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Algorithms predict your passions before you feel them and satisfy them with entertainment calibrated to neutralize anger. Surveillance is built in: voluntary implants for instant payment, domestic assistants who listen“ to optimize well-being,” urban sensors that anonymize crowds while tracking their movements. Moral coercion replaces physical repression: shame becomes a more effective means of exclusion than prison. Reforms are sold as“ protections,” freedom-killing laws as“ security updates.”
Those who protest see their social visibility gradually fade away, rendered invisible by the algorithmic erosion of their presence. In other words, when you protest, it’ s not a police officer who arrests you, but an algorithm that erases you.
The Shadow Zones
But counter-history takes root in the margins. It can be found first and foremost in former industrial areas converted into urban dumps, in subway tunnels that official broadcasts cannot reach, and in forgotten villages where the network has never fully penetrated. There, diverse collectives are forming: hackers with coffee-stained fingers, dismissed teachers who recycle forbidden knowledge, artists who weave subversive images, parents who hide printed books for their children. Their manifesto is not a single text but a mosaic of acts— sabotage of data nodes, analog radio broadcasts, public pantomimes that transform billboards into poems of resistance.
Flashmag! Edition 166 Novembre 2025
Millennials witnessed the last era of freedom, while Gen Zers were born into the Matrix but became capable, for some, of perceiving its inhuman foundations and taking offense at them. Their goals are normality: creating screen-free zones, inventing free protocols, relearning how to think without filters.
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