The empire of technology: privatization and hacking of our minds

                             The empire of technology: privatization and hacking of our minds

 By Carlos X. Blanco: We live and suffer from a technological world. Techné, the first part of the word, refers to the “applied arts”. Today we immediately think of robots, computers, and pharmaceutical or genetic engineering laboratories, but in the ancient world these "arts" were manual trades. 

For its part, the second Greek root of the word, “logos”, refers to the rational discourse that, in this case, gives body and understanding to the set of applied arts of each era. Since the 18th century, in a very contrasted way with respect to the classical and medieval world, technology refers to the use of natural resources, on the one hand, and to the rationalization of productive work. In that century of industrial revolution and of "lights", the 18th century, as Marx has well known, the gestation of the Idea of ​​Production developed.

 Only with this idea, crossing various technical and scientific categories, could the science of Political Economy be created. In Production, the physical-natural aspects of the economic life of peoples (energy, energy transformations in the environment) and the anthropological aspects (social relations of production, work organization). 

The explosion of information, communication and control technologies today resembles an atomic mushroom that leaves us blind, as charged with narcotic radioactivity, incapable of reacting to changes so accelerated that they seem to condemn the peoples to their slavery and violence. most unworthy passivity. The computerization of tasks, the mechanization and digitization of all processes, the “dematerialization” of national economies (which, in reality, conceals industrial relocation and the intensification of the international division of labor) have taken everyone by surprise. popular resistance movements. Much of the left, especially in the West, has been carried away by the illusions of "dematerialization." To the extent that in the hitherto opulent countries capital has withdrawn almost all the active youth, and also an important part of the adults, separating them from the primary and secondary productive processes, this illusion has only grown. The dissolution of the concept of "proletariat" has nothing to do with the dissolution of exploitation. This exploitation continues, and has even intensified in recent decades, but at the cost of a greater international division of labor and at the cost of the creation of ever larger inactive layers in the affluent world. In Europe, the factory proletarian is hardly visible, but many multiform classes of exploited and victims of the new capitalism abound. 

 The affluent world is ceasing to be so, and very significantly Europe. Europe is sinking more and more, unable to sustain its low birth rate (a bad omen for a productive life of its nations) and the invasion of human contingents of difficult labor exploitation (now called "integration"). The relocation of industries and attacks on the countryside result in the creation of larger and larger layers of the population "who have nothing to do", layers that are partly statistically disguised by a) pseudo-education, a very long training in time, where young people cease to be young sitting in classrooms where they will obtain “garbage-titles”, b) indoctrination in the “culture” of leisure and entertainment, with a view to not being layers that cause social disturbances and unrest , an objective that is tried to be achieved by means of the cheap distractions that are provided to them ("panem et circenses"). These new layers of parasites function as agents that give fluidity to the circulatory system, as unproductive consumers, of that same alienating industry.

Within the opulent world that is ceasing to be so, people allow themselves to be indoctrinated by the big technology companies that make available to subjects "intelligent" electronic devices increasingly designed for leisure and not production, as well as computer applications, digital platforms, electronic messaging, etc. that only partially respond to commercial, academic needs and advantages, etc. and mostly serve for “entertainment”. Those big companies, especially those that incorporate artificial intelligence tools, are proceeding with a real hacking or “hacking” of human brains and minds. Such mind hacking consists of 1) dislodging from human minds the need to think and memorize for themselves, 2) dislodging from human minds the generative capacity for ideas of their own, including the critical ideas needed to subvert the System when this System it is gaining degrees of totalitarianism and self-perpetuation, and 3) separating large masses of the population from the culture of productive work and self-sufficiency. The "Big Brother" is going to be, at the same time, the Big Redistributor: from the crumbs of the surplus value produced in the new forms of "immaterial industry" or "knowledge society", "digital content" will be provided (which includes violence, pornography, addictive games and indoctrination) enough to a sufficient number so that the business does not stop. The "material" economy goes to the back room, as is evident and necessary in capitalism from the very beginning, and the back room is the group of "developing" countries where there are not so many legal obstacles to exploitation in those productive branches where there are still hands, bodies, raw materials, etc. are needed. 

The big "information and knowledge" technology companies, the GAFAM (Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon...) are carrying out a real hacking of human knowledge made by and for people. Inadvertently, every time a person publishes content on the web, he is doing more than just "sharing" information: he is giving it away for free to those companies that, in turn, will redistribute it according to their interests. From a simple “like” to a brainy report, everything “shared” is exploitable material for these knowledge pirates. 

 All of us users are handing over our information and our share of neural work to companies that will convert it into capital. Analogous to the primitive system of domiciliary capitalism, in which the workers did part of the process in their own homes and at their own expense, long before the rise of large factories, today we are witnessing forms of free work, and even unconsciously, at the service of the big technology companies. The COVID pandemic has served to accelerate this new “work from home”.

 It should be noted that these technology companies are even privatizing education. In Spain, cases have already been detected in which these giants get in touch with public educational centers and promise "gifts" to their management teams or to teachers adhering to certain "virtual classroom" programs. In the mandatory implementation of certain programs for the use of electronic tablets in schools (for example, in Castilla-La Mancha the "Carmenta" program) putting away paper books, we observe with concern how certain private companies, such as Google, make blow, with the data of thousands of children who are given their own accounts to access messaging, the cloud and Google accounts, with all the utilities. Google, apparently, generously "gives" children and educational administrations free tools aimed at virtualizing teaching. 

 In reality, Google does nothing but recruit thousands and thousands of users with the help of the government and with the coercive aspect that is present in the stages of schooling that, being compulsory (primary and secondary) also include the obligation of certain tools.

 Tools, by the way, that as some experts have pointed out (Dr. Manfred Spitzer, for example) do not have any scientifically demonstrable advantage over traditional and non-digital methods. On the contrary, they are highly harmful tools, which prevent the brain from making an effort to memorize, in the autonomous resolution of complex tasks, which cause hyperactivity, inability to pay attention, addiction, in addition to a host of symptoms that coincide with a true dementia.

 The GAFAM are pirating the collective knowledge made by people and from people, and once they become parasitic intermediaries, they become companies that can redistribute everyone's knowledge by pretending to be necessary.