Who rules the world today?
US-based tech giants have more power and more influence over each of us than any of our EU states and the EU itself.
But they still don’t decide my life.
Really? How many hours have you been glued to the screen today, giving it to these platforms and their technologies that increase their profit with you every day?
Well, about two, maybe three hours.
And it’s barely one o’clock now. Every day we dedicate more time of our limited and precious life to enrich these platforms like Google, Amazon, Twitter and so many others.
That maybe they don’t give us services?
One day historians will analyze this era and say that this life of ours in front of the screens was slavery and that the real power over our lives was held by these technologies and no longer by any State…
Are they today’s Big Brother?
They have already taken away a large part of our sovereignty, because the decisions about this part of our lives that we already live on screens are not made in Catalonia, Brussels or Berlin: they are made in California.
But these megatechs just want to command us to earn more.
These borders between money and power of other times are increasingly blurred today. Twitter, to quote one, run by Musk, decides our freedom of expression. And this technological conglomerate also puts limits on our culture and values ??every day.
No one is forcing us to use Twitter.
But this does not prevent us from de facto depending on Twitter to be taken into account in the public debate. And they will direct us and regulate it for their pure economic interest, inseparable from others.
What prevents us from stopping using it?
This freedom is only virtual, because they also ensure that we do not have alternatives to their platforms. In fact, they are libertarians; because this ideology gives more freedom to those who already have more money and power than anyone else.
In what sense?
If you were a billionaire, your only great enemy would be the democratic states, in whose sovereignty the citizens are equal to you; if there is no State, they command the money. So we are slaves without knowing it, which is the worst kind of slavery.
A slavery even desired?
Technologies generate an immense prison, which are the networks, in which we enter looking for easy notoriety, distraction, even business, friendship, partner… In exchange for controlling us, exploiting us, squeezing our attention.
In what sense?
The networks are like an immense p anoptic, a watchman who sees everything and to whom we make stronger and more powerful with our daily attention, more and more hours: our data, information, plans, lives…
Would Foucault have long ago denounced this bogged down domain?
And not only Foucault. Any geopolitical analyst can verify today that Musk has been a more influential figure in Ukraine than many statesmen…
Its satellite networks guide the Ukrainians against Russia.
And Putin and Xi Jinping welcome him and have more respect for him than most of our leaders.
I, of them, would not measure up to Musk.
These billionaires have more power than states because they de facto monopolize the control and surveillance of billions of people. And this is a raw power that makes us now depend on his good will every day…
And we haven’t even talked about artificial intelligence.
It reinforces these dynamics of power concentration to extremes that we are not yet able to imagine. They are a step in what Hanna Arendt defined as the main feature of totalitarianism: they normalize the lie to the point of equating it with the truth.
Is the truth just what ChatGPT and Google say?
We need more regulation, more control and more counter-powers to our sovereignty over technology and its powerful.
Is technology today’s ideology?
The Cold War ideological battle between communism and capitalism is today the technology race between China and the US.
Does the race for the chip replace the struggle between the market and the State?
China explores new ways of mixing authoritarianism and free market; and the power of the US today is its technology.
and the EU?
We are spectators of this race. Our only chance is to regulate them as a counterpower… Or submit.
