Jump to content

#27The Dictatorship of Foreclosed Alternatives

The dictatorship of no alternatives is in full force here. … it is ever more difficult to identify avenues of escape, let alone genuine alternatives.

Facebook used anticompetitive strategies to increase its domination over the market: acquiring potential competitors or simply threatening to close them down.

When does Facebook have divisions in virtual reality or drone development? They allow the company to multiply its sources of behavioral data while increasing the engagement of its users.

Finally as alternatives to surveillance capitalism are foreclosed, we are left in a state of “no exit,” trapped in an involuntary merger of personal necessity and economic extraction.

The strategy of corporations such as Facebook is as follows: circle, capture, and conquer, until their services become indispensable to use and that we no longer have the choice of avoiding them, preventing any competition from entering the market.

It is now urgent to escape from the dependency of ever-more growing giants like Facebook, who pose a serious threat to the future of democracy. Despite our feeling of helplessness, we can still refuse the inevitabilistic speeches served by these companies and search for ways to make truly autonomous decisions.