NO SIGNAL: DISCONNECTION AND HYPERCONNECTION. ALGORITHMIC DISCRIMINATION IN THE DIGITAL AGE

Abstract

This text takes as its starting point Samir Amin's book, The Disconnection. Towards a polycentric world system (1988), with the aim of exposing the mercantile hyperconnection generated in previous industrial stages and unequal development in order to establish a parallel with the fourth technological-digital revolution that still preserves neo-imperialist free-market practices. In this way, a similarity is established with the digital hyperconnection as a system of control and incentive to consumption. Within virtuality, a world without borders has been constructed, where we can meet, play, share and become intimate with different people around the world, however, on the terrestrial plane, the tools of encirclement and surveillance are becoming more sophisticated, people seeking asylum in the global north are identified and only have a place within the productive mechanism. Discrimination and racism are transferred to algorithmic thinking, educated with the images and prejudices inherited from a colonial past, where dehumanising patterns are replicated in the form of racial profiling, biases that preserve prejudices around race, gender and sex. Algorithmic equity does not exist as it is subjective and so this paper traces a trajectory towards disconnection and a reconfiguration of consciousness, exemplified by the works No signal (2020). A digital reset is proposed to reconfigure the ethnocentric vision and increase awareness and egalitarian development.