Marina Planas

8 artists reflect and dialogue from different perspectives on how individuals approach and relate to technology. We are in an environment dominated by Google, the leader of the internet control society that gives orders of the type: save page as, delete, password, there is not enough space in hard drive, love your mother, love your father, download, password, love your boy, love your president, open new window, password, cancel, quit, eat, password, option + control + delete, password, open new tab, open history, password, buy ...

Furthermore, this abstract being appears with hidden face to stress these invisible forms of control.

The images of the war come to us through a screen; we are invited to the phenomenological experience of visiting the abandoned Myspace space.

 
Theoretical framework and references.

 
Within control societies, based on the numerical control language, the essential is a number: a password that marks or forbids access to information.

 
Foucault determined that disciplinary societies would reach their apogee at the beginning of the 20th century. The rules were defined first by the family, then by the school, then by the factory, sometimes by the hospital, sometimes by the prison and finally, by the state. These institutions no longer dominate today; new forces have been installed. It is about control societies.

These societies work in a deterritorialized way, through television consumption, marketing, private indebtedness and aim to standardize a behavior focused on consumption. The factories are replaced by companies and simple machines by computerized production and control systems that glide in a virtual space. It is not just a technological evolution; it is a profound mutation of capitalism.

Paul Virilio has continuously analyzed the ultra-fast forms comparing the Internet with the different imprisonment centers. The different "controllers" are inseparable variants that constitute a variable geometry system with a numerical language. They are invisible, depersonalized and abstract controllers who observe without being observed at all. They exercise control from the dark. The person is aware that he is being watched but does not exactly knowing when, a fact that subdues him to the will of power through a mechanism of self-discipline and allowing automatic functioning of power.
 
The Internet is like a big electronic brother who observes, catalogs, registers and finally offers a fairly adjusted profile of all those who look at the world of the network. The metaphor of Orwell (1949) is very suggestive. Even more precise is the metaphor of Bentham's Panopticon, later picked up by Foucault. Every time we surf the Internet we leave behind a kind of electronic trail that reveals a lot of us: our tastes, our preferences, our habits. Data collected and cataloged offers an overview of us, building a digital identity that perfectly fits within electronic compartments and suggests an increasingly perfect profile of us, as never before in mankind. Never, men have managed so much continuously updated and accurate information about each individual citizen. The great electronic brother looks and catalogs in a cold and precise way our tastes and preferences.

 
The new engineering of social control goes far beyond the simple act of looking. It seeks to create channels where the individuals’ behaviors take place. Create the information needed to build a profile of consumers’ habits. Profiles that will be sold to other companies.