I-Selfism, the internet our new religion

I SELFISM The internet our new religion

Lorenzo Columbo Design innovation and citizenship 2018

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

Dedicated to my family, to those who continue to teach me and to those who recently arrived that will learn from the best.

To the Scots, who with their thousand shades of gray sky, do not make you ever bored.

To all those from overseas who shared a little of them with me.

PROCESS

Step 1.

The first step of this project was dedicated to research and understanding.

Primary focus on books acknowledges and comparison. To completely understand and explore the contrasting forces and the different theories on the internet, technology mechanisms and the actual information society structure.

Step 2.

The second step was dedicated to the connections and analysis.

I spent a lot of time managing to map in a structured way this vast research.

It could have been organized in many ways and in all circumstances created different possibilities and new gaps to fill.

Through interviews and the acquisition of different perspective I started defining the different passable paths.

Step 3.

The third and final step was dedicating to definition and production.

Once defined the narrative in which I could have address effectively all the different levels of related problems, I focused on the representation of them.

Having the possibility to re-evaluate and reflects on the contents.

Research / Understanding

Connections / Analysis

Definition / Production

INTRO

‘Most people think that, in the last few decades, we have managed to rein in famine, plague, and war. Of course, these problems have not been completely solved, but they have been transformed from the incomprehensible and uncontrollable forces of nature into manageable challenges. For the first time in history, more people die today from overeating than from eating too little; more people die from old age than from infectious diseases, and more people commit suicide than are killed by soldiers, terrorists, and criminals combined. In a healthy, prosperous world, what will demand our attention and ingenuity? This question becomes urgent given the immense new powers that biotechnology and information technology are providing us with.

What will we do with all that power? As a fair statement is exceptionally naive. Still, what about the billions of people currently living on less than 2 pounds a day? Wars raging in Syria and Iraq? What about the ongoing AIDS crisis in Africa?’

Yuval Noah Harari,’Homo Deus, A Brief History of Tomorrow’, 2016

Technology is re-shaping democracy and the social order as we know it. It can be said that Technology is currently winning battle, crushing its diminished opponents.

By “Technology” in the following reflection, I specifically mean the digital technologies associated with Silicon Valley, social media platforms, big data, mobile technology and artificial intelligence, that are increasingly dominating our economic, political and social life. With hindsight, it is obvious that these technologies have made us more informed, wealthier and, in some ways, happier. After all, technology tends to expand human capabilities, produce new opportunities and increase productivity. It also grants us access to further information and ideas, new ways to pool knowledge and coordinate action. However, in exchange for the undeniable benefits of technological progress and greater personal freedom, we seem to have allowed too many other fundamental components of our lives to be compromised and undermined: control, parliamentary sovereignty, economic equality, civil society and an informed citizenry.

In fact, the rise of smart machines is limiting our capacity for moral judgment. Moreover, this reconfiguration brings new threats: smart machines might replace human decision-makers, transforming political choices in ways we do not fully understand. Invisible algorithms are creating new, sources of power and injustice. The more the world becomes connected, the easier it will be for a small number of actors to cause immense damage and harm. The funniest things? We do not have a clue on how to deal with these problems.

Now, you might think I am being hypocritical since, it is true, I regularly use multiple technologies from Silicon Valley. Like many of us, I simultaneously rely on, love and detest most technologies I will write about. Over the time my optimism towards technologies has drifted into realism and then morphed into nervousness. I am now genuinely concerned about the long-term prospects of our society. It is not my intention to demonise the workers in Silicon Valley as I believe most of them are driven by their faith in the emancipatory powers of digital technologies, many of which are seductive. This is exactly what makes them potentially more dangerous. People in Silicon Valley believe in constructing a world based on utopic abstract principles dictated by connectivity, networks, platforms, and data.

All of these thoughts are well presented in the book “The Circle” by Dave Eggers, (2013).

This thesis is a journey that intends to subvert the dominant mindset and

ideology in which the internet is proclaimed to be the ultimate liberator of the individual. To do so, I am hoping to be thorough enough to avoid expressing an equally reductive train of thought that would only achieve to invert our current and positive reading of the internet to an all negative one, considering it as the ultimate oppressor instead.

. Why is that relevant?

All goods and services are designed. Faced with any given situation we

feel the urge to ponder it, to make it better and to design. We act in order to create an improved situation. This impulse goes back to our prehuman ancestors. Today the word design is overused and means many things.

However, the process of designing is always more than a general, abstract way of working. Design takes a concrete form in the work of the service professions that meet human needs in a broad range of making and planning disciplines. The practice of design today requires advanced knowledge. It involves both higher technical skills and a qualitatively informed thinking that emerges in response to the demands of the information society and the economy to which it gives rise.

Donald Norman writes in 2010: ‘Designers often fail to understand the complexity of the issues and the depth of knowledge already known. They claim that fresh eyes produce novel solutions, but then they wonder why these solutions are seldom implemented, or if implemented, why they fail. Fresh eyes can indeed produce insightful results, but the eyes must also be educated and knowledgeable.

Designers often lack the important understanding complex issues, about the interlocking complexities of human and social behavior, about the behavioral science, technology, and business. There is little or no training in science, the scientific method, and experimental design.’

On one level design is a general human process used to understand and shape our world. However, we cannot address this process or the world in its general, abstract form. So when futurologists express their techno-utopian vision and manipulate us to consider a “happy-ever-after” idea of life with technology as the solution to all of our problems, there is no room left for doubt or complexity. Everything and everyone becomes a stereotype, and social and cultural rules remain unchanged. Even though technology is evolving, everything will remain the same. The process is simple, predicting patterns of behavior in regards to technological developments. The resulting scenarios further develops and reinforces the status quo rather than

challenges it.

Consequently, electronic products and services that could become a medium for experiencing complex aesthetic situations and both enrich and expand our experience of everyday life rather restrict it. To avoid this and make use of their real potential, designers would have to think about these products and services very differently.

Agonism, perhaps the most fundamental purpose of “adversarial design� expressed by Carl Di Salvo, is a condition of forever looping contestation where the ongoing disagreement and confrontation are not detrimental to the endeavor of democracy but are productive of the democratic conditions.

The foundation of agonism is a commitment to contestation and dissensus as an integral, productive, and meaningful aspects of the democratic society.

To claim that adversarial design does the work of agonism means that designed objects or manifestation can function to prompt understanding of political issues and relations, express dissensus, and enable contestational claims and arguments.

To organise my thoughts and help you reflect on the matter and form your own opinion, I organised my ideas according to the following headers: The Internet - The information society - Our identity.

Technology is developing so rapidly now, that reflection and criticism are particularly critical. We need to consider alternative visions to those put forward by the industry. Design, being accessible, contemporary and part of the culture, is ideally positioned to perform this role. But in order to achieve this, some significant shift needs to occur. We need to develop a parallel design activity that questions and challenges industrial agendas.

As designers we should exploit our privileged position to explore a subversive role as a social critique. Free from commercial restrictions and based in an educational environment, we could develop provocative design proposals to challenge the consumer vision of the electronic industry.

The internet has allowed people to be connected with similar-minded people all over the world. As we channel energy into making new friends around the world, we no longer need to care about our immediate neighbours. This general dissatisfaction with existing models coupled with new forms of bottom-up democracy further enhanced by social media, makes this a perfect time to revisit our social dreams and ideas as well as the role of design in facilitating alternative visions rather than defining them.

STRUCTURE In the “journey” that has become the attempt to make sense of a complex

vision of the information society per se and of how it affects us, I have been influenced by the agonism mentality.

It has lead me to approach the same problem from three different angles: - The internet is considered unique. (Mythification of the internet) - The loss and shaping of our identity caused by the mechanisms of the internet. (Problem that we face as individuals and that confuse us) - Who is really in charge: us or the internet?

. Algorithm I encountered the term ‘algorithm’ when trying to understand what emotions are and how the brain functions. It can be defined as a methodological set of steps that can be used to make calculations, resolve problems and reach decisions. In illiterate societies, people make all predictions and choices in their head. In literate societies, people are organised into networks, so that each person is only a small step in a vast algorithm, and it is the algorithm as a whole that makes the crucial decisions. This is the essence of bureaucracy. Digitally an algorithm is a simple mathematical technique, a set of instructions that a computer follows in order to execute a command.

. Data The term ‘data’ is defined here as every action taken digitally or translated digitally. If we imagine the internet as a new world, then we are algorithms, and our molecules are data.

Our data are mined with no compensation. We can be banished from platforms for any or no reason, and we cannot not participate without incurring severe social and economic consequences. This is a serious class issue, and worth calling attention to.

MYTH META LEVEL MONOTHEISM CULT SOCIAL LEVEL CLERGY IDENTITY LEVEL

CAPITAL SINS

INDEX

1 2 3

MYTH . Holy internet

MONOTHEISM CULT . Politics . Economy

4

CLERGY

. Protestants

5 6

CAPITAL SINS CONCLUSION

MYTH

1

Myths consist of narratives that play a fundamental role in society.

The most effective religious myth is probably the one about requital beyond the grave and has been instituted by Christianity. In the 1980’s a new Myth was born (not so different.)

If humans rule the world today, it is because they alone can cooperate flexibly in large numbers. We humans tend to think that we are unique, and that we deserve all kind of privileges. As proof of our entitlement, we point out that we built the pyramids and the Great Wall of China, we deciphered the structure of atoms and the DNA molecules. But what give humans the ability to construct such large and sophisticated social systems? It is not through intimate relations. It is through storytelling. Humans follow sets of rules, some of which only exists only in our imagination, and that we truly believe to be as true and inviolable as gravity. All large-scale human cooperation is ultimately based on our belief in these stories. People believe that there are only two types of realities: objective realities and subjective realities. In objective reality, things exist independently of our beliefs and feelings. Gravity, for example, existed before Newton and affects people who do not believe in it just as much as people who do. Subjective reality, in contrast, depends on personal beliefs and feelings. Hence once they satisfy themselves that something isn’t just their subjective feeling, they jump to the conclusion it must be objective. God, money and nations must, therefore, be objective realities. However, the third level of reality has been identified: the intersubjective level. These entities (Intersubjective reality) depends on communication and interaction, vetweenmany humans rather than on the beliefs and feelings of individuals. Money, for example, has no objective value. You cannot eat, drink or wear a pound note. As long as the majority of people believe in its value, you can use it to buy food, beverages, and clothing. The same can happen to gods, laws and even nations but we do not accept that our God, our country or our values are fictitious because these are the things that give meaning to our lives. So, we can say that humans rule the world because they can weave an intersubjective web of meaning: a network of laws, forces, entities, and places that exist purely in their collective imagination.

Other animals can also imagine various other things, but not chimeras that they have never seen or smelled or tasted. Historians and social scientists seek to understand the development of intersubjective entities like gods and nations, whereas biologists hardly recognise the existence of such things. In contrast, we humans don’t ignore objective factors such as climate changes and genetic mutations, but we give more importance to the stories people invent and believe. In the twenty-first-century fiction might become the most potent force on earth, as human fantasies are translated into genetic and electronic codes while the intersubjective reality seems to swallow up the objective reality, and biology is about to merge with history.

With the new century technologies are likely to make such fictions more and more powerful. To understand our future we need to understand how stories about Christ, the French revolution, and Apple become so influential.

Here is a link to the 1984 Apple’s Macintosh Commercial. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VtvjbmoDx-I Humans think they make History, but History revolves around this web of fictional stories. The basic abilities of humans have not changed much since the Stone age. Today, corporations are fictional legal entities that own property, lend money, hire employees and initiate economic enterprises. In the ancient cities, the gods functioned as legal entities that could own fields and slaves, give and receive loans, pay salaries and build dams and canals. The gods didn’t run their businesses, for the simple reason that they didn’t exist

anywhere except in the human imagination.

To be clear: fiction is not bad. It is vital. Without commonly accepted stories about things like money, states or corporations, no complex human society could function. However, the stories are just tools. They should not become our goals. When we forget that they are fictional, we lose touch with reality.

Then we enter entire wars ”to make a lot of money for the corporations” or “to protect the national interest. “Corporations, money, and nations have been invented to serve us.

Without any doubt, humankind is the one dominant species in the world. As humans, we also like to believe that we have a superior moral status and that our life has much higher value than the lives of other animals. We love telling ourselves that we enjoy some magical quality that only accounts for our immense power, but also gives a moral justification to our privileged status. The traditional monotheist answer is that only humans have eternal souls. Whereas the body decays and rots, the soul journeys on towards salvation or damnation, and will experience either everlasting joy in paradise or an eternity of misery in hell. Because other animals have no soul, they don’t take part in this cosmic plan. However, our latest scientific discoveries contradict this monotheism myth. There is zero scientific evidence that in contrast to other animals, humans have souls. Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution already proved us that. This is a terrifying understanding not only to religious people but also to those who do not hold any specific religious dogma but want to believe each human possesses an eternal individual essence that remains unchanged throughout life and even survives after death.

In ‘Homo Deus’, Harari writes: ‘Modernity is a deal. All of us sign up to this deal on the day we are born, and it regulates our lives until the day we die. The entire contract can be summarised in a single phrase: humans agree to give up meaning in exchange for power. Until modern times most cultures believed that humans played a part in some grand cosmic plan.’ The plan was given to us by the gods or by the laws of nature and it cannot be changed by humans. It is the cosmic plan that gave meaning to human life, but that also restricted human power. Humans were like actors on a stage. Now, modern culture has the proves and rejects this belief in a vast cosmic plan. We are no longer actors in any more massive drama. Life has no script and no meaning. From our scientific understanding, the universe is a purposeless process. The modern world does not believe in purpose, only in cause, therefore humans cannot be confined to predetermined roles. We can do everything we want. Nothing except our ignorance constrains us. If no paradise awaits us after death, we can still create our heaven here on earth and enjoy it more than we can. The possibility of omnipotence is an enormous temptation to humans. It stands in front of us, almost within our reach.

On the practical level modern life consists of a constant pursuit of power within a universe devoid of meaning continuingly growing, reinventing, researching and discovering itself.

So an obvious consequence for us has been dominating the world by individualism, human rights, democracy, and free-market. Science, however, is undermining the foundations of liberal order. Because science doesn’t deal with questions of value, it cannot determine whether liberals are right in valuing liberty, more than equality, or in evaluating the individuals more than the collective. Liberalism like every other religion is based not only on abstract ethical judgments but also on what it believes to be a factual statement. And these accurate statements don’t stand up to rigorous scientific scrutiny. Liberals value individual liberty because they think humans have

free will. According to liberalism, the decisions of voters and customers are neither deterministic nor random. External forces and chance events of course influence people, but at the end of the day, each of us can decide things for ourselves. This is the reason liberalism gives so much importance to individuals, and instructs us to follow our heart and to do what feels right.

It is our free will that inculcates the universe with meaning. No outsider can know how one will think or predict one’s choices for sure. Scientifically, the sacred word “freedom” turns out to be, just like “soul,” a hollow term empty of any discernible meaning. Free will exist only in the fictional stories we humans have invented. When confronted with such scientific explanations people often brush them aside, pointing out that they feel free and that they act according to their wishes and decisions. This is true. Humans act according to their desires, and so do chimpanzees and dogs. But the question is not whether other animals or humans can act upon their inner desires, the main point is if they can choose their desires in the first place. Today we can predict people’s desires and decisions using brain scanners well before they are aware of them. At the beginning of this millennium, liberalism is threatened not by the philosophical idea that “there are no free individuals,” but rather by concrete technologies. We are about to face a wave of handy devices, tools, and structures that make no allowance for the free will of individual human.

Scientific theories could be interpreted as the new form of myth. Modern science certainly changed the rules of the game, yet it did not merely replace myths with facts. Myths continue to dominate humankind, and science only makes these myths stronger. Instead of destroying the intersubjective reality, science will enable it to control the objective and subjective facts more thoroughly than ever before. Thanks to computers and bioengineering, the difference between fiction and reality will blur, as people reshape reality to match their fantasies. Now, religion is created by humans rather than by gods, and its social function defines it. Religion legitimises social structures by arguing that they reflect superhuman laws that we did not invent and that we cannot change. Usually, we identify science and religion as the complete opposite. Though science deals only with facts, religion never confines itself to ethical judgments. Religion, anyway, cannot provide us with any practical guidance unless it makes some factual claims too, and here it may well collide with science. The most important segment of many religious dogmas are not their ethical principles, but rather factual statements such as “God exists,” “the Pope is never wrong.” These are all factual claims. So, when religions advertise themselves, they tend to emphasise their excellent values.

However, God often hides behind factual statements. Religion tends to turn factual statements into ethical judgments. For instance the statement “God wrote the Bible” mutates into an ethical injunction “you have to believe that God wrote the Bible.”

Conversely, ethical judgments often hide within them factual statements because they think they have been proven beyond doubt. Although science contributes to ethical debates much more than we commonly believe, there is a line it cannot cross. Without the guidance of some religion, it’s impossible to maintain large-scale social orders. Religion provides an ethical justification for scientific research, and in exchange gets to influence the scientific agenda and the uses of scientific discoveries. As individuals, scientists and priests may give immense importance to the truth; but as collective institutions, science and religion prefer order and power over reality. Modern society believes in humanist dogmas, and use science not to question these dogmas, but preferably in order to implement them.

. Holy internet In 1995, left-wing academics Richard Barbrook and Andy Cameron detailed

the philosophy and ideas of the new tech, which they labeled as “The Californian Ideology.” It was appealing because it offered a way out of the traditional political struggles over wealth distribution or fairness. A profound faith in the emancipatory qualities of technology allowed the techies to promise that when the revolution arrived everyone would be great and cool and fulfilled and rich. All you needed to get to utopia was a belief in ‘disruption’, in the idea that progress is achieved through smashing up old industries and institutions and replacing them with something new and digital. Steve Jobs, once a hippy and later a ruthless businessman, incarnated perfectly the Californian Ideology. Over the past years, the big companies in Silicon Valley have carefully cultivated this ideology. Even though they are massive multi-billion-dollar corporations, they pitch themselves as anti-establishment; even though they are built on a model of data extraction and surveillance capitalism, they purport to be promoting exciting and liberating technologies as well as about social justice and equality. The I-phones and web browsers we now all use have carried this ideology, around the world, infecting us with this idea of disruption as liberation. Total individualism is a synonym for empowerment and gadgets equal progress. They have insinuated themselves in our lives and minds so well, that we are no longer able to imagine a world without them. Nowadays, many humans idealize the internet has a sort of higher consciousness. The internet had become a powerful myth, one of a singular, interconnected, and fragile network. It constrains our imaginations and ties our hands in responding to genuine problems that have emerged as by various data platforms once have become interconnected and easily accessible. From that point of view, today, virtually every story is bound to have an “Internet” angle. A historical debate on the internet and the tendency to not distinguish the different part that constitute it. To synthesize this concept I will refere here to a provocative quote of Zittrain: ‘we wouldn’t have a conference here about electricity and how it could be used for good or evil.’ It’s not that our Internet thought leaders are insincere or inclined only to say things that will secure them better consulting projects, even though, occasionally, this seems like a factor. They believe their own epochalist rhetoric. We don’t realize that virtually every generation has felt like it was on the edge of a technological revolution for the last hundred years or so.

Be it the telegraph age, the radio age, the plastic age, the nuclear age, or the television age. Gordon Crovitz in the Wall Street Journal’s writes that: “whatever the mix of good and bad, technology only advances and cannot put back.” Or Nick Bilton, in The New York Times’, notes that: “ Whether it’s good or bad for society... is somewhat irrelevant at this point.” All these commentators adopt the what Evgeny Morozov calls ‘digital defeatism’, where technology has its own agenda, tends to acknowledge implicitly or explicitly that there is little we humans can do about it. This view of technology as an autonomous force has its own rather intellectual pedigree. Kevin Kelly, one of the major exponents of this theory and author of the book “What technology wants.” coins the fancy word, ‘Technium’, that stands for “Technology” with a capital T, telling his readers that ‘the technium wants what we design it to want and what we try to direct it to do.’ In this sentence, Kelly offers a

great vision of the internet. He defines technology as both what we make of it and as an autonomous force with its wants and desire, largely independent of humans. Kelly shaped a theory that mimics the evolution of genetic organisms.

Who would want to challenge nature? He pushes the pro-innovation ideology, “the first response to a new idea should be to immediately try it out and keep testing as long as it exists.”

The most influencing tech guru Ray Kurzweil declared an underlying message: technology is perpetually making things better and more abundant, for “when seen through the lens of technology, few resources are truly scarce; they’re mainly inaccessible.” In ‘Abundance’ a book co-written by Peter Diamandis, he promises us a world of abundance that will necessarily require no sacrifice from anyone, and since no one’s interests will be hurt, politics itself will be unnecessary. In fact, thanks to technology all problems can be fixed locally, bypassing entrenched interests; ‘In today’s hyperlinked world, solving problems anywhere solve problems everywhere.’

Not everyone is so optimistic about the spirit of the internet and technology voluntary. However, in any discussion on the internet, today is not taking into consideration the political, social and economic implications. Also, no one else better than a technician could have something to say on the arguments without slowing down the so-called “innovation” process.

The idea that the Internet supports the oppressed rather than the oppressor could be identified as cyber-utopianism. He’s a naïve belief in the emancipatory nature of online communication that rests on a stubborn refusal to acknowledge its downside. We tend to explain everything by making the Internet both the starting point and the main actor of the explanation. Prioritizing the tool over the environment, ignoring the context completely. An example is the Arab Spring revolution that happened in 2009. Where Twitter had an important role in publicising what was happening. It allowed activist movements to explain and fight dictatorship/censorship. However, there is no way to assess Twitter importance without looking beyond itself because we need to compare its contribution with some non-internet factors. ‘If a tree falls in the forest and everybody tweets about it, it may not be the tweets that moved it,’ Evgeny Morozov dicit. The event is remembered more for the consideration of the tool itself rather than for the event.

If we take a step back, we could also understand how the same social media platforms, are also used by the same censoring regimes to surveil and control the population and eventual acts of dissents.

“The internet” is seen as revolutionary because of factor X, but the same factor X is seen as revolutionary because of “the Internet.” No optimism or pessimism.

The criticism matters only if the phenomena they are criticising are seen as unprecedented.

As an ideology that tends to be universal is declaring to be neutral towards how the technology works. It is not a question of good or bad; everything depends on the impact. So even after analysis deduction, until we do not see tangible results, we cannot evaluate if such a mechanism or possibility is worth it or not.

Sorry to disagree, but is too comfortable in that way do not take responsibility for our decisions. But sincerely, who is today mad enough to challenge the virtues of proving more information, the direct result of self-tracking, to facilitate decision making? Or finding new incentives to get people interested in saving humanity, fighting climate change, or participating in politics?

In all of that, we often forgot that the Internet, the bane of public debates, also contains many stories about innovation, surveillance, capitalism that have little to do with its infrastructure per se. If the businesses and companies over the internet-work and are structured in that way, there is a reason and is not the

unique possibility that we have. The internet is just a reflection of our values and purposes. Unlikely to say, has always been and will be the efficiency to profits.

A good exercise could be to take a moment and consider, whom you rely on regarding problems outside your personal sphere?

It’s no longer the state, but the modern tech-geek superhero. Space travel and climate change have fallen to Tesla and SpaceX. Facebook gets to decide what free speech is and battle against fake news, while Amazon’s funds’ scholarships. Let’s imagine we might run the National Health Service like Uber, while Airbnb style room rentals for patients who needed to stay overnight. It’s not too bad as a prospect, right?

The internet can be invoked to provide a quick and easy (invariably wrong) explanation. We don’t usually question the sources and accuracy of such internet driven explanations. We just rely on the easy widespread habit of: ‘let me google it, just a sec.’

2

MONOTHEISM

Monotheism is a myth involving one sole God. Polytheism is a myth

involving many Gods. Christianity’s “Trinity” doctrine consists of a single God that manifests three ways. Scientists and theologians puzzle over this contradiction 3 = 1.

In this unique’ period, evolutionary pressures have accustomed humans to see the world as a pie. If somebody eats a larger slice of the pie, somebody else inevitably gets a smaller slice. A particular family or city may prosper, but humankind as a whole is not going to produce more than it provides today. Accordingly, traditional religions sought ways to solve humanity’s problems with the help of current resources, either by redistributing the existing pie or by promising a pie in the sky. Modernity, in contrast, is based on the belief that economic growth is essential. This fundamental dogma can be summarized in one simple idea: ‘If you have a problem, you probably need more stuff; and to have more stuff, you must produce more of it.’ Modernity has turned more stuff into the panacea applicable to almost all public and private problems. Free-market capitalism has a firm answer. Invest your profits in increasing growth. We overcome the problem of resource scarcity, with a unique catastrophic nemesis, the ecological collapse. If all industries pollute the atmosphere and the oceans causing global warming and mass extinctions, then we should build virtual worlds and hi-tech sanctuaries to provide us with all the right things in life, even if the planet becomes as hot, dreary and polluted hell.

I call this attitude blind solutionism, and apparently, the internet has allowed “solutionists” to significantly expand the scope of their interventions, operating experiments on a much bigger scale. It has also given rise to a new set of beliefs. The conviction that we are living through unique, revolutionary times, in which the previous truths no longer holds, everything is changing, and the need to “fix things” runs as high as ever. In short, we are eliminating inefficiency, ambiguity, and disorder, while also providing some new justification for doing so. But it has also supplied them we a set of assumptions about both how the world works and how it should work, recasting many issues and debates from just an Internet point of view. Internet-centric manner relates to the Internet very much like scientism refers to science, with no dissenting viewpoints.

As the Internet makes technological fixes cheaper, the temptation to apply them even more aggressively and indiscriminately also grows. When technology promises so much and demanded so little, the urge for a quick fix is, indeed, irresistible. In most organizations, low cost, especially in times of technological change, is usually a strong enough reason to try something, even if it makes little strategic sense. When it’s so easy and cheap to start a social network site, a common gut reaction is usually “it should be done.”

There is no incentive, to point out that one needs to fight other, non-technological problems, because actually, with the same technology is just mitigating the social consequences of the problem itself, proposing fixes, which attack symptom but not the roots of the cause. When technological fixes fail, their proponents are usually quick to suggest another, more effective technological fix as a remedy, and fight fire with fire. This explains when we fight climate change by driving cars that are more fuel efficient and protect ourselves from internet surveillance by relying on tools that encrypt our messages and conceal our identity.

In an open system made by large and interconnected networks of systems, amount of a solution can become inputs of other problems. We are often considering different issues in the same way. Intellectual, challenging and

undefined symptoms open another question, with early identifiable and accessible to solve one.

BinCam, a new project from researchers in Britain and Germany, is a good example of this. It seeks to modernize how we deal with garbage by making over bins smarter and more social. The bin is equipped with a tiny smartphone that snaps a photo every time someone throws something away, all of this, to document what exactly has been thrown away, by who, each time.

After this data is collected and analysed, the amount of recyclable items, food items etc., discarded by each individual is determined, who then receive a weekly score. Scores and photographs can then be shared. The aim of this project is to turn recycling into a game, an exciting competition.

However, the ethics of the project and the solutions its implements are questionable. Should we get one set of citizens to the right thing by getting another set of citizens to spy on them? Should we introduce game incentives in the process that has previously worked through appeals to one’s duties and obligations? Will participants stop doing the right thing if their Facebook friends are no longer watching?

And lastly, even if one doesn’t share the pictures, how is one affected or benefits from the surveillance systems of the bins, that check and evaluate ones ’daily routine in regards to food preferences and waste production.

What will happen once this data is made available to other companies?

This tendency of solutionism is evidently and widely spreading and seems to say that our purpose is to be handed a solution for the majority of the problems we are currently facing.

This form of deal offers us power and peace of mind but on the condition that we renounce our belief in a vast cosmic plan that gives meaning to life.

If humans somehow manage to find meaning without predicating it upon some great cosmic plan, this is not considered a breach of contract. The great political, artistic and religious project of modernity has been to find a meaning to life that is not rooted in some grand cosmic plan. The humanist “religion” expects humanity to play the part that God played for Christianity, Judaism and Islam, or the laws of nature played in Buddhism and Daoism.

Humans from within their inner experiences must draw not only the meaning of their own lives but also the meaning of the entire universe.

This meaning is supposed to be obtained through knowledge.

The scientific revolution proposed a formula for knowledge: KNOWLEDGE = EMPIRICAL DATA X MATHEMATICS. If we want to know the answer to some question, we need to gather relevant empirical data and then use mathematical tools to analyse them.

Humanism offered an alternative. As human gained confidence in themselves, there is a new formula to acquire ethical knowledge: KNOWLEDGE = EXPERIENCES X SENSITIVITY. If we wish to know the answer to any moral question, we need to connect to our inner experiences and observe them with the utmost sensitivity. In the twenty-first century, humans will try to attain immortality, bliss, and divinity. It merely reflects the traditional ideals of liberal humanism. Since humanism has long sanctified the life, the emotions and the desires of human beings, it’s hardly surprising if a humanistic civilisation will want to maximise human lifespans, human power, and human happiness.

Actually, when consider human happiness, we notice that we our prospective on the subjects has already changed utterly.

Throughout history numerous thinkers have defined happiness as the supreme good, over life itself, making finding the key to joy a crucial goal.

Contemporary scepticism about the afterlife drives humankind to seek not

only immortality but also earthly happiness. Despite our unprecedented accomplishments in the last few decades, it is far from evident that contemporary individuals are significantly more satisfied than their predecessors.

Indeed, despite higher prosperity, comfort, and security, the rate of suicide in the developed world is also much higher than in traditional societies.

Even if we were to provide free food for everybody, cure all diseases and ensure world peace, it wouldn’t mean we would achieve real happiness.

We can divide this idea at a psychological and a biological level. From a psychological perspective, happiness depends on expectations rather than objective conditions. We become satisfied when reality matches our expectations. Dramatic improvements in circumstances, as humankind has experienced in recent decades, translate into greater expectations rather than greater contentment. In the future we then risk to be stuck in a loop of never-ending dissatisfaction. From a biological perspective, both our expectations and our happiness are determined by our biochemistry, rather than by our economic, social or political situations. According to the ancient Greek philosopher Epicurus, we are happy when we feel pleasant sensations and are free from unpleasant ones. Science says that people are made happy by one thing: pleasant sensations in their bodies. But what is the point of running after something that disappears as fast as it arises?

At present, humankind has far greater interest in the biochemical solution.

With each passing year our tolerance for unpleasant sensations decreases, and our craving for pleasant sensations increases. Both scientific research and economic activity are geared to that end, each year producing better painkillers, new ice-cream flavours, more comfortable mattresses, and more addictive games so that we will not suffer a single dull moment of our life.

All this is hard enough, of course, we never evolved to experience constant pleasure. It will be necessary to change our biochemistry and re-engineer our bodies and minds. So we are currently working on that. You may debate whether it is good or bad, but it seems like one of the great projects of the twenty-first-century is to ensure global happiness. The second more significant step is the attempt to upgrade humans into gods, to overcome old age and misery, trying to acquire godlike control of the human biological substratum. If we obtain the power to engineer death and pain out of our system, the same power will probably be enough to engineer our system in almost any manner we like, and to manipulate our organs, emotions, and intelligence in myriad of ways. The upgrading of human into gods may follow (as Harari suggests) any of three paths: biological engineering, cyborg engineering and the engineering of non-organic beings. If in some we are so far from a complete good understanding in another field like cyborg engineering is a step further in reality rather than in our mind still stuck with the idea that is just science fiction. If you want you can already remote-control electric devices in your house using an electronic “mind-reader” helmet. The helmets require no brain implants. People are taken aback by dreams of immortality and divinity not because they sound so foreign and unlikely, but because ideologically they are old news. For three decades the world has been dominated by humanism, with sanctifies the life, happiness, and power of humankind. We just kept this dream hidden, and now we start to idealize a possibility of success.

Everyone has all the rights to argue that we are so far from the understanding of the human brain mechanism and secrets.

In fact, another story employed to justify human superiority says that of all animals on earth, only us, humans, have a conscious mind. The mind is something very different from the soul. The brain is not some mystical eternal entity. Instead, it’s a flow of subjective experiences, such as pain, pleasure, anger, and love. These mental experiences do not doubt their existences and are made by interlinked sensations, emotions, and thoughts,

which shine for a brief moment and immediately vanish. Every subjective experience has two fundamental characteristics: excitement and desire.

Robots and computers have no consciousness because they feel nothing and crave nothing. But before risking to enter in a long and without proper answer discussion about how minds function, let’s say that not even scientists have a precise idea of how a collection of brain signals creates subjective experiences. Even more crucially, scientists don’t know what could be the evolutionary benefits of such a phenomenon. It is the greatest lacuna in our understanding of life.

What will conscious humans do once they have created highly intelligent non-conscious algorithms that can do almost everything better than them?

The concept that humans will always have a single and unique ability beyond the reach of non-conscious algorithms is just wishful thinking. Science summarised it in the following simple principles: -Organisms are algorithms. Every animal, including humans, is an assemblage of organic algorithms shaped by natural selection over millions of years of evolution.

-Algorithmic calculations are not altered by the materials from which the calculator is built.

-Hence there is no reason to think that organic algorithms can do things that non-organic algorithms will never be able to replicate or surpass.

At present, there are numerous things that organic algorithms do better than non-organic ones. That is not going to be, maybe more valid in a decade or two. Until a short time ago, facial recognition or the personal operator “Siri” weren’t working so well. Today, facial recognition programs can identify people far more efficiently and quickly than humans can do.

Harari synthetizes these thoughts for us along the following lines: Humans might become militarily and economically useless. This is just a possibility, not a prophecy. Secondly, the system might still need humans in the future; it will not need individuals. The system will thereby deprive individuals of their authority and freedom. ‘The liberal belief in individualism is founded on three critical assumptions: - I am an Individual. I have a single essence that cannot be divided into parts or subsystems. I have wrapped in myself an inner core, which is my inner self.

- My authentic self is entirely free.

- I can know things about myself nobody else can discover. I have access to my internal space of freedom, and only I can hear the whispers of my authentic self.’

However, life sciences challenge all three assumptions: - Organisms are algorithms, and humans are not individuals. Humans are an assemblage of many various algorithms.

- The algorithms constituting a human are not free. They take decisions either deterministically or randomly, shaped by genes and environmental pressures, but not freely.

- It follows that an external algorithm could theoretically know me much better than I can ever do myself. An algorithm that monitors each of the systems that compose my brain and my body could know exactly who I am, how I feel and what I want.

This last assumption doesn’t necessary mean that such algorithms will always be correct but it is already enough that the algorithm will know me better than I know myself and will make fewer mistakes than I will. This line has already been crossed in medicine.

In Silicon Valley, teams of hi-tech gurus promise all the old prizes: happiness, peace, prosperity and even eternal life, but here on earth with the help of technology instead of with the help of ethereal beings after death. Alternatively, individuals are lead to agree with and follow the ‘dataism’ religion -(term invented by Harari)- that argues that humans have completed their cosmic task. Or they accept that humans will no longer be relevant in the future, but conclude that technology should therefore be used to create ‘a new human’, a superior model to us, with upgraded physical and mental abilities that will enable it to hold its own algorithms against the most sophisticated non-conscious algorithms. Seeking to improve the human mind and have access to unknown experiences and unfamiliar states of consciousness ‘Dataism’ declares that ‘the universe consists of data flow, and its contribution to data processing determines the value of any phenomenon or entity.’

Dataism thereby collapses the barrier between animals and machines and expects electronic algorithms to decipher and outperform biochemical algorithms eventually. Humans were supposed to distil data into information, information into knowledge, and knowledge into wisdom.

However it has become clear that they can no longer cope with the immense flow of data.

The work of processing data should, therefore, be entrusted by electronic algorithms, whose capacity far exceeds that of the human brain. In practice it means that our trust is put in Big Data and algorithms rather than in human knowledge and wisdom. Dataism is founded through two disciplines: computer science and biology. According to this view, free-market capitalism and state-controlled communism aren’t competing ideologies, ethical creeds and political institutions. They are, in essence, competing data-processing systems. Capitalism used distributed processing, whereas communism relies on centralised processing. People want to be part of the data-flow, even if that means giving up their privacy, their autonomy, and their individuality.

The individual is becoming a tiny chip inside a giant system that nobody understands but that no one needs to understand effectively. As the global data-processing system becomes all-knowing and all-powerful, the connection to the network becomes the source of all meaning. Dataism is neither liberal nor humanist.

It should be emphasised, however, that Dataism isn’t against humanism, it merely believes it not to be intrinsically valuable.

I refer to this process as “I-Selfism.” Selfism encompasses any philosophy, doctrine, theory, or tendency that upholds explicitly selfish principles as being desirable. Today, our relations with the internet and new technology is making us more than simple humanists. Our belief in the internet is not determined by a spiritual perception per se. As individuals, we are enriched and empowered as never before thanks to technology. We are already dependent on the real and digital realm, that’s why the capital ‘I’ added to selfism.

Until we ask ourselves the question of who is driving our lives, us or the internet? A question that there is a high probability we do not know how to answer. To be “out of the grid” is a useless position that excludes people from the actual world until complete marginalization. The benefits of the internet have permeated our society in such a way that they cannot be denied, even when there is no intention to achieve “all knowledge” of the Internet of all things through data or to develop a superhuman form. In the end, predictively, the masses will be driven by the data model, whether the internet Plays or not a major role in their day to day life.

As Humanists we do not need gods to limit our power and give us meaning.

Our free choices as customers or voters supply us with all the sense we require.

What, then, will happen once we fully realise that customers and voters never make free choices, and once we posess the technology to calculate, outsmart or design our feelings? If the whole universe is pegged to the human experience, what will happen once the human experience becomes just another designable product, no different in essence from any other item in the supermarkets?

CULT

3

Cult is a system of ceremonials, manifestations and gestures, which have the function to amplify and influence.

“The Panopticon” is a type of institutional control building designed by Jeremy Bentham in the late 18th century. The design schemes to allow all inmates of an institution to be observed by a single person without the inmates being able to tell whether or not they are being watched.

Jamie Bartlett took that concept to describe our actual society.

‘We live in a giant advertising panopticon which keeps us addicted to devices, this system of data collection and prediction merely the most recent iteration in a long history of effort to control us, it is getting more advanced by the day, which has severe ramifications for potential manipulation, endless distraction and the slow diminishing of free choice and autonomy.’

The basis of practically the entire business of social media is the provision of free services in exchange for data, which the companies uses in return to target us with adverts. When registering to a social network, hardly anyone ever reads the terms and conditions they agree to. They just tick the box. A few years ago a British firm included a clause that asked for permission to “claim, now and forever, your immortal soul,” and no one noticed.

In 1915 John Watson, president of the American Psychological Association argued that all human behaviour was primarily the product of measurable external stimuli, and could, therefore, be understood and controlled through study and experiment. The tendency to assess how a targeted audience will likely react according to what is known about it, is rapidly becoming a practice that has intruded on different parts of our culture. Social media platforms are the latest iteration of the behaviourist desire to manage society through a scientific observation of the mind, via a complete information loop: testing products on people, getting feedback and redesigning the model. Tech companies run thousands of tests with millions of users, changing backgrounds, colours images, fonts and so on, all to maximise user experience and user clicks.

We still underestimate the link between the apparent opening of our technological infrastructures and an ever increasing level of control. Imagine that someone decides to become a vegetarian. This person will probably go on Facebook, use its search engine to search for his/her friends’ favourite vegetarian restaurants. This will inform the social network of his new preference which will have consequences on different business sectors. In this case; Facebook would make a real-time auction for the sale of its advertising space, between the tofu and the meat industry. It is at this moment that we no longer control our choices. Targeted advertising promoting let’s say a 20% discount on meat at the supermarket, will appear on the newly vegetarian’s social network. After a few days, that he/she might decide that being a vegetarian is not for him/ her. If the tofu industry had won that advertising space, things could have gone differently. But what matters is that a decision that seems autonomous is in fact not autonomous at all.

Note: Whenever you “refresh” a web page, an auction is conducted over who will offer the highest amount to show you an advert.

The Holy Grail for the social media giants is to understand you better than you understand yourself. To predict what you will do, say and even think. Facebook doesn’t collect data about you for fun. What the company knows about you, based solely on the untold hours you’ve spent on it, is enough to fill several binders: interests, age, friends, job, activity and more. Furthermore, with robust “data broker” partnerships, which probably have information over thousands of data points per person, collected from other shops and records, the data flow is far beyond human analysis these days. This is why algorithms have become

so central to the modern economy. An algorithm is a simple mathematical technique, a set of instructions that a computer follows in order to execute a command. Filter, predict, correlate target and learn. Our lives are already guided by algorithms that determine everything from Amazon recommendations, our Facebook newsfeed, to the things that pop up on our Google search results. Our dating matches. Our route to work. Our suggested music. Etc. The logical end goal of this mechanisms is for each of us to be reduced to a unique, predictable and targetable data point. The main risk with that is that these tools are used to manipulate, distract and influence us in ways that are not in our best interests.

If we consider that democracy has a unique moral value and purpose because we regard human judgment and moral choices as uniquely valuable; then what happens if smart machines armed with petabytes of data are able to make better, wiser and smarter decisions than us and for us? The speed of advance in artificial intelligence suggests that it will provide more and more practical insight and answers that are superior to humans’. Let’s take medicine as an example. Diagnosis by AI will soon outperform professional doctors and play an active role in decision making and on the evaluation of symptoms. At first, we will likely be nervous about trusting a machine with life and death decisions. However, everything indicates that we will take to it quickly, just as we did with autopilot controls in planes. The same could be true of aid distribution, smart energy power grids, crop yields predictions and more. It is only a matter of time before this shifts from practical questions to moral ones, since the distinction is not as subtle as we might think. Numbers are intoxicating because they hold out the promise of a straight, exact, judgment-free answer. Algorithms are doubly so, since they appear to be logical and objective calculating machines which draw on millions of examples.

Also, I am sorry to say that whatever is considered trendy is actually not a manifestation of our choices. Nothing is “trendy” on the internet simply due to natural and autonomous forces. A trend results from the measured popularity across discussion within settled clusters, made by the same algorithms. Many might deny it, but we already rely on machines for moral choices. Catchy O’Neil, in her book ‘Weapons Of Math Destruction’, documented dozens of instances where crucial decisions, relating to hiring policy, teacher evaluations, police officer distributions and more, were taken thanks to machines. They might look and sound very objective, but algorithms always start with a question framed by whoever is in charge. As a result, they tend to reproduce the biases of their creators. That they are all currently created and owned by a bunch of rich white tech guys in Northern California (Silicon Valley) has already shown some unfortunate results. They are never neutral.

Here is an example from O’Neil’s book: In 1997, a convinced murderer, an African American man named Duane Buck, stood before a jury in Harris County, Texas. He had killed two people and was definitely guilty. The jury had to decide whether he would be sentenced to death or life in prison with the chance of parole. It was a case of evaluated recidivism rate, where the race factors and the geographical area where you lived influenced the result. Now the jury sentenced Buck to death, and there wasn’t math to help the judgment. The new recidivism rate models are complicated models but not for that fairer. The so-called LSI-R questionnaire for the prisoner to fill out and be evaluated by a model in a second moment to individuate your recidivism rate. Had some questions like:’How many other convictions have you had?’and ‘What part did drugs and alcohol play?’; Fair. Further on, ‘Was that the first time you were ever involved with the police?’. A white man who grew up in a middle-class suburb would

probably answer no. A young black male, by contrast, is likely to have been stopped by the police dozens of times, even if he has done nothing wrong.

So if early involvement with the police signals recidivism, poor people, and racial minorities are at a much higher risk. The questions hardly stop there.

The questionnaire also considers circumstances of a criminal’s birth and upbringing, including his or her family, neighbourhood, and friends. These details should not be relevant to a criminal case or the sentencing. We should be judged according to our actions, not by who we are/our circumstances.

-Quick advice out of context, if you want to get insurance for your car, the way you manage your money and your habits are more important than your driving abilities when it comes to defining the insurance cost. The consumer pattern, meaning the collection of all of your photos and details in social networks influences your credit score. So, be careful whenever you share a picture of you and your friends at the pub because you could also be evaluated on that, and the result might be an invisible calculation that makes you pay more.These models usually create a self-perpetuating loop of growing inequality and algorithm-driven injustice. A mathematical model of data evaluation work in that way: A pre-processing moment, where a target data set must be assembled.

A clustering process that is the task of discovering groups and structures in the data that are in some way or another “similar.”

The classification and the evaluation, so the providing part of a more compact representation of the data set, including visualization and report generation. These algorithms give you a score based on the factor that has to be evaluated, reputation or geographical position for example, and manage to define you as a “high risk” in a court case or police patrolling or a perfect matching result in the analysis to getting insurance, depending on a specific situations. These models commonly in use in the U.S.A., evaluate you in a situation such as going to college, online advertising, getting a job, being evaluated on the job, receiving a landing credit or again getting insurance and so on.

So, what if these algorithms evaluations are mistaken?

How the algorithms itself works is often unknown even by its own technicians, hence following obvious question: How can you justify evaluating people by a measure for which you are unable to provide explanations? The reality is that the content of the model is guarded under corporate secrets, referred to by technicians as the “black box.” Like the magic formula of a recipe, something that no one knows, not even the engineers in charge of applying it, the model evaluation criteria are entirely opaque and leave the users with no possibility of appeal when a mistake has been made that wrongs them and nobody takes responsibility for.

But the danger doesn’t reside in machines coughing up poor solutions, it’s the opposite instead. As they improve, they will repeatedly produce outstanding, money-saving solutions (at least compared to human solutions), which will further establish their importance in our lives, even if they are unjust in an invisible way. If a machine diagnosis were repeatedly better than a human doctor, it would potentially be unethical to ignore the machine’s advice. A government with a machine telling them a specific policing allocation would save money and cut crime would be hard to resist, even if it did not solve any long-term problem. Nearly five million Brits have already used the voting app “iSideWith” in multiple elections. The fact that all this large number of people asked at an app, that they barely understand, how to fulfil their

most important duty as a citizen bothered precisely... no one!

Why we believe to be a moral agent depends on us is because we are repeatedly taking decisions, shopping, voting, raising children, and so on.

Those choices are often driven with bias and error, which is why decision-by-machine are so appealing. But our critical faculties only improve through the repeated use of reason, evidence, and moral inquisition.

. Politics The media’s role in cultivating political knowledge in both democratic and

authoritarian societies is strikingly similar. Once the political news was the unique things, you could have watched. As citizens, you were far better informed, much more likely to participate in politics. The emergence of cable television, however, gave people a choice between consuming political news and anything else, and most viewers went for “anything else”, which mostly consisted of entertainment. The cult of entertainment, which Philip Roth predicted in 1990 would have been replaced the dissident intellectuals. He could not have predicted the rise of social media, which have proven even more entertaining than cable. Now even authoritarian governments have discovered that the best way to marginalize dissidents books and ideas is not to ban them, instead, is better flood the market with trashy popular stories, self-help manuals. All governments are beginning to understand that online entertainment, especially pornography, can serve as a great distraction from politics. Much of the internet censorship in Vietnam for example, targets political resources. Allow the youth generation to consume porn but not Amnesty international reports. Now, there are many factors that unable the political interests of the citizens, and the scarcity of critical thinking in the context and disengagement between the masses living in both democratic and authoritarian states. From liberal democracy and consumerism, until the environment of information abundance. Aldous Huxley, in his book ‘Brave new world,’ Criticized democracy societies with their cult of entertainment, sex, and advertising. George Orwell in his book, ‘1984’ gave us an understanding of how authoritarian states exercise control, through surveillance, propaganda, and censorship. He called it ‘trinity of control.’

The internet hasn’t changed the balance of this ‘trinity of control,’ but it has significantly changed how each one of these is practiced. The decentralized nature of the internet could have made more difficult to be censored, but it has made propaganda more effective. The proliferation of social networking has turned ‘amateur’ activists into easier targets for surveillance.

Evgeny Morozov in his book ‘Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom’, writes about how political group use the internet for activism. Analysing the rise of the so-called “Slacktivism.” While digital technologies enable

small groups to mobilize quickly and easily, most participants and online activists find more important to be seen by their online friends than to really care about a cause, which means that the awareness regarding a cause is not necessarily rising. So you can usually see an increasing number of engaged participants but less individual effectiveness. Today, aspiring digital revolutionaries can stay on their sofas forever, or until their laptop’s batteries run out, and still, be seen as heroes. Even worst, people will take selfies while performing a good action like giving money to a homeless person, and then post it online as a proof of their commitment to a cause.

The internet has made the three pillars of control much more interconnected, so the intention to undermine one of them might ruin its efforts to do something about the other two. While encouraging everyone to gather to social networking sites and blogs to avoid the control of the censors, it would make more natural surveillance and propaganda. The more the government can identify connections between activists, the better, while the more trust users have in blogs and social networks, the more accessible to the propaganda to promote carefully disguised messages. The internet is an instrument challenging to command if it is producing side effects that can weaken the propaganda system but enhance the power of the surveillance apparatus or evade censorship but only making the public more susceptible to propaganda. To avoid mistakes in the promotion of internet freedom we have to examine how censorship, propaganda, and surveillance strategies have changed in the internet era.

The idea that the Internet is too big to censor is dangerously naive. As the Web becomes more social, nothing prevents governments or any other interested players, from building censorship powered by recommendation technology similar to that of Amazon and Netflix. Fortunately, much of our internet browsing is still done anonymously, the people who administer different sites cannot quickly tell who we are. But there are growing incentives to tell websites which we are. Many of us would eagerly trade their privacy for a discount coupon. Alternatively, they have already their face on the facial recognition system of Apple. The future of internet control is thus a function of numerous business and social forces; many of them are from free and democratic societies. Internet censorship isn’t practiced always by governments. Denied access at a critical blogger, for example, is far better rather than delete the entire blog posts. Forcing companies to police the Web according to a set of broad guidelines is a dream come true for any governments. Even if global companies are usually unhappy to take on a censorship role, because it might cost them customers in the long term.

It is undeniable that these tech giants are more likely to catch dangerous contents, as they know their online communities better than the government censors. Also, no individuals can tell companies how to run those communities, if they shut down yours.

If in a broader vision we recognize that the U.S.A. have a sort of global information sovereignty because the majority of data produced in the world are stored on American soil. (So, the U.S.A. governments could potentially be monitoring our “cyberspace,”) Other governments as Russia and China that have shown legitimate concerns about it and have created a national dominance on their information markets are creating a more censored and digital isolated life for their citizens.

The more significant problems that we are facing nowadays is that technology is creating a politic where politics is less important. That does not mean less control. Technologies are reducing regulations, increasing on the other hand supervision and production of desired results.

In his book ‘The People vs. Tech’, Jamie Bartlett, explain how digital analytics has changed elections. Donal Trump digital campaign in the 2016 presidential election showed how big-data and micro-targeting could win votes. He interviewed Theresa Hong, the digital communications specialist at project ‘Alamo’ the so-called digital plan designed to make Donald Trump win the American election campaign. She explains how every election has become a sort of arms race. Big Tech has built the infrastructure for selling stuff, some of the most connected and sophisticated configurations ever seen, and now these infrastructures have been repurposed to win elections.

Thanks to ‘Psychographics’ method, a specific micro-targeting technique, that figured out people’s personality traits through a collection of data, that created a key target group modelled in function of how ‘persuadable’ people were. This ‘Alamo’ team was able to send a supposedly organic and authentic content to all the elector categorized in these groups. What about the evident involvement of Facebook and Cambridge Analytica, or the ongoing investigation of the alleged collusion between the Trump Campaign and the Russian Government? (If you don’t know anything about the arguments, I highly recommend to read the book of Jamie Bartlett). In this panorama who wins and loses is less important than whether the integrity of elections themselves are at risk.

. Economy

Today we live between continuous and radical transformations, in a metamorphosis from which not even the business world is immune. The largest taxi company, Uber, does not owb is without real estate, Skype has no infrastructure, Alibaba has no inventory, Netflix does not operate cinemas. In such a context, consumers can struggle to manage the new paradigms and complexity due to the amount of information, advertising, and products.

Today the consumer is always in search for shortcuts to which to ask for responsibility for the choice, is based on previous users, decision-making algorithms that offer bespoke services and products tailored especially to your feelings and desires.

However, rather than speculation about “jobless future,” we should be

worried about growing inequality and whether the coming tech revolution will wipe out the middle class.

AIs start to outperform humans in a small but quietly growing number of small tasks. Over the last few years, incursions have been made into things such as bricklaying, fruit-picking, driving, banking, trading and automated stock-taking. Legal software firms are developing a statistical prediction algorithm that can analyze past cases and recommend trial strategies. Tools to analyze CVs are now routinely used by companies to help them filter out the unsuitable candidates. The software Using sophisticated data models can now make predictions on investment strategies.

History and the industrial revolution have made evident that machines tend to drive up productivity, which in turn stimulates more investment and demands. In many instances, productivity gains driven by technology will not mean fewer jobs, but rather improvements in the current ones. When AI techniques transform medical diagnosis, within the next few years, it will not mean fewer doctors, but better patient care because our busy doctors will not need to spend hours staring at scans. We are terrible at predicting what the jobs and industries of the future might be. Millions of people are already employed in roles that didn’t exist 20 years ago: web developers, app designers, Uber drivers, lifestyle coaches and a thousand other things besides.

But stop a second. What about an unemployed trucker in their fifties? It is far more likely that many bus drivers, without the necessary skills, will drift off to more precarious, low paid work, perhaps becoming taxi drivers or Amazon warehouse operators. Right?

The Man & The Dog (short film) could help you get this fantasy not too far from us. ‘The factory of the future will have only two employees, a man, and a dog. The man will be there to feed the dog. The dog will be there to keep the man from touching the equipment.’

We can be reasonably confident that AI will result in forwarding leaps in productivity and overall wealth. The question is how the spoils of that wealth will be shared out. Many of the ‘thinking’ things human can do, such as extremely complicated calculations, can be easily replicated by machines.

They can undertake routine or predictable tasks as speed and accuracy better than ours. Inversely, they are significantly worse than human at dealing with unpredictable situations. It means that the jobs most at risk will be those involving the routine tasks that can most easily be done by machines. The strange things about our economy are that non-routine jobs tend to be either very well or very badly paid. A specialist in machine learning performs a non -routine job, so does a gardener or a JustEats cyclist. If you are a train operator, a mortgage, a stock analyst, a loan officer, a tax accountant or a radiologist, you might consider retraining. We will be heading towards what David Autor calls a ‘barbell-shaped economy’, a kind of extreme inequality. There will be plenty more low-paid, insecure service jobs that won’t disappear due to automation, too. But with millions of people competing to wait on, care for and serve food to the winners of the great tech revolution. McAfee and Brynjolfsson said in their book ‘The second machine age’: ‘No economic law says that all workers, will benefit from the technological progress.’ Also that, there are other factors for the growing economic inequality, including the

globalisation.

Uber and Deliveroo to take two famous examples are part of an increasingly important sort of industry: the gig economy. This encompasses companies that monetize everything from borrowing cars, helping with daily tasks, lending bikes or money and selling clothes. A market distinguished by the prevalence of short-term contracts or independent work compared to permanent jobs.

Where the workers have no real rights and instead to be a short-term work is more often becoming the unique one available.

As more jobs become precarious, the people will depend increasingly on secure rights and decent pay. Enforcement of minimum wages and sick pay in the gig economy is derisory. We also need to reverse the trend of profit accruing disproportionately to capital rather than labour. One way to do that is to make more manageable for the workers, drivers, cyclists, handyman, to become unionised and organise.

Our market is also increasing in another system, the sharing economy.

It could be defined as an economic system in which goods or services are shared between private individuals, free or paid, through the Internet.

Today, the sharing economy allows each person to get what they want on demand. Decentralizing every good and service making sure you do not have redundancies. Another factor, often forgotten, is the ability of identity verification that allows you to check that you are whom it claims to be. But the rapid rise of the Sharing economy can also be read in this key: capitalism now has new technologies capable of converting every commodity that has been bought and therefore removed from the market, becoming an inert capital, into reliable objects in the market. At its worst, the sharing economy transforms us into perpetual opportunists. All we possess can be categorized from tangible assets to intangible thoughts. For some, it is a very tempting proposal: helping to cope with excess consumption, but also the feeling of having taken a conscious choice of life. It’s nice to be able to choose between renting and owning, but many people can not do it, it’s just a default setting. No one denies that the sharing economy can make the consequences of the current financial crisis more bearable, the fact is that in dealing with the consequences it does nothing to remove the causes. It’s like distributing earplugs against street noises, instead of doing something to reduce them.

When the classic or the sharing economy don’t apply, the ‘gamification’, as defined by Evgeny Morozov, is put into place. The ‘gamification’ is a mechanism, using rewards, into social practices. Increasing people expectations and demands of giving back experience more fun and engaging. Recyclebank, a company that uses points and rewards to nudge consumers to perform eco-friendly activities, is an example among many others. Once you accumulate enough points for your green behaviour, Recyclebank allows you to convert them into discounts, free offers, and gift cards. The company will use game incentives to make you greener. So it is a win-win situation, right? Some believers think that ‘gamification’ can even solve problems like global warming. But do you individuate some similar mechanisms to the BinCam project as explained in the previous chapter?

The dystopia we should fear is not robots that take all the jobs, but a barbell-shaped economy where socially progressive tech millionaires live in communities well isolated from the rest of the population.

The reality is that now we create data in almost all aspects of our day. Devices are now capable of controlling and regulating our previously unregulated domains by our choice. At the moment it is not prohibited or limited by law to acquire data concerning your sleep for example, but who will benefit from it? You that you will succeed thanks an application to sleep better; the company that will have more precise information on how to sell you other products or the possible government that will know if you are at home sleeping?

CLERGY

4

The four apostles aim to provide voluntarily, complete information on the

internet. Considered on earth, instead, as the higher point of the hierarchical pyramids of the internet religion.

We used to consider Facebook as a social network, Google a search engine, Amazon, a digital store And Apple, a company that makes phones and computers. Facebook builds solar drones; Google sells smartphones, Amazon owns a supermarket chain, Apple produces a TV series. Over the course of their history, this society have become increasingly liquid, spreading in dozens of sectors and adapting them to their needs.

Google is the mind of the modern man. Imagine a magazine with your name on it is all you asked Google; you will understand that you trust Google more than any other entity in the world. Facebook is the heart that satisfies our need to feel and give love. Amazon is our intestine. The penalty for having too little is much higher than for having too much. Apple is our aesthetics/ body, trying to make us unique.

Evgeny Morozov in his book ‘To save everything click here’, classifies and questions these different companies according to how they inspire and how they confuse. How iTunes and Wikipedia have become models to think about the future of politics, How Facebook has become model to think about civic engagement, How Yelp’s and Amazon’s reviews have become models to think about criticisms, and how Google has become a model for thinking about business and social innovation.

Back in the days, many predicted that the internet would slay monopolies, not create them. The popular thinking of the time, repeated over and over by digital gurus, was that the net was decentralised and connected, and so would automatically lead to a competitive and distributed marketplace.

Here some monopolies or oligopolies in their respective fields: Google (search engine, video streaming, online advertising); Uber (ride-sharing); Airbnb (home-sharing); Facebook (social network, messaging, online advertisement; Amazon (online retail, cloud computing); Instagram (photo-sharing); Spotify (music streaming); Twitter (micro-blogging).

The most important reason for this lobbying is the so-called network effect.

If you join Facebook, your friends will be more likely to join too, which in turn makes their friends more likely to join. When everything is connected, such network effects can spread further, and far more quickly. The network effect is so powerful because it is self-reinforcing. Let’s synthesise this: the more users a company has, the more it acquires data, and the more data the better the service it can offer. Another factor that influences this network is that these companies can efficiently scale-up, because of how they function.

As mentioned earlier, Airbnb, for example, is a home-sharing/renting services but doesn’t own any house per se. So, to add a new unit it cost hardly anything. All this means that the best provider can capture entire industries more efficiently, ‘winner-take-most.’ Now, in the actual economy, there are examples of anti-monopolies successful stories and examples of market response. But once monopolies are established, they will do everything they can to keep themselves there. In fact the top companies in a country, usually tech companies, are the one that spends more on research than businesses in other industries. The result is that, if anyone wants to compete with them, these companies have enough cash reserve to buy the competitor out merely. Monopolistic power also means that the most prominent firms can pressure their smaller rivals, especially when they own the platform on

which they depend. Amazon’s domination is not of books per se; it is of the place where books are sold. That means it can be set the prices and dictate terms, and other vendors have to accept it.

The ongoing digitisation of the economy means more and more aspects of our economy will be subject to this drift towards monopolies. For example, “smart manufacturing” or “internet of things” is the process in which every aspect of a production line collects data and communicates with every other part of the process, allowing comprehensive monitoring and analytics, in real-time. This does not end at the factory but rather once the product is out in the real world. Embedded sensors will continuously collect data too, in smart fridges, smart toys, smart food packaging, smart prosthesis and so on. That is already happening, although only in a limited way. When everything is online, different devices will need to speak to each other. Your phone will talk to your fridge, which will talk to the supermarket, which will talk to its suppliers and manufacturers: these are all data. This game is more efficient if only one or two companies provide the infrastructure to do this.

The same rule will apply to many of the AI techniques. Even if AI is a technology that could be applied in a wide variety of contexts, every company have any way an AI calibrated more on the different specific application that needs. Now, there are countervailing tendencies, of course, some experts have got together to develop “open source” AI’s which are more transparent and well designed, but the direction of progress is evident, follow the money.

Market leaders in AI are having at their disposition the data, the geniuses, the experience, and the computing power will not be limited to just search and information retrieval. They will also be able to leap ahead in almost anything where AI is essential. We need to take a look at one of them. Amazon is already a retailer, marketing platform, delivery, and logistics network, payment system, credit lender, book publisher, TV programme company and cloud computing provider. In the next decades or so, these small firms are going to create the biggest cross-industry monopolies that have ever existed, and who knows, maybe, in a bit, they will distribute first necessities services. At some point, these tech giants could become so essential to the health and well-being of nations that it would be too damaging for the economy if they fail.

Over the years, most democracies have developed anti-trust legislation to guard against this (GDPR). The problem is that such legislation is designed around the idea that monopolies are bad for the public only when prices start going up or consumers welfare is damaged. Today tech firms are different beasts because they often push prices down and are generally excellent for consumers. Some, like Google and Facebook, are technically free to use. We need to reconsider what monopolies look like using non-price metrics. The threat tech monopolies pose to democracies is about more than the price they charge: it is the concentration of power, data, and control over the public space, and spread this power over a growing number of economic activities in the infrastructure and technologies of the future. Let’s propose the term data-metric.

They have an immense power, not only political parties are dependent on tech firms in ways they are not on other companies. Secondly, owning the infrastructure of these massive digital platforms also gives these companies the unprecedented opportunity to nudge the public debate in subtle but beneficial ways.

In all of that, the decline of the local newspaper is over explained example but center the information power of these companies correctly. Print advertising and sales revenue are down because fewer people read the physical

paper. Online advertisers are more interested in volume than in quality, and so the link between advertising spends and quality output is broke. Moreover, because there is now so much content online, the ad spend per article is tiny. Besides, many people now view their articles through Facebook rather than on, say, a news homepage, and so much of the revenue and customer data stays with the platform rather than the media company. Not always is just a matter of money, but more a relationship of dependency because social media platforms drive a high proportion of traffic directly to sites.

The Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci made criticism of capitalism that I think worth here. “Economic power morphs into cultural, where domination can be achieved through controlling the ideas and assumptions available to the public.

. Protestants The Protestants movement reject the doctrine of clergy/apostles supremacy but firmly believe in the internet mythology, justified by faith alone.

We are going to call them crypto-anarchists.

The crypto-anarchist has a faith belief in the power of technology over politics and society. He looks around the world (and back in history) and sees oppression, corruption, and suffering caused by democratic political decisions. Let’s be honest; actual democracy has not so far done a particularly good job at regulating financial markets. Many democracies are influenced by donors and lobbyists which skew politics away from the ordinary people.

Billions of dollars each year vanish into offshore accounts and constellations of shell companies. It is no surprise that people are losing faith. Instead, the blockchain system is for many of them the real disruption of old institutions as the “Californian Ideology” proclaimed, plus is immutable, perfect and eternal.

The rise of crypto-anarchy, a philosophy that aims to undermine the power of the state via encryption, is on the rise. It is driven by a quest to protect our privacy online. However, it also challenges the central authority of the state and threatens to weaken it to the point of near collapse.

You may have heard excited talk of the latest technologies that promise to liberate us from monopolies and concentrations of power, collectively called “blockchain.”

However, advocates of this new technology sound a lot like being a techno-optimists. It promises a world of peer to peer, distributed exchanges and so on. However, there is a first pattern that should make us think twice.

In the late 1980s, a Californian wrote this manifesto of techno-freedom, his name is Timothy C. May. ‘A specter is haunting the modern world, the specter of crypto anarchy. Computer technology is on the verge of providing the ability for individuals and

groups to communicate and anonymously interact with each other... These developments will alter completely the nature of government regulation, the ability to tax and control economic interactions, the ability to keep information secret, and will even alter the nature of trust and reputation.’

Timothy C. May, believed in his statement strong of a unique tool on the internet. (Public key) So-called encryption. It allows people to communicate, transact and browse making it significantly harder for the state to control information, and subsequently, its citizens. This is because of a simple rule: due to some properties of prime numbers, it takes far more computing power to decrypt something than to encrypt it. It is like an egg: a lot easier to crack than to put back in its shell. The crypto-anarchists reasoned that encryption could do more than protect citizens: they believed it could also carve out vast new spaces of freedom online and maybe push society closer to a sort of anarchic-heaven where governments would be severely weakened.

These crypto-anarchist motivated by an honorable desire to protect online freedom and privacy, are working on ingenious way of keeping online secrets, preventing censorship and fighting against centralised control.

Anonymous web browser like Tor, which can browse the net without giving away the user’s location (and are used to access the “darknet,” an encrypted network of sites that uses a non-standard protocol), is becoming even more popular. There are now hundreds of encrypted messaging app: Signal, WhatsApp, FrozenChat, ChatSecure and more.

The most popular crypto-anarchy technology is at the moment bitcoin.

Short description of it: a quantity of bitcoin (digital currency) is stored at a bitcoin address, the key to which is a unique string of letters and numbers that can be kept on a website, desktop, mobile phone or even a piece of paper.

Anyone can download a bitcoin wallet on to their computer, buy bitcoin with traditional currency and use them to buy or sell any products or services as quickly as sending a message. Transactions are fast, secure and free, with no central authority controlling value or supply, and no intermediary taking a slice. Give a nickname or, and you can start up an account. Because it is still a technology at his early stage present many problems: the centralisation of mining, transaction speed, environmental costs, “initial coin offerings” and a small number of people own a disproportionately large amount of them.

So because bitcoin “mining” is reliant on having the best technology and most powerful computing rigs, the mining function of many crypto-coins are concentrated in the hands of a small number already wealthy people and venture capitalists.

What matter most, however, is that people are using these systems even though any central governments do not back them. Now, I will try to synthesize the concept of the blockchain. (It is difficult to explain in short easily, and my center is not focusing on that too much, and there are plenty of excellent guides and books available.)

Bitcoin is more than just money, though: it is a new way of handling information. Every time someone sends a bitcoin payment to a recipient, a record of the transaction is stored in something called the blockchain, a massive database of every bitcoin transaction ever made. Transactions are collected into blocks, with each block representing a certain amount of minute worth of transactions. The blocks are ordered chronologically, with each including a digital signature (a “hash”) of the previous block, which administers the ordering and guarantees that a new block can join the chain if it starts where the preceding one finishes. A copy of the blockchain record is independently maintained by the thousands of computers which have installed the software. As a result, the history of transactions cannot be undone or edited,

because that would require editing every independent record. If you have ever read that bitcoin is “anonymous,” that is isn’t completely true, because of this database record. However, even though the blockchain records the transactions, there is no link to the identity of the people behind them, they use ‘pseudonymous.’ A simple way to put it is: the blockchain is a massive, distributed, tamper-proof database that anyone can add to but no one can delete. Bitcoin’s blockchain was designed to store financial transactions, but it can hold other information, too. In fact, a new wave of blockchain allows complicated code to be stored. This could be revolutionary as the internet itself because it represents a way to store information in a far more decentralised way.

Concluded that explanation is better to point out that this ideology is not on the point of taking over society.

Gerard Briscoe is a researcher at Glasgow School of Art, and a Research Fellow in Digital Cultures and a Research Affiliate of the University of Glasgow who gave me a great perspective of the blockchain, which I had not understood before. Basically, we can plan the best service or possibility, but first of all, we should ask ourselves: What do we need decision consensus and above all how do we want to get this consensus? He explained to me the different way of getting the consensus if for bitcoin it is a Proof-ofwork (PoW); many others exists like Proof-of-Stake (PoS), Proof-of-Activity (PoA) Proof-of-Capacity (PoC) and so on.

The fear of surveillance and data-driven managerialism is more than legitimate, and some of these techniques will be vital in the coming years to defend ourselves against the tech giants. However, in the noble pursuit of privacy and freedom, we might risk undermining the foundations of these ideologies. Total freedom and equality are sometimes in tension. Democracy is about individual liberty of course, but that is only half of the picture. The state’s control of information justifies and organises a system of coercion, through official taxation records, land registries, criminal records, and passports. The moral basis for this control is the assertion that its laws and powers express the will of the people, and also protect certain fundamental rights.

Instead, crypto-anarchists believe that our rights and freedom should be reliant on immutable technology that no human law, no judge, no police officer can change. Information should not be held on some secretive database controlled by governments, but on decentralised systems controlled by no one.

The more connected we are, the more exposed we are. The internet is already a massive problem for the police, that has to maintain law and order.

They are often helpless to respond. They can not control and stop the trade in stolen data, and they are struggling to remove illegal pornography.

Now, A long story short. A famous and successful prosecution for cybercrime, the Silk Road case. Refers to an anonymous darknet marketplace where you could have bought anything essentially. Stolen personal data, narcotics and child abuse images. The case became so famous because between 2011 and 2013, Silk Road processed over 1.2 billion dollars in sales, mostly in illegal drugs. That persecution has been displayed as one of the first stories and examples of justice over cybercrime. The founder of the website, with the pseudonyms “Dread Pirate Roberts,” Ross Ulbricht was publicly demonized and was utilized as an exemplary punishment for everyone by the government: sentenced to multiple life imprisonment without the possibility of parole. However, the news is now arbitrated by the media, and

indeed, it is not disputed that the sale of illicit substances or materials is not authorized. However, in itself, Silk Road is the reflection of our society, and we must not blame anyone else other than ourselves. Ross Ulbricht was the founder of this platform, Amazon’s style, what we sold and buy was our hidden desires. The fight against drugs remains one of the highest expenses in every state, where the most logical solution is entirely different. In over the same money they could then be used against more sensible actuals struggles, see abuse, data theft, and identity or mental health issues awareness and prevention. That example shows how government start to understand the importance of the digital web but are still completely unprepared to tackle any issues. The consequence of that episodes is that now instead of that just one marketplace in the darknet there is, even more, a significant number of them. A hydra of Lerna as in Greek mythology.

I am not saying that crypto-anarchists are happy about this, they are not.

If for individuals citizens, better encryption is an excellent solution against digital crime,the more we use it, the more the situations could be uncontrollable.

Let’s imagine a blockchain-based social media platform in which posts are simultaneously hosted on multiple decentralised blockchain databases. A blockchain social media servers would be untouchable, and no government would be able to edit or remove hate-speech, illegal images or terror propaganda.

Inevitable is the fact that in the future technology will increase further the ability of small groups of individuals to do great harm and is always getting more expensive and time-consuming the persecution of online criminals and the cost of law enforcement is going up. Instead, the barrier to entry into criminality is going down. We cannot escape from that. So, let’s take back the concept of the internet of things. Within a decade, the tv, house, car, fridge, and clothing will be all chipped and be communicating with each other. Sometimes they will be lifesaving, but they will also be vulnerable because of the security standards for these “IoT” devices are notoriously bad.

There have already been examples of hacked devices. Easy example, do you will pay a small ransom to re-obtain access to your hacked smart coffee machine?

The same tools usually designed for security experts to identify weaknesses and fix them are also frequently exploited by those with less honorable intentions. There is now a readily available code called AutoSploit that automatically searches for vulnerable “IoT” devices. Once it finds them, it scans the Metasploit database, which lists hacking exploits, to find the best form of attack. You set the programme running and then it disappears into cyberspace and hacks whatever it can. Without trying to be alarmist, justice and criminality always coexist in a sort of balance, but one of the parties is going to be more comfortable for the next decade, if nothing change. Probably.

If the challenge made by the potential of these technological tools is already massive, we did not finish to analyze the effects that a tool such bitcoin could have to governments. It is opening a challenge to the state monopoly over money. As said before is a fictional reality that we created but in itself fundamental to maintain our cooperation. If money becomes independent, governments will struggle to pay for themselves. Let’s avoid for a second that bitcoin technology itself is going to produce just a finite number of cryptocurrency, however more and more new digital-coins and tokens are growing.

Our current banking system is crap, but that scenario, eventually, it will create many problems. First, it would be harder for governments to raise income tax at source. There would be an increase in tax evasion, along with a rise in money laundering.

Already a massive problem that influences many challenges we already face, regarding healthcare, environmental change, welfare, crime, diminishing a democracy’s tax-raising powers at this point, is not a smart move.

Lots of privacy activists believe in encryption for fundamental and educated reasons. Most have no intention of creating a stateless crypto-anarchic utopia. The majority have no idea of all of that.

5

CAPITAL SINS

The seven deadly sins is a grouping and classification of vices, originally from Christianity. Here are behaviors or habits classified as not in conformity to the purpose of fill the data flow of the internet. They showed themselves as paradoxes in the investigation of our identity.

It seems as if the excess of something would produce the opposite effect: information excess produces confusion, the excess of knowledge makes us aware of the ignorance in which we live, an intense cold, burns, something produces in a lovely way almost the same sensation that something very sour, a deafening noise, produce deafness, a harsh light can be blinding.

However, how said Jonathan Franzen: “The terrors of technocracy, which sought to liberate humanity from its humanness through the efficiency of markets and the rationality of machines. This was the truly constant fixture of illegitimate revolution, this impatience with irrationality, this wish to be clean of it once and for all.�

‘EXPLORE YOUR FEELINGS’ -The internet will help you-

We surrounded by products that give us an illusion of

choice and encourage passivity.

Reality is the construct emanating from multiple subjectivities: power, social rebellion, political imagination, and art experiments. Power is the fixation of a set of expressive simulations in the form of institutions, laws, and established relations.

“There is nothing more fictitious than reality,” says Umberto Eco in an interview with Alex Coles entitled “Here I am, not a fiction” in the book Design Fiction.

The whole debate about post-truth is based on a philosophical misunderstanding that primarily concerns the very notion of truth and authenticity in the present techno-media landscape. The technological transition that is underway is not provoking a collapse of truth and authenticity but is bringing a radical reframing of the relation between media and self-perception.

We can see three significant examples of this mutation in three levels, between us and: the territory, other’s bodies, ourselves.

At the first level, GPS technology transforms in our sense of direction, which is based on our ability to remember sights, smells, nuances, and colours, as well as on the creation of our interior maps. We are no longer traversing territories.

We are, instead, following the instructions on a map. Maps are taking the place of territory, but they are the fixation of our previous experience of the territory.

The second level concerns our relation to other’s bodies.

We send and receive information about those others, but we are not dealing with their presence. The others are implicated as a linguistic fiction, not as bodies. This mutation is rooted in our growing inability to show solidarity with the social body.

The third level concerns our relation to ourselves. A reframing of self-perception comes together with the “datafication” of the identity. Our identity is increasingly becoming the data

we emit. These data objectify our identity immobilize the continual process of our re-definition. Identity is a conceptual trap: it does not exist, but it produces mirrors effects, the result of looking back at some imagined origin. Without having the possibility to forgot. We are trapped to see in loop our mistakes and transitions, making them more difficult to metabolize.

There is no identity, it is a fictional reality, there are processes of identification. Identification is a way to stabilize reflexive consciousness. It acts, in the end, as a projection of reflexive consciousness. Identification may be viewed as an attempt to stabilize the self in its relation with outside reality. Dependency on our memories and self or driven perception. Technology is nowadays helping us tackling many issues, but is also driving us in a direction without senses.

Why bother ourselves trying to experiment something when technology can give you a harmless and precise shortcut?

It is like a mechanized version of the Narcissus fable, where people fall so sharply in love with an environment constructed in their image that they lose the will to live outside it. Be seen as mad or weird is the risk of awareness of this game perfectly constructed, judged and misunderstood. At the opposite, it is like getting people to acknowledge a drug habit, a problem of dependency incredibly challenging to kick away.

In how many actions are you dependent on the internet and technology? How many wouldn’t you be able to do without technology help?

This lost of senses is making us always more unaware of being manipulated. The commodification of overwhelming reality where technology is helping us in every choice, without recognizing that are augmented exponentially, in correspondence the amount of choice to make. We think to be exercising free will, in reality, we are not: we believe we are making conscious choices when we are not even aware to be actually influenced invisibly.

What can seem helpful in the short term will debilitate you in the long term. This is especially more dangerous when it comes to making political and moral decisions.

‘STORE MEMORIES IN YOUR MIND’ -To discover your uniqueness-

so you need to discover and upload and share something unique. Sandberg’s dream of an authentic identity is just a marketing slogan for Facebook, creating a vicious circle quite evident to everyone. But let’s pay attention to a few common examples.

In the 80’s, the possibilities of communication were much more limited than those that exist today (nor Facebook, nor Twitter, nor WhatsApp, the penetration of mobile phones was enormously smaller than today).

Now, is precisely the opposite: “In an era of hyper-communication, people are more isolated and humanly less communicated.”

Identity consists of two imperatives: there is the imperative

to keep secrets and the imperative to have them known.

How do you know that you are a person, distinct from other people? By keeping certain things to yourself. You guard them inside because if you do not, there is no distinction between inside and outside. Secrets are the way you know, you even have an inside. A radical exhibitionist is a person who has forfeited his identity; your identity exists in correlations to others confirmation.

Sheryl Sandberg wrote: Facebook profiles are now “detailed self-portrait” that “expresses our authenticity in identity.” The only way to make such portraits even more authentic is by uploading and sharing even more details. Thus, it’s embrace of the ideology of “frictionless sharing,” in which, and we need to choose what not to share, not only exposes our “self-portrait” for everyone to see but also to results in other users discovering and perhaps even liking our favourite songs and books. However, if other users like the very same things that you do, then perhaps you are just a sort of fake,

Today mobile phones have a vital presence in the daily life of many people. Almost everyone has a mobile phone, and if you do not use it, you do not exist. A few days ago a middle age woman passed along the street in Glasgow West End, she was singing loudly and dancing. She was passionate about it, she felt it. Instead of appreciating her ability to freer herself emotionally and broking the constriction imposed by our fictional social behavior, people around trying to make her stay silent or even worse the stopped what they were doing to film this “events” as she was a clown. She is more of a hero, actually.

Instead as a mass example, the compulsion to record an event has something sad: I see the vast majority of people more aware of taking a pícture or recording the moment than of really living it. The same feeling you probably have when you go to any concert, and everyone do the same: filming with his cell the event, more interested in posting it on their Facebook or Twitter than in living it. Beyond the beautiful visual spectacle in the middle of the night that could be, it is a little disappointing to see all these people not living that moment by the mere desire to capture with their phones that instant and, presumably, share it with their fans and followers wherever they have. The paradox of this is that the more connected we are to our devices and gadgets, the more it seems that we are disconnected from reality, from the moment we are living.

More we store in our digital memories and less we will remember as feelings. There is who playing on it made astonishing performances and predicted and hoped the audience have used their phones to film, “Beyond the mirror” of Michelangelo Pistoletto.

At the end does it matter?

That self is a matter, not of expression but circulation. The content expressed doesn’t need to be original or spontaneous. Instead, it is just a pretext for measuring the circulation, which becomes the “authentic” expression of one’s situatedness within a network.

‘ASKING -Be yourself-FOR HELP’

The obsession to know himself (mainstream culture and

literature of “self-help “), make the human being more and more confused about who he is. “Be yourself” is the suggestion that we receive from advertising discourse. The tough part is that you don’t know who your self is because it is the product of mutually contradictory injunctions that are thus advertised and that push you in different directions. Nevertheless, the sense of inauthenticity, of the loss of identity, is real in the contemporary subconscious, in the suffering

self-perception of this precarious generation.

Towards the obvious and over known example of narcissism reflected and amplified on the internet.

It is more worrying in my opinion the growing attitude of self-tracking. Like the pioneer, Gordon Bell. The first person in the world to do life-tracking. He started doing it in the late 1990’s and has been at it ever since. Recording every detail of his time on Earth. He didn’t mind even a second of privacy (He is a radical narcissist). The reality that with him nowadays this movement is growing and are born entire groups of people doing so and creating communities. Not all of them are life-logger, but many are self-tracking themselves for many different reasons and often without even a clear result in mind. The idea that every data could be more valuable and have a purpose rather than no one. You can so discover hidden meanings or patterns of yourself before impossible to discover. For Bell, suddenly, lifelogging turns from a quirky geek pursuit into a moral obligation that we have toward ourselves and, perhaps, even others. If you do not lifelog, you are harming humanity. Until he arrived to define the uselessness human memory when you can count on a machine. For him, you could be freer without the pressure to have to remember. In the Silicon Valley this mechanism of track almost everything is essential, it addresses the possibility to design better, optimize more, governate better and the idea to know himself better.

I precedently spoke many times about trackability and control of our data to make us do specific actions. What I want to address here as a discussion is slightly different. Because without even recognising that, the Tech companies are translating social problems like poverty, climate change, and obesity as individual problems. If we are not fit is because we are not following the schedule of our smartwatch, and if we are overweight is probably because we are not able to follow a diet application. The sensation of making feel you guilty because you could do it, like everyone else, you just to put enough effort probably. One of the underlying assumptions, shared by many behavioral economists, is that we do not always act in our best interests because of specific reasons that can be identified, categorized and corrected.

So let’s take poverty as an example. It is therefore supposed derives from cognitive scarcity rather than a personal trait.

In other words, the poor make bad decisions in the economic field because they are worried by other dynamics, if only they received a right message at the right time, they would be able to save more. Poverty in this sense becomes an information problem that can be solved with the same connection between all the tools as any other problem. BillGuard It is an application that tells you if you have exceeded the monthly spending threshold that you have imposed, also search online for discount coupons based on your buying habits. Or take the iBag, a bag equipped with sensors And Internet connection, which closes automatically, And metaphorically And not your wallet, when you think you are going to exceed your spending limit. It is the constant control that makes innovations of this type possible.

The idea to “be yourself” with a parachute for any situations.

How mad is all of that?

‘BE SELF-CONSISTENT’ -You are uniqueriously. However, in exchange, you are not allowed to leave their proprietary walled garden. Google, on the other hand, encourages you to explore freely and follows closely behind you. Collecting and reselling the data that you generate.

They all represent ideologies, and most perpetuate those ideologies in using them to the desired effect. As they say, “if you are not paying, you are the product.” An internet economy run on the ad-based model is turning us into data points, and this has to stop. But only works because of our complicity. Or worse, we are both the product and the labor that makes the product, all for the benefit of the tech companies, the owners of the current means of identity production.

When we fight for an “open” internet, let’s be clear that as an ideology is good and right, but actually, casualty want is also what Google and Facebook want, and this is addressed as the need of Internet, instead of their own need. But surely there is an explanation. Harari said in an article published

by Wired: “We mustn’t confuse freedom of information with the old liberal ideal of freedom of expression. Freedom of expression protected their right to think and say what they wished, including their right of shut-up and to keep their thoughts to themselves. Freedom of information, in contrast, is not given to humans. It is given for information. Moreover, this new value may impinge on the traditional freedom of expression, by privileging the right of information to circulate freely over the right of humans to own data and to restrict its movement.”

Different platforms represent competing ideologies, where you are afforded certain freedoms in exchange for your compliance. Apple, for example, takes your privacy very se-

So why that complicity? Not only people allowed that by even “fight” for the cause.

The service that social media supply is: permitting way self-expression; through algorithm recommendations of what you should read; whom you should know; how you should spend your time and so on. We see our authenticity unfold in how social-media interfaces change to accommodate us.

We get to be a commodity and to consume it at the same time. We are like a hot dog putting ketchup on itself. This self-commodification does not diminish the user’s self-conception but instead makes the self-conceivable, legible.

The self-presented to us through the algorithm processing of our data becomes the most authentic self-possible. The “end of privacy” appear far more tolerable in this light, much as attaching metrics to social interactions in social media makes social stalking and spying seem only natural. Only by been watched we can see who we are. Surveillance will let us chart the path to “being natural” without immediately feeling unnatural about it. Our data gets processed, and what we want to know, or how we want to be, is presented to us encapsulate in product form. The self-presented back to us can serve us as a simplified guide to how to be ourselves, in a version that mainly consists such as product recommendations and crude assumptions about what sort of information we are presumed to want to know. When our social-media profiles can be authentic in our stead, authenticity becomes a matter of quantified attention and network prominence, rather than of self-consistency.

‘BE CONSCIOUS’ -You have to be ambitiousism of our gurus is coming to help us. We are programmed, thanks to technology, to “do the right thing” by constraining and in some cases altogether eliminating moral behavior rather than use ethics and law. It’s understandable, is too complicated chose to pay attention to the space around us when we are so focused on ourselves.

I already described many examples of the genre during this narration but here a recent one: https://youtu.be/fUbgsgYkuuA

Product in consumer culture capitalist culture quickly loses

their novelty. They become moribund. They become trash.

The self, as a product, loses its enchantment for us and needs to be revitalized to what becomes familiar, known. We love ourselves only as a novelty, a mystery, not as a staple product. I inevitably our desire for ourselves needs to be renewed, and we will need to be repackaged. We do that with us and with everyone else around. Judging the others and selling ourselves so quickly for any new adventure. The reality is that every object around us is programmed to be replaced in a bit of time, is called determined obsolescence.

More often than we expected, we are driven by an attitude that before could have seen as crazy. We purchase directly new object (often technological as smartphones) while your “old” one is still working completely fine.

Some identify that as “the number trap.” We as humans attach a lot of our happiness, satisfaction, and feelings on numbers. The higher number of Instagram likes you get the happier or more accepted you feel. The higher number of goals your football team scores, the happier you feel. Higher the number of money you make, the happier you feel. The reality is that numbers never end. So, in theory, you can always get higher and higher numbers to get even happier.

Every one of us, often unconsciously attached is happiness to numbers: number of followers, number of views, number of money, number of friends, and so on. Even when that number got to immense proportions, let’s say millions, the question becomes: why not more? Why not tens of millions?

Why not billions?

Numbers at the end are a trap that couldn’t satisfy you, and Bob Marley knew it. He said: “Money is numbers and numbers never end. If it takes money to be happy your search for happiness will never end.”

In all of that, the unique thing that doesn’t change but is accusing this constant upgrading is our planet. It is plagued by environmental problems that deplete natural resources and strain livelihoods. Because of us. Fortunately, the solution-

This video is an Adidas advertisement and event launch.

“Our oceans are dying, but you can help save them. All you need to do is run. Run For The Oceans on June 8th, World Oceans Day 2018, till July 8th. Every km = $1 for the Parley Ocean Plastic Program, up to 1 million USD. Join us on Runtastic and clock a run, wherever you are. Every kilometer counts. “ So, 1. because you already like run or is supposed to be any way healthy and natural activity. Everyone should get it. 2. Every km is counted to earn money for the cause, so you have to be connected to proven your participation. Here the incentives. 3. Create data that someone else will benefit more than you from, with your Runtastic or clock run. 4.

Help Adidas to make their best and shared advertisement launch for the new lines of products. 5. Be satisfied and proud because you made something good for the world.

The first comment under the video says: “Why to run when you can go out and pick up trash in the ocean.”

Everyone could do something to help the environment, but the problem is when we don’t say anything or worse when we seem blind on not understanding that almost every technology is making buying time at governments and companies until someone is going to have a real solution that tackles the roots of the problems. Let ‘s say that no one now how solves these problems and until people will continue to consume faster than they can why the same companies have to slow down?

You have to want it. The reality is that be sustainable have a higher cost than not to be.

We live in the age when the man has had the most significant impact on the planet. Consumption, pollution, urbanization, technology, waste, transport are among the most evident signs that our presence is leaving on earth. All this today It’s a debate. Among those who have a catastrophic perception of the next millennium, to whom, more optimistic, hypothesizes that here our social, economic and technological powers, we will succeed in making the land stable. The Anthropocene (definition of dominion given by man choice) is the product of a contemporary world too populated, too intense, too fast, too overheated, too neoliberal and too dominated by human beings. Energy, urbanization, mobility, waste, and information. In each of these areas, we begin to see how the growth typical of capitalism and the optimism of Enlightenment thinking are now over.

‘DON’T YOURSELF’ -In a worldCATEGORIZE of like-minded peoplehuman ability to be categorised into any principle, sense of hierarchy.

How we already have seen technologies aren’t neutral. The collection of data, and activities related to it, always divide us into clusters and implement the oppression of marginalized groups as they are confronted with evaluation by categorization of the mathematical algorithms. The race to quantify, collect, store and model information by stakeholders of power, such as the internet corporations, results in the rapid development of digital infrastructures. In these digital infrastructures, information technologies are modeled as objective by the hegemonic identities that create, implement and control them. If you have a Nikon camera and you make a photo of an Asian person, it’s going to tagging them as blinking people. Google photo identification of black people might show you gorillas pictures and so on.

In the Cult chapter, there are more severe examples of this unfair categorization loop in mathematical models.

Information overload and connectivity has encouraged a

divisive form of emotional tribal politics, in which loyalty to the group and anger overtake reason and compromise.

Back in the 1960’s, the theorist Marshall McLuhan predicted that the coming age of electronic communications would lead to the breakdown of established structures and identities. The consequence, he asserted, would be a return to a more tribal society. He called this seamless web of information “ the global village.” Over the last few years, however, the nature of political disagreement has changed.

It’s gone tribal. It is becoming hyper-partisan, characterized by a fierce group of loyalty, overlooking one’s failings while exaggerating one’s enemies. Politics is becoming like a tv program. In the act of re-tribalisation, we need to belong to a group. We move from information scarcity to one of too much of it. Available information is now far beyond the

Worse are doing these technologies, and more are dividing us rather than address the central problem united. The splintering of established mainstream news and a surge of misinformation allows people to personalise their source in ways that play to their pre-experiences biases. Online anyone can find any communication they wish, and with it, thousands of like-minded people that stick with that. What transforms a group of like-minded people into motivated, and mobilised tribe is a sense of shared of struggle and common complaint. If you are a gay person, you can cite and share the awful crime statistics and proves of regarding violence towards gay people. If you are a person of colour, survey data reveals over and over the enormous differences in your life opportunities. If you are Muslims, you’re more likely to end up in prison. If you are a woman, you are still earning less than men, and are subjected to a vast amount of casual sexism. If you are a man, you are subject to reverse discrimination, will live for less time and are more likely to die from suicide. The list is immense, change subjects and changes problems or even mix them sometimes.

All the above statements are true and reflect genuine problems. The point is that every individual now has a massive amount or reasons to feel legitimately aggrieved, outraged oppressed. Even if their own life is going just fine. For years we have retreated into tribes with different information and principles, but the internet has opened new ways of forming, finding and joining ever smaller tribes that we never even knew we belonged to.

Here a short video about marginalized groups/clustering culture and when the exaggeration of being politically correct becomes hypocrisy. https://www.facebook.com/9gag/videos/10157535724186840

‘HAVE A CRITICAL THINKING’ -You are often right, but never wrong-

The Internet has almost eliminated the barriers to the

transmission of information. Today, a smartphone or an account on any social media is sufficient to reach a broad audience with information. This transfer of power to individuals it was inspiring, but now we begin to see the consequences. We have never had so much freedom of expression.

However, the truth is obscured by reconstructed falsehoods, wrong interpretations, invented news. The enormous power of the Net has made it possible to spread information about the social tension that some countries consider dangerous.

The question is where to set limits. When is it that filtering contents become censorship. Different cultures and societies have limits at different levels. How can these differences be reconciled when we are talking about a global internet?

Committed to filtering opinions that we do not like or we do not share, we run the risk of obscuring severe social problems that deserve our attention. Here the dilemma, how to stay aware of what is happening in the world while limiting the consequences of the freedom to throw up hatred, falsehoods and wrong ideologies?

Daniel Kahneman points out that two primary systems govern human behavior and vehicle the bias in human decision-making. “System one” is thinking fast, instinctive and emotional. In contrast “system two” is thinking slow, deliberative and more logically. Its institutions are arranged to arrive at logical, fact-driven decision. The internet, by contrast, is where everyone and everything is immediate, instinctive and emotional. The internet inculcates new assumptions about how things should work in two important respects. First of all, the internet allowed you to access everything and everyone, to millions of web pages, all the goals, all the pictures and all for free. You zoom in, you zoom out, swipe, tap. Second of all, the internet is primarily an emotional medium. Speed and information are related, of course, because both are means by which our finite brain handles information overload and total connectivity. The modern citizen is expected to filter through a flux of competing facts, networks, friend requests, claims, blogs, data, propaganda, misinformation, different charts, commentary, and reportage. This is confusing and stressful, and so we lean on natural and simple emotional processes to make sense of the noise. As has been well documented, we rely on “confirmation bias,” reading things we already agree with, surrounding ourselves with like-minded people and avoiding information that does not conform to our pre-existing view of the world. Tribalism and “system one” thinking are the direct products of information overload. These are ideal conditions for division and disagreement to turn into existential opposition. There is nothing wrong per se with political tribes. But if partisanships overwhelm everything democracy breaks down because it makes compromise impossible. Disagreement over practical issues starts to involve purity and impuri-

ty: at which point there are no negotiable principles, just tribe loyalties. “We” are good and pure, while “they” are evil and corrupt. There are signs of this attitude everywhere on the internet. Have you ever noticed how swiftly arguments online seem to progress from reasonable disagreement to absolute denouncement? The neuroscientist Tali Sharot writes: “Our belief affects our well-being and happiness, we avoid information that makes us confused or insecure to privilege information that makes us feel strong and right.”

This is why, when exposed to contradictory facts, most of us become more strongly set in our beliefs. Now, on the internet, everyone feels allowed to throw hate messages against other people just as the default. We ignore the social rules and norms at play in the “offline” world. We often don’t know or see the people we are speaking to because of instant communication, we perceive that as a place in an alternative reality, without rules or accountability, and we do things we would not do in real life.

Still not convinced why do so many people use the internet to harass and threaten other people? Here the link to an excellent short documentary made by Kyrre Lien, “The internet warrior.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=751&v=8JyTW4Rg2tE All social media platforms insist they are “platforms” not “publishers” which means that, unlike newspapers, they are not legally liable for the content they host. The paradox is that everything on social media is still curated, usually by some mysterious algorithm rather than a human editor.

These algorithms are designed to serve you content that you are likely to click on, as that means the potential to sell more advertising alongside.

You are in a circle of self-perpetuation. YouTube’s “up next” videos are statistically selected to be optimised not to be honest or truthful, but to optimise your watch-time, and hooked you in a content that has been scrutinized to be most likely to you. This is both mirror and a multiplier, a giant feedback loop powered by big data. Advertising is the defining language of the present mediascape, and the effectiveness or otherwise of advertising messages is based not on truth or critical reception, but on the intensity of nervous stimulation. Is a general decline and inability of critical thinking. Critical skills are not naturally given, but the result of mental evolution in history. Critique is the individual ability to distinguish between false and true enunciations, and also between right and wrong. It is not all on us citizens. Our education system needs to respond to the overwhelming and confusing information world. Every school should teach the critical thinking necessary to navigate the internet skeptically. Are not just young people who are subject to online misinformation. Instead of the concern about the creation of echo chambers in the internet conversation, I suggest old advice: place yourself in the position of someone unlike yourself and always remember that no one is ever annoying in real life as he or she seems online.

What the internet is telling you:

-The internet will help you-To discover your uniqueness-Be yourself-You are unique-You have to be ambitious-In a world of like-minded people-You are often right, but never wrong-

Technology is a beautiful, a fantastic thing, I would never blame it and pray to get back to the Stone Age, when we communicated through smoke signals, but I also believe that technology should make us happier, more human (and not otherwise) and make life easier (lot of times it does), and I also think that it should have a limit, a limit that we have to establish: we must try to prevent that technology isolate us as human beings, that face to face dialogue, direct contact is lost.

Communication becomes a mechanical and aseptic operation, slowly and almost without realizing about it, we go through life depriving us of living it without Instagram filters, thoroughly and intensely. Let’s be aware that if the “selfie� trend gets serious and we end up appearing alone in the photo; It would be sad.

6

CONCLUSION

TECHNOLOGY This video show Guy Verhofstadt, former Prime Minister of Belgium and

today a member of the European Parliament of the AldĂŠ when he asks his questions to Mark Zuckerberg during the discussion in the European Parliament. https://www.facebook.com/GuyVerhofstadt/videos/10156775649115016/ In a synthesis, Salvatore Iaconesi says that the speech of the video shows only one thing: a substantial inability to understand the existential positioning of the human being of this historical period, and how this determines its ability to relate to the other elements and subjects of the ecosystem. Other human beings, organizations, and with the environment, buildings, objects, processes, everything progressively made more and more sentient through ubiquitous technologies. This misunderstanding is echoed by governments and, basically, by companies. All of these subjects address the issue using administrative, bureaucratic and financial tools, entirely unsuitable to propose any innovation that is capable of tackling the issues in ways that aim at welfare, happiness, and social justice. The GDPR itself is a bureaucratic and administrative tool whose purpose is to regulate the extractive economy of data, (extracts data from people, just like that of oil extracts oil from the ground) and which by its nature is not able to propose other visions, nor to implement them.

However, while Big Data, when managed wisely, can provide valuable insights, many of them will be disruptive. After all, it aims to find patterns that are invisible to human eyes. As Cathy O’Neil examined in her book, there are loads of emerging mathematical models that might be used for good and an equal number that have the potential to be great, if they are not abused.

Consider the work of Mira Bernstein, a slavery sleuth. The goal is to is to use the model to help companies root out the slave-built components in their products. The idea is that companies will be eager to free themselves from this scourge, naturally because they should be opposed to slavery, but also because it could devastate their brand. Another model for the common good has emerged in the field of social work. It is a predictive model that pinpoints households where children are most likely to suffer abuse. The model has been developed by Eckerd, a child and family services nonprofit in the United States. Many of these models, will arrive with the best intentions.

However, they must also deliver transparency, disclosing in the input data they are using as well as the results of their targeting.

Moreover, they must be open to audits. These are potent engines, after all.

We must keep our eyes on them. Data is not going away, not even computers, much fewer numbers, and mathematics. These models are constructed not just from data but from the choices we make about. Those decisions are not just about logistics, profits, and efficiency. They are fundamentally moral.

If we back away from them and we treat mathematical models as a neutral force, we abdicate our responsibility.

We can imagine an ecological economy (that does not mean environmentalist) of data, which deals with the ecosystem and its evolution. We can imagine a data economy with people, not by people, where data originate from participatory, civic, ethical, aesthetic processes, originating from the solidarity necessary for digital cultures to produce positive results in society and the environment. Capable of producing new rituals around data. We can imagine and implement processes that involve new identities, as we have described them, and relationships with new subjectivities, while computation and artificial intelligence enter the scene and nurture organizations, processes, objects, buildings, cities, and territories, making them sentient, live.

There are so many questions we can ask ourselves in this scenario: how do we collect data in a performative, participatory way, out of the laboratory, in the public space, making sure that everyone can benefit?

How are these new companies, organizations and institutions, which use data not according to extractive models, but collaborative, supportive, and participatory?

So above all: there is a cosmological question.

We have not built a society, to position ourselves existentially against data and computational entities. The rituals we have at our disposal, which constitute our daily experience and which shape our imagination and our ability to create meaning, do not yet speak to us about these opportunities and conflicts. On the contrary, we are exposed to myriad micro rites that are not imagined for the relational construction of our existential positioning, but to opaquely influence, through the interface design, our perception of what is possible, recommended, suitable, acceptable, desirable and imaginable.

Each of the interfaces to which we are exposed, in front of the monitor, with the smartphone in hand, or in the technological cities, consists of hundreds of these rituals, which influence the boundaries of our world and our relationships.

What new rituals can we surround ourselves with?

IDENTITY Commercial interests have always distorted the truth, and we can see

that showing up in purportedly objective political and journalistic coverage of issues over time. Google and Facebook are advertising networks; Their implicit goal is to sell you on something, irrespective of whether it is true.

The concept of digital identity is distorted on the concept of univocal identity, and the strategies are oriented towards competition and closure rather than towards solidarity and collaboration. That is contributing to the debasement of the human being, and its transformation into an exchangeable, transferable financial entity, without any civil rights, of expression and relationship.

The human being reduced to a mere financial value. I think a big leap would be a movement to socialize these technologies and to try to restore some semblance of truth and progress outside privatized commercial logic. We need to take the concept of power seriously, and not be seduced by the kind of power that the market offers us. For instance, I do not see successful people within the entertainment industry as powerful: while they may make much money, and have a platform to speak from, their power depends mostly on their advocacy of an ultimately disempowering system of exploitation, illusions, and competition. At the base of all this, there is a fundamental misunderstanding on the evolution of the concept of identity that is activated in digital cultures, and of the psychological, social, relational and political implications that derive from it. The idea of ​​digital identity put in place by governments, including Europe, is the furthest from the concept of identity in the digital world. While the digital identity promoted by governments is, in essence, a passport expressed in bits, a unique identity, digital identity can be an individual, multiple, collective, anonymous, temporary, transitive, and combinations of the previous ones.

Given the current political climate, optimism is something challenging to maintain but is an essential aspect, particularly in the realm of creativity.

We have an abundance of dystopian perspectives, although many of those seem outmoded. Trends in politics and technology have been pointing towards adverse outcomes for some time, and so it has always been the focus to be positively critical. Art as the design does not operate or is not received, in isolation from other aspects of culture. We should be able to understand thoroughly and critically the environment or the critic that we are going to address if we want to have a meriting result. Is useless try to tackle problems that we do not even fully understand or at least, not even pushed or tried to understand. Any of us cannot and have no moral obligation to save the world, and it is correctly naive to think otherwise. Anyone of us (as creative workers) should take the exact amount of time needed to think and understand a particular problem critically and just later, explore and deviate from the issue in an alternative preferable of reality. The risk is to misguide and misinterpreted. We are fortunate to have the privilege of expanding our knowledge we should not waste it. This “digital stuff” is of fundamental importance for the future of privacy, autonomy, freedom, democracy itself: these are issues that should be important to any person. Do not worry about your responsibility on “digital” equivale but do not worry about your responsibility for the future of democracy.

SOCIETY It is natural that the less well-off are turning their kitchens, cars and person-

al data into a source of profit. What else could they do? For Silicon Valley, this represents a triumph of entrepreneurship, a natural, technological development. Governments could resist, but they have budgets to make ends meet: that is why Uber and Airbnb will finally be allowed to exploit this great opportunity as desired, increasing tax revenues and helping citizens survive later this month. The Economy of Sharing will not replace that of debt: they will coexist. The only task of tech giants is to create tools to solve problems as they arise, and not how they could be formulated through a political and economic critique. In this Silicon Valley behaves like any other sector: unless there is profit in the middle, no company would require permanent social changes. If you complain about them, you will be described as technophobes and nostalgic. In this way, all the criticisms of an economic-political nature to the technology companies, and an intimate relationship with the neoliberal program become a cultural criticism against modernity.

Now, however, there is a new battle looming over the best way to run society: should technology or the people govern it? Is democracy still the best way to ensure wealth and stability? These are spiritual as well as technical questions. At the moment technology appears to have the answers. Maybe not the best one, but not worse than ours. Are we looking for an answer?

If we think regarding months, we should focus on the refugee crisis in Europe and more immediate problems, but if we believe in term of decades, then global warming, growing inequality and the disruption of the job market are to take in considerations. All the problems and developments are overshading by interlinked processes that make the same Harari raise three questions: “Are organisms just algorithms, and is life just data-processing?

What’s more valuable intelligence or consciousness?

What will happen to society, politics and daily life when non-conscious but highly intelligent algorithms know us better than we know ourselves?”

It took only a century for the problems inherent in nationalism to explode in the Second World War. The event is so traumatic that it has pushed the world to hope for a new type of national identity. This new model of identity is based on an idea born in the United States, where anyone can become an American if it shares values ​​like freedom and work. This idea means to share race, religion, and language and is omnipresent in our history. However, something went wrong. Today this battle involves the whole world and is increasingly intense. We fight for a collective past and a shared future. They have taught us for decades that the concept of identity defines us as individuals. Building a world based on shared values ​​means creating a myth. But to work this motion must be at least as powerful as the one that preceded it.

What is your myth?

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