One of the most interesting phenomena that digitalization has brought us is that demand, what users/consumers think, is becoming more decisive every day than the supply from companies that until very recently established public taste and set market trends. The cultural leap is so enormous that the Malrauxian vision of shaping taste and showing ways to expand knowledge through culture has been overwhelmed by what consumers think, as they are now the ones who establish consumption patterns and dictate what we should see, read, and even think. Ayn Rand's nightmare, which she denounces in her work The Fountainhead, consisting of seeing the dictatorship of communities, of the masses, of collectives, of the opinion of the people in general over individual talent, seems to be coming true. In the film, the architect Howard Roark [a tribute to Frank Lloyd Wright], who decides to fight individually against the conventionalisms and social prejudices that prevent him from developing his architectural work, would today be completely defeated by social networks that impose their aesthetic and political verdicts with the force of an anonymous and ghostly majority against individual creative opinion. The power of digitalization affects both the private and public universes, leading to the confrontation of technological utopia with dystopia as a way to end free will.
The most catastrophic and alarmist visions of this expanding phenomenon represented by social networks claim that we observe how they are flattening content, how they are violating our privacy, how they have decentered our gaze and our attention, and how they are eliminating the border between reality and virtuality. On the other hand, enthusiasts of new communication models appeal to the improvement of possibilities for contrasting information, to the improvement of the defense of freedom, and to the capacity to turn the Earth into a dense and efficient communication network that improves our understanding of the world.
What we would never allow in reality, for a man to observe us from a window at all hours to know our personal tastes, we are willing to do on networks, showing and baring ourselves.
What we can confirm, in both cases, is that the effort of companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon to dominate data, content, and the control of user behavior, raises reasonable doubts about whether we are losing the ability to decide for ourselves. The monopoly of knowledge held by these three mega-communication companies implies asking what is the limit of control over our reality that economic media have to imprison the will of individual users. The ability to present themselves as collaborative and open projects, while their monopoly is shown to users as positive by proposing a social commitment and presenting themselves as a public service company, as an extension of the public without being so, allows us to see to what extent the discussion is not about maintaining market freedom but about the appropriation of our freedoms. Their strategy has as its main ally the commitment to managing reality from algorithms that allow knowing and monitoring consumers, knowing what we think.
What we would never allow in reality, for a man to observe us from a window at all hours to know our personal tastes, we are willing to do on social networks, showing and baring ourselves. Privacy, one of the most important rights in a person's life, is destroyed when it is left exposed to public eyes, to a scrutiny of our actions from their morality. A controlled, indexed, data-fied, related, interconnected, and 24-hour available world should begin to be questioned and legislated. It must be remembered that the force of this world that represents the internet was unleashed without rules, without regulations, and without a deep analysis of its consequences, so it would be positive and logical to begin to subject the virtual world to the same scrutiny as we do the real world, based on drawing up a strategy that allows for the recovery of citizens' freedom and privacy and that sets limits on the concentration of knowledge in the hands of large communication corporations. The great paradox we are witnessing is that large communication corporations block the way for creatives, for authors, for the Howard Roarks of the world, when their own creators, Steve Jobs, Jeff Bezos, or Mark Zuckerberg, were able to act because knowledge was not in a few hands and when the tastes and trends of consumers and users did not dictate the strategies of companies.