Welcome to a perfect storm On the one hand, the most absolute and sadly celebrated corporate spirit, represented by companies like Google, advances without delay over all space of digital individuality. On the other hand, a Central Culture heaped of candidates to trivial visibilities and trinket situations, who are dully willing to hand over the remains of their strategic and sensory capital to the strongest predator. As a catalyst, an ideological atmosphere of bizarre, dystopic tones, where anything from a neo-technocratic fundamentalism and a heightened advertising motherland to a hopeless, lost progressivism coexist. In order to analyze the origins of this phenomenon, nothing better than to explore the ideas of one of its leading exponents, the editor of Wired Magazine, Chris Anderson. In his interesting book “Free”, Anderson condenses a cynical representation of the freshness with which the Central Culture seizes every opportunity that will allow for the consolidation of its hegemonic advance on individuals. The key, according to the author, lies in a change in the economic essence of production and consumption dynamics in the digital era, so that the existence of massive markets with falling distribution costs will give way to the illusion of a nearly free access to a basic core of functions and services. In this way, the technological sector finds the master key to access an alleged innovation panacea. As Anderson quotes, referring to the goals of the businessman from Palo Alto, Alan Kay, “to make technology so cheap, easy to use, and ubiquitous that anybody can use it, so that it propagates around the world and into every possible niche. We, the users will figure out what to do with it”. And what would be the main financing strategy in this model of falling costs and prices? It is easy: advertising. This means enclosing to every stage of consumption the most widespread language of naturalization: the pervasive and uncritical footprint of marketing. In this way, advertising becomes the almost universal enabler of consumption, boasting its ability to lower the monetary costs of these services, in exchange of an increasing and seemingly harmless saturation of vital moments of our everyday life. The descentralized dynamic of creation of “beneficiaries” of this financing awakens a proliferation of conspirational glances, in particular, the conflicted artistic and academic corporations. This spirit of degeneration and boundless colonization of the cultural sphere should not be surprising, since what links marketing, neo-technocracy and progressivism is their mainly materialistic, and therefore, anti-cultural joint vision, not only of their own commercial and political goals, but also of the entire reality. However, this offensive would not be possible if the defenses of the civil society were not tempted to take bribes in order to “cheapen” apparent costs. After all, the chain is only as strong as its weakest link, that is to say, the strategic plane that we are taught, by all means, to disregard so that its disgraceful surrender hurts less. Facing an unperturbed mass, leads, in this perversely visionary colonization, to nothing else but to the awakening of the instinct to raise the stakes and increase submission. So much so that it is striking to observe companies that, even having hegemonic success, have managed to handle situations in which users are exaggeratedly, and probably unnecessarily, harmed. Let's analyze an example that many might find unusual: the Motorola Droid phone, which runs on the Android operating system developed by Google, requires, in the second page of its instructions manual, the user to synchronize their calendar, contacts and notes with Gmail. Yes, the champions of technological democracy forcing the user of, for instance, MS Outlook, to transfer all of their personal information to their innocent cloud! This scheme has gone virtually unnoticed by forum users, where a few and isolated signs of protest due to this situation have been confronted by pathetic nerd speeches of the type: “being Google's operating system, it is only logical to use their products”. What will be left of the user's right to not become a captive of a brand or standard? We should stop merrily giving away the caracterization of democrats to this mercenaries, just because they have troubles with Chinese goverment. Corporations are authoritarian by definition, in spite of the austere joys of “proto-fullfilment” that generate the priced consumption (or the free consumption) of its products. In this context, advocates of the “marketing neo-technocracy” cannot fail to acknowledge their quest for a monopoly, though they minimize it for the sake of what they may save. Let's see what Anderson says: “What is interesting about on line 'quasi-monopolies' is that they rarely bring monopoly rents with them. For all Google’s dominance, it doesn’t charge $300 for its word processors or spreadsheest –it gives them away. Even for things it does charge for, mostly advertising space, the price is set by auction, not by Google.” These guys don’t seem to step away from the logic of relying, in case of argumentative failure, on the low (or null) amount of the bill, which raises the question of the existence of an impact, and eventually a cost, in those alternative grounds to the non innocent monetarist obsession of these captains of sponsorship. Beyond that it is free, what are we surrendering? From the perspective of these effects, let's see the amazing reference to a historical culture’s episode that Anderson himself recollects, maybe without being aware of the direct extrapolation that can be made with the current situation. Describing the prevailing culture when the plastic industry was expanded he said: “In the 1960s, brigthtly colored disposable goods represented modernity, the triumph of industrial technology over material scarcity. Throwing away manufactured goods was not wasteful; it was the privilege of an advanced civilization”. “After the 1970's, attitudes toward this superabundance began to change. The environmental costs of a disposable consumer culture became more obvious. Plastic may have seemed close to free, but that’s only because we weren’t pricing it properly. Include the enviromental costs and maybe it doesn’t feel as right..” “We were not pricing it properly”.... it doesn’t seem that the mischievous indulgence prevailing in current speech indicates they are attempting to be especially careful to “set the right price” this time. To do so, they would have to acknowledge that Culture has dynamics and sensitivities similar to those of the physical environment; one can be more or less “polluting” in the media sphere beyond monetary costs. The problem is that acknowledging this would inevitably lead to an invocation to a subtler responsibility, which we have witnessed, is not a characteristic of the new technology and marketing “plastic manufacturers”. Thus, the idea of innovation associated to the awareness of the effects of creations is abandoned. In the plain wording of the venture capitalist, Paul Gram, the slogan for technologists is stark: “Create something people want”. Nice slogan for Germany in the 1930s. Adding to this, there is an extra murky emergent factor, which belongs to this bitter process and that is related to a fashionable concept: the cloud. The idea consists of promoting the greatest possible centralization of the availability of hardware and software, both at individual and organizational levels. This instrumentation is based on the fact that, for the sake of practicality and the reduction of costs, individuals and work teams will have to host all of their strategic information, and eventually, also their own computing power and application space to centralizing entities. What could be just a mere technical discussion, veils, however, a philosophical and cultural inflection point of a great importance for the future, because this centralizing voracity is based on three intertwined fundamental principles. In the first place, the new paradigm is benefited by the fact that individuals have homogeneous digital representation needs. That is to say, that a greater number of people use the same things in the same way. And given that the digital representation of individuals is becoming a greater part of their full identity, there is a risk of entering into a phase of exacerbation of the most authoritarian and massive traits of our Culture, in this case, as a practical consequence of a consumption and technological model. Secondly, this new conception is based on the fact that large corporations seize the increasing availability of storage and computing power, delivering standardized scraps to individual users. That is to say, the advances of technology are largely capitalized by the systems of corporate intelligence, in detriment of the creation of decentralized intelligence, except for some exceptions like Wikipedia. The third aspect is cultural and stems from the lack of awareness and sense of digital sovereignty (and therefore identity sovereignty) of individuals, who agree without opposing resistance to assign the role of custodian of their key assets to none other than a corporation. In this way, the takeover and resulting dilution of the individual digital sovereignty is the last stage in the progression of the attack to individuality by the Central Culture. For instance, there is the announced decline of personal computers to the detriment of mobile phones, as an indicator of the degradation of the instruments that allow free culture agents to count with intelligence and sensorial immersion environments, in agreement with an Independence calling. The fact that Independence implies and needs a cybernetic dream, only adds up dramatism to this circumstance, announcing a direct confrontation for a vital territory that cannot be yielded. Independence must become stronger in the sensitivity of what is virtual, and must go to fight in that field, with the familiarity of having based in that ultimate transcendental virtuality: Culture, established as an urgent battle and last revolution.