di Andrea Romanazzi

As already noted in the previous analysis, neo-druidism does not arise in order to preserve a past, but to respond to a rupture. Today this rupture is deeper than in any previous phase. We are not facing only an ecological, social, or political crisis, but an ontological one: what is at stake is what it means to be human.

The reduction of the individual to a behavioral profile, to data, to statistical prediction marks an epochal shift. For the first time, the human being is conceived and treated not as a relational subject, but as an informational resource. Once again, this must be emphasized: being “neo” does not mean updating ancient rites—perhaps merely disguised as ancient—but rather looking squarely at technology, algorithms, the Anthropocene, and the digitalization of the sacred, without pretending that they do not exist or that returning to the forest would be enough to resolve them.

We have examined the human–nature relationship, but there is another world in crisis: the human–human relationship. There was a time when opening Facebook meant encountering faces. It was neither a relational utopia nor a communal paradise, but a space in which the social dimension still had a recognizable anchor: names, faces, minimally shared stories. Even the weakest ties—the former classmate, the colleague from a past job, the friend of a friend—retained a trace of reality. They were light relationships, certainly, but not abstract ones. Today that space has changed profoundly. Scrolling through the feed, what dominates are no longer people we know, but an indistinct flow of content: advertisements, suggested posts, viral videos, profiles of strangers. We no longer enter a social place; we move through an optimized informational environment. We do not encounter someone; we traverse something.

This change is not merely a matter of algorithms or business models. It is an anthropological transformation. The way platforms present the world shapes the way we think about ourselves and others. In digital space, the human being is no longer conceived as a relational subject, but as a unit of behavior. What matters is not who you are, but what you do: how long you stay, where you pause, what you click, what you ignore. Identity is progressively reduced to a series of measurable signals. This is where the logic of the “data-human” takes shape: not a human being with a story, a face, a complexity, but a predictive profile, a sequence of probabilities. An “friend” is no longer someone with whom you share a portion of life, but someone the algorithm proposes because they fall within a statistical curve—same interests, same anger, same curiosity, same attention span. The relationship does not arise; it is calculated.

This system does not produce isolation in the classical sense. It does not lock us in an empty room. On the contrary, it immerses us in an overabundance of stimuli and presences. We are seen, but not recognized. Exposed, but not addressed. The attention we receive is not human attention, but computational attention—not someone who looks at us, but something that measures us. The difference is subtle, but decisive. Recognition implies reciprocity; measurement does not. It can be constant, total, and yet entirely impersonal.

In this context, the word “friendship” is gradually emptied of its original meaning. It becomes a quantitative category: number of contacts, followers, interactions. Being “friends with everyone” means being compatible with many flows, not being bound to someone. But real friendship is the opposite of universal compatibility. It requires friction, difference, shared time. It requires memory. Presence, however, is precisely what the system struggles to tolerate. Presence is unproductive. It cannot be optimized. It does not accelerate. It does not guarantee constant retention. Genuine friendship has pauses, silences, distances. It is not always performative. It is not always interesting. And precisely for this reason it builds bonds. In an environment designed to maximize attention and reduce all friction, all this becomes a problem to be eliminated.

The paradox is that we have never spoken so much about community while experiencing it so little. Platforms multiply contacts but weaken bonds. They offer visibility but subtract depth. They produce a form of sociality without body, without time, without place—a sociality that leaves no trace in memory, only in the database.

It is in this scenario that neo-druidism can once again take shape as a form of ontological resistance, that is, as a stance on the very way in which human beings and relationships are conceived today. In the druidic vision—ancient, yet consciously reworked in a contemporary key—relationship is never abstract or disembodied: it exists only where someone agrees to remain, to listen, to share a space and a time, assuming their weight and responsibility.

Even the earliest forms of online Orders, born in periods when physical distance imposed new solutions, were not conceived as substitutes for presence nor as indefinite networks of contacts. On the contrary, the distant group had a precise function: to prepare, to orient, to discipline. It united people far apart around a common work on time, study, and practice, while making it clear that the relationship was not exhausted in continuous exchange, but was built through continuity and commitment.

Distance, in this model, did not erase presence; it suspended it. It did not replace it with flow, but safeguarded it. The encounter—real or symbolic—always remained a binding horizon, not an optional one. Mediation was not rejected, but kept under control, preventing it from turning into a dematerialization of the bond.

The transformation of social platforms—Facebook being only the most evident example—has, however, also affected the way we think about relationships. Not only how we communicate, but what we consider a “relationship” to be. The problem is not to add a spiritual dimension to a technocratic world, but to challenge the assumption that whatever exists must be visible, measurable, and evaluable in terms of likes, interactions, and performance.

From this perspective, neo-druidism cannot be reduced to an online community, nor to an identity to be displayed through clothing or photos of altars, nor to a rejection of technology. The issue is not the tool, but the horizon within which the tool operates. The problem is not the network itself, but the multiverse of the feed: a continuous space without thresholds, in which everything is present in the same way, without hierarchies of meaning, without duration, without memory. In the feed, every piece of content is worth only the time it manages to hold attention; what does not generate reaction disappears. There is no depth, only succession.

Exiting the multiverse of the feed does not mean turning it off, but ceasing to assume it as the implicit model of reality. It means refusing the idea that human experience must be fragmented, immediate, and continuously renewed in order to exist. The feed is not only a form of information consumption; it is a form of perceptual education. It trains us not to linger, not to wait, not to distinguish. Everything flows, everything is equivalent, everything is potentially replaceable. This is the exact opposite of neo-druidic cyclical time. Contemporary neo-druidism, therefore, must not simply criticize the feed, but neutralize its formative effect—not by rejecting technology, but by moving toward an online experience that is chosen rather than endured, one that makes possible encounters that remain human, situated, and recognizable.

In this sense, contemporary neo-druidism should not ask us to exit technology, but to exit the logic of the algorithm—so that encounters are no longer the result of automatic selection, but of shared decision.