We compare ourselves to Orson Welles’ masterpiece, Citizen Kane (1941), p Red social (David Fincher, 2010), a film that explores the origins of Facebook, can identify two types capitalist models and distinct learning; two bearers have an advantage where information has become the central paper, but from monopoly strategies oriented towards the creation of heterogeneous value.
Mierdificación
Cory Doctorow
Translated by Eduardo Maldonado.
Captain Swing, 2026.
376 pages. €25.
de facto “inshitification” was the eschatological term chosen by the writer and activist Cory Doctorow (Toronto, 1971) to define the current state of the digital world and how it affects our daily lives. A neologism chosen by the American Dialect Society as the word of the year in 2023.
We realize: we are light years of promises that in the decade of the 90s we expected red to promote the strengthening of democratic possibilities and a livelier culture of debate. The new platform capitalism on the Internet—from X and Google to TikTok, via Amazon and Apple—not only fuels toxic proactivity, but content degradation that leads to ethically and politically disastrous consequences.
Ante este panorama, la “mierdificación” no evidencia, sostiene Doctorow, limitaciones contingentes susceptibles de resolución, sino un dispositivo estructuralmente nocivo, cuya seductora y adictiva lógica algorítmica comienza a amenazar la salud de nuestras democracias, como muestra la importancia de los gigantes tecnológicos en el segundo mandato de Donald Trump. Si el emergente “tecnofeudalismo”, acuñado por Varoufakis, parece cobrar fuerza, ¿no es en virtud de esta creciente degradación tecnológica y su política de datos?
¿Exageración? El diagnóstico de Doctorow huye del sensacionalismo maximalista y busca, más bien, indagar en las prácticas concretas que, buscando fidelizar a sus usuarios, están generando esta mutación antropológica de la sensibilidad y un preocupante recorte de libertades y derechos.
Este deterioro tecnológico no obedece ni a grandes fuerzas de la historia ni a leyes de hierro económicas: lo que nos ha llevado hasta aquí son decisiones políticas limitadamente interesadas de figuras concretas (Musk, Bezos, Zuckerberg).
Pero el ensayo muestra también cómo estas plataformas han podido crecer desmesuradamente en virtud de sucesivas reformas legislativas desreguladoras orientadas a anular la competencia y favorecer monopolios. Asimismo, empresas como Google han empeorado intencionadamente sus buscadores para promover más interacción y actividad aun en detrimento de la calidad. “Hay diferencias significativas entre el internet que tenemos hoy […] and the internet is good and I hope you have seen it in the past”.
Reversing this situation requires that politics does not abandon its responsibility and common sentiment regarding technological transformations and is built into the mechanisms of regulation and control, which today is a hyperactive avalanche of completely unlimited data.
After reading, the question arises from the reader: can the hardware of the hook dismantle the house of love? If we appreciate that Doctorow does not despair. On the other hand, it not only diagnoses the metastasis of the digital body, but also offers resistance options and the ability to build a new, more protected red left.
Of course, the battle over the Internet is not the most important thing that humanity faces in the future, but it must not be extremely relevant to promote minimal media conditions, where the basic rules of social communication are not marred by the accumulation of digital media and can be heard from basic democrats for the remaining games. This is it a brave, inspiring and funny idea If you’re getting a lot of international attention, that’s not a bad thing.
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