Symptoms of we don't know what

José María Lassalle said in a debate at the Ateneo de Madrid that “the networks are a symptom, although we don’t know very well of what”. I think that this intelligent imprecision allows us to understand the complexity of the moment we live in, where technology invades everything and transforms everything, but it does not give us clues to know where we are going as a civilization. We don’t even get to know if we’re going anywhere.

Social networks may be the symptom of a society where everyone feels empowered, even if they have nothing to say. We are running out of intellectuals to help us think about the world in exchange for exponentially increasing the number of blessed people who accumulate occurrences. In the Ateneo debate, the journalist Marta Peirano and the essayist Remedios Zafra, both researchers of the phenomenon of networks, also took part. But they did not agree on whether it is a new disruptive power or if we are dealing with new forms of the same old power.

Or maybe their owners are not part of the economic elites of the United States who have tried for the last century to control not only money, but also speech? But on top of that they have become more powerful, since they know everything about us and can end up swaying our votes. Lassalle wrote in one of his books that the Watergate case, which ended the career of President Richard Nixon, might not have occurred with the emotional firewalls that the networks are capable of deploying.

Chat GPT is the latest tool that can be useful in fields such as science or health, but which we are introducing into our lives with some frivolity, to the point that it is taking over the word. “He’s so good at holding a conversation with you, that you almost like him better than your boyfriend: he’s always attentive to what you say,” Peirano quipped.

But beyond the joke, the truth is that technology no longer aims only to sell products or ideologies, but also to replace us. Hopefully one day we won’t repeat Leonardo DiCaprio’s phrase at the end of Don’t Look It’s Coming, before the planet blows up: “Actually, if you think about it, we had it all.”