Under no circumstances would we recommend… netflix to anyone! Or anything like that. (Some book yes…) But on the occasion of the documentary “the social dilemma”, where various “repentant” executives / inventors of applications and technologies that have proven to be huge commercial successes and cultural / intellectual / moral hurricanes (related to antisocial media) become accusers of their own works, consider this: Would you ever trust a fetishist (of technology, religion, commodity) even if he or she sincerely wanted to set you free from a fetishism?
Nine years ago the dominant wisdom in the west was that revolutions / uprisings in the Arab world (the Arab Spring) took place… thanks to twitter! It was a way of underestimating the plebeian anxieties and struggles in the south, and glorifying the technology of the north. No one had thought of attributing the formation of the First International to the railways; although the movement through them played a role in bringing together a number of radicals in Geneva in 1866. But it was “taken for granted” that some communication techniques, in 2011, could even start revolutions… with hundreds killed, thousands tortured in prisons…
This fetishistic conviction still haunts the “repentant”. They were missionaries when they were working for the bosses of digital communication / incorporation; they remain missionaries as “former” too. Maybe everyone can learn / understand some things from their confessions; but not the basics. Because these basics don’t come from the projects of capitalism and its technologies, from its machines themselves, but in principle they come from their preconditions. And these political / social preconditions are now, differentiated and more complex, where they were 30 years ago: everywhere.
Yes, behavior engineering (and the mechanization of behaviour) is at the forefront. Yes, terrorism on all pretexts, provoking continuous states of emergency, is at the forefront. But…
Light always comes in through the cracks… And the cracks aren’t pleasant. They terrify…