It is one thing to have your information manipulated; and another, that they manipulate your ability to think, because they have already created conditioned reflexes. This significant message from Fidel Castro reminds us that we cannot talk about our way of seeing reality without understanding that the reality that surrounds us, as well as its representations and imaginaries, is influenced by powerful forces, which are placed between the reality of foot and our gaze, to shape our perception, our reflection/interpretation/action and our consciousness. Behind our ways of feeling/thinking/acting is a whole horizon of beliefs and ideologies, which gives meaning to our existence. In our ways of thinking and acting, we see, at its maximum expression, the unspeakable civilizing dispute that we are witnessing in this new century.
These are not easy times. Although the modern/colonial/capitalist project has had cyclical crises, the scales and magnitudes of these have been changing; Likewise, the instruments and means used to mitigate or confront them have been changing, so that things remain as they are. Today, in its eagerness to reset itself, capitalism is acting camouflaged by “progressive” discourses (believing—teacher Simón Rodríguez would say—that, because its colonial ideas are seasoned with fashion, we should not recognize its ruse); But it seems that those still called "left" have not learned how to define themselves in the face of the trap myths of modernity, which the global scenario offers us. For example, today, the majority celebrate the new era, marked by digitalization, and do not realize that, there, humanity is risking future slavery.
On the cell phone, our control is now!
It is no longer just about the end of the private, the personal, the intimate, and its edges of personal abuse, with biotechnologies such as facial recognition, fingerprint and even analysis of genetic material; information that is incorporated into the enormous data of power and control. The phenomenon is more complex: it is the battle for (inter)subjectivities. In other words: the new era It will have an impact on subjectivity and the forms of human relationship, which points in various directions with a single purpose: the resignification of social, emotional and cultural ties of capitalism and the ontological horizon that sustains it: modernity/coloniality.
As reflected in the essays in the book Capitalism and cyber control. Configuration of (inter)subjectivities, imaginaries and psychosocial repercussions, written by a group of social scientists from Venezuela, technology 4.0 brings with it a new loss of consciousness, as happened with previous industrial "revolutions", when "original community principles and values were transformed towards consumer society and, with it, the meaning of life changed. In other words: 4.0 technology would generate great, unprecedented psychosocial transformations, with progressive adaptations in the ways of thinking, acting and interrelating, as human beings. At this point, it is not so important to understand the "new" forms of production as to meditate on the principles, beliefs and values installed under the same ideal model of "progress" and what the production of capital produces: relations of domination and exploitation. , to have "comfort." When we naturalize this production model, we no longer have any problem accepting the prevailing injustice.
The new technological era (industrial operations with intelligent technologies, artificial intelligence, big data, robotics and automation; all developed from the logic of Cartesian dualism, which assumes that the human being is above non-human nature) exposes the arrogant accents of ideology of naked capitalism, which has been imposing global governance, to continue its principle of dominating the people and mother earth. This idea is not as absurd as you might think. The founder and executive chairman of the World Economic Forum, Klaus Schwab, is clear: “We are on the brink of a technological revolution that will fundamentally change the way we live, work and relate to each other. In its scale, scope and complexity, the transformation will be unlike anything humanity has experienced before. […] The fourth industrial revolution will ultimately change not only what we do, but also who we are. It will affect our identity and all the issues associated with it: our sense of privacy, our notions of ownership, our consumption patterns, the time we spend on work and leisure, and how we develop our careers, cultivate our skills, meet people, and nurture relationships. Our health is already changing…”
Despite the evidence, some "progressives" believe that the issue is an artificial, supposedly innocuous novelty; when it is the most skillful and mean invention that capitalism and its life-destructive religiosity has promoted: the reset of capital and its culture of domination/coloniality, which would allow rearm hegemonic values, beliefs and prejudices, in order to make imposible any civilizational turn.
The 4.0 revolution demonstrates what the will to dominate modern/capitalist rationality is capable of. The example given by the Bolivian decolonial teacher Rafael Bautista is very illustrative: "With the plan-demic, global quarantine - which was a military exercise of a deterrent nature, which confined us all to confinement and which was an undeclared coup d'état to everyone—the reset of the new world order began, based on rules that only serve the rich and on a new global governance that wants to turn the world into a panopticon. With the covid-19 quarantine, the entire world witnessed an exercise that would mark, from then on, the apocalyptic character of the new century. Millions of people locked in their homes, dependent on electricity and connectivity, immersed in digital avenues, an unprecedented phenomenon and an ideal moment to start the great reset of capitalism.
Making explicit the content of the capitalist rationality that is behind the 4.0 revolution is one of the revolutionary commitments that corresponds to us, at the present. As Rafael Bautista points out, «the widespread constructive chaos (which, in the name of “revolution”, promotes fourth generation wars) is designed, precisely, to delay any reconstruction indefinitely, in such a way that, as in the myth of Sisyphus , an endless reconstruction constitutes the objectification of the existential meaninglessness of the current human condition. Seeing how vital projects continually and tragically crumble leaves the popular struggle without the social optimum necessary to redirect its own political commitments.
Faced with arguments about the adoption of a digitalized social style, some will say that the end justifies the means; but they forget that the media define us and constitute us. What good is it that our ends are good, if the means we use are means of domination! The imposition of the digital revolution, as a form forced of life to all citizens of modern/colonial society, it is not coincidental. We are talking about the configuration of a subject made in the image and likeness of the consumer society. "How can we see ourselves as alien to the mold that technological society makes of us?" ask the Venezuelan researchers who participate in the text. Capitalism and cyber control.
4.0 technologies constitute—as the aforementioned work describes—a cultural superstructure of the era of capital and its overwhelming strategy of human control, which is imposed with the enthusiastic and unconscious participation of people: «This is how we see it in the linking of access to those who satisfy people's essential needs through digital social networks. This mechanism, which borders on the perverse, compels many people to be users (intermittent, but tied) of digital networks to access domestic gas, food... information about the supply of water, medicines or electricity, to mention a few satisfiers; without leaving any margin to the right not to be digital. Such is the interweaving that these surveillance and communication devices have acquired with everyday life, whose use moves away from an optional condition and becomes societal imperatives.
The global digital era is fundamentally aimed at maintaining the global economic growth model, associated with the continuous reinvention of the consumer society, which has us immersed in the multiplied crisis that we suffer today. It is no coincidence that capitalism invests enormous resources and uses all the scientific knowledge at its disposal to mitigate and neutralize or weaken the people's struggles for liberation; and to establish the uncritical acceptance of relations of domination and its values, through legitimations deeply rooted in the subjectivity of colonized peoples: «Current society, with the principles and precepts that make it up, has conditioned lifestyles and forms of behavior [read here: action] that reproduce and sustain it. This has been built with the intention of conditioning any possibility of questioning" (according to what was highlighted by the group of researchers cited).
Faced with this new threat - says the aforementioned book - it is probably imperative that States dedicate themselves to identifying and evaluating the psychosocial and psychocommunity impacts of digitalization - which, incidentally, has been presented to us as a right. acquired human.
The new era calls us to a deep reflection about its implications and consequences for life on the planet. How rational and viable is the new era? Let us not forget that, as the teacher Rafael Bautista emphasizes, one of the ways in which the modern/colonial/capitalist project operates in our common sense is the invention of technological needs, which lead us to always want more, to not be satisfied with what that we have, even if that dissatisfaction means more aggressive methods of plundering Mother Earth and, therefore, the depletion of the resources essential for life. Another question to answer would be this: How many planet Earths would we need to democratize these technologies that capital offers us today, to make us believe that the possession or accumulation of these material goods allows us to "live better"?
At a time when the construction of a new humanity is being disputed, to get out of the quagmire to which the logic of capital has led us, the technological transition of the 4.0 revolution would constitute the most colonial bet that we would be making. In other words: promoting the 4.0 revolution is condemning the people to support the decline of the West.
We people, in our struggles for liberation, have the right not to subsume ourselves in the neo-industrial paradigm, we have the right to change the dominant consumption models, we have the right not to be digital, we have the right not to submit to psyche 4.0. Making revolution is, essentially, transforming the way of life implemented by the hegemonic world and the construction of other forms of human relationships. Today, the greatest challenge for people is to reconstitute communities of life in the face of the society of "well-being", "development", "progress" (read: consumption) and its suicide train.
