Our societies and our daily life are characterized by the exercise of control in everything that is done. Knowing laws, understanding protocols and their consequences creates capacity to deal with the system. Great allies are found in the digital world. Google is a wealth of information that allows reaching everything, one just needs to know how to type.
This digital world is aseptic, fast, and efficient for controllers as well as for the controlled. Each choice, each path is scripted, measured, watched. Cookies, the design of our trajectories on the web, exist, work, and are returned to us, users, in the form of suggestions for consumption. Our profiles are elaborated, our motivational preferences are reviewed, and so the markets are expanded. Our digitalization process feeds the market and is truly driven by it. The control that we exercise is in short what allows the capture of data that are offered for continuity of control. Interfaces get confused.
Controllers and controlled ones are identified as faces of the same coin: they are the data that feed our current system, which cushion and amplify spectacles submitted to profit and consumption protocols. The main social networks plan their algorithms from this referential - profit. Even if what comes about is a supposed ideological control, this is only an identifiable reference for market classifications. How do you keep people as long as possible on the same platform without annoying them with posts antagonistic to their beliefs, without them thinking about going out or going off? By thematic classifications, for example, according to the most polarizing issues in each society, which quickly organize the data. Moreover, the user facilitates and participates in the control mechanisms each time he/she assumes a fight flag in his/her profile: # elenão, #lulalivre, #orgulhogay, #orgulhohetero, #feminismo, #machismo, #proarmamentismo, #abaixoasarmas, #immigration, #HealthCareForAll, #AgainstTrump, #feminism, #sexism, #racism, #Proarms, #Againstarms, #AgainstBrexit etc.
Within the largest “bubbles”, which are each network/platform, and within the smallest “bubbles”, which are algorithm-based clusters composed of people of a similar nature in values and positioning, the market is maintained and enhances; thoughts circulate repeatedly, without oppositions, consequently without conflicts and without news.
The easy exercise of control in the virtual world strengthens and expands the control that has long been established in society, in homes, in schools, in offices etc. via manipulation of values, beliefs, and the dilution of struggles, antitheses resulting from processes, now replaced by slogans that ultimately refer to profit, such as “globalization is inevitable”, “increased production benefits all”, “megacompanies generate jobs”, “minority rights are important”, “were it not for overpopulation...” etc.
In a profit-based society, it is not advantageous to exclude anyone, it is enough to control diversity and unproductive excess, directing it to consumption. The freedom to come and go, to decide, to stand, to oppose, to create, and even to stop is predictable and controllable unless questions are constantly exercised, contextualized in the individual motivations themselves. Thus, one can neutralize oppressive controls experienced as an illusion of freedom, of being able to act, to manage one’s own life and provide children with a better life.