La forma de la multitud

In this brilliant essay, which outlines the limits of the multitude and reveals the cryptic processes that shape us, Agustín Fernández Mallo traces a genealogy of an indefinitely expansive capitalism, based on an idea of being as an incomplete entity, dispersed and blurred from the first interaction of the body with the environment. Already in the premodern era, religions, political ideologies, philosophical systems and sciences have tried to analyze the human being, to collect quantifiable information about people, to produce a uniform and undifferentiated conglomerate, a form of multitude whose behavior , both individually and collectively, is predictable. This essay proposes that the same mechanisms operate on the Internet, a space that hosts all the accounting data of individuals in an anonymous mass, and that generates, through algorithms and at such a fast speed that it escapes us, a phantom identity for each one of us, which is no longer what we had (or thought we had), but an amalgamation from which our statistical identity emerges, a conglomerate of statistical data operated by bots that manage our emotions and determine our decisions. Thus, Agustín Fernández Mallo reveals to us that, contrary to what one might think, capitalism is far from being deposed or overcome today, and, through a pleasant, surprising and enlightening analysis, he reflects on great philosophical questions such as where is freedom in this context, what happens with the relationship with the other, why, in an ambivalent world between the analog and the digital, an unprecedented solitude appears, what is the territory of intimacy and creation in this habitat in which that we develop and live as a multitude.