What is the Capulcu collective?

We took the name of the 2013 protests against Turkey’s President, Erdogan. Erdogan said they were twins who despised citizens defending a park in Istanbul, vague, useless. The protesters turned the insult half round, taking the floor with pride in identifying themselves.

We knew each other through the street, through social movements and through the hacker scene. Eduard Snowden’s allegations in 2013 were the starting point for our group. We thought we had to do a kind of digital self-defense to maintain the spaces of privacy and anonymity. But then we realized that self-defense, however necessary it was, wouldn't be enough, that we had to form a radical discourse about technology itself.

Is technology neutral?

Within the left, there has been a tendency to believe in the liberating capacity of technological progress and at the same time try to liberate it from capitalism, understanding that technology is neutral. We are of another view, because from an autonomous radical point of view it seems to us that most of the criticisms are made from a Social Democrat point of view. According to Marcus, domination is not only the use of technology, but technology is domination. Some of the objectives and interests of domination are not established from the outside, but as a sign of identity of the technology itself. Power uses technology to transform society into a direction. So technology is not a tool, but an entire system, a way of thinking. That's why we say technology is violence, social war. Taylor invented the assembly chain to fight for worker autonomy, and a similar process is currently taking place.

One of the achievements of capitalism is the disappearance of the self-awareness of the working class. Even the precarious do not feel like a working class.

In addition, they think they have control of their lives, that all of those devices give them the power, and they don't realize the power they're giving to corporations. Only if we take into account that these devices are useful, are we lost. The virtualization processes of the capitalist platform, which refers to platforms like UBER, Airbnb or Deliveroo, cause us to lose consciousness.

Is Amazon the current paradigm of corporate capitalism?

Yes, along with Google. Both want to know in depth our situation, customs and aspirations, monitor them to do business. The staff also controls through a device. The device tells the worker what are the topics that make up each order and what is the shortest path within each purchase warehouse. The device also measures this worker's speed for Amazon, but it doesn't tell him what his productivity level is; the worker, worried, is working harder. Every three months, Amazon fires workers below average.

Facebook creates profiles with our private data and sells them to advertisers, as well as parties, lobbies or governments.

They are selling, but we will increasingly see how they will use them directly to dominate the sectors. Amazon itself, for example, is going to soon enter the world of health insurance. They know so much about us, that using data they can calculate our situation and our risks based on the consumption we make. The insurance company Generali offers its customers smart bracelets for free. With the data extracted, it is known whether the person performs the exercise, how his body responds and whether it is convenient to ensure it. It is a paternalistic approach, “the world is too complex for you, give all the information to the experts and we will take care of you”; soon they will start asking for DNA samples “for our good” to make sure and the prices will be set dynamically and adapted to each profile.

There was a time when the autonomous vision very much observed the idea that power spied on us. Currently, the paradigm has changed radically: The Big Brother is harder to identify and we are also the ones informing him.

Yes, and it's getting complicated. The prospect of the 1980s of oppressive power was simple, too simplistic. Orwell’s image does not very well reflect the current situation, as it is not a terrible panoptician who sees us all, it is more a mixture of normalisation processes. If you don't want to participate, you can disconnect, but stay out of everyday social communication. It is, therefore, the confusion between free entry and forced entry. We are invited to give details about our life and the mechanism works very well, we are pleased to make known the most intimate aspects of our life. The current version of power rarely uses the old repressive mechanism. Big Brother is no longer a threat, but a reliable friend.

Is there less and less chance of living disconnected?

In China, for example, a comprehensive social scoring system has been implemented that extends not only to the Internet, but also to all measurable aspects of offline life. For example, if you behave well as a driver, you'll earn points, because the surveillance system knows your car's license plate. You'll get negative points if you break the rules. You get positive or negative points for everything you do: to buy, to evaluate services... Then, depending on those points your capacities in society are defined and what you can do: go abroad, rent a house... In order to do some things, it is necessary to have a minimum of points. Inter-online differentiation is disappearing.

What about people who don't get enough points?

They're not dissidents automatically, but they have very little chance in society. In China, you don't get tickets for the high-speed train or for international flights, you don't get a job, you get a home ... Your profile assessment is becoming a prerequisite for more and more basic services. They intend to bring this comprehensive system to Europe, and now you can proudly say that you would never accept such a system, but they will make it part of the standardisation process, without resorting to violence.

This seems like a description of a dystopian nightmare.

Yes, and it starts to open down. For example, students, parents, friends… There are groups that organize themselves in Whatsapp. If you refuse to do so, you separate yourself in some way, you reproach yourself from social groups. This is not, therefore, just the Chinese issue, but it seems that in Europe too it is going to be implemented very easily. So resistance has to start much earlier, we have to stop these cybernetic processes of measuring and driving social life, we have to deal with that idea that in social life everything is measurable. These measurements will become evaluations that will serve as a starting point for predicting our social life and correcting our dissident behavior. Therefore, to begin with, we must face up to our own measurement process.

Is domotics one of the ways that this dystopia uses to access our homes?

Yes, cars, homes and smart cities -- it's a process to get into all aspects of our lives, and we have to give up on it. It's more comfortable to live in an autonomous system where not everything is interconnected, because otherwise, we lose control of our lives. In the Smart Home concept, you cannot close or turn on your home door without connecting to the central computer, if this is damaged you cannot leave your home, it is absurd. The trend towards the interconnection of everything is creating great dependencies, not a liberating trend, but quite the opposite. It turns us into subjects of corporations like Amazon, Google, Facebook or Apple.

What about the real physical plazas and bars, the traditional spaces of socialization?

Corporations are weakening the representative authority of the classic state. Administrations are losing the ability to control citizens for the benefit of these companies, although they have similar strategies. The State, through urbanism, wants to eliminate the real plazas and street meeting points that are uncontrollable, and Facebook and Google try to transfer communication to predefined channels. From our point of view, it is fundamental to maintain true and analogous relationships on the street, because they are out of control.

The more we get into this interconnected world, the harder it is to get out.

Indeed, technological development is taking a lot of speeds, we are no longer standing in front of it to stop the train, but perhaps to run behind it. We have to think about what technologies are that are not yet fully approved, artificial intelligence is going to have great development soon but it's not yet approved. There, for example, we are still in time to act with a strong attitude of resistance.

What can we do, is it possible to disconnect?

Disconnecting is expensive, because in today's society it means cutting all of your possibilities. So everyone has to look at which of these social services they really need, what they can give up on. I would never enter Facebook because it would be a renunciation of many things, but there are, among Mexican activists, people and collectives who agree to use Whatsapp for the fight.

What other tools do we have at our disposal?

Hacker attacks, data filtration, boycotts against Google Bus and robots, campaigns against Google glasses, protests against Google Campus and Amazon distribution centers, attacks on their digital infrastructures, tackling cybernization of social life, etc. Keep the future unwritten.