First of all, we believed that the Internet would serve to bring the powerful down from their glass tower. For a few brief moments they seemed to listen. It was fascinating, for example, to see Alex de la Iglesia change his mind about the Sinde law to the point of resigning as president of the Academy for internal coherence: the public dialogue on Twitter had transformed him. “These people taught me a lesson. It’s nice to talk to those who accompany you: you reaffirm your ideas, you feel part of a group, protected, against the rest of the crazy people who make mistakes. For the first time I learned that talking to those who disagree with you is much more interesting. At the beginning it can be uncomfortable, especially if you are arrogant, like me. But when you learn to integrate, things flow and ideas arrive. In this country, changing your mind is the most beautiful thing. Sins”, he wrote in 2011.
Networks have become huge, they have become the big business of our time and they have become dehumanized. Propaganda, disinformation and harassment campaigns were digitized and decided the elections. The fake accounts, the bots, the coordinated attacks, the apathy of the platforms, the polarization encouraged by the media and the parties, the troll professionals. The tone was raised in Congress, on television and in the streets. The opposite of what was expected happened and the Internet meant that the glass tower, far from breaking, rose even higher. Those most exposed to the public eye (politicians, journalists, columnists, activists, even content creators) have had to develop armor against extreme attacks that have allowed them to do their jobs but also isolated them.
Political analyst Sarah Santaolalla told journalist Martín Bianchi that she has 2,000 whatsapp without responding, mostly anonymous insults or threats organized through far-right chats. “I had to turn off my voicemail because I had to constantly delete insults to receive new ones. I feel harassed every day, but I will not change my number, my house or my life because some fascists are hunting me,” she said. Santaolalla has learned to desensitize himself. There is a structural part to their harassment: women, especially journalists, are more likely to suffer it.
Carlos Mazón has just dramatically fallen from the glass tower. It seems the crack opened when he heard from the victims in person and his mother told him “enough”. He wasn’t broken enough to resign, but enough to do so. I try to imagine the process: at first you think it’s with the position and that this is the game, over the years you stop listening, you survive, you normalize the extraordinary, you separate what happens on your cell phone from everyday life. As Alex de la Iglesia said, you find an ideology and a group that reaffirms you. The other becomes a cipher, an account on the networks, an enemy without a body. In the end everything escapes you. Perhaps the opposite happens, and the most exposed have, especially if they succeed, a natural inclination towards brutalization because what balanced person would want to suffer so much violence? It is worrying that the wonderful possibility of open communication through digital has turned into a systemic harassment that desensitizes power, erodes democracy and distances sensitive souls from public positions. Only those with the thickest skin survive, and in return they feel nothing.
