By migrating to the network of networks, technological mediation took a qualitative and irreversible leap. The Internet, which began as a military project of defensive interconnection to guarantee the survival of the command during the Cold War, mutated into the largest corporate infrastructure for controlling, extracting, and shaping human behavior.
The old television miniaturized, crossed the threshold of intimacy and settled in our pockets through so-called smartphones, which actually operate as complex devices for intelligence and continuous surveillance.
Today, if a person is not part of the digital ecosystem, the system effectively declares them nonexistent. In this new algorithmic domain, human beings have become an inexhaustible source of organic, biological, and social data. Through touchscreens, smartwatches, and everyday apps, we hand over our heart rate, location, voice recordings, facial scans, and fingerprints.
We are experiencing accelerated biopolitical extractivism where the cloning and commodification of our routines advances relentlessly. Intimacy has ceased to be a natural dimension of life and has become the most coveted raw material for the technology market.
The algorithms of massive platforms like TikTok and artificial intelligence systems do not have a life of their own nor are they autonomous entities; they respond (for now) strictly to the corporate hand that designs the software to fragment the population into isolated and hyper-personalized swarms.
Television in the last century cultivated massive audiences around the same message; the contemporary algorithm individually manages dopamine spikes, stimulates digital addiction, and meticulously shapes the perception of reality to predetermine consumption and political behavior.
We have built the most surveilled and vulnerable society in human history. In this hyperconnected environment, the boundary between public and private has completely vanished.
Communication technologies were never neutral. They became a framework with an engineering that perfected the cultivation and control of society, establishing a permanent audit of the body, daily life, and the massive invasion of the community's psychosocial fabric.
