“Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.” Christian Lous Lange

                                   The neocapitalism of the cell god

By José Luis Lanao: The place that the gods used to occupy is now occupied by your cell phone. It is your conscience. He knows everything about you. He sleeps under your pillow, and he will be the informer who will justify against you if one day you fall into the hands of justice. In this collective submission lies the core of Modernity. There is something excessive that tires, not only in the appropriation of time but in the hypervisibility that connected life offers. We have settled into the realm of liberal hedonism, stopping “seeing” to look, dominated by a desire that is impossible to calm: overexposure to screens and an overabundance of information.

Some time ago we stopped "being" to be others, immersed in the duality of living two parallel lives: the real one and the one that must be taught in the virtual society. That vaporous world that we are told we must "be" in order not to cease to exist. A universe of “clicks” ordered in code labels carefully packaged by opaque algorithms that have generated a kind of Big Brother of emotions and consumption, reflected in virtual societies of deceit, dissimulation, interpretation and imposture. A kind of bloodless tyranny, apparently painless and kind, without tanks on the streets, but that gets to the bottom of what it wants: the massive dependence on the obsessions that it injects us with. A form of feudal neocapitalism, without competition or precedent, that has elbowed its way through knowledge and monitoring of our intimate lives. A nakedness of personal sovereignty that exposes us twice: when we hand over our data in exchange for relatively trivial services, and when these data are used to reify and structure a world that is neither transparent nor desirable to us. That usefulness of the useless, which makes the unnecessary necessary, and which manages to shape consciences for the consumption of emotions and products that are not needed, but are believed to be needed. That externalization of intimate life turned into a protector of global capital, absorbed in the superfluous, in the marketing of the self, and in the self-satisfaction of desires. 

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The search for happiness represents one of the cruelest paradoxes of today's society: an ever increasing possibility of experiencing it corresponds to a greater inability to obtain it. Thus we find the paradox of Polycrates: the unhappiness of being happy. That unbridled pursuit of the desired happiness, so close at hand according to virtual parameters, in a context where contact occurs through the digital medium and not in real life, and makes reality seem disappointing. The interactive action seems to offer more intense sensations than the real ones, as it is not conditioned by the anxiety or vulnerability that direct contact can cause. Thus, we have stopped "being" to look. A screen world where it becomes difficult to close your eyes or stop looking and delve into it. This submission of a world without eyelids weakens the ethical forms, of solidarity and citizenship, but also of own thought that requires subjects with eyelids, with reflection, with rationality and an intimate life. Virtual competition is about getting more eyes on both redeemable and new form of value. Absorbed gazes are coveted to be auctioned off in a frenetic market for attention. Although we are not expressly interested, it is interesting that we participate in the global control circuit: that by sharing what we do, the wheel turns, we leave traces, and this requires others to speak out, leaving traces and data to forecast us, being an active part of the control modes and productivity. They are extractive operations in which our personal experiences are packaged to turn them into associated data. No constructive reciprocity or exchange of value is established between the parties. Thus we "navigate" domesticated by the secrets and miseries of humanity, by its perversions, confidences, dreams, unspeakable desires and realities in an unstoppable "vanitas vanitatum" (vanity of vanities) where we turn out to be docilely trained, impelled by an impossible desire to calm down: overexposure to screens and an overabundance of information. A suggestion of individualities in a time of self-absorbed and softened subjectivities from contemplating ourselves so much. A virtual world that navigates the universe with such a chicken coop on its back.

The liquid society that Bauman predicted has already mutated its state and is beginning to be gaseous, caustic, more fluid than substantial, more dissolved than diluted. The civilizing urgency of the great principles that we declared to be universal yields to the data of reality. We inhabit with perplexed normality the era of the hoax, the zasca, the ancient arts of lynching, far from the slow, respectful and rational argument that replaces the outburst, the insult and the lie. In a sphere in which nobody cares about that immutable idea that was "the truth", which now turns out to be relative according to the algorithm. 

                               CELL PHONE SPY

 We have replaced solidarity with narcissism, and we have reached the point of identity tragedy of waking up every morning checking social networks to see if we still exist. That feeling of estrangement from reality that could serve to open up new ways of rethinking our place in the world. Asking what has led us here and how to move forward. 

 Brecht assured that one day they will also sing about dark times. Fate triumphs the moment we believe in it. We no longer have time to have time. To touch each other, get together, look at each other, talk to each other. To contemplate true life. To admire the tiny. That the beauty of the sun surprises you as it melts on the horizon. To savor a nap with the sound of cicadas, with half-lights of half-closed wood and curtains that inflate with the warm breeze of the evening. "Navigate" with calm calm on the delight of fragrant, beautiful, infinite life, and wish that this miracle of disconnected life occurs again tomorrow, or the day after tomorrow, accompanied by the warm and faint dew of early morning. “Technology is a useful servant but a dangerous master.” Christian Lous Lange