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.

The Generalitat activates the creation of a "sovereign public cloud" in Catalonia to strengthen Catalan digital autonomy. The executive of Salvador Illa has opened the tender for the contract this Tuesday, with an estimated total value of up to 481 million euros during the first eight years, although the objective is to "maintain it once this period has passed". The new infrastructure will allow hosting 40% of the Catalan administration's digital services and data to "comply with the highest level of European sovereignty achievable today". According to the Government's forecasts, the service will come into operation during the second half of 2027 and will be fully operational during the third quarter of next year. The Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, has highlighted the capacity of the new Catalan cloud to "protect and store" citizens' data and public services.

The adoption of artificial intelligence in the Catalan technology sector is already beginning to take a toll on the workforce, especially among the youngest. According to the latest report "Digital talent overview, developed by the Mobile World Capital Barcelona Foundation, the offers for junior workers among ICT companies in Barcelona fell by nearly 27% in 2025 The survey, it should be noted, coincides with the digital talent director's assessment: professionals in the sector are using AI to carry out tasks traditionally assigned to new hires. More than 74% declare using chatbots to draft documentation related to code; a similar rate to those who use them to elaborate explanations of already operational code. They also highlight assistance in development or making small additions to developed applications and websites.

The Culture section of ARA receives an email from a company representing a high-ranking Catalan executive requesting to change a photograph from an old news story to a current one. Behind that curious request is 202 Digital Reputation, a consultancy specializing in digital reputation. Industrial engineer Carlota Gatius took advantage of COVID to train in digital business and swapped a job at Deloitte for this personal project, with a partner (Ruben Gálvez) and her own capital. Five years later, at 202, they work with big brands and top executives, mainly to weather reputational crises on the internet. In the era of LinkedIn, Instagram, and AI, the image we project online may be as crucial as the work we do.

The digital economy continues its expansion in Barcelona, also in the labor market. According to data from the latest Digital talent overview report, the annual study by the Mobile World Capital Barcelona foundation that details the state of the ICT professional network in the country's capital, the Barcelona technology sector has already surpassed 135,000 workers, 6.5% of the city's total employment. Last year, the local ecosystem added nearly 6,300 professionals, a year-on-year increase of 4.85%; triple the rate of the general Barcelona labor market, which grew by 1.73% compared to 2024.

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.

More population, lower density of bank branches. Catalonia, along with Andalusia and Madrid, the most populated autonomous communities, has the fewest bank branches per 100,000 inhabitants, according to data from the Bank of Spain. And regions like Extremadura, La Rioja, and Aragon, with smaller or more dispersed populations, are among those with the most. However, in both cases, the reduction in networks and supply, with the disappearance of savings banks through their transformation or absorption by other entities, has been drastic since the peak reached in 2008, the year the financial crisis erupted.

The far-right's victory on social media is so overwhelming that an overly defeatist narrative about the internet is taking hold. In the United States, people have been asking for years why a left-wing Joe Rogan doesn't emerge, and our equivalent would be asking the same question about Jordi Wild. These are two extremely popular podcast hosts among teenagers, featuring long conversations with diverse guests and blending entertainment, curiosity, and politics, always with a strong bias in favor of the new right's arguments. Rogan's numbers in particular, and the male-dominated online sphere in general, are so large compared to progressive alternatives that a significant portion of the American left has blamed this digital world for Donald Trump's reelection, just as here, every time Vox gains ground in the polls, we see editorials blaming Elon Musk's algorithms. This past week, these talking points resurfaced following... the Army Awards gala presented by Santiago SeguraThese anti-awards ironically recognize internet personalities and the most viral moments of the year, and have sparked controversy because several nominees left the event denouncing the unbearably fascist atmosphere.

1. Last Monday, in a debate on "The Future of Work and the Meaning of Life" at the European School of Humanities, Sara Berbel emphasized the importance of recognizing and dignifying work as a fundamental element of society, and the need to address technological changes from this perspective, changes that are often seen as a threat to a collective threat. If significant breaches have already opened in the logic of work culture in recent times, the instruments of knowledge advancement are now dizzying. And in this sense, AI, the great myth in full swing, generates great anxieties.

Bags and suitcases must pass through a scanner upon entering and exiting, which displays the contents in green and black. If a bag or suitcase contains an electronic device, such as a computer, a special sticker is placed on it. Upon exiting, the sticker is removed and discarded. I don't know if mobile phones count as devices, because never in my life, never once, in that public institution, has anyone been seen without their phone in their hand.

The "free" economy has become the greatest illusion of our time. We don't pay with money; we pay in kind. And a lot. Every click, every registration, every "free" update is an invitation to surrender something more valuable than our money: minutes of our lives, attention spans, fragments of our identity. Digital freeness has trained us in a lie: if it doesn't hurt the wallet, it doesn't hurt anything. And that's false. The tech industry discovered before anyone else that our scarcest resource isn't money, but attention. And it orchestrated a perfect system to capture it. The entry price is zero euros. The exit price is never clear: it's the trapped users.

This week we presented the main findings of the Survey on Sexual Violence by the Department of the Interior. These are alarming figures that should shake anyone to their core, but at the same time, they allow us to construct a clear picture of the serious problem and the impact of this violence. The fact that two out of every three Catalan women (67.3%) have suffered sexual violence at some point in their lives, and that 15.5% have experienced it in the last year, definitively shatters the myth that sexual violence is exceptional or circumstantial. It is structural, persistent, and deeply rooted, and even today, only 6% of those affected report it. This violence, as the data indicates, transcends generations, public and private spaces, and intimate relationships, and it remains silenced. This silence is not resignation or passivity on the part of women, but rather a response to institutional distrust, the difficulty in identifying situations of violence (many of which are normalized and internalized), and a reflection of the fear of reprisals and the social burden that still falls on those who suffer it in the form of guilt or shame.

Today I would like to talk to you about something that has been observed for some time and that, slowly, has been sneaking in through the back door until it has settled into our lives.

I imagine hell as a kind of hospital for the lonely, where only the word is heard. IAll the patients are condemned to repeat it spasmodically, but each time they do, the distance between them increases.

When technophiles feel challenged, they often brandish the example of Socrates's wary attitude toward a new technology that would change the destiny of humanity: writing. Socrates believed that the transmission of knowledge should be oral, that codifying our thoughts in writing would weaken our memory and intellectual abilities. Instead, his disciple, Plato, used this technology to bequeath us his thoughts, and also those of his teacher. Well, now we find ourselves at the exact opposite of that moment of technological transition.

Last year, Maria earned her C2 Catalan certificate and had to go in person to pick up a copy of the diploma at the Citizen Service Office located on Las Ramblas, in the Barcelona Ministry of Culture. This year, since Thaïs has been removed, she received an email with a link to her Private Citizen Area, where she could check her oral and written exam scores and download her certificate. This is one of the procedures the government had planned to streamline to reduce bureaucracy and costs and improve citizen service. "The digitalization of the Catalan exam certificate was a long-standing request from the public and Language Policy," explains the department's Catalan Knowledge Assessment and Accreditation Service, which until now had prioritized other areas, such as the surge in C2 level exams resulting from the mandatory certification for teachers.

The Telecommunications and Information Technology Center (CTTI), under the Generalitat (Catalan Government), will incorporate 25 new professionals, according to the agreement approved by the Government this Tuesday. This agreement is part of the Government Plan for the 15th term and the process of administrative reform and improvement of public services. These plans foresee a set of actions to advance toward "an easier, smarter, more accessible, closer, and friendlier administration, at the forefront of technology and in a more connected digital Catalonia," the deployment of the public fiber optic network throughout the country and the connection of all public offices to this network, digital data sovereignty, and a robust cybersecurity model.

Can you imagine a world where a medical consultation, a diagnostic test, or the monitoring of chronic diseases could be done from the comfort of your home? Technology applied to health can help us achieve this. our Health systems also contribute to a global problem that affects everyone? Some countries, like the United Kingdom and Canada, are already measuring the environmental impact of health systems, an issue still pending in our country.

A few weeks ago, at an institutional event in Brussels, a digital policy expert celebrated that Europe's commitment to defense opened a window of opportunity for European artificial intelligence. But he warned: "We will need a lot more data than we have now." No one in the room seemed to have any problem. No one mentioned that one of the most important principles of the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is precisely that of limiting data collection to what is strictly necessary.

"Germany is back on track," proclaimed the new German chancellor, Friedrich Merz, as the Conservatives and Social Democrats announced their coalition agreement to govern Europe's leading economic powerhouse for the next four years.