The Shape of Data

I had a kind of epiphany, not one of those elegant ones from a book, but something rougher, almost annoying, while looking at public tenders: they were there, scattered and disordered, accumulated without apparent intention, then at a certain point they gathered, and just like when you stare long enough at a surface and start to see figures that weren’t there before, a pareidolia emerged, and within that data, I began to glimpse something.

At first, I thought the problem was mine, like when they tell you that to get the right form you first need to request the form that certifies the need for the form at the counter next door that opens on odd Thursdays; I tried to understand, to look for the missing line, the hidden key, the secret combination, then I opened the ANAC portal and found myself in corridors leading to other corridors, numbered doors without handles, instructions referring to instructions referring to instructions: it became clear there that it wasn’t a matter of ability, but of form.

The data was there, everything was formally available, yet availability does not coincide with understanding: it was like being invited into a room full of books without order, without an index, without a path, where “it’s all here” already sounds like a resignation.

Then TED arrived, more organized and more readable, almost a well-lit cave, yet the logic remained the same: a mass of documents in front, entire flocks of pages, and you there, like Ulysses before Polyphemus, counting sheep and looking for a passage without getting crushed; everything is visible, sure, but visible doesn’t mean comprehensible, and it is precisely this transparency that doesn’t deny anything but doesn’t help you see.

The problem, then, is not access, it’s form, because when data lacks a readable form, it stops being neutral, favoring those who have time, tools, structure, and penalizing those who should use it for work, so that transparency becomes an elegant word for saying “figure it out,” a beautiful word that is precisely why it is attempted to be emptied in every possible way.

I live in Sicily, and here certain dynamics don’t need much explanation: when data is accessible but not readable, the same ones always win, the mafias, the lobbies, the powerful of the moment, not because the data is hidden but because it is scattered.

So I did something simple, without adding anything and without improving the data, limiting myself to changing the form and putting them on a map, a map of Italy that is almost a banal gesture and at the same time an implicit question: did it really take so long?

When data enters space, something happens, the “where” stops being an attribute and becomes the center, the “here” takes the place of “search,” and you are no longer interrogating an archive but looking at a territory; the map, after all, is a manifesto that simply says it can be done this way.

What I am doing I don’t consider political in the everyday sense of the word, yet it is deeply linked to something higher, almost an application of the Constitution, because real, simple, comprehensible transparency for most is a condition of citizenship.

In the meantime, I discovered an uncomfortable thing: I know much less than I thought, and every document, every PDF, every XML has become a lesson, not so much about the data but about how easy it is to underestimate the complexity of the world when viewed from afar; the more I delved in, the more I understood I was at the beginning, and I am still there, while Vistagare improves every day from what I learn, it adjusts, corrects itself, grows through small shifts, as if it were learning alongside me.

This has become part of the system, not a platform that knows everything but a structure that allows learning by looking, and it will not disappear, not out of prediction but out of stubbornness.

The goal is not just to build a product, it is to try to change, even slightly, the way we look at things, moving from searching to seeing, from reading to understanding, and building along the way a different, human, distributed company, without toxicity, a place that does not consume those who build it.

If this resonates with you even just a little, then perhaps we are already meeting: I am looking for travel companions, not to fill seats but to tilt trajectories, people who bring resources, relationships, skills, along with a certain stubborn idea of how things should be, because it is not necessary to agree on everything, it is necessary to want to look in the same direction.

Every construction begins with a tiny, almost invisible gesture, a line drawn where there was only noise before, a shape that emerges without asking for permission, and it is there that something happens: not when we accumulate data but when we start to recognize it, not when we possess it but when we finally see it, so that, by seeing better, something changes, not outside at first but inside the way things take their place.

From there, slowly, it is not just rewritten: it is sculpted, forged, chiseled, and by working the material, something in the world begins to yield, to reorganize, to finally become readable.