Cory Doctorow (Toronto, 1971) is one of the most lucid voices for discussing power and technology. Aware of the importance of words –he is a novelist and journalist–, he invented a concept at the end of 2022 to define, avoiding technicalities, the process that platforms were experiencing: emmerdification. A concept that has become popular and gives its name to his latest book, which has been translated into Spanish by Capitán Swing.

Free, rigorous, and verified information, based on facts and data, and on pluralistic and honest analysis and opinion, is in danger, besieged by a combination largely invisible to the general public: the one formed by large digital platforms and the most toxic political populism. These are two worlds that feed off each other and are putting professional journalism, as a guarantee of pluralism and democratic quality, on the ropes.

The major digital platforms (the big techThey dominate the economy. Digital technology has become indispensable, whether for information retrieval, social networking, e-commerce, operating systems, or smartphones. Each of these fields is dominated by a few companies. The leaders are Google with its search engine; Meta in social networking with WhatsApp, Facebook, and Instagram; Amazon in e-commerce; Microsoft with Windows and applications; and Apple in mobile phones. High fixed costs, network effects, and dynamic economies of scale (e.g., in the learning curve) make these companies increasingly competitive. big tech are dominant. The accumulation of data leads to feedback effects, in which more production and more sales induce more data and more network effects that make the company more efficient, improve products and services, and stay ahead of competitors. They are, therefore, markets that migrate towards a winner that takes the whole market or most of it (winner-takes-alleitherwinner-takes-most).

For several years now, difficulties in coexistence, arguments, and conflicts of all kinds, both social and economic, have been steadily increasing across the planet, even reaching warlike proportions. During the second half of the 20th century, in a significant portion of what we considered the developed world, we experienced economically prosperous and socially peaceful conditions. It is evident that this situation has been disrupted in recent decades, and there has been a growing concern about the causes, especially those that could be corrected, as they have been the result of conscious or unconscious human actions.

Love has no age. It's a cliché that contains one certainty—there are different types of love, for every stage of life—but anyone who has fallen in love as a teenager knows it's a unique experience. Fortunately. If we had to experience the same fireworks, the same roller coaster, and the same despair over heartbreak we experienced when we had acne our whole lives, we wouldn't be able to bear it. Creativity and talent are also traditionally associated with youthful energy and curiosity, but in this case, the passing of time means that experience, technique, and patience compensate for the loss of vitality. So an artist can be brilliant at 25 but more productive and wiser at 50.

Death The recent video by Jean Pormanove, a French strummer known for broadcasting marathons of humiliation and abuse on the Kick platform, has been shaking Europe for days. In this case, we have been able to see how suffering, broadcast by the thirst for likes, ceases to be a human experience and becomes a commodity. The images, broadcast live in front of thousands of viewers, confront us with uncomfortable questions about regulation and civilization. Is life turned into a spectacle, in the purest style of gladiators in combat, the kind of digital society we want? Let's ask ourselves carefully and in all directions.

Uncertainties cause insecurities. And insecurities encourage authoritarianism. In the first stage, it seems that there will be a congruence between the economic and power orientations of the White House and the court of business magnates who support it: the Magnificent Seven (The Magnificent Seven) of the new technological imperialism (Meta, Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, Nvidia, Amazon, Tesla).