Norbert Wiener, in his book "Cybernetics or control and communication in the animal and the machine", states:
The thought of each era is reflected in its technique. The civil engineers of the past were surveyors, astronomers and navigators; those of the 17th century and beginning of the eighteenth century were watchmakers and lens polishers. As in ancient times, craftsmen made their instruments in the image of the heavens. A watch is nothing more than a pocket planetarium, which moves by necessity as do the celestial spheres; and if friction and energy dissipation are of any importance in it, they are effects to be overcome, so that the resulting movement of the clock hands must be as periodic and regular as possible. The main technical result of this engineering, according to the model of Huygens and Newton, resulted in the age of navigation, when for the first time it was possible to compute longitudes with respectable accuracy and convert the commerce of great oceans from a thing of chance and adventure, in a business considered regular. It is the engineering of the mercantilists.
Wiener further emphasizes that "...if the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries constitute the age of clocks, and the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries the age of steam engines, the present times are the age of communication and control."
I also think that today it is through communication and control that people are governed, kept in their territories ranging from the family to the nation. These strongholds of labor, of values, of potential wealth, have to be cared for and maintained. It is through values, mainly ethical and religious, that these systems are reinforced or sustained. Everything must converge so that the properties and the rights to exploit them remain. Laws, education, and medical and psychological institutions are the auxiliaries considered necessary for the maintenance of agglomerations: societies, schools, churches and families. Creating slogans, revamping satan, sweetening the savior and bringing him to Earth, enable stability. This is how the family and social orders are maintained due to the purposes of domination and wealth exercised by state powers.
Communication and control make it possible to keep the components to which individuals are submitted cohesive and together. Disseminating that everyone is equal - as long as they prove and exercise this equality - is one of the main fallacies of the current dominant system, captured in its neo-liberal phase. Becoming a product is the perfect daily exercise to which the inhabitants of the planet are subjected. The considered scum, rubbish - those who live on 10 dollars a month in Africa, Asia and Latin America - all these people no longer need to be manipulated, as they are soil, ground on which to walk and from which contradictions arise and must be smoothed out, banished so that everything continues to flow smoothly.
In this swamp, a sinkhole of capacities, there are still talents and human creativity, reduced, however, to the creative discovery of what to eat and where to sleep, in short, how to invent, how to create forms of survival. Thus, walled off and devastated by the system's communication and control mechanisms, what emerges as new is survival. It is the fact of staying alive that is surprising in this lack of resources, food, and schools and amidst environmental destruction. Dragged by hurricanes, dry soil and the demolition of forests, human beings are creative: they survive. Regrettably reduced to that - surviving - denied as a possibility, he is increasingly subject to be slaughtered by artifacts, by machines, by artificial intelligence that, fed by algorithms (communication and control) will dominate and control the corrals, the strongholds of individuals reduced to the status of survivors.
It is urgent to transform control and communication mechanisms. It is urgent that human expression emerges as a relational possibility. It is urgent, but we also know that it is practically impossible in the process of alienation and objectification generated by survival as a basic objective of most people. Everything revolves around this: families, schools, hospitals, and society's security forces. One of the by-products of this calamitous survival is drugs. Through this obscuration, the disguise of pain and anguish, there is the constant search for pleasure, forgetfulness, of feeling alive when being dead. It is the passage to paradise, the other side, the other world hidden and sought after.
The more oppression and objectification, the greater the need for evasion; this is human, and this is liberating as well as imprisoning. It's a life of desperation, trying to get out, trying to breathe and feel something, trying to become human. Being crushed and pretending to be free by artifices, drugs, dreams, faith and belief is to realize and approve the learned dictates of communication and control that characterize our social, cultural and family systems.