Control – The Illusion of Individual Freedom
24 July 2019 (Wall Street International)* — Our societies and our daily life are characterized by the exercise of control in everything that is done. Knowing laws, understanding protocols and their consequences creates capacity to deal with the system. Great allies are found in the digital world. Google is a wealth of information that allows reaching everything, one just needs to know how to type.
This digital world is aseptic, fast, and efficient for controllers as well as for the controlled. Each choice, each path is scripted, measured, watched. Cookies, the design of our trajectories on the web, exist, work, and are returned to us, users, in the form of suggestions for consumption.
Our profiles are elaborated, our motivational preferences are reviewed, and so the markets are expanded. Our digitalization process feeds the market and is truly driven by it. The control that we exercise is in short what allows the capture of data that are offered for continuity of control. Interfaces get confused.
Controllers and controlled ones are identified as faces of the same coin: they are the data that feed our current system, which cushion and amplify spectacles submitted to profit and consumption protocols.
The main social networks plan their algorithms from this referential – profit. Even if what comes about is a supposed ideological control, this is only an identifiable reference for market classifications.
How do you keep people as long as possible on the same platform without annoying them with posts antagonistic to their beliefs, without them thinking about going out or going off? By thematic classifications, for example, according to the most polarizing issues in each society, which quickly organize the data.
Moreover, the user facilitates and participates in the control mechanisms each time he/she assumes a fight flag in his/her profile: # elenão, #lulalivre, #orgulhogay, #orgulhohetero, #feminismo, #machismo, #proarmamentismo, #abaixoasarmas, #immigration, #HealthCareForAll, #AgainstTrump, #feminism, #sexism, #racism, #Proarms, #Againstarms, #AgainstBrexit etc.
Within the largest “bubbles”, which are each network/platform, and within the smallest “bubbles”, which are algorithm-based clusters composed of people of a similar nature in values and positioning, the market is maintained and enhances; thoughts circulate repeatedly, without oppositions, consequently without conflicts and without news.
Read more articles by Vera Felicidade de Almeida Campos, published in Human Wrongs Watch:
Dedication and Despair – Problems and Solutions
Intimacy – Being Completely There for the Other, for What Happens
Fear and Trembling – Masks and Images
Alienating Hedonism – Wishes and Bargains
Origin, Beginning and Causality
Infinite Human Resources – Fulfilled Lives, Shattered Lives
Madness – Strangeness and Paradox
FEROCITY – NETWORKS OF CRIME AND OPPRESSION
NEUROSIS AND THE HUMAN CONDITION – DESPAIR AND REALIZATION
2019 Human Wrongs Watch
