argia.eus
INPRIMATU
Digitisation
Sonia González @sonetska 2023ko ekainaren 13a
PAULA ESTÉVEZ

I remember my life before the Internet. Today I would not know how to return. I wouldn't like it. I remember the possibilities of democratization that we saw. Pop-ular culture also talked about cyberpunk. The Hacker Manifesto said that the network of networks could be an instrument to open our horizon and free the world.

Computer science and technology are no longer a chip and a computer, but a radical transformation of our lives.

The trend towards social atomization comes from before, but since the announcement of connecting people we are increasingly disconnected. More and more people are afraid or ashamed to talk face-to-face with another person or simply make phone calls. One of those who accused me verbally, saying that we should reflect on it. Enpin!

Screens cannot replace face-to-face relationships. They interrupt and hamper the work of mirror neurons that ignite empathy. The environment itself is disruptive. It seems that animals have to be in front of each other to work empathy.

Big tech companies own. The most valuable companies in the world are under the acronym GAFAM. Google, Amazon, Facebook, Apple, Microsoft, among others. Don't look at the election results, to know who's in the world, you have to look at the bags.

There are no politicians who have not mentioned the word digitalisation without knowing what they mean. Meanwhile, the websites of the administrations rot with obsolete information. That is not the objective of digitisation, it is not to transmit information or to facilitate life to citizens, but quite the opposite. The administration has found a new form of bureaucracy that separates more and more citizens.

The Administration finds in digitalization a new form of bureaucracy that separates more and more citizens

But beyond that, digitization is the final straight line of capitalism that wants to postpone decline.

It is a great promise to keep lowering costs (job destruction): robotization, applications and platforms that override labor relationships, automated responses led by algorithms…

It's a new business nest that feeds mining, industry, trade, transportation and trash businesses. Consumerism, exploitation and estractivism painted green.

But digitization could be of any color, except green: mineral fever, destruction of territories, non-recyclable waste deposits -- and energy spending. Yes, the cloud is not immaterial, but interconnected servers. The greenhouse gases generated by Internet traffic are equivalent to all civilian flights; U.S. data center cooling systems spend 1.7 billion liters of water a day.

Finally, they are the best tools for citizen control. But, attentive, in addition to what can be achieved with direct control, the simple knowledge that we are constantly monitored leads the whole society to conformism and submission.

This is not a call to become a luge of the 21st century, but to reflect on everything that is played behind screens and to work on critical thinking.

Resilience, another buzzword, is in contact, help and human collaboration, not on a smartphone. That's the social network to weave. The others are only useful to feed the ego, so that we are hooked on the chops dopamine of the calyxes and hate that inflate that ego. There is only the self projecting on the screen the ni and shadows of the cave of Plato.