Is the internet a wonderful invention?
The Internet, with all its problems, remains the most global, universal and democratic communication tool ever invented. Its basic infrastructure is very good at the server level and protocols that allow us to connect many computers and devices across the world. The problem is how the entrepreneurial layer of this technology has developed.

You say we've been robbed of memory about creating the Internet.
Yes, there are dozens of biographies about the accounts of Elon Musk, Marck Zuckerberg and Silicon Valley. On the contrary, other essential aspects are undervalued, which have occurred in public research centres, citizen innovation centres, hacklabas and civil society in general.

With the arrival of the first social networks, social movements and independent media we believed that there we could find a way to deal with the monopoly comunicativo.Han for a long time
to be useful. They still serve us. What happens is that we're losing ground. In the creation of the Internet, before all those companies that control the network were created today, there was the ability to create very powerful communication spaces, at the same time, as the over-dimension of the technological monsters was not so great.

When we started using commercial platforms like Twitter or Facebook for social communication, I don't think we were naive, we already knew what was behind it. The knowledge of the origin of these companies was aware of the criticism about the loss of privacy, autonomy and technological control.

But a few years have passed when the interests of banks and the multinacionales.El environment of commercial social platforms have
also taken precedence is becoming more and more competitive. On the one hand, it is replete with brands that use exclusively advertising communication. And on the other hand, they're occupied by the reactionary forces, at a time when it seemed to us that we could revolutionize through Twitter and Facebook, and they started organizing to respond to all social movements, by 2010.

They have now organized what I call the International of Hate. They are men who share tactics, resources and a lot of money. What for? Steve Bannon, strategic ideologist of Trump’s first campaign, summed it up to invest in a strategy: "Fill up all the cocoa space." That is, occupying the whole space with a lot of toxic content, a digital space that, in the first place, served for people to hold important conversations, get to know each other, organize politically or just have fun.

For a while, these commercial social networks served us, but every day less. So we have to think about getting out of there, because we're staying in those increasingly competitive spaces. We're competing with tech giants that have more resources and less scruples than we do to get very small care. We have less and less room for our things.

In any case, it seems a contradiction that anyone who wants a better society should continue to feed toxic social networks, right? But getting out isn't as easy as it seems.
We have to look at why we want to be in these spaces. I understand that our main goal is to be able to talk to people. From there, we have to analyze what results we are having.

The fact is that it is becoming more and more evident on all networks, and especially on Twitter, that when you look at how it has changed in recent months, you have to invest a lot of money to actually reach people. It's a lie that with good content and a little clarity it gets viral. Not so, you’ll have to pay for advertising your content, you’ll need a Premium account – the Twitter algorithm shows more times the contents of the accounts they pay – and you’ll have to put money into the content, in many cases you’ll invest in a fake community, with troll and bots that will appear in favor of your content, so you can imagine that you have a lot of people behind you. All of that we don't have at hand, they do.

I think we are still there for inertia, but we are not achieving good results. The illusion of virality has led us, at some point, by chance, to reach thousands of people.

In addition, this type of communication is very volatile. "You've seen this video 100,000 people," they tell you, but chances are you've only seen the first five seconds, and also, on your phone, something else was being done.

This kind of communication is far from the possibility of building something in common, because there's a lot of noise around these platforms. We need to value other kind of more paused communication processes that allow us to create common spaces to talk to people in a more continuous way, for there to be exchanges and conversations.

"The knife is not bad or good, it depends on how we use it." Does this well-known phrase serve for the algorithms of the major Internet platforms? Or is the game pre-rigged? Some
knives are automatic knives that make it easier for you to stab a person in the street and some saw knives are made to cut bread. So, yes, the two are knives, but if you want to cut the bread, your knife is saw, not automatic.

I do not deny that I have reached the mainstream, appear in La Sexta, or try to make it super viral in fact on a Youtube channel, that is, in super mainstream. But these multinational tools are designed to condition the reach of users.

We've been laying all the eggs in those baskets for a long time, and we've set aside the other -- common, cooperative spaces, where we can have conversations and construction processes, slowly and passively. At the beginning of the Internet, we already had those. The spaces weren't that invasive, because there were fewer people on the Internet, too.

I remember the time of Indymedia and other similar processes, when we realized that we could get something on the commercial social media that we almost left aside.

It is curious that many people have been blown down the mask. I remember very well the time when Google moulded.
Yes, that Silicon Valley ideology, which comes from hippies, which with those ways and ways of acting look something else, but in the end they are companies that use the same criteria as Wall Street companies. Google has often shown in California that “sweets” treat their employees, but that further demonstrates the level of racism, classism and perversity that the company has. In fact, they treat every worker much worse in every workplace, including those nearby, like in Arizona, and let's not say those who have subcontracted in the global South.

I don’t like the term “alternative”, because from the beginning it places you in a minority, but the jump to the “alternatives” of toxic networks, software or free networks remains difficult for muchos.No everyone
must be hacker, it doesn’t have to spend a lot of time setting up their tools. Free software options should be designed with the greatest possible availability. It is true that sometimes ethical alternatives have had real stability problems and have been more difficult to use. But sometimes I think we're stuck in that narrative, maybe because of some bad experience, because we've ever tried to use something that was recommended by a hacker and it seemed like a fuck bite to us. But today there are possibilities that can actually be used. Repeating that ours is more difficult, we must stop pissing in free software spaces.

One example is the Mastodon social network. It's true that if you start the instances up, down the interoperative protocol, it may seem like aliens' stuff, but getting into Mastodon, opening the user account and starting to post content is as simple as Twitter. Of course, we have to make our own narrative and explain why this instrument is ethically better, but once you have it, jump there and use it.

There is another trend, more evident after the pandemic, which is to demonize all new technology and reclaim a past that will never return.
During the pandemic, as everyone was online, he realized how toxic these commercial networks are. Since then, this criticism has become mainstream. Everyone knows that there is a problem there. That is a good thing. Being able to talk about it with your father, cousin and especially people who are not techies is the first step to talk about the solutions that proponemos.Es to say, I find it positive that there are people facing the need to test every new toy

from Silicon Valley, the hype. However, I would like to argue with those people and see if we can think together other technologies, taking into account that it is impossible to give up everything, because the world without the Internet is not going to come back. Even if you don't use certain applications, we're all dated. If you're not going to live in a cave, if you live in cities and towns, we all have to go through processes of datification. So I think it makes more sense to try to intervene in those processes where you can't help but try to adopt an attitude of empowerment.

Just because it is one of the central pieces for the development of turbochiapitalism that we are currently experiencing, the Internet should be a fundamental battleground for the left. But I don't know if we have that idea very internalized.
Of course. It's not internalized in that general way, but I think we all know how Airbnb, Uber, Deliveroo and all of them are ruining our cities and some sectors of work, or in the case of the Basque Country, how these tools oppress linguistic diversity.

I do not believe that the climate struggle is more important than the climate struggle, the fight for housing or the defence of labour rights, but the Internet is the tool and the basis that we will have to use in all those struggles.

Does EU fines on Meta or Google serve any purpose?The EU believes that
Europe is losing sovereignty over its dependence on digital technologies from the US and China. Surely the sovereignty they want in Brussels does not correspond to what we want from left-wing social and spatial movements, but it can be a useful tool as a lever to achieve more favourable changes or scenarios.

Since the white European privilege, we have some rights that sometimes make us better able to deal with these multinationals.

The privacy we have and the ability to fight for it strategically, with judgments against these companies, the conditions of transparency and some social responsibility that multinationals have ... All of them have created a situation a little more favourable to the natives than if there were no regulation, even if it were a regulation within the neoliberal framework of Brussels. I'm going to give you an example that has created new privileged classes: the law of artificial intelligence. The latest regulation adopted by the European Union sets out a number of assumptions in which European citizens cannot use automated or artificial intelligence systems because they are contrary to fundamental rights such as biometric identification or certain ways of creating profiles of people. But the EU has also made an exception: they can be used to control migrants. They are creating two-class citizenship. It is a terrible thing, because it deepens racism, but it also shows that, by the way of regulation, some improvements in rights can be achieved.

Some, such as Simona Levy, propose creating a browser and public email at European level.
It is reasonable. At first, the Internet looked like this. It wasn't a technology developed in Europe, but it was servers. This has been the case in public administrations or universities. They've all had their own email servers, but in recent years, Google has eaten them.

Now the proposal seems a little crazy, but it can happen. For example, it is taking place in countries such as Germany, the Netherlands and France, which are more aware of the issue of data sovereignty. They have a much larger public infrastructure. Also in the Basque Country, compared to the rest of the Spanish State. In some places the issue is being taken more seriously, and I do not think it is very unusual for it to happen at European level.

An initiative that comes from neoliberal Europe can give us a breath, even if it is to be a little better, as the current situation is to follow what the American Big Tech does. If this is done, the important thing is that it be interoperable so that our local initiatives are linked to this system.

Can public/private talk today be pre-digital?
Yes, or pre-neoliberal. States have not taken care of everything for a long time, they are being outsourced. And I think it can be beneficial, because we don't want all power to be held by centralized states. Therefore, these public-private partnerships, if done well, with sufficient democracy and transparency, can be good, provided that they are not limited to the private binomial to four or five large companies, but include a much broader cooperative fabric, which includes companies with social economy criteria and which includes a space for civil society.

These issues do not seem to be on the political parties' agenda or in institutional policy in general.
Yes, it is. The first servers were public and in recent years Google and Microsoft have been made with them. There are politicians who do not take these issues into account, but, on the other hand, no politician is an expert on all issues. The fact is that they need advice and Big Tech uses a lot of resources and a lot of money to lobby, to make it easy for public officials who don't want to eat too much on these issues and to make sure that policies are on the right track.

There is also another part of the responsibility: Community regulations. In fact, it is much easier for Google than for smaller companies, with an army of lawyers able to “buy” the General Data Protection Regulation.

Technology and Decolonality. Two terms that are not heard enough in the same sentence.
More or less, depending on where we read about technology. The feminist colleagues in Latin America have been working on this issue for a long time and have many interesting things that we should read.

On the one hand, the issue is related to data extremism. This process is much more violent in the global South, and it has to do with how Big Tech subcontracts the most boring and hard parts of its work to people from places where it takes less. We talk about programming, data filtration, content migration, etc. And yes, surely a person from India will earn more by filtering detestable TikTok data than by driving a taxi on the street, but the one who wins the most in that process is the one who is in California, earning a fortune as CEO.

The technological decolony has to do with the extraction of raw materials from conflict zones, in most cases minerals. And at the same time, it's related to the location of large data centers that consume a lot of energy and water, and that place them as far away as possible from centers of power and privilege.

The loss of cultural diversity must also be taken into account. The use of certain instruments designed by these kinds of multinationals, of course, is incapable of thinking and creating in another way and in other languages. Feminist colleagues in Latin America talk about epistemicide.