When a beneficiary is indebted, is he free? What about when a student can’t follow the class because the magnetism of the screen calls him to infinity? Or when a young person swears that refreshing vaping is just a recreational habit, but panics when the device discharges? Are regulatory efforts always paternalistic and restrictive of freedom? Or the opposite?
The sovereignty of the individual is a successful piece of fiction in contemporary society. Under the mantle of “freedom of choice”, markets operate a radical mutation: the subject’s cognitive and emotional structure is captured for the sale of goods. The word freedom, here, offers ideological veneer for the exploitation of biological and social vulnerabilities. A perfect crime.
This servitude architecture encompasses at least five gears. Each economic field corresponds to an illusion of autonomy of will.
In the economy of fear and hate, moral panic has become a vector for monetization. Digital platforms have discovered that maximum engagement derives from conflict, and structure algorithms that reward extremism. Citizens believe they exercise freedom of expression when they are involuntary fuel for a business model that converts hate into traffic and fear into revenue.
In the attention economy, the dispersion of focus makes dense and slow reflection unfeasible. The Brazilian is among Distraction generates a democracy with attention deficit. The capacity for monitoring and democratic argumentation is atrophied. The spasms of superficial engagement are confused with access to information.
The exhaustion economy created unprecedented mechanisms of self-exploitation. Subsistence entrepreneurship is sold as autonomy. The exhausted guy celebrates the absence of a boss and the flexibility of his schedule, without realizing what he has become. Burnout is the voluntary price of the pursuit of success.
In the outsourced intelligence economy, the “promptification” of reasoning transfers analytical and textual effort to the platform. By delegating language and critical thinking, the individual gives up their own tool of emancipation, confusing the speed of the algorithm with the depth of their own thinking.
In the addiction economy, we have the illusion of satisfaction. The engineering of chemical and financial dependence operates under the alibi of individual responsibility. Central Bank data catalyzed by Pix’s instantaneity. They capture income and compromise the domestic budget of poor families.
There is an important example today in . CNI legal action challenges Anvisa’s regulatory authority to prohibit aroma and flavor additives in cigarettes. The industry’s argument invokes “free enterprise” and the consumer’s “right to choose” to mask and shield design from youth addiction and initiation. It ignores that the desire was designed at the neurochemical level to neutralize its ability to refuse.
The important thing is to appear free. Even if our decision-making impulse is shaped by chemical addiction, hatred, distraction and exhaustion.
Paulo Leminski provoked: “Distracted, we will win.” It was a joke. Addicted, distracted, exhausted and brutalized, we will be defeated.
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