It is more than likely that, due to one problem or another, the reader has been forced to contact a service provider, for example, and that after unsuccessful attempts through telephone robots that do not understand you, applications that describe circles that lead nowhere, etc., has given up on speaking directly with the person responsible for the matter. This is not mere discourtesy, but an increasingly frequent violation of rights. The idea that communicative power has mutated into structural and premeditated, highly calculated, incommunication is one of the most significant paradoxes of our time. For much of the 20th century, it was believed that whoever controlled the transmission channels – the press, radio, television – possessed almost omnipotent power: they could shape public opinion and, indirectly, even set the agenda for politicians. In fact, they could determine who or what was visible, and who or what remained in the shadows. The undeniable strength of communication lay in the ability to reach everyone. Today, however, the panorama is radically different: power is demonstrated by covertly blocking the interlocutor, that is, by preventing, or greatly hindering, communication from being reciprocal.Large corporations – banks, operators, and increasingly, outsourced public services – have perfected a perverse architecture of non-communication that functions as an invisible wall. When there is a problem, we enter a loop of phone menus, dead-end forms, or emails that receive no response (and which actually end up serving to receive spam advertising once we have provided our email). The effect is twofold: on the one hand, the more than understandable feeling of powerlessness; on the other, the realization that communication is no longer a right or a service, but an administrative resource to abuse the user, with or without a contract. Power today lies not so much in speaking as in not listening, and non-communication thus becomes a form of authority: those who do not respond dominate with impunity and without complexes, with total normality.
Corporate incommunication has the equally perverse reverse that we have pointed out before: the excess of communication in the form of useless notifications, invasive advertising, messages that disturb our daily lives daily, generally in Spanish and with a Colombian or Venezuelan accent (I would like to know the misery they pay them to interrupt people's lunch or nap). If before power consisted of sending a message, now it consists of saturating the communicative space until it becomes noise. Make a brief count and you will confirm that, of the daily informational impacts, almost none is real and useful communication.There is, therefore, a double strategy: that of opacity and that of saturation. The first serves to avoid the interaction that places you and me on equal terms with the interlocutor; the second, saturation, is what prevents the silence necessary for the real understanding of messages, especially in the case of people who, for different reasons, have to process things more calmly.What does all this translate into? As the reader knows perfectly well, many companies do not respond, but send incessant messages. They do not listen, but one fine day, when they arbitrarily decide to, they demand to be heard. The citizen then finds themselves trapped between the impossibility of making themselves understood and the impossibility of stopping receiving messages. In this context, human communication – which involves listening, responding, negotiating, recognizing the other – becomes a scarce commodity, almost a luxury. When someone rarely picks up the phone, they remind you, condescendingly, that they are doing so because they want to, not because they have any contractual obligation to do so. If you don't have a smartphone, as is my case, the labyrinth becomes directly a dead end or a trap.I can understand the various inertias that have brought us here. I can even assume that the robotization of communication is part of the same predatory logic that leads to even worse behavior. There is one thing, however, that shocks me: the fact that the administration refrains from these types of problems as if it had nothing to say, as if all this were just a set of unimportant misunderstandings between individuals. There is yet another level. Public authorities have enthusiastically discovered that they can go beyond, far beyond, administrative silence by raising an impregnable barrier of electronic forms. Pure digital absolutism that, docilely, we consider a minor issue.
