Who rules the world today?
US-based big tech has more power and 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, delivering it to those 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 so that these platforms like Google, Amazon, Twitter and many others become rich.
Don’t they give us services?
One day historians will analyze this era and say that living 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 the Big Brother of today?
They have already taken away a large part of our sovereignty, because the decisions about that part of our lives that we already live on screens are not made in Catalonia, Brussels or Berlin: they are made in California.
But those megatech companies just want to boss us around to make more money.
Those borders between money and power of yesteryear are increasingly blurred today. Twitter, I quote one, run by Musk, decides our freedom of expression. And that technology conglomerate also places limits on our culture and values ??every day.
No one forces us to use Twitter.
But that does not prevent us from de facto depending on Twitter to be taken into account in the public debate. And they are going to direct us and regulate it for their pure economic interest, inseparable from the rest.
What prevents us from stopping using it?
That freedom is only virtual, because they also ensure that we have no alternatives to their platforms. In fact, they are libertarians; because that 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 democratic states, in whose sovereignty citizens are equal to you; if there is no State, send the money. So we are slaves without knowing it, which is the worst kind of slavery.
An even desired slavery?
The technological ones generate an immense prison, which are the networks, in which we get into looking for easy notoriety, distraction, even business, friendship, sex… In exchange for controlling us, exploiting ourselves, squeezing our attention.
In what sense?
The networks are like an immense panopticon, a watchman who sees everything and whom we make stronger and more powerful with our daily attention, more and more hours: our data, information, plans, lives…
Would Foucault have already denounced this stagnant domain long ago?
And not just Foucault. Any geopolitical analyst can verify today that Musk has been a more influential figure in Ukraine than many statesmen…
Their satellite networks guide the Ukrainians against Russia.
And Putin and Xi Jinping welcome you and have more respect for you than most of our leaders.
I of them would not measure myself with Musk.
Those billionaires have more power than states because they have a de facto monopolization of control and surveillance of billions of people. And that 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 concentration of power to extremes that we are not yet capable of imagining. They are a step in what Hanna Arendt defined as the main feature of totalitarianism: they normalize the lie until it is equated with the truth.
Is the truth only what ChatGPT and Google say?
We need more regulation, more control, and more counterpowers to our sovereignty over technology and its powerful people.
Is today’s ideology technology?
The ideological battle of the cold war 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 markets; and the power of the US today is its technology.
And the EU?
We are spectators in that race. Our only chance is to regulate them as a counterpower… Or submit.
