10 Perhaps the best metaphor to understand what is happening to us has been put into writing by Chris Hayes, the American journalist, whose essay, The Song of the Sirens, has just been translated into Spanish. It is a serious, informative, and at the same time very critical work of the current attention capitalism society, when we live immersed in a sea of continuous noise and have learned to pay attention only to what makes the most noise —what stands out amidst the continuous bustle—, or to the song of the sirens. But Ulysses chained himself to the ship's mast to avoid succumbing, he imposed limits on himself to avoid falling into what could distract him from the life he wanted to lead, something we find ourselves unable to do, always looking at screens. Although in principle it is not 'the screens' that are the problem, but rather the applications designed to capture and hold our attention in a enslaved manner and then make a profit from 'our eyes', reselling our attention to advertisers who insert advertising in the midst of the content that the algorithm has discovered fascinates us. This is how we spend our hours, attention time that we could dedicate to matters that are truly useful, or that give us some measure of happiness. If the average in Spain is three and a half hours per person per day of mobile phone use, how many things could we do to recover this time in our lives? How many languages could we learn? How many instruments could we master? How much love could we give to others instead of watching strange videos or participating in useless controversies? And how could everyone's culture improve if, instead of looking at a screen, books were read; therefore, people consumed more literature, which would also benefit the publishing market? The progress of humanity was based on the idea that a day would come when, beyond work time and night rest, we would have time to dedicate ourselves to our true interests, to our inner freedom. But now that we could finally have some leisure hours: why have we uselessly given them away? Let's focus on this: the ‘masters’ of this lost time are the richest men in the world, the owners of X, Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, etc. Networked capitalism has been built on the time we were supposed to emancipate ourselves from, just as industrial capitalism did on the time we were supposed to go to factories and mass production centers. Now we find ourselves even incapable of reading a short text, like this article, and let alone a whole novel, much less if it is long and perhaps a bit demanding. The only way, now, to read certain things is to ‘tie yourself’ to the mast of the ship, that is, disconnect the phone, even turn off the modem to avoid temptations to connect and check the screen every fifteen minutes. The fact that we are in this state, so interfered with, should worry us, because this is, literally, the alienation that Marxism intended to denounce. Your life is no longer yours if even the time of your freedom is blocked.       

]]> For the past few weeks, social network X has had new interaction options. There's a form of artificial intelligence that can search for information about what's posted there, telling you if it's factual or not, or helping users provide context or question the veracity of what's being said. But the algorithm also has another application: undressing young women.

]]> In times uncertain in every aspect, the promise of impossible certainties becomes a blinding and addictive opiate. Certainties that function as temporary refuges from a world that is increasingly difficult to digest. But the temporality of these certainties is more ephemeral than ever, laying bare their lack of real substance. They are pseudo-certainties thrust upon us through information overload and technological algorithms, which transform any legitimate concern into an avalanche of easy, conclusive, and reassuring answers. Answers that offer instant comfort, but which then leave a deep void, an absence of meaning that seeks only to be filled with more immediate stimuli, with extreme dogmatism, with simplistic and salvific narratives, with trap-like refuges that promise protection while imprisoning us in a desperate meaninglessness, hunting noise, excess, and emptiness.

]]> There's something truly exciting about hearing Zohran Mamdani address Donald Trump with his now-famous cry of "turn up the volume!" during his victory speech. The brand-new mayor of New York—having broken all his records: the first Muslim, the youngest in a hundred years—not only taught the president a lesson from the wealthiest city in the United States, but also demonstrated that politics can be done differently. While some parties present reports, charts, and address the public like technocrats or PhD students, Mamdani spoke to them as if he were sending them a memo.

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