“Social media is designed so that reactionary messages win”

Manuel Varese Cabrera

From the Bureau of La Jornada

The newspaper La Jornada
Monday, August 12, 2024, p. 12

Ekaitz Cancela has been researching the intersection between capitalism and technology for ten years. In an interview with The Daythe native of the Basque Country spoke to us about the need for a digital socialism that seeks to be at the service of creativity and human autonomy, much more than capital and expropriation. He defines himself as a writer who tries to read technological phenomena from the perspective of historical materialismpolitical economy and philosophy.

The young Basque asserted that “the discourse of the elites is very well designed and financed with experts in public relations, think tanksfoundations of ideas that they finance to establish an intellectual hegemony where there seems to be no alternative to the technological progress led by a series of American companies, and for which they deny or avoid talking about the materiality behind words like the cloud, which is full of cables, data, minerals and other raw materials that are extracted, slave and feminized labor. It is full of expropriation.”

To understand this phenomenon it is essential to see it from a materialist perspective: “The only alternative to solve this great mess that neoliberalism and Silicon Valley have put us in is to socialize technological infrastructures, decentralize them and create economic, but also cultural and social forms that are not startup or business when it comes to distributing and socializing the products and services of the 21st century, which are hyper-technological,” he said.

Cancela argues that exploited work is present on different platforms. In the case of Mexico, “the data is that 60 percent of the workers behind the platforms are chatbots artificial intelligence, who answer questions, exposed in some cases to sexual violence, are precarious Mexican women,” she said.

After denouncing slave labor that causes deaths and human rights violations in the Congo, the author stated that Sometimes it seems that there is no class struggle with the digital world, that it has already disappeared, that the end of history has arrived, but just by looking at the production and logistics chain behind a cell phone you see that the class struggle is always present and that denying it is a discursive strategy of the capitalists to win the political battle..

For Cancela, social networks They are means of productionbecause they are “accepting to battle on a platform designed so that reactionary messages win and people believe that they are organizing, that they are militating or proposing revolutionary strategies simply by interacting with social networks, through initiatives that tend to individualize action [con] extremely anti-collectivist thoughts (…) and it is he who has to change things instead of the citizens organized in a revolutionary way.”

In the same hegemonic logic of the Silicon Valley guidelines, the young Basque highlighted that there is a war economy, “a kind of military Keynesianism that redistributes the profits that are being produced by the massive purchase and sale of all kinds of war technologies. softwares from Israel used to spy on Catalan independence supporters and journalists in Mexico are an example.”

Israel is also providing services to all of Europe’s police forces and its defense ministries, even to industrial companies, with cutting-edge technologies that are testing weapons on the battlefield, committing genocidehe said, referring to the war in Gaza.

Because that is the only way, say those with the money, for capitalism to survive. Neither the greatest engineers in Silicon Valley nor the best CEOs who come out of their garages and are the most creative in the world have come up with how to solve the problems generated by capitalism without war.; for this reason, they innovate in the military, so that the United States triumphs, Every day more authoritarian, every day more decadent.