Flavio Cobolli: The Fax-Wielding Italian Who Could Save Civilization (Yes, Really)
Flavio Cobolli: The Last Man Still Using a Fax Machine in 2024
By our Rome bureau chief, filing from a city that keeps receipts the way other capitals keep secrets
ROME – In an era when your toaster has a verified Twitter account and the IMF negotiates with emojis, Flavio Cobolli remains gloriously analog. The 62-year-old Florentine sysadmin still signs every memo in indelible ink, still insists on carbon copies, and—most baffling to a planet that has outsourced memory to the cloud—still feeds curling thermal paper into a beige Panasonic KX-FP207 that wheezes like an asthmatic accordion. Ask him why and he’ll shrug: “Paper doesn’t get ransomware.”
It’s easy to dismiss Cobolli as an office curiosity, the human equivalent of a payphone. But zoom out—past the espresso-stained ledger books and the drawer full of Europlug adapters—and his obstinacy starts to look geopolitical. While Brussels dreams of a “Digital Europe,” Cobolli is the continent’s living dead-man switch, a reminder that civilization still depends on people who can function when the satellites hiccup. Last March, during the ransomware siege that froze half of Lithuania, the Tuscan hospital where Cobolli consults kept admitting patients because its fallback pharmacy orders ran through—you guessed it—his clattering fax. Lithuanian health officials, fresh out of bitcoin to pay hackers, sent an actual thank-you telegram. It arrived by courier; Cobolli framed it.
Across the Atlantic, the Pentagon’s Office of Net Assessment keeps a classified file labeled “Cobolli Scenario”: what happens if tomorrow’s war begins not with missiles but with a continent-wide zero-day exploit. Analysts conclude that victory may hinge on whichever side still employs at least one stubborn Florentine with a landline. The irony is not lost on them; the same military that funds quantum-encrypted satellites now issues field manuals on how to load tractor-feed paper.
Global finance has noticed too. When the SWIFT network wobbled last winter, a boutique hedge fund in Luxembourg wired €50 million through an emergency chain that terminated at Cobolli’s machine. Traders nicknamed it “the Cobolli Put,” an options strategy that pays out when digital infrastructure fails spectacularly. Bloomberg now lists thermal-paper futures; the ticker is FAX.
Of course, the man himself is oblivious to his cult status. He commutes on a 1993 Moto Guzzi, refuses LinkedIn requests “on moral grounds,” and thinks TikTok is a pocket watch. Colleagues whisper that he once punched a consultant for suggesting cloud migration. HR filed the incident under “cultural heritage.”
Yet the wider world keeps tugging at his sleeve. Japan’s Cabinet Secretariat flew him to Tokyo to lecture on “analog resilience,” a phrase that sounds better in bureaucratic Japanese than it has any right to. Silicon Valley VCs offer seed money for a start-up—“Fax-as-a-Service”—that would rent vintage machines to jittery CTOs. Cobolli declines, citing “dignity.” He does, however, license his surname to a craft-beer label in Oregon: Cobolli Bitter, notes of paper toner and regret.
Climate diplomats see a darker utility. Should global emissions targets collapse and the cloud data centers start to brown-out, low-tech fallback systems could keep basic services limping along. The UN’s latest adaptation report quietly recommends “proactive retention of legacy technologies,” bureaucratese for “keep one weird Italian on retainer.”
The joke, of course, is that Cobolli isn’t a Luddite; he’s just allergic to planned obsolescence. He codes in COBOL (yes, the prophecy was in the name), maintains a 486DX for fun, and can strip a fax machine blindfolded. In a supply-chain world where a single fire in a Taiwanese resin factory can cripple GPU production, his spare-parts drawer is a strategic reserve. Somewhere in a NATO bunker, a three-star general is updating the readiness checklist: beans, bullets, toner.
So when the next undersea cable gets snipped—by Russian trawler, Chinese anchor, or bored orca—don’t be surprised if the last readable message on Earth emerges from an Italian office, faint and curly, smelling faintly of scorched plastic. It will say something like: “Running low on coffee. Send more.” And humanity, temporarily booted back to 1989, will know exactly what to do.
Conclusion: Flavio Cobolli is not merely the world’s most anachronistic sysadmin; he is its unwitting insurance policy against digital hubris. In the grand tragicomedy of modernity, he plays the fool who keeps the kingdom’s keys on an actual ring. Laugh if you must—just pray the line stays open when the joke stops being funny.
