News
28 November: what is celebrated today
The last Friday of November emerges between shop-window lights and lines of code, between the vertigo of consumption and the precision of logical thought. It is a day of contrasts: while millions of people rush to shops to take advantage of Black Friday discounts, others prefer to stop and buy nothing; at the same time, the technology world celebrates the quiet work of those who make the digital era possible: systems engineers. Three different views of the same contemporary reality—a planet that produces, consumes and connects without rest.
Black Friday
Born in the United States and spread across the rest of the world, Black Friday marks the beginning of the Christmas shopping season. Shops fill with offers, shop windows shine and queues grow from dawn. The term “Black Friday” appeared in Philadelphia in the 1960s, when traffic police gave that name to the urban chaos after Thanksgiving. Over time, retailers adopted it, giving it an optimistic meaning: the day when accounts moved “from red ink into black”.
Today, Black Friday is a global phenomenon worth billions of dollars. It is observed in both physical shops and digital platforms, and is followed by Cyber Monday, its online counterpart. Yet beyond the figures, the day reflects a modern ritual: the urge to search, acquire, seize an opportunity — and perhaps also compensate. Behind the shine of the offers lies a necessary question: how much of what we buy belongs to us, and how much does it buy us?
Buy Nothing Day
On the exact reverse side of Black Friday comes Buy Nothing Day, an invitation to switch off consumer fever and reflect on its consequences. Created in 1992 by the Canadian artist Ted Dave and promoted by Adbusters magazine, the movement proposes 24 hours without shopping as a symbolic act of resistance to the current economic model. It deliberately coincides with Black Friday, confronting the impulse to acquire with the value of abstaining.
Buy Nothing Day activists do not oppose the economy, but excess: waste, throwaway culture, and the idea that we are only what we own. Each postponed purchase, each conscious decision, becomes a political and ecological act. In a world where everything seems measured in transactions, the day proposes something revolutionary: the silence of consumption as a form of freedom.
International Systems Engineer Day
Far from the crowds and shop windows, there is another, quieter yet essential celebration: International Systems Engineer Day, dedicated to those who design the invisible mechanisms that sustain our digital lives. Every fourth Friday in November, the technology world thanks these professionals for their creativity, logic and vision.
They build the bridges that allow a message to travel from one continent to another in seconds, hospitals to function, banks not to collapse and satellites to stay in perfect orbit. They are architects of the intangible, guardians of order amid complexity. In an age when we depend on ever more sophisticated systems, their work is the pulse that keeps the world connected.