Més Enllà del Mirall Negre. Una Defensa del Periodisme en l'Era de la Comunicació Blob i el Capitalisme de la Contenció

Abstract

Surveillance capitalism is mutating due to the latest computational advances in artificial intelligence and is giving birth to a new type of algorithmic communication, which is being described, but still from the theoretical framework of surveillance and network communication and, therefore, is not being precisely characterised or distinctively named. Therefore, in this thesis we identify it, we define it and we situate it within a new form of capitalism, which is inscribed in a new political culture. Techno-hydraulic despotism is the political and economic infrastructure that sustains the Global Silicon Valley on containment capitalism and blob communication. Techno-hydraulic despotism draws on the ancient Eastern hydraulic tradition and fuses it with an anarcho-capitalist neoliberalism. Based on a permacrisis that forces constant mobilisation, this form of despotism bases its violence on the precariat as a new form of labour based on relays, temporality and decentralisation; on the cognitariat as the class that makes possible the intensification of content production; and on the platform as the discursive apparatus that enables vicarious interactions on a global and infinite scale. The fruit of this new scale of domination of techno-hydraulic despotism crystallises in containment capitalism, which sophisticates surveillance to the point of surpassing it, and which completes the containment of contingency, the tyranny of elections and the hijacking of the event. This whole ideological device is embodied in a containment culture and blob communication, which we have defined as the communicative architecture of the algorithm, artificial intelligence and the platform that stands on an algorithmic orb. All processes of human communication are caged in a kind of mercurial mesh that envelops and isolates us, that promotes vicarious interactions and self-referential narratives, based on rewards and gratifications, and that dehumanises human beings and distances technology from their reach, so that we cannot appropriate it. This is why we consider it essential to overflow the containment dikes and the mercurial mesh of blob communication, proposing a new form of communication from cultural heterodoxies, which allows us to liberate a journalism-other capable of confronting this new dominant class and its narrative matrix. The media, which were and still are the discursive institution of the bourgeoisie and nation states, have neither the tools nor the capacity to combat this new scale of domination, because they have reduced journalism to a kind of obsolete industrial practice that only responds to the interests of a declining dominant class. Journalism must not only emancipate itself from the new chaotic order of containment, but also from the clutches of the classical bourgeois industrial model that spawned it.

Date of Award	10 Nov 2022
Original language	Catalan
Supervisor	Tresserras Gaju, Joan Manuel (Director) & Catalina Gaya Morla (Director)