There was a time when great mountaineering feats took place in the silence of the peaks, in the intimacy between man and the mountain. A time when the news arrived later, sometimes months later, told downstream with that sobriety that only those who have known the extreme limit can afford. Think of Walter Bonatti on the north face of the Matterhornat his bivouac in the cold, that night suspended between life and death that no one saw, that no one could see. The greatness of the undertaking was born precisely from that confidentiality, from that sacred and solitary relationship with the impossible.
Today that dimension belongs to an era that seems very distant. Alex Honnold, American climber of undisputed talent – the man who in 2017 conquered El Capitan without rope or protection – has just climbed Taipei 101, a 508 meter skyscraper in the heart of Taiwan, once again free solo. The feat is undeniably remarkable from a technical point of view: one hour and thirty-one minutes of climbing on glass and steel, with no possible errors. But this time there is a substantial difference: millions of people around the world followed the rise live streaming on Netflix.
And this is where we need to stop and reflect. Not on Honnold’s skill, which remains beyond question. Not even on the legitimacy of his personal choice to take the extreme risk. But about us. On we viewers, on our relationship with these imageson the meaning we give to the live broadcast of an undertaking where death, the real one, is not a theoretical hypothesis but a concrete possibility, mathematically present in every movement.
As Pietro Lacasella observes on L’Altramontagna, we should try turning the camera upside down for a moment. Ask ourselves what would emerge if instead of framing Honnold clinging to the skyscraper, the direction showed us, sitting in front of our screens. We would discover a disturbing anthropological story: that of the human being who, in a sort of contemporary fetishism, seeks enjoyment in the risk of others, the potentially mortal one. Once upon a time these impulses filled the Roman amphitheatres. Today they keep us glued to computers and smartphones.
The question is not new. Already in ancient times we wondered about the dark charm of gladiatorial shows. But here we are talking about something else: not about an arena where death is staged, but about a real person who could really fall from four hundred meters and crash to the ground before the eyes of millions of people connected live. And us? We would be there, watching. Maybe with my heart in my mouth, sure. Perhaps with anguish. But still there, consumers of extreme emotion served in real time. Chiara Guglielmina, again in L’Altramontagna, gets to the point when she writes that death today takes on a different dimension: it is no longer just a private tragedy but a potentially monetizable media event. The recent death of the young climber Balin Miller, who fell – due to a technical accident – while he was live on TikTok last October, has already shown us how thin the border is. If such a fatality occurred during a live broadcast followed by millions of viewers, it would not only be a loss for friends and family, but a collective trauma seen, commented on, shared, probably also recorded and rebroadcast endlessly on social media.
What respect for pain? What cure for the affections? What editorial responsibilities in such circumstances?
Honnold’s feat takes place in a precise historical moment, in which mountaineering – that discipline which for over two centuries has been a school of rigour, modesty and silence – finds itself at a cultural crossroads. On the one hand there is tradition: the idea that greatness arises from the interiority of experience, from the direct and almost mystical relationship between man and nature, from the ability to manage risk with humility and confidentiality. On the other hand there is the spectacularization: the business as content, the risk as a product, the adrenaline as a commodity to be sold to an increasingly addicted public hungry for strong emotions.
The risk is that this second path ends up emptying mountaineering itself of meaning. If the ultimate goal becomes digital applause, the number of views, viral sharing, the company’s horizon narrows dramatically. Traditional mountaineering has always exercised a precious dialectic between challenge and respect, between courage and prudence. The live broadcast spectacularizes the error, trivializes the risk and sends an ambivalent message to the new generations: greatness is no longer measured by personal experience but by the audience that watches.
Then there is the equally serious question of collective responsibility. Our hyperconnection has transformed us into spectators and actors of an endless digital circuswhere attention is consumed in a few seconds and images of tragedies or businesses flow like ephemeral content between a video of kittens and a post on the climate crisis. It’s as if every time we read about a climb or a fall, our heart gets used to the distance, like a background noise that accompanies us without really shaking us.
Is this progress? Reduce every great human event to a series of images to be consumed quickly? Or is it still possible to preserve what in the extreme gesture truly speaks to us of humanity, teaching us the limit rather than celebrating its spectacular violation?
This is not to deny Honnold’s motivations, which arise from a genuine passion for climbing. Nor can his laudable social commitment be ignored: Part of the proceeds from the climb will be donated, through his foundation, to solar energy projects in disadvantaged communities. A noble gesture. Yet the underlying question remains, the one that many mountain enthusiasts ask themselves with discomfort: to what extent is it ethical to transform extreme risk into spectacle, making human life a content to be consumed?
The history of mountaineering has taught us something else. He taught us Reinhold Messner who climbed his mountains without the need to show every step to a global audience. He taught us Bonattiwho preferred quiet and rigor. He taught us that true strength lies in the depth of personal experience, which does not need to be acclaimed by anyone to have value.
As Guglielmina effectively writes, we are faced with a cultural crossroads: either we will be able to reintroduce limits to the spectacularization of the extreme, or we will witness a progressive implosion of the sense of enterprise, consumed and forgotten in the time of a scroll on a social media. Choosing the first path requires the courage – paradoxical but necessary – to give up easy audiences to preserve the profound value of human action.
With the hope that every future undertaking will be resolved in the best possible way, the urgency remains to reiterate that certain images should not be treated as mere entertainment goods. Out of respect for the athletes, their families and the entire community, some thresholds should not be exceeded or violated by an audience connected in real time. Because the mountain – the real one, made of rock and ice, but also the metaphorical one of our human limits – still deserves a little silence. And silence, ultimately, is not absence: it is respect. It is that sacred dimension where business finds its most authentic meaning, far from the spotlight and clicks, where man truly meets himself.
The challenge of the future lies in knowing how to recognize when risk, even the greatest, must not be translated into spectacle. Because it’s in thebalance between body and soul that human beings find their true health. And this, perhaps, is the highest legacy we can leave to future generations: the ability to respect the limit, even when we are technically capable of going beyond it. Even when the whole world is watching us.
