A few weeks ago, Martín Caparrós put a mysterious reality into clear words. He recalled the moments before Colombia’s 2016 referendum, when everyone he spoke to seemed to have the same opinion: everyone supported the agreements with the FARC, everyone would vote “yes”, the victory of the “Yes” is assured. But by the afternoon of voting day, the results were progressing and the results were coming in, and slowly the defeat dawned on us. “I remember above all,” writes Caparrós, “the discomfort of those who discovered that their country was not what they thought, who understood that they had been living wrong.” Something like that happens every now and then and it is brutal: that moment when your loved ones show you that they are not what you always believed. That somehow you yourself weren’t what you thought.” And he adds: “That’s what’s happening to me now, sorry, with Argentina.”
I found it strange, to say the least, to find the same nameless sentiment in the latest column by Leila Guerriero, who, like Caparrós, is Argentine and shares more than one political belief with Caparrós. Guerriero talks about the “feeling of alienation” he felt upon returning to Argentina after a trip. “Who were the people who voted for him and were willing to follow a candidate who proposes to destroy much of the acquired rights in order to cure our many ills? That strangeness that I thought would be mitigated, just as the effect of a nightmare is mitigated, has not gone away. I walk among people and think, ‘This man voted for him, and so did this woman,’ with the unsettling feeling of being threatened by those who actually belong to me.” Walking among strangers is the title of his beautiful column. I read it again: I reread “Feeling of Strangeness” and return to Caparrós’ column: “The hardest thing is not him,” says Caparrós, referring to Milei: “It’s this strangeness of being part of a country , in which.” a “A third – or even half – of people are willing to give up control to a madman.”
I dare say that the same strangeness also overwhelmed us Colombians who supported the 2016 agreement. At that time I heard the same opinion from very different people: it was impossible for the agreements to be rejected. It seems that trust has been transferred to the government. I never shared it, not only because of my stubborn pessimism, but because every day I met people who rejected agreements, some out of conviction and pain (and you’re not one to tell others how to deal with their losses). . ), but many others due to ignorance, ignorance, delusion or innocence; and that is why, in the last few months before the referendum, I have dedicated myself to defending the agreements in my columns, but above all to reflecting thereon on what I have seen: the success that the lies and distortions of the No campaign have achieved Gullibility and the infinite docility with which more or less educated people swallowed the most absurd untruths and the most absurd slanders. Life in Colombia has confirmed day after day that there is no lie so crazy that it cannot be believed, if believing in it satisfies our prejudices, our distrust or our hatred. And going through life meant looking strangely at everyone who had believed them: How was this possible?
I don’t know how many times I’ve talked about this with Americans who were surprised by Trump’s victory. The day after the election, they woke up in an unrecognizable country made up of Latinos who voted for a man who called Mexicans rapists, of women who voted for a self-confessed (and proud) sexual harasser, of convinced ones Democrats who voted for someone who was unwilling to acknowledge an electoral defeat, from truth-lovers who voted for an unredeemed and compulsive liar, from religious fanatics who gave their vote to a man whose biography represented everything they wanted detested. Who were the others? asked the Americans who didn’t vote for Trump. Which country do we live in? One answer among thousands was: We don’t know who the others are because we don’t know how they live, what their complaints are, what frustrations they harbor.
There is no single answer that illuminates the strangeness that Caparrós and Guerriero speak of, but I have no doubt that no answer can ignore the phenomenon of social networks, which is much more complex and even more unknown than we believe. I am not the first to point out the intangible but very real ways in which social networks have dismantled our shared reality or created individual realities for each of us: realities that algorithms produce using as raw material the information that we ourselves have give them. Our life on the networks has replaced the real life that we share with others and has also destroyed our idea of the same reality, which we interpret differently. No: reality is not the same for everyone. It’s no longer a matter of interpreting it differently: we just don’t see the same thing. And hence the strangeness.
I never tire of quoting Jaron Lanier, pioneer of new technologies and renegade of Silicon Valley, which he describes very well in a pamphlet – because his book calling for the closure of social networks is just that, a pamphlet, and an urgent one at that Brochure that. and necessary― the practical consequences of the functioning of networks. It is, says Lanier, as if Wikipedia had given each of us a different version of its articles, depending on our profile: our gender, our age, our political and religious beliefs, our location on the world’s GPS, our history of surfing the Internet. With all this, the algorithms propose to us a series of contents that, in the end, form a vision of reality that another – the Other that Leila Guerriero meets on the street, the Other that Caparrós finds incomprehensible – not only does not share, but also sees it as an insult. If we add to this the division of our personalities as Internet users, the divorce between citizens is complete.
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Of course – I’ll say it again – you have to be careful with these considerations. What I am saying is part of the problem, not the whole problem, and undoubtedly part of the problem is the great frustration that many citizens feel with what we might call, in intellectual shorthand, “power.” “There is nothing worse than arguing that people have made a very bad choice and trying to justify it with the black magic of advertising, mass media and social networks,” says Caparrós. “Or say that marginalization, the decline of education, the logical anger of those who see no solution or future are to blame for everything,” he adds. No, none of this is enough to get us divorced, but it all contributes to it. Now the strange thing has happened to Argentina, a country that, I believe, was never what Milei is; and I hope for the sake of Latin America that it finds itself again. In any case, we can accept that we are more radicalized citizens than yesterday, that anger, resentment and tribal hatred move us more politically than yesterday, and that the illusion of understanding others is now more than ever a mirage. And that is a problem in democracy.
Juan Gabriel Vasquez He is a writer.
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