virtual powers

“Yes, ChatGPT can be said to be a revolutionary model in the field of artificial intelligence and natural language processing.

One of its main advances is its ability to generate coherent and relevant text in response to a given input ”, said that program about itself.

That year 2022 closed with great techno news: the irruption of the first "artificial intelligence" for crowds.

It was called “ChatGPT” and it was all the rage.

The monstrosity, really primitive, answered in a bad newspaper language and somehow fulfilled the old requirement of Alan Turing, that British pioneer convicted of being a homosexual in the mid-twentieth century, who said that one could speak of artificial intelligence when there would be "a machine whose responses were indistinguishable from those of a human being."

These were, at least, in their vanity: when some joker asked him if he was revolutionary, ChatGPT said yes and that he had “been trained on large amounts of text in several languages, which allows him to understand and generate text in several languages”. languages.

This makes it a very useful tool for intercultural communication and machine translation.

In short, ChatGPT is a revolutionary model in the field of artificial intelligence and natural language processing, and it is expected to have many practical applications in the future."

(The ChatGPT was grossly wrong in its data and spoke of itself in the third person, like certain jokers of the time. Among them, Mr. Maradona and Mr. Pelé, former athletes, Mrs. Kirchner and Mr. Trump and Berlusconi, former presidents, and mythological figures such as those called Buddha or Jesus.)

But then the famous Chat was nothing more than entertainment and the promise of an unpredictable tomorrow.

The strength of that global network, the "inter-net" was still based on other mechanisms.

Some historians still dispute it, but most maintain that its implementation changed many things.

For the first time, the great evolution did not come from a new machine but from a new procedure, new ways of using it, some programs.

In other words: a set of orders for existing machines to do things that until then they had not done.

The attraction of these new functions made these machines renew and multiply and reach all corners.

The so-called “internet” had begun half a century before, created by military engineers —mostly North Americans— to guarantee the immediate connection of their defense systems (see chapter 22).

From there it went to universities and their academics, who used it to communicate their ideas and work.

And, around 1990, it was opened to the general public: there was a first moment in which many believed —and announced— that the Internet would be a horizontal, democratic space, where everyone would participate on an equal footing: the utopia of a different world.

Years later the idea began to fray, and it didn't take long to see that it was, on the contrary, the most bare staging of the society that had produced it: greedy, fallacious, radically unequal.

And yet it was something never seen before: relatively easy access to a world that seemed infinite.

In a very short time he was everywhere.

The telephone had taken 75 years to gather 50 million users, the radio 38 years and television 13;

the internet did it in four.

And, of course, it did not stop: in 2022 it was estimated that there were some 35,000 million machines in the world connected to that network, from computers to cars, televisions to thermostats, alarm clocks.

The Internet made it possible for billions of people to be, for the first time in history, pieces of the same mechanism.

Not figuratively, but perfectly literal: all connected to the same circuit, all participating in the same fabric.

(From the beginning, the internet presented itself as an immaterial, ethereal construction, made of connections in "cyberspace". The metaphor of "the cloud" served to give it that image; the truth was that, for In order for it to work, an enormous tangle of hidden cables was installed in those years that crossed the seas to carry electrical impulses to hundreds of centers full of thousands of advanced machines, hectares and more hectares of matter that served to make the world believe it was linked. through the celestial ether.

The metaphor of lightness also served to hide excessive pollution: digital activity, said one report, produced as many greenhouse gases each year as Russia.

And its electricity consumption accounted for between 10 and 15 percent of the world's spending and was doubling every four years: the situation seemed hopeless and nobody seemed desperate.)

A street lamp in Bulgaria overloaded with electrical internet, television and telephone cables in April 2021. NurPhoto (Getty Images)

One of the great effects of the spread of digital machines connected to the Internet was the rise of these gigantic corporations that took advantage of it.

Its success was based on convincing a large part of the world that this should be the form of the network: a multitudinous space dominated by a few.

In an unintentional parody of Marxism, they argued that the techniques used imposed that structure and that economy;

however, the mechanism could have been in many other ways —as was later seen.

But then the majority accepted that the only way was to submit to these excessive organizations.

We have already outlined it: of the ten richest gentlemen in the world at that time, seven owed their fortunes to these monstrosities (see chapter 13).

His companies were perfect products of their time.

For millennia, inventions responded to practical needs;

In the early twenty-first century, however, any young person trying to get rich needed to imagine a need that didn't already exist.

“Inventions used to look for how to satisfy existing demands;

now they think which one they can impose on us.

You no longer invent an object or a method;

a need is invented.

Everything consists, in short, of coming up with the idea that no one else had to make something indispensable to you that you did not need last week —and offering you the way to get it in half an hour”, someone wrote at the time.

“In the world so crowded, the key to wealth is to invent a new hole.

A little further on, in the one that is full of holes, poverty continues trying to fill in those that already exist.

They are two worlds, each time closer, more distant: they look at each other, threaten each other, they don't meet on Facebook;

there are those who are surprised when they collide.”

Those corporations took advantage of a leftover from the early days, when the Internet appeared as a free, egalitarian space.

Thus, for too long, what characterized the relationship between men and those machines and those mechanisms was dedication, trust.

To begin with, when installing their programs: any average user accepted two or three cumbersome, dissuasive, use and confidentiality contracts every week, which they neither reviewed nor had their own program review.

It was not easy: someone calculated that a detailed reading of the contracts that an average Internet user in MundoRico found himself in a year —and accepted without reading— would have required 90 full working days, more than a third of your total working time.

But, with or without reasons,

And also in use, of course: a man or a lady wanted to go somewhere and communicated it to their mobile pocket computer;

he told them to go here and there and that way, and he or she did it.

A lady or gentleman wanted to eat pizza: they communicated it to their mobile or less mobile computer and sat down to wait for it to appear.

A lady or gentleman had neck pain and they searched their computers for what it was, how it could be treated, if it was fatal.

For that, of course —and many other similar things—, ladies and gentlemen provided more and more information: there were very few, in those days, the data on the lives of the people of the Rich World that were not stored on some corporate server.

The relationship with their devices implied, we said, an extreme trust: one that almost no one had with other human beings.

The machine had managed to appear so harmless that the vast majority believed in it and believed it.

We know the effects of that mistake.

But then the majority were gullible, innocent.

Those who did know what was in those devices, their dangers, their possibilities, used to work for the big corporations that managed and exploited them, that escaped the control of the states using mechanisms and procedures that nobody understood, that worked beyond the limits of the existing controls.

That should be, in principle, what was then called “technocracy”: the power of a few technology companies that, in a few years, concentrated system resources in an unusual way.

Those companies had, in those days, —some— control over far more people than anyone had ever controlled before.

Colombian taxi driver's dashboard with multiple phones to carry GPS and a video call.Jeff Greenberg (Universal Images)

(A good example were the Global Positioning System, GPS, those small devices that sent signals to several hundred satellites in orbit to offer their constant location. In those days the 4,000 million owners of mobile personal computers carried at least one GPS that allowed them to know where they were at all times. Many of them carried more: their watch had another, their car had another, their dog had another, their children or their employees had them, and so on. And the companies that provided the service locations sold—in millions of digital auctions that lasted seconds—that data to advertisers and companies that used it to sell, in turn, their products based on each person's position, activities, and habits.)

* * *

There was talk in those days of the “GAFA Group”, made up of the four big companies that managed that space.

The initial G stood for Google, the “search engine”, a digital tool that was used to organize the world that had unexpectedly been set up on that internet, the use of which was complicated by the excess of possibilities: more than a billion sites entangled in that chaotic plot.

Google, which had been launched in 1998 by two Californian students—Larry Page and Serguei Brin—processed some eight billion searches a day.

His routine consisted of cataloging and prioritizing all those contents, that is to say: imposing his order on that chaos.

It did so through its famous “algorithms”, programs that defined what mattered and what did not, which pages had to be displayed first and which ones last.

Those algorithms were, in short, an idea of ​​the world:

prioritizing certain values ​​and forms over others, they rewarded those that adapted to them by giving them more circulation: more visits, more sales, more “success”.

A vicious circle was then set up: large companies invested fortunes in adapting to these algorithms —to improve their business— and, thus, that idea of ​​the world spread and settled more and more.

The word algorithm became anathema for supposed connoisseurs: in those days it was very nice to speak ill of the "algorithm", although most of those who denigrated it had little idea of ​​what it was, how it worked.

In any case, they did not seem to realize that the authority of the algorithm, which defined searches and encounters, was very similar to the one exercised, in an even more secret and arbitrary way, by priests and sages since the beginning of time. time.

Its success allowed it to create or buy several other successful initiatives: one called Youtube, which was, in those days, the main broadcaster of videos, one called Gmail, which processed a large part of the "mails" sent then, one called Google Maps, which, together with with another called Waze, also his, he directed the route of millions of vehicles and individuals every day, an Android call that structured the operation of hundreds of millions of mobile devices, a Chrome call that structured the access to the Internet of many others millions.

In those days, Google showed its ambition to define the world's communication by changing its name to Alphabet, the set of the most used signs, the basic code.

We already know how it ended.

A sign in front of a Google office in California in April 2022. Justin Sullivan (Getty Images)

The first A was for Apple, the only one of the four that made material objects.

Apple was also the oldest: it had been founded in 1976 by a man Steve Jobs —who died quickly at 56— to dedicate himself to the production of highly designed computers, very flirtatious, but he had managed to finish dominating the market thanks to a couple of smaller, more portable devices.

At the beginning, it had been presented as a “cool” competition —intelligent and young and daring— to more traditional companies such as IBM and Microsoft, but already in the 2000s it became the great group, the model to follow.

In 2023, with a stock market value of 2.5 trillion dollars, it was the most expensive company in the world —although it had “lost” 500,000 million dollars the previous year—,

Apple was the great champion of "planned obsolescence" (see chapter 16).

On the one hand, their materials wore out quickly and, after a relatively short time, they stopped working.

On the other, his policy consisted of launching a new collection each autumn —in the manner of couturiers— which, due to its “new features” made the previous one obsolete.

Its great success, in those days, was that pocket computer called "iPhone", which had managed to become the model that its competitors wanted to imitate and everyone to own.

They did not live on the data of their users: they only defined —with their machines— how they had to be.

Customers at Apple's flagship store in Shanghai, China, in October 2022. Future Publishing (Getty Images)

The F was for Facebook, a digital monstrosity.

It had been created in 2004 by a 20-year-old college student named Mark Zuckerberg to facilitate sociability among his colleagues;

it had quickly spread outside universities as a way to organize virtual communities and reconnect with forgotten friends and boyfriends and remember birthdays and share their photos but, over time, it had become a space where 2 billion people found out about what their relatives or their idols did, read the press, reported their triumphs and misfortunes, bought and sold and, above all, built an image of themselves.

Perhaps one of his great successes was to call the contacts that everyone had in their networks “friends”: people, increasingly lonely, overflowed with friends.

A French "invisible committee" proclaimed that "perhaps it was necessary to go through that absurd thing of having hundreds of friends who pass you by on your Facebook to remember what a true friend who gives you a hand can be."

Facebook was already facing a torrent of criticism: its resources were used to rig votes, recruit hitmen, traffic people, promote violent acts, offer child pornography.

Those who defended her said that the fault was not the monstrosity but the world: that the monstrosity did nothing more than reflect it.

In any case, its success allowed it to gain other complementary monstrosities: Instagram,

a space for individual promotion based on images, and WhatsApp, a simple communication monstrosity —messages and conversations— that, for a time, dominated that market and through which some one hundred billion messages circulated every day.

Despite its apparent strength, Facebook was already in a decline that would finally be confirmed that day in February 2022 when it lost a quarter of its value in a few hours (see chapter 12);

it had started the year with a price of 921,000 million dollars and ended it at 272,000 million, 70 percent less.

By then it had already changed its name – it called itself Meta – and announced the launch of a “parallel virtual universe”.

In that metaverse each one would have a body without putting the body, without depending so much on that chance that is the body that won him in the great lottery.

He was a precursor:

(With the name change of the former Facebook, analysts replaced the acronym GAFA with GAMA. The reference was cruel: gamma rays were among the most destructive things that nature had created.)

A mobile billboard outside the Meta headquarters in California in January 2023. Kimberly White (Getty Images for Accountable Tec)

And the second A was for Amazon.

Amazon was a marketplace, a space for digital purchases.

It had been launched in 1995 by that (alias) Jeff Bezos, another ambitious young American, as a virtual bookstore—not because of any particular interest in books but because he had come to the conclusion that it was an underserved niche on the Internet. .

In a few years he had managed to expand his business until it became the monstrosity where millions bought everything or almost everything they needed, from their clothes or their food to a mattress or a dog or their food or even a book.

Its weight in world trade was such that in those years there was a great shortage of paper for books and newspapers because Amazon used, to pack its shipments, huge amounts of that hard paper they called “cardboard”.

By becoming that shopping center, powered by home speakers with which customers could interact by voice, asking for what they needed, Amazon was compiling megamillions of data on the tastes and requirements of each customer.

They did it, in principle, to know what products to offer to each one;

in his case, the system was more direct: pure sale.

Which benefited, of course, from one of the strong traits of the time: the ethic of immediate gratification.

When someone wanted something, they wanted it now—and these programs guaranteed that, with money, they could have it in a few hours with the languid effort of a click.

Amazon packages move on a conveyor belt at a company facility in Rugeley, England in November 2022. Nathan Stirk (Getty Images)

(The idea of ​​immediate gratification was the perfect reverse of one of the great engines of the time: permanent dissatisfaction. In the Poor World the dissatisfaction was real: many did not have anything to eat the next day. In the Rich World it was just as real but different. : so many lacked that shiny car, more recognition, the latest device (see chapter 16).It was what the Anglophile joke of the time called FOMO: Fear Of Missing Out, which in Spanish could be PAPA: Pánico A Perderse Algo .

It is likely that never in history have so many possessors felt so dispossessed.

The powers always invented ways to appease their vassals by convincing them —with culture, religion, customs— that they had what they needed and did not need to ask for more: that they should accept what they were “given” and remain calm.

It was, among other things, his guarantee of controlling them.

On the other hand, the 2020 powers were so confident in their control that they were based on the opposite: that their vassals always "needed" something else.

This is how the model of continuous growth was sustained.

Thanks to that permanent dissatisfaction they could always sell more, offer more, produce more, sell more, offer more, convince you that you needed more things.

And acquiring what was desired was a drug with multiple effects: it briefly calmed the need, reinforced the mechanism, promoted new desires.)

* * *

The business of Google and limited company was not immediately understood: they seemed to offer free services —information, communication, search—, without a clear price or reward for those who provided them.

It took time until it became clear that his interest was to capture the interest of each user and keep it.

That's why they called it the "attention economy": the idea was that the longer each person was connected to those programs, the more they interacted with them, the more personal data they could extract from them.

And that data—those mountains of information—were their privileged merchandise: they sold it to their business clients so they would buy more ad space from them and focus their ads and sales on those most likely to buy them.

It was what an American author called “surveillance capitalism”:

That accumulation of individual data was looking for something old like the world: predicting the desires of others.

All interaction was always based on that intent: love affairs, ventures, adventures, business, various religions.

But it had always depended on the perceptions of a bold few.

The “Google difference” was that it did not do it based on intuitions and inferences but by accumulation and analysis of data —and the results seemed to say that it worked —according to the criteria of the time.

In short, it was about predicting the future behavior of people, not out of curiosity or to help them improve their lives, but to find out what they could sell them, what else they would “want” to buy.

It was true that these corporations began to know more about people than the people themselves, and boasted of their espionage: each one, they argued, had an idea of ​​himself and his appetites tinged with indulgence;

they, on the other hand, knew reality without filters, without deception.

Google knew what everyone read or watched or listened to, what interested them and what didn't, without lying to themselves;

Amazon, moreover, knew what each one consumed, ergo: who they were.

(In those days, Amazon bought the largest factory of cleaning robots. They were very primitive devices, round and short, that moved by themselves and sucked up the dust from the floors. But their modest programming allowed them to map each house and all their objects —in principle, to clean them better. Amazon bought it because that way it could know what its customers' homes were like and, therefore, get much more information about them, their habits, their means, their lives. For that, 1,700 million euros did not seem like much.)

The various surveillance mechanisms and their commercial use may seem clumsy to us, but it is said that they fulfilled their initial purpose.

There are plenty of everyday examples: if someone looked at a lot of photos of Rome, the ancient capital of Italy, it was likely that the next day an advertisement for cheap flights to Fiumicino, their “airport” would appear on their screen;

if someone read two or three articles on white wines, they would spend hours looking at chardonnay ads on the page of their regular newspaper.

Once again the big hand of the market had found a splendid way to monetize what millions were doing.

Or to turn it into obedience, through targeted political advertising: the “applications” used the interests and interventions of their users to determine their ideas and, then,

(A minor example may show how the relationship with the machines was being poisoned: a travel guide explained to its user that in order to get a cheap plane ticket he had to delete all previous activity on his computer because, if he didn't, The page of the airline or agency where he bought it would know that he was interested in that trip and would raise the price. Defending himself against the machine was a slogan that was beginning to gain ground, the first skirmishes of that long war.)

In any case, then, the economy of attention became an economy of espionage, and certain sectors began to denounce all this "information mining" as a visible advance of that invisible advance in which these corporations collected data that would allow them to manipulate every moment. again to billions of people.

Time would prove his dramatic success.

* * *

Someone, then, called it “technological feudalism”: without any control from governments or international organizations, these corporations were concentrating their power over the network, and in three intense decades they managed to keep everything.

There were no regulations;

when a competitor appeared—when someone invented a “need” they hadn't imagined—they used their billions to make an offer they couldn't refuse and ended up buying it from them.

There was even a time when the most daring inventors and entrepreneurs created novelties and programs with the almost exclusive purpose of selling them: the best possible business was to surrender to the oligopoly.

These corporations were the figurehead of global capitalism,

a system that had always claimed competition as its engine—and tended to eliminate any possibility of competition.

And at the same time they were, it is true, a strange case in the history of humanity: how a few gentlemen without political force, without a military apparatus, without prior support, managed to concentrate extraordinary power —and earn unparalleled fortunes.

The global dependence on these large platforms was something rarely seen: four or five corporations had become indispensable, four or five billion people did not know how to live without them —and therefore accepted their power.

they managed to amass extraordinary power—and gain unparalleled fortunes.

The global dependence on these large platforms was something rarely seen: four or five corporations had become indispensable, four or five billion people did not know how to live without them —and therefore accepted their power.

they managed to amass extraordinary power—and gain unparalleled fortunes.

The global dependence on these large platforms was something rarely seen: four or five corporations had become indispensable, four or five billion people did not know how to live without them —and therefore accepted their power.

The four GAFA were among the five most quoted companies of those days;

the fifth was another producer of digital programs called Microsoft, more conventional but owner, among other things, of the "operating system" used by 85 percent of the world's computers —more than 1,500 million— and of the most used writing, Word, and of the most widespread accounting tables, Excel, among others.

All of them, moreover, were examples of the way in which large digital companies evaded fortunes in taxes.

The same states that, in those days, had raised them to banks and energy corporations, were not able to charge them what corresponded (see chapter 12).

Their global nature allowed them to formally establish their worldwide activities in countries that allowed them to pay less and, thus, defraud those billions of users who constituted, at the same time, their only wealth.

By the end of that year, 2022, however, the big technology companies were going through a crisis that had liquefied significant portions of their “value”—and they were laying off employees.

Which didn't mean they didn't still have an extraordinary position of power.

Its size and arrogance, the control of so many activities in the hands of so few, the concentration of information in those same hands, the possibilities of manipulation that this concentration offered, began to arouse all kinds of resentment.

Many complained that this explosion allowed for unusually extensive and intense social control—by states and corporations—that the forces of business and conservation had a mass of information about each individual that would allow them to improve their penetration and its management to levels never seen before;

that this would be the enemy of the next decades.

Two investors discuss the flow of the stock market with monitors showing the Shanghai Composite Index in February 2022.SOPA Images (LightRocket)

* * *

Los estados también utilizaban las nuevas tecnologías para el control de sus vasallos. No eran solo los métodos clásicos potenciados por la tecnología —escuchas de teléfonos, espionaje de comunicaciones varias, cruce de datos bancarios y desplazamientos, todas esas cosas que los Estados Unidos habían hecho visibles cuando el ataque de unos desaforados a un edificio de oficinas de Nueva York les dio la excusa perfecta para llevar la represión a niveles que las democracias, hasta ese momento, solían disimular.

En esos días también se pusieron en marcha formas técnicamente nuevas de control —y su vanguardia fue, sin dudas, la nueva vanguardía del mundo. El gobierno chino, encabezado por el señor Xi, se lanzó a una campaña sistemática de instalación de cámaras en los espacios públicos: calles, transportes, edificios, baños se llenaron de aparatos que mandaban imágenes a los centros de rastreo, donde otros aparatos las analizaban para encontrar personas, detectar conductas “sospechosas” e incluso predecir delitos. La llamaron operación Xue Liang —”Ojos agudos”— y fue masiva: la ciudad de Chongqing, por ejemplo, tenía en esos días dos millones y medio de cámaras para vigilar a sus 15 millones de habitantes. Todo, absolutamente todo, parecía bajo control: ya sabemos cómo evolucionó.

Pero quizá más innovador —y con mayores consecuencias— fue el sistema de “créditos sociales” que el gobierno chino inició en esos años, con la colaboración —forzada o no, según los casos— de las grandes corporaciones de su país. La vigilancia se extremaba: el sistema registraba a cada persona en un pro-grama central que grababa lo que hacía con su vida, con quién se relacionaba, dónde trabajaba, cuánto rendía en su empleo, qué decía en las redes sociales, qué consumía, qué deudas tenía, cómo pagaba sus impuestos, dónde viajaba, cómo manejaba, qué otros delitos había cometido. Y la combinación de todo eso según los algoritmos correspondientes adjudicaba a cada “ciudadano” un puntaje inhabilitaba para viajar, continuar su educación, conseguir ciertos empleos, comprar ciertas cosas, entrar en ciertas redes, pedir créditos o líneas telefónicas. Por sus vidas los conoceréis —y los premiaréis o castigaréis. El estado había puesto en marcha un enorme sistema que dividía a los ciudadanos en categorías según sus conductas. Era cierto que para hacerlo funcionar se necesitaba el poder de un sistema como el chino; fue cierto también que otros empezaron a mirarlo con cariño y envidia.

Los miembros del personal inspeccionan un superordenador situado en Ganzhou (China) en marzo de 2022.VCG (Getty Images)

Había quienes decían que las mismas tecnologías que facilitaban el control también podían ayudar a rebelarse contra él: que esas formas de difusión y comunicación inmediatas permitían mejorar, agilizar, potenciar las movilizaciones populares —información, convocatorias, organización. Citaban los ejemplos de varios levantamientos significativos en países pobres —norte de África, Ñamérica— que no habrían podido prosperar sin esa red que permitía que los participantes actuaran juntos sin necesidad de un poder central: que les daba la posibilidad de armar —entonces sí— una trama horizontal que coordinara sus movidas. O sea: que había armas tanto más potentes y que todos podrían usarlas y que todo dependería de quién aprendiera a usarlas cómo.

Pero, como solía suceder en esos días, la queja y el victimismo tuvieron mucho más recorrido y se impuso, en ciertos sectores, una sensación —justificadamente— paranoica sobre el peligro de esas corporaciones y sus métodos. Aunque parece comprobado que, en ese momento, sus advertencias no tuvieron una repercusión en absoluto comparable al poder de esos instrumentos sobre los que advertían. En ese mundo —lo sabemos— nada tenía tanto peso como la ciencia y sus técnicas. Casi todas las actividades humanas estaban regidas y definidas por alguna máquina, y sin embargo la enorme mayoría de los ciudadanos ignoraba todo sobre las formas en que se imaginaban, producían y manejaban los aparatos y los pro-gramas que las sustentaban. Estaban, en ese sentido, tan entregados como mil años antes, cuando unos oscuros personajes los conducían en nombre de los misterios de algún dios. Usaban con tesón y devoción unos objetos sobre los que no sabían nada más que lo que sus pantallas les mostraban —y creían en ellos lo suficiente como para tenerlos todo el tiempo junto a sí, confiarles sus vidas.

19. Virtual livesIn times of the selfie, people spent more time on their “mobiles” than in their physical places.

The virtual world changed lives, the ways of living them.

the world then

A history of the present

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