"I would rather be without a state than without a voice" E. Snowden.

      Communication in the internet age 

 By Luis Britto García: Every technological advance raises a utopian dream and a dystopian nightmare. The invention of the internet around 1990 generated enthusiastic expectations. Its own beginning was utopian. Its creator Tim Berners-Lee refused to register the patents that would have made him a billionaire, to make them available to humanity. A device originally appropriated by the military-industrial complex as an underground network invulnerable to atomic attack, became an instrument apparently available to all for the free exchange of messages and knowledge. If in the era in which we live the most precious asset is information, a channel that promised to multiply it and communicate it in a practically free and universal way seemed an open door to Utopia. 

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 This optimistic outlook was promptly closed. Just as all the goods at the disposal of humanity - land, water, minerals, biological organisms - were soon seized, the internet did not take long to fall under the power and plans of the operators. The network conceived to transmit messages did not take long to find whoever wanted to take ownership of them and through them their issuers. Currently, about 70% of global GDP is produced by the tertiary sector (finance, research, education, advertising, computing, entertainment) which in turn is managed through the Internet. Since the last century, the United States developed the system spy Echelon to decode bids in tenders and make American companies win them. Information, like surplus value, is expropriated from the society that creates it, and tends to be concentrated in fewer and fewer hands. To dominate the Net is to dominate the economy. 

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 All control over the economy becomes social control. The Internet and networks accumulate memberships that far exceed the citizenships of many sovereign states. At the beginning of 2021, 4.66 billion people use the internet: 59.5% of the world's population. 5.2 billion use cell phones, 66.6% of the planet's inhabitants. 4.2 billion people are trapped in social networks: 53.6% of earthlings. In these networks, Facebook alone gathers 2.74 billion people; You Tube, 2,291; Whats App, 2,000. Internet users spend an average of six hours and 54 minutes a day in it: the usual length of a working day (https://marketing4ecommerce.net/usuarios-de-internet-mundo/). These disproportionate clienteles are immeasurable markets that incessantly provide their operators with invaluable data and receive publicity and propaganda in return.

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 Let's imagine that a postal service, by the mere fact of transmitting correspondence, claimed the right to open all the letters it transmits and to use their content freely. Such a service would soon be denounced as an inadmissible instrument of tyranny and lose all its users. Such is the case of the internet. From the earliest times, first the governments, and then the network operators abusively attributed both privileges to themselves. Today, the user can be almost certain that all their messages are opened, scrutinized and used for their own purposes by the organizations that transmit them and their accomplices. Content analysis programs detect the presence of certain key words or constructions and alert surveillance mechanisms that apply tight controls over the senders of the message. In an advance of the siege, the channels install cookies on users' computers, spy programs that provide detailed information on the content of the computers and the messages they emit. These mechanisms bring all Internet users closer to a world of total control, in front of which the two-way television imagined by George Orwell seems like child's play, which not only transmitted images to the viewer, but also monitored all acts of East. 

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Espionage uses all kinds of devices capable of recording information. Edward Snowden decided to defect from the American intelligence services when he noticed that they were spying on telephones, and that the number of espionage devices dedicated to monitoring American citizens was greater than that applied against the rest of the world. It is almost impossible to open a web page without it informing us that it uses cookies to serve us better - actually, to spy on us better - and that the mere fact of using the page is equivalent to consent to host a spy on the device on which we depend. communication with the world. Some, in an innocent way, ask us from the beginning for our email password, which is like asking us at the same time for the key to the house, the car and the safe. But our so-called servants already have them: we are actually their servants. Web pages, social networks explicitly or implicitly attribute the right to use for their own purposes all the content that users circulate on them. It is as if a postal service claimed ownership of all the messages and objects entrusted to it. It is easy to understand what this means in a world where the fundamental economic good is information. To appropriate information is to appropriate the world.