The claim of “natural freedom” in the cyberverse may also seem old in our parts; Although his golden fifteen years (in ‘90s and ‘00s) are not so ancient. The fact that digital communications (and their content) are “out of nature” them out of every control capability gave information an almost ontological character. And that too many people imagined cyberspace as a “new space of freedom” became a belief so strong that whoever questioned it was immediately considered dangerous heretics.
These seem old: Snowden’s revelations, for example, must have acted like a cold shower, like a painful waking up with hangover… Only because online libertarianism was raw, driven by ignorance and fetishism and not by the solid knowledge of its power relations and methods, the after Snowden understanding of the vastly evolving cyberverse and the joints of power within it has so far been like a parade of apathy; and not by regrouping criticism. 1
Finally, as we are in the early stages of the 4th industrial revolution, the burning issues have multiplied, even within general indifference. Rather, to put it more correctly: this general indifference resembles the silent drift from the drunkenness of toxic whispers about mechanically mediated “freedom” in capitalism; And, as such, as a mass numbness, it is a lubricant of developments. It is not only general digital control, but also its unexpected new forms that, in various ways, originate from this drunkenness. To such an extent that they look extremely intimate and friendly. ..
In the following little tribute, there are two texts and one smaller comment. The two texts divide them over two decades. The first james Boyle, in 1997, brings Michel Foucault to cyberspace, to indicate the prospects of surveillance and discipline already available, behind the fog of the distorted beliefs of cyber-libertarians on “prohibition” and “anti-prohibition/freedom”, just a few years after the boom of internet usage. The second, written now, around a local example of surveillance and behavioral formation, indicates the maturation of those who 22 years ago were the potential of the 3rd industrial revolution. We must remind ourselves: in 1997 “Internet navigation” was an electronic peeling of pages; mobile phones were small radios; social media did not even exist by imagination; the word data only existed in the vocabulary of techniques; the increased reality was a fiction idea; and the internet of things or the internet of thoughts maybe not even there…
The hasty, who are practically the same social subjectivities that ran to bow down and shout the de facto “freedom of the internet” now, today, tomorrow, will want quick escape responses from the control it forms. Some ideological brothers of those who claimed 20 years ago that overcoming the bans is a technological piece of cake on the Internet, now they are confident that the escape can be done by technological means. Their failure now has its genealogy!!!
Definitely cyborg does not intend to spread a fatalistic, depressing idea a la “big brother”! It is, on the contrary, convinced that not enthusiasm or naivety, not technofetikism or technophobia, but the timely (working) criticism of the new wave of capitalist mechanization, it and only it can discover the weak points that cyber capitalism has to have, as it spreads around and before us in the social field.
It is also convinced that this awareness has many obstacles, most of which are “non-technological”…
Ziggy Stardust
cyborg #16 – 10/2019
