Roisin Kiberd was born in Dublin the same year and month as the internet we know: in March 1989when an engineer named Tim Berners-Lee He presented his bosses at CERN with a proposal for a new “information management” system. Since then, Internet and social networks have transformed the economy, the planet and human behavior to unsuspected limits.
Also the life of Kiberd, who in ‘Disconnect’ (Alpha Decay) narrates his particular descent into hell in the form of anxiety attacks, eating disorder and addiction to the network that led her to a suicide attempt. “I was anesthetized. She was glued to a screen and, behind that screen, I felt trapped inside a body that did not seem very far from exhaustion& rdquor ;.
Like almost everyone born after the second half of the 80s, Kirbin grew up parallel to the Internet: he spent his childhood playing with a huge PC with a square white monitor, he was 12 when he was given his first Nokia 8210 (which of course he got hooked on) and survived his teenage years between Flickr and MySpace. By the time he opened his first blog on LiveJournal, he had already begun to flirt with anorexia.
His college years coincided with the landing of Facebook in Cambridge and her entry into the world of work as a journalist specializing in online subcultures happened at that time (not too far away) in which tweeting and working to exhaustion, without schedules, in order to build a “personal brand & rdquor; it was the goal of an entire generation. He also worked as a ‘community manager’ for a cheese brand, a supermarket cheddar very popular in deep pro-Brexit England.
“It took me a while to realize that the internet had eaten my life & rdquor;, he confesses in the book. “Sometimes I think that I have spent such a substantial part of my life in the networks that in reality I was educated online. I have forgotten where the limits are, where the technology ends and where I begin. Am I a mutant?& rdquor ;, he wonders in ‘Disconnection’, a fascinating collection of autobiographical essays, the umpteenth example of a literary trend on the rise in recent times and with a markedly feminine character: the revelation of the dark side of the internet.
‘Free Mark’ for the good of humanity
Kirben’s memoirs coincide with the publication of another fundamental book to understand the epidemic of anxiety and sadness generated by social networks. It is written by Frances Haugena senior Facebook executive who in 2021 decided to leak 22,000 secret documents to the Wall Street Journal that demonstrate what everyone knows by now: that Meta products (Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp) are harmful to children and adolescentsfuel sectarianism and damage democracy.
Deusto has just launched ‘The truth about Facebook’, where it warns of the danger that an application that has such a savage influence on the lives of billions of people (2,960 users according to the latest figures) does not share its algorithms when its power is already greater than that of many states.
In the book, Haugen predicts that Zuckerberg will end up in jail if you don’t turn away from the Facebook address and ask for a move ‘Free Mark’ in the style of ‘Free Britney’: assures that Zuckerberg, a millionaire since he was 19 years old, lives isolated from the real world, bunkered by an environment that manipulates him to continue optimizing benefits without taking into account the mental health crisis of half the planet’s adolescents, the generalized attention deficit and the high political polarization.
George Orwell fell short
The expression “surveillance capitalism & rdquor;today fully integrated into the conversation, celebrates a decade: it was coined by the philosopher Shoshana Zuboff, a professor at Harvard and theoretician of this new era of capitalism that we have had to live in, in which the earth’s resources are no longer exploited, but rather our most intimate information. ‘The era of surveillance capitalism’ (Paidós) is already a classic that recounts in its 900 pages how technology companies have developed a new invisible architecture that has changed human behavior and aspects of our entire world (friendships, love, work, health, everything).
Zuboff warns that democracy will die if those who govern us are the algorithms. Despite everything, she is a moderate optimist: she believes that we still have time to stop Amazon, Google and Meta and avoid a corporacracy led by four megalomaniac millionaires from Silicon Valley thanks, among others, to the European Union.
The machos of Silicon Valley
Another of the books that has best reflected the Silicon Valley bro culture is the novel ‘Uncanny Valley’ (Asteroid Books) by Anna Wiener, data analyst in a ‘start up’ until she resigned, fed up with the anxiety caused by a toxic and infantilized work environment, endless hours and the poor ethics that were required of her at her job. Wiener was 25 years old when she landed in San Francisco in 2013, a decade marked by an obsession common to all apps that were born at the time: The addiction.
In ‘Uncanny Valley’ he describes with tremendous lucidity the sexism of his company, led, like almost all of them, by a millionaire as young as immature. From the open bar on Fridays to Las Vegas seminars, ball pits, ‘Whiskey Wednesdays’ and gymkhanas with strippersWiener breaks down in great detail the prevailing objectification and misogyny in Silicon Valley, where everyone hopes to get rich under the promise of a hit.
Literature and emoji
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Can you write the same as you are on the internet? That is to say: jumping from link to link, with gifs, emojis, memes and alerts who interrupt conversation and reading, going from moments of absolute and devastating intimacy to others of collective and viral laughter… Yes, you can and one of the best examples is ‘Little is said about this’ (Alpha Decay) by Patricia Lockwooda novel that reflects with sharpness, sensitivity and humor all the strangeness, emotional dissonance and numbness that generates life online.
Finalist for the prestigious Booker in 2021, the protagonist is a famous tweeter (in the novel, Twitter is the Portal) famous for her sharp wit who travels the world giving talks, a bit like Lockwood herself, who one day receives two messages from his mother: ‘Something wrong’ and ‘When could you come?’. The story of his niece, a baby born with Proteus syndrome, is also explained. A book about how the real world and the network world collide.