A common practice in certain supermarket chains has been to offer, at first, products of all kinds, to finally discover what the customer truly wants. Once this 'discovery' has been made, however, these products are no longer sold to start selling identical or similar products but only from the same supermarket's brand. Where there was a 'branded' product, there is now a generic or 'private label' one, perhaps cheaper and of more or less identical quality. Thus, there are supermarkets (and large online retailers) that have almost ended up selling only products of their own label, even for things as basic as water or eggs. There are bookstores that basically sell books – they have them more visible or well-placed – from the publishing houses that belong to the same business conglomerate to which the bookstore belongs: everything stays in-house. And a very similar thing has happened with so-called social networks. At first, people signed up to see friends and acquaintances, or people from their field of activity, or those figures of interest: sports journalists, film critics, people whose contact was convenient for one reason or another. In the film about the birth of Facebook (The Social Network), winner of an Oscar, we saw that the success of the invention came from the ability to unite people and create bonds, facilitate acquaintances, connect, etc. That this came hand in hand with an unsociable person and through the account of the lawsuits his friends had filed against him was just another of history's great ironies. But then there was talk of solidarity and even democracy of communications in a new era that the internet had just begun. But now the 'networks' are not that, not by a long shot, because they have done like supermarkets: they have become repositories of what the owner is most interested in selling, and which are not precisely the products of others but their own. Content that is no longer what our friends sell, but what a series of very well-known personalities create, whom everyone follows passively and without true interaction. It is curious how they have transformed into what televisions were, but personalized after the algorithm's study of each of its users. They are no longer debate and surprise arising from each person's interests, but entertainment and capturing attention for resale with commercial and ideological intentions. That is to say: the primary invention of mass culture. And all because it has been the way to make profitable an invention that was free, but that in the end we paid for with our attention, our time, and our data. All of this is obviously not new. But it is often necessary to stop and reflect on how they sell us a motorbike only to later transform it into something else, when we have already ridden it too much. I would not be at all surprised if the same ended up happening with AI, because it repeats the same pattern as other digital inventions that have reached us in recent decades.
