virtual lives

That year an absolute novelty shook cyberspace.

The media did not pay much attention to it: if anything, they found that

, an "application" that reproduced images and sound in short pieces, had been the most frequented by the public.

They said that in 2022 it had surpassed

permanently

, and that it had reached 1,000 million users in five years, half of what

had taken .

TikTok was a “video” reproduction system with short stories, dances, jokes, public intimacies, even news.

To see them, you didn't have to create lists or search for friends: after a few uses, the application itself decided what each person would like — and they say that it was not usually wrong.

We assume that their algorithms were the best at extracting and analyzing their users' information.

Or that perhaps those users liked to adapt to the image of themselves that the algorithm presented to them.

But none of this would have been as significant if it weren't for one fact: TikTok was Chinese.

In other words, for the first time since the invention of the Internet, a “foreign” application broke the monopoly of the North Americans.

Also in that virtual space the oriental escalation was confirmed.

TikTok was, in many ways, a great metaphor for that moment in history.

A group of young people record a TikTok in front of the Estadio Olímpico Universitario in Mexico City, in August 2022. Hector Vivas (Getty Images)

Because "cyberspace" was still the place.

The big digital corporations (see chap.18) had sites and channels for almost every industry in the world, and almost every industry in the world used them.

At any given time, half of the planet's inhabitants were connected to its services.

And the “operating systems” of mobile pocket computers were a good example of this market domination: only two companies completely controlled it.

Apple, the elegant one, managed 16 percent with its “iOS”;

Google, the popular one, controlled all the rest with its “Android”.

In just five years, between 2017 and 2022, the circulation of information on the networks had multiplied eight times, and almost all of the increase came from the transmission of animated images.

71 percent of Internet consumption consisted of watching “videos” —especially on TikTok, YouTube and Netflix—: for these purposes, the network had become a great on-demand television.

But, in addition, every minute of those days some 70 million messages called “whatsapp” were sent, three million “searches” were carried out on Google, 575,000 angry phrases were included on Twitter, 65,000 “photographs” —still images— on Instagram, 240,000 on Facebook and so on.

Other uses were very impressive: in a period when so many heralded the end of written culture, 300 billion "mails" were sent every day.

Half was "spam",

automatic crap, but the other half don't: every day the 4,000 million e-mail users receive 150,000 million e-mails that they have written.

Yes: 150,000 million emails every day.

Those people, you can see, had so much to say to each other.

For which a simple but effective protocol was put together: you had to look at the camera, turn your head a little and smile.

Never in history have so many people smiled so much;

Never in history did smiles mean so little—except for the class privilege of showing off sparkling teeth.

As one sharp author predicted then: people had spent millennia not caring much about their appearance because they couldn't see it to begin with, and to continue, no one could record it.

And that in those days, after the explosion of images, they would go back to not worrying because they were tired of seeing each other and everyone recorded everything all the time.)

Teenagers take a 'selfie' in the middle of the flood in Bekasi (Indonesia), in February 2023. NurPhoto (Getty Images)

These networks, the largest the world had ever known, offered everyone the chance to watch, listen, read what they wanted: they offered so many possibilities — “a little bit of everything all the time” — that it was impossible to concentrate on any one.

One of the strongest traits of the time was dispersion, the impossibility of maintaining attention, dalliance.

Someone then complained that "the Internet creates a hunger that cannot be satisfied, that forces me to jump from saucer to saucer."

It was, they said, like living in an incessant tapas, snacking that is never complete, nibbling that only serves to make you hungrier.

And so, in those unbridled jumps, everyone built their world.

There is also the paradox: so much shared and available information allowed each one to seclude himself in a hyper-individual space, organized by himself to suit him.

Never had people been so numerously communicated;

they were never more closed in on themselves.

And changes began to take place that still shake us.

In those primitive times of the networks, nothing had changed as much as what we could call the "relocation of personal relationships": after millennia in which meetings took place when two or more people met in the same place, those machines inaugurated the era when that ceased to be central and people began to relate beyond their location.

They could meet from far away places: there was a feeling that distance was no longer what it had been.

Or, to put it more precisely: it was then that the material world ceased to be the place where human relationships took place.

Virtuality made them ubiquitous: someone could "be" in several places at the same time,

interact in real time with people located in the most diverse spaces.

The evidence began to prevail that being in a place did not mean being alone in that place, and men and women felt freed from one of the most persistent, most apparently iron yokes in their history: time continued to condition them, space much less.

The very notion of the “unity of time and space” was cracking.

(The networked world had inaugurated a rare form of global coexistence and simultaneity. To begin with, people were interacting at different times: it was not uncommon for some of them to have just gotten up and others in a hurry to eat dinner in a virtual meeting. And everything happened in a flash. unified time: until then what happened to a person, when he was far away, happened without his family knowing it and it was, for a variable period of time, as if it had not happened; then not anymore.)

At the same time, the fact of having all of humanity's knowledge archived in —immediately— accessible circuits turned doubt into a luxury, something superfluous that no one allowed themselves to exercise: it was there that the habit of consulting any question began and immediately cleared up—which, as we know, had decisive consequences for our ways of thinking.

People were beginning to discover that they had direct access to world memory and that there was no point in trying to remember things that their machines would remember much better.

That externalization of memory that today seems so normal to us began;

what is hard for us to imagine now is the incredible amount of data that an ordinary brain had to—and could—remember in those days.

And curiously

It was discussed whether all that human brain capacity that would be released would be used by each man or woman for some interesting purpose or if it would be lost through lack of use - which, as we know, also had decisive consequences on our behavior.

“What use is our head for today?

Before it was used to memorize.

In modernity it served to order.

Today they are required to listen, mutate and invent”, said an optimistic philosopher of those days.

That was still a mediated and imperfect communication —the machines kept getting in the way— but it was the first step of what was to come.

Perhaps one of his greatest anticipations was that these networks managed to establish the sensation that important things were happening there: that the material world —eating, sleeping, touching, working, those things— was the necessary support for people to enter the world. important world, virtual space.

Which was seen at every moment, in every place.

As soon as they fulfilled their need—as soon as they sat on the bus seat or in their living room or in their bathroom—the majority locked themselves in their network.

The average use time per person could range from 10 hours a day in the Philippines or Brazil or Thailand to five in Australia, Austria,

Korea—for a global average of just under seven hours per day.

Many people spent more time “connected”—as it used to be said, in a revealing new use of an old word—than they slept.

And many, too, spent so much time trying to remember who they were.

The simple identity of the name and the state document had been supplanted by a myriad of identities: all the aliases — “users” — and passwords — “passwords” — that everyone had to manage to access her favorite spaces.

It was not easy —texts of the time comment— to have to remember that one was so many.

There were programs that did this, but many people did not trust them: the theft or loss of one of those identities could cause various damages.

So each one had to remember who he was according to where he was: this false multiplicity could now be interpreted as a kind of precursor sign.

A fan of the Croatian soccer team makes a video call with his family from a World Cup soccer stadium in Qatar, in Doha, November 2022.Adam Davy - PA Images (Getty Images)

Other changes were physical, fast.

An example of the influence of the virtual on the real were the great urban mutations produced by a small apartment and room rental program called

.

First designed for individuals to rent their own homes for a few days, it was quickly taken over by companies that bought dozens of apartments to rent.

They called them “tourist apartments” and they radically changed, in a very short time, the centers of the most “beautiful” —most visited— cities in Europe (see chapter 14).

Old capitals like Paris, Rome, Barcelona, ​​Amsterdam saw how their most traditional neighborhoods were left without their neighbours, who could not afford what a flat collected when they rented it out to visitors — and, thus, those streets emptied and turned into large hollow scenery, caricatures of themselves.

***

The internet changed too many things, and we cannot be exhaustive.

But among them stood out, for example, courtship rituals.

Some dating programs appeared in those years —

, hetero, and

, homo, above all— that produced a million meetings per week among their 60 million subscribers based on ratings and —in the strictest sense of the word— discrimination: their treasure was the algorithms that classified each new subscriber into categories defined by age, purchasing power, various interests and, above all, the supposed physical attractiveness defined by norms that sound like parody: muscular men, curves in women, eyes that are lighter than dark, angular faces, white teeth in opaque smiles. .

Thus, the program put together differentiated groups that served to bring together —let's say— similar people.

Its owners and operators said that this way they offered more possibilities for the grout to work;

It is also true that it was a way of pre-judging the conditions of love or a good fuck.

They helped to keep order, the old differences: they made sure the rich and pretty were among themselves and that a pretentious swaggering girl didn't get a short guard.

Thanks to such precision, in the MundoRico these programs became the most common way to meet couples —dancing, in bed, in life— for the young and not so young.

Authors of those days suppose that its development was accelerated by the diffusion of those conventions that considered aggressive, inappropriate, for one person to approach another in a bar or a car or on the street or even at certain parties —the ways in which strangers they used to know each other before (see chap.5).

And so dating shows served to fill that void.

they made sure the rich and pretty were among them and that a pretentious swaggering girl didn't get a short guard.

Thanks to such precision, in the MundoRico these programs became the most common way to meet couples —dancing, in bed, in life— for the young and not so young.

Authors of those days suppose that its development was accelerated by the diffusion of those conventions that considered aggressive, inappropriate, for one person to approach another in a bar or a car or on the street or even at certain parties —the ways in which strangers they used to know each other before (see chap.5).

And so dating shows served to fill that void.

they made sure the rich and pretty were among them and that a pretentious swaggering girl didn't get a short guard.

Thanks to such precision, in the MundoRico these programs became the most common way to meet couples —dancing, in bed, in life— for the young and not so young.

Authors of those days suppose that its development was accelerated by the diffusion of those conventions that considered aggressive, inappropriate, for one person to approach another in a bar or a car or on the street or even at certain parties —the ways in which strangers they used to know each other before (see chap.5).

And so dating shows served to fill that void.

in the MundoRico these programs became the most common way to meet couples —dancing, in bed, in life— for the young and not so young.

Authors of those days suppose that its development was accelerated by the diffusion of those conventions that considered aggressive, inappropriate, for one person to approach another in a bar or a car or on the street or even at certain parties —the ways in which strangers they used to know each other before (see chap.5).

And so dating shows served to fill that void.

in the MundoRico these programs became the most common way to meet couples —dancing, in bed, in life— for the young and not so young.

Authors of those days suppose that its development was accelerated by the diffusion of those conventions that considered aggressive, inappropriate, for one person to approach another in a bar or a car or on the street or even at certain parties —the ways in which strangers they used to know each other before (see chap.5).

And so dating shows served to fill that void.

for one person to approach another in a bar or on transport or on the street or even at certain parties—the ways in which strangers used to meet before (see ch.5).

And so dating shows served to fill that void.

for one person to approach another in a bar or on transport or on the street or even at certain parties—the ways in which strangers used to meet before (see ch.5).

And so dating shows served to fill that void.

It is possible, although we cannot prove it.

In any case, meeting someone suitable had always been random: just that night she was there, just that friend was a friend of that boy, just that girl dropped her bag.

It is true that it was a chance habitually limited by the sectors, the environments, the circulation that each one maintained —but it had its exceptions.

With these programs, any chance was replaced by careful stratification and classification: the pretty with the pretty, the rich with the rich, the ugly with the hideous.

In any case, the business of these services was also the enormous amount of data —more and more intimate— that they could extract from their users and sell it to the companies that used it to direct their offers and advertisements (see chap.18 ).

A sign for the Grindr app on the New York Stock Exchange building in November 2022. Spencer Platt (Getty Images)

But these dating sites were, of course, nowhere near the number of hits that the various porn spaces had.

Some estimates claimed that while only 4 percent of websites offered such materials—visual records of men and women intermingling excessive bodies—about 20 percent of searches asked for them.

In the United States they had measured them: 87 of their men looked at it at least once a week;

their wives, three times less.

In any case, mixed meat was one of the great offerings of the internet: at times it seemed extraordinary that so much invention, so much work, should lead to something so archaic.

But the fifth most visited site on the web—ahead of the first porn, a certain

, with an inclusive name—was something of a miracle.

it was a space-encyclopedia built collaboratively by millions of users who wrote, corrected and completed each article and, with this collective effort, constantly improved them.

It was a radical change in the conception of knowledge: it no longer depended on a supposed authority, as in the old dictionaries and other encyclopedias, but on the collaboration of many.

Wikipedia revolted against the power of sapients, and it was democratic in the best sense of the word (see chapter 10): it was not based on quantity, on mere accumulation, but on the interactions of those millions of users that made up a collective knowledge like never —until then— had been able to crystallize in a common space.

There were, of course, those who tried to transfer this model to politics.

We already know what happened.

***

Interestingly, at that time the networks still offered the illusion of “free speech for all”.

It was true that anyone who wanted to could express their opinions;

it was also true that they exposed them to their close ones and, more generally, to those who shared them.

One of the characteristics of almost all these networks was that they put those who had common interests and ideas in contact: they created de facto communities that deluded themselves by thinking that everyone believed what they believed —because they locked themselves in those retreats or toilets.

The old system of the urban tribes was reproduced with new technical means.

The networks also offered the illusion that everyone had the same right to express themselves, that an uneducated employee could debate a famous analyst or a powerful politician or the fashionable singer.

And it was true that the law existed, and that the debate could eventually take place in these “networks”, but, in reality, the usual powers —large companies, political bosses, various celebrities, influencers— had it all the greater.

(A kind of "declarative society" had been set up: many people who wanted to intervene in some way in public affairs did so by "participating" in disputes on Twitter, Facebook and other networks. Their intervention, then, no longer required displacements or meetings or other inconveniences; it consisted of throwing out a phrase, an image or what was then called a "like" —a little heart that indicated that the person who offered it agreed with what was said. And they were more or less satisfied, more or less active: they had made their position seated—while still sitting.)

In the networks, the hierarchies were obscenely clear: they were measured in number of “followers”.

Rarely has the “power” —or capacity for dissemination and influence— of something or someone been so perfectly quantified.

And it was constantly put to the test: each photo, each video, each “post” needed to renew the approval with those little hearts that meant that the sender had gotten the attention —always the attention— of its receivers, supposed peers but receivers.

The fight for attention was not only for companies.

Individuals also participated, in their own way, in that search and that economy.

In those days, the list of the most followed "twitterers" in the world was almost purely North American: it was headed by one of its former presidents —the one who had won a Nobel prize for being black—, with 130 million followers, closely followed by obnoxious owner of the network and among the eight that followed there was another blond ex-president of the United States, four female singers, a male singer—and a Portuguese soccer player and an Indian premier, the only foreigners.

On Instagram, on the other hand, which was supposed to be more "youthful", the followers were much more numerous: the first 10 on the list had more than 300 million each but there were no politicians, media outlets, millionaires or anything that wasn't entertainment. pure: footballers, singers, actors and "influencers", that breed so typical of that circulation.

(China had its own networks, because it blocked all others. Weibo, for example, was similar to Twitter, and so on. In another show of strength, those Chinese-only networks had user numbers similar to their Internet counterparts. rest of the world.)

A person holds their mobile phone with a tweet from Elon Musk on the screen, in London, December 2022.Yui Mok - PA Images (Getty Images)

The influencers —or influencers— were an effect and a symptom of the lack of authorities, in the sense of “people entitled to give their opinion on certain things”.

Many young people preferred to believe someone similar, a similar, than someone who pretended that, thanks to his knowledge and experiences, he could explain to them what those things were like.

Having fooled so many so many times, that kind of character found no trust.

So the influencers were young people who did not usually have a special ability beyond their funny faces to try to convince millions with their recommendations on different forms of consumption: clothing, above all, but also creams, shampoos, music, food, travel, etc. footwear, various ways to "have a good time" and convince them, incidentally, of the advantages of the system —or of one of its main aspects.

At first they knew how to be people who succeeded in an activity open to all: athletes, singers, various actors.

And then two new sectors appeared: the entrepreneurs, glorified as super-intelligent guys—never girls—who had invented something in a garage, and, above all, the famous for being famous.

They were generally

somehow attractive people who had made themselves known on television circuits or the internet and exercised their authority: they showed millions how good their lives were and, by showing it, they told them that perhaps theirs could be just as good if they copied them Somehow, they did something a little extraordinary or, more modestly, they consumed this or that product—which, of course, they were paid for.

They were the most recent form of one of the oldest forms of the story: advertising (see chapter 18).

Advertising had always been a way of installing archetypes and directing desires: linking a certain product with a situation or a character that would be enviable for potential consumers.

The "influencers" supposed, in many cases, an honesty: pure publicity, pure product without the alibi of a story or an opinion on the side;

They did it in such an overt, artificially natural way that it stood out in those days of extreme confusion.

The 'influencer' and 'instagrammer' Alessandra Sironi poses during a photo session in Madrid, in 2021. Europa Press Entertainment (Getty Images)

a “good-wild” illusion according to which we would have been good—like those kittens—before society perverted us.

It was not for nothing that the “animalist” movements were among the most successful at the time.)

Mobile pocket computers, the reason and support for all these movements, were reaching their peak in those days: it seemed that they couldn't grow any further.

In those days a billion were sold each year, and they had saturated their market.

On the one hand, the half of humanity that was in a position to buy them already had them and did not need to renew them as much as the industry would have needed.

On the other, more sophisticated communication devices, more portable, more integrated with their user, began to appear on the technological horizon —and would end up completely replacing them.

Seen from now—but who knows if it makes sense to think about things from now—those machines were far inferior to what the state of science in those days could allow.

They were a flagrant underutilization of the intellectual resources of the age: a mismatching of those resources to the economic needs of the small group that controlled that huge market.

In those days, successful experiments began with what was then called “quantum computers” —the prehistory of those we knew—, which would change the entire system.

Those computers, they supposed then, would leave the primitives at the level of an abacus.

And you could already see that the Chinese were more advanced than the other countries: they had registered more patents in that domain than all the others combined.

The West's backwardness was consolidating,

Those “mobiles” were, as their name indicated, independent of the place where they were: u-topics par excellence, ubiquitous.

But also the houses, the most topical place, began to be under the control of computers or computers or computers that, little by little —first, of course, in the places of the rich— began to manage many of their devices and functions. : already in those days the machines operated the alarms, the lights and the music, the provision of food and drinks, the environmental temperatures, the operation of kitchens, refrigerators, washing machines.

And, in many cases, they operated them by voice: it was another of those moments in which the human voice once again became the basic instrument for ordering movements.

These monstrosities followed a larger trend: a stick looked like an arm, a glass like eyes, but the great machines of the first industrial revolution looked nothing like a weaver.

It was then that the resemblance stopped being in the form to pass to the function, and it continued like this: a ball whose shape did not remember that of any possible human spoke like any of them, answered questions, remembered purchases, ordered meals, organized programs of entertainments.

It was one of the most widespread examples of what was then beginning to be called the “internet of things”, an ambiguous name to designate the direct communication of machines like this with exchanges to which it sent information.

The formula had been installed in the RichWorld but very few really knew what it was and even fewer practiced or used it.

The most basic uses occurred in houses where machines managed supplies or temperature or energy, or in the bodies of sick people implanted with devices that monitored them;

the most powerful allowed the automated management of commercial and industrial stocks, the control of production and labor, the management of plantations according to soil and climate data, the obtaining and processing of military information and many other possibilities.

All of them were

They were the first practical experiences of "artificial intelligence", a concept that was beginning to emerge from the mists of science fiction to finally settle in the lives of some.

And that it was becoming the great threat: what many loved to fear.

The ability of machines to think as if they were —or better than if they were— human beings was called “artificial intelligence” —AI.

In those days, the appearance of ChatGPS was a media bomb (see chapter 18);

There had also been much talk about the machine that won a match of go against a great champion, because go was a game that —it was said— did not need, like chess, a handling of millions of data but rather a kind of cunning , suddenly, which used to be considered very human.

A shiver of fear began to run through those societies: among their many fears, the threat of what they then called “the singularity” gained space.

The singularity would occur, according to those definitions, at that moment in which the increasingly intelligent machines were capable of growing on their own: that they learned to learn from themselves and their procedures and that they could, thus, improve, redesign, until these increases, gradual at first, produced a geometric acceleration, an "intelligence explosion" that turned them into minds much more complex and efficient than human, different from human - and completely detached from their creators and tried to control the world .

Serious accounts never defined how this more or less global coup would take place.

In 1993, for example, Vincent Vinge, a widely read North American author, had offered his certainties:

“Within thirty years we will have the technological means to create superhuman intelligence.

Soon after, the human era will end."

We now know that in 2023 none of that had happened.

Another guru of the moment specified, already in the 21st century, that “the Singularity will allow us to transcend those limitations of our biological bodies and brains;

behind it there will be no difference between men and machines”.

The historian sometimes has her advantage: now, in 2122, she is enough to look back to see what happened to those predictions.

behind it there will be no differences between men and machines”.

The historian sometimes has her advantage: now, in 2122, she is enough to look back to see what happened to those predictions.

behind it there will be no difference between men and machines”.

The historian sometimes has her advantage: now, in 2122, she is enough to look back to see what happened to those predictions.

But then, still, some joker was surprised that there were "so many people working on artificial intelligence and so few on natural stupidity, so much more numerous."

20. Leisure jobs A revolution that took time to take hold was that of free time.

For the first time, people had it in spades—and they used it mostly to look and listen.

But not alone, of course.

the world then

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