The student body in the internet's black hole

It seems that the political response to current educational challenges is going through a double surveillance, digital and police. Much has already been written about the police in these pages. On the other hand, not so much about digital surveillance. We can say that we have a Googlized or platformized education. Primary school students – and university students too – when they start already have a Gmail account to access Google Classroom. It is a tool that turns education into a public-private space where advertising, entertainment, education, and potential sexual content are mixed. In one of the official school books, students are asked to look up a word not in the digital DIEC but "on the internet". We do the exercise: we put the word in the search engine, we read the automatic result from Gemini that appears as a featured snippet – sometimes it translates automatically, or invents results, or doesn't find it –; or we put the word on YouTube, leading to a long chain of flashy and seductive videos. We use one of the Google Classroom worksheets, product ads appear, the child focuses on the product and not on the exercise. And a long etcetera.If we scale the problem from the classroom to geopolitics, a couple of weeks ago Palantir became a topic of general concern following the publication of the 22 techno-fascist and ethno-supremacist theses by its director, Alex Karp. The initial result was an increase in the stock market value of the software company at the service of war and institutional surveillance. These strategies apply to companies linked to AI or to tech companies like Amazon, Alphabet (Google), Meta, Tesla... That is, to the large digital monopolies within what has been called "platform capitalism", a capitalism that extracts economic and financial returns from human behavior through the analysis of all the digital data we produce on different platforms and services, including those linked to public education. Through these infrastructures, daily life and geopolitics become communicating vessels, as do entertainment, education, and war.

In the late seventies, analyst and consultant Roger Clarke was already talking about dataveillance (surveillance through data). He referred to the shift from surveillance of individuals through physical means to low-cost surveillance focused on people's behavior through the increasingly voluminous digital data trail, although at that time the internet was mainly focused on ARPANET (governmental and academic uses). Using this technology, according to Clarke, implied a series of risks: erroneous identifications, lack of data context, blacklists and witch hunts, arbitrariness, predictions of guilt, selective advertising, covert operations, anonymous accusations, generation of adversarial relationships, unfair law enforcement, minimization of individual responsibility (one of the elements Donatella Di Cesare highlights in her book Technofascism), impossibility of self-determination, and the creation of a climate of permanent suspicion. Today, companies like Palantir advocate for exploiting all these uses and returning to the internet of the post-World War II era, when it was part of the industrial-military complex; a dual consideration of connected digital technology as an informational and warfare weapon.In other words, it all seems like a chain of blunders: official contracts with North American monopolies of neoliberal acculturation, non-negotiable technological protocols, textbooks that lead students into the black hole of the internet without guidelines or any kind of guidance, an import of digital tools without prior literacy from both faculty and students, and a justifiedly tired faculty that declares itself on strike and which, instead of being listened to and supported, is compensated with police surveillance in classrooms and more software.

with police surveillance in classrooms and more software.