirelli: “I would like to encourage this production but how can I, in that huge aggregation of large factories, as large as a town, where huge interests are in motion? I, Bruno Munari, weighing in at just forty-eight kilograms, do not want to interfere with all your hard work, so I will just wait here with my cat on the corner, joined by a bunch of children who are asking me whether they could have one for Christmas.”

There is a stark contrast between the technological multinational and its playful and very human side. So, in the imposing hall of the company headquarters, there is a rubber mixer on full display, as if it were a work of pop art, standing there all shiny and red like a toy, to remind us where we come from, even today that Pirelli is focusing on the future. The future is one of very special tyres for the electric cars that one day will drive themselves (by the way, it appears that one of the biggest problems of new electric cars is their excessively fast acceleration that consumes the tyre tread, proving once more that power is nothing without control).

And the mixer is right underneath something else that they don’t have in Silicon Valley: a tower, an enormous cooling tower, placed like a large objet trouvé enshrined in the complex designed by Vittorio Gregotti. And outside, in the rubber district, to sweeten the whole deal like a funny quip, stands the Haribo edible gum factory. There are so many symbols of what Pirelli once was. Just browse the legendary Pirelli magazine, in which Buzzati, Montale and Gadda wrote, and the reportage by Mulas, Roiter, Sellerio and the illustrations by Guttuso and Mendini. In the archives are three linear kilometres of documents, photos and posters, where the best Milanese minds drafted the blueprint of the economic boom. The most recent advertisement for the famous Cinturato is a work of art worthy of being exhibited at the Pirelli Hangar Bicocca (but let’s not tell its rigorous director Vicente Todolì).

Indeed, there is also a museum, and that is something they definitely don’t have in Silicon Valley. The PirelliHangar Bicocca is a gigantic cavern where trains were once made and now major exhibitions are held, all free of charge, which is quite a rarity for Milanese and Italian private museums. Between a Chinese and an African artist here are the Seven Heavenly Palaces by Anselm Kiefer. Seven watchtowers over history, standing there like little Pirellone towers and observing the goings-on below, between the city and the factory, and above all humanity: the humanity of Milan and the world ˙