Dear reader, as soon as you have the opportunity, take a brief look at four fundamental books that marked the history of the 20th century. They are, by Oswald Spengler, The Decline of the West, 1918, by George Orwell, 1984, published in 1949, by Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man, from 1992, by Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, published in 2019.
We are in 2024 and all of them, each in their own way, are precious to understand our time, the time of techno-digital modernism and, who knows, the time of a techno-digital dystopia in the style of Orwell. That is why I bring Orwell's dystopia to 2024.
In this techno-digital postmodernism in which we live, speed is a dictatorship and no one really knows where to place the limits of what is reasonable and common sense.
It is not by chance that the winning motto of Évora Capital of Culture 2027 is called wandering and the art of existence.
In fact, it is very difficult to understand why so much is invested in technology and so little in humanity. At a time when we are witnessing the trivialization of evil and the digitalization of wars, all that is missing from Big Brother is a newspeak, a semantic machine and the ministry of truth to deal with the market of disinformation and counter-information that floods the public space.
We are living in a decade of great transitions and a far-reaching civilizational change, I would say a paradigmatic change where the values and corporate interests that inform the technological dystopia of the algorithmic society and the values, principles and rights that inform the humanist and democratic utopia representing the community of free citizens confront each other every day.
Let's look at some of the main lines of this Orwellian dystopia:
1) Technology is a source of speed, speed is a source of power, power inhibits thinking which increasingly delegates to intelligent machines and algorithms;
2) Each speed corresponds to a reading or perception of reality that varies greatly with the compression of space-time where the image prevails over language, reflection over reflection and emotion over opinion;
3) Screens drive us crazy, they are a kind of electronic drug of the virtual colony to which we are all emigrating, they prevail over orality and writing while the flow of images and emotions paralyzes the viewer;
4) In the space-time compression of technological dystopia, form prevails over content, the instantaneous prevails over the past and the future, while the culture of urgency and emergency impedes empathy and otherness;
5) Technological progress disguises technological accidents, but the risk of collision and accident is imminent, society becomes vigilant to prevent surprises and unexpected accidents, perceptions of fear grow and are greater than threats;
6) The paradox is becoming more pronounced, with urgent attention and permanent distraction; security in public spaces is declining, there is a shift towards the miniaturization of politics, automation and policing, no one trusts anyone, the internet of objects, telesurveillance, traceability and the concealment of reality in simulated environments are growing;
7) The acceleration of speed affects social subsystems unevenly and causes disconnection and chaos; we need to reinvent speed rhythms for each sector, if we want, an intelligence of movement, a political economy of speed so that all social subsystems can communicate with each other;
8) Human rights are threatened by the compression of space-time, full of technology, empty of humanity; the growth of digitalization, augmented and virtual reality, the internet of objects, automation, artificial intelligence and simulated environments, create a parallel reality, a second life that puts our mental health at risk;
9) An increasingly vigilant and security-oriented democratic State, an increasingly para-civil civil society, databases that look more like digital panopticons, permanent disputes over the violation and abusive use of our personal privacy and security;
10) Faced with the imminence of a technological dystopia, we must preserve, at all costs, the autonomy and independence of science, art and culture and make a special appeal for research and development of the human and social sciences at the beginning of this century so that they can light our way in the face of the oligopolistic hegemony of large technology companies and prepare us for the great transformation in the style of Karl Polanyi (1944).
Final grade
Less than eight days before the American elections, we are on the brink of a techno-digital dystopia where the biggest star is the owner of the social network X.
This is, therefore, a warning to navigation, look in the mirror, slow down and review the material given.
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