The original article is in Spanish, this translation to english is done by a locally hosted chatbot.
Husks and Camos
The contemporary digital economy projects narratives of resilience, individuality, and sovereignty while perfecting a continuous processing and technical assembly chain for data extraction (a Pipeline, in marketing and sales terms).
The intimacy market, exemplified by platforms like OnlyFans, operates under the narrative of a direct and empowering relationship between creator and fan.
The material reality of this system represents the mutation of Girlboss 1.0 into Girlboss 2.0:
The archetype of the 2010s (the 1.0) was characterized by corporate feminism, where executive figures instrumentalized liberation rhetoric to justify the hyper-exploitation of their subordinates, camouflaging oppression beneath the sale of physical merchandise and the promotion of extreme work culture or Hustle Culture.
The new model (the 2.0) constitutes the reduction of biology, meaning, and relationships into a tradable transactional asset (a Commodification) subject to a pyramid scheme structure. Creators are pushed into a hyper-exploitation of erotic capital under an aspirational aesthetic of self-management (the Hot Girl Economy), selling the illusion of a life of comfort and luxury [1]. "Content creators" operate within an ecosystem directed by management agencies and human chatter farms that manufacture parasocial relationships on an industrial scale (as I detailed in a previous article).
This infrastructure for capturing attention and desire is a crude manifestation of an ecosystem that treats human interaction—also full of nonsense, friction, creation, and destruction—as an obstacle that must be eliminated in the name of optimization and productivity.
This is also how the absorption of cultural production operates: generative tools (such as AI Slop), intrinsically authoritative and oppressive in their design and deployment, are introduced to capture the creative process, treating creation as a zero-cost nuisance.
Generative tools intercept and nullify the experience and tempering necessary for human feeling and thinking, substituting that entropy with a shortcut that delivers results without the process, without its context, without its burden, without its cost.
These tools operate through automated, clandestine, and non-consensual information scraping on the web (called Data Scraping); they steal massive blocks of information (or Datasets) and use them for algorithmic training, regurgitating a product stripped of context, process, burden, experience, and quality. [7]
At a macro-cultural level, the consolidation of global narrative control in a handful of techno-oligarch corporations (like Disney, Paramount, Sony, etc.) fulfills a parallel extractive function. [8]
Entertainment conglomerates operate as ideological defense mechanisms for the prevailing systemic conditions (they are Status Quo propaganda), absorbing subversive discourses and emptying them of political meaning.
They neutralize rebellion through a narrative of appeasement that allows the victory of the exceptional individual, or of a team with traditional accompanying values (truth, justice, passion, love), as long as the oppressive system remains intact.
This cultural sterilization is symbiotically completed when the work is finally consumed, processed, and interpreted by the public. At that moment, the viewer with authoritarian inclinations executes an oppositional decoding that grasps some superficial aspects of the work—referring to superficiality not as something minor, but as a style lacking substance: the confrontational plot or the effort and struggle, the sophisticated, attractively designed, or nostalgic aesthetics—but actively rejects its moral and progressive core. For example, enjoying Star Wars but not comparing the authoritarianism of the Empire with that of current governments.
The viewer with authoritarian inclinations executes an oppositional decoding that grasps the work's message in order to actively reject its moral and progressive core; by emptying the narrative of its ethics, they manage to appropriate the aesthetic shell to project their own ideology onto it. This allows them to consume the work and validate their fantasies of dominance without having to confront the political critique the story originally intended to communicate. (Stuart Hall calls this Oppositional Reading)[12]
This mechanic operates through the deliberate and systematic suppression of empathy towards marginalized groups or the denunciation of abuses within the narrative.
By eradicating the ethical subtext, the user effects the exclusive assimilation of the visual shell, the authoritarian iconography, and the fantasy of dominance.
Stories designed to denounce fascism are stripped of their humanity and reappropriated to validate the viewer's ideologies of oppression.
Political friction is sterilized, both in corporate production and in reactionary consumption, to manufacture consent and protect the machinery. [8][12]
To guarantee the sustainability of this architecture of subjugation and extraction, the machinery does not rely on chance or overt physical coercion, but instead exerts constant, hard-to-detect structural pressures in multidirectional ways upon the individual.
This is why they are imposed from active pressure vectors or "forces". These forces do not act in isolation, but as a simultaneous framework designed to mold behavior, extract biological value, pathologize exhaustion, and, ultimately, criminalize escape. They are also neither the definitive forms nor the only forces at play, nor do they work in isolation; you will see how they intersect and reinforce each other. In any case, these are the ones we will focus on in this article.
The deployment of this panopticon with absolutist intentions is articulated through these systematic pushes, obligatorily initiating with a process of aesthetic camouflage that convinces the subject to voluntarily accept the very instruments designed to subjugate them.
Force A: Domestication, Sterilization, and Dissection of Autonomy
The first gear of this machinery seeks to domesticate the public perception of its control instruments.
Technologies derived from the military-industrial complex apply a corporate facelift through the appropriation of progressive aesthetics or apparent empowerment (a Tech Pinkwashing) [4]: Corporate platforms coat tools designed for the deep, industrial excavation of behavioral profiles (Data Mining) with a sweetened, playful, and accessible user interface (a playful Frontend) directed specifically at female self-optimization.
This masking injects the illusion of technical sovereignty granted to the user who surrenders their data to the ecosystem (a False Autonomy) [4], camouflaging systematic capture behind friendly filters and image generation applications.
This aesthetic camouflage acts as a patina, or a fine, tight covering, almost fused with the coercive technology it conceals (a Digital Patina) [9], serving as an indispensable varnish to get the individual to voluntarily submit to surveillance.
This facade hides the true nature of the hardware and the transaction, returning the technology to its original state as an instrument of visual dissection (the Chronophotographic Gun) [9].
Visual capture technology shares its inescapable origin with ballistics; the marketable camera was initially built as a weapon with a trigger and barrel, designed specifically to aim at, isolate, and dissect biological movement, converting the living human body into a static and extractable metric.
By camouflaging the extractive machinery and its inescapable links to the military apparatus under a narrative of personal care, play, or empowerment, the system ensures that the violence inherent in mass data extraction becomes completely invisible.
The aesthetic patina of the technology, by seamlessly fusing with the user's daily life, deactivates the individual's defenses (both acquired and natural) against surveillance.
When the population becomes accustomed to submitting daily to scrutiny through the constant capture of their own face and environment (the Selfie) and the use of biometric filters that alter spatial and bodily perception, it internalizes the machine's gaze.
The individual no longer perceives the camera as an instrument of dissection because the weapon no longer appears to be held by a police, state, or external oppressive agent; the user points it at their own face and enthusiastically and voluntarily pulls the trigger.
This routine of constant self-documentation and aesthetic alteration ensures that the physical body, raw and algorithmically unprocessed, begins to be perceived as inherently inadequate or defective.
A deep psychological dependence is thus manufactured on the very tools that extract the subject's value, forcing them to use the playful and sweetened interface (the Frontend) in order to validate their own existence and identity in the social sphere.
The ultimate effect of this first force on the population is the establishment of a prison without walls where the friction of resistance has been eradicated from the root. This force succeeds in converting massive corporate and military surveillance into an act of obligatory social participation and aspirational consumption.
By neutralizing any perception of risk or coercion, the ecosystem ensures an inexhaustible, free, and voluntary supply of biometric, identity, and relational data, completing the dissection of citizen autonomy while keeping the population hypnotized by the artificial reflection of its own camouflage.
Force B: De-womanizing, Minor Gazes, and a Dehumanized More-Than-Human.
Once the sanitized tools are established and accepted, the machinery turns toward the exploitation of the biological and cultural asset.
The absolute asymmetry of surveillance imposes upon the individual the dissociative emotional weight that crushes the subject under directional and uninterrupted scrutiny (the Psychic Burden of Being Watched) [10].
To counteract the inescapable expiration of human flesh and neutralize any threat of agency or political demand, the ecosystem demands the castration of female material and political adulthood.
The market reacts by erasing the complex materiality of the female creator to impose an aesthetic paradigm of forced infantilization; a design created to please, which demands an object of desire purged of adult agency, thus guaranteeing a perpetually docile, submissive, and malleable visual product, reducing her existence to a form perpetually submissive and purged of maturity. (I call this De-womanizing).
This adult-erasing design is strictly structured to feed an inherently predatory and enslaving visual demand. The ecosystem is configured to please observers who puerilize the bodies they consider for consumption, exhibiting a drive with pedophilic overtones that rejects the implications of encounters with non-subjugated entities or individuals, and instead seeks an object of desire devoid of all agency or resistance (I call this Minor Gazes) [10]. It is a push toward a pedophilic fantasy.
This dynamic reveals the true nature of the capture interface: it is not a space of empowerment, but an instrument of subjugation that actively seeks to manufacture and isolate docile, infantile, and malleable female bodies to exert absolute dominance over them.
The imperative to erase human complexity manifests with equal force in the automated production of content. All this synthetic content generated with extractive tools designed by techno-oligarchs offers an absence of human sensation, experience, intention, and context.
The massive proliferation of these synthetic images aims to provide a backdrop to a current existing epidemic of loneliness, fabricating an empty forgery that replaces organic human interaction and presents itself entirely purged of interpersonal friction; the human context and its relationship with its universe, its own construction of meaning, begins to dissolve. [6]
Factions of the "reactionary" but extreme right-wing native to the web (the Alt-right) have eagerly assimilated these tools due to their own lack of creativity, spiritual and intellectual habits of substance and form, and lack of a viable sociopolitical framework toward the future (an Ideological Void).
Faced with this intellectual and creative void, they use automated generation to manufacture synthetic and photorealistic images designed to inoculate panic (Hyperrealistic Propaganda). They flood the ecosystem with standardized scenarios of xenophobia and disinformation, bypassing the need for intellectual rigor, talent, or vulnerability. [5]
In this ecosystem, both the infantilized creator and the automated content fulfill the exact and precise function of nullifying human experience and denying the creation of meaning.
The direct impact of this asymmetry and the systematic erasure of adulthood is the political castration of the public sphere. By forcing creators to inhabit an aesthetic of perpetual vulnerability and infantilization to survive in the market, the ecosystem nullifies the possibility of them acquiring material agency or organizing collectively. The biological experience of the woman is banished from the visual landscape, replaced by an inoffensive and consumable avatar that will never threaten the corporate order.
The consuming population, in turn, is trained to reject complexity, aging, and the ethical demands inherent in relationships with other humans, severely atrophying its capacity to tolerate the indispensable friction of human interaction.
In parallel, the ultimate effect of flooding the culture with forgeries devoid of human experience is the structural and profitable deepening of isolation.
By routinely consuming a synthetic replacement free of emotional demands, the individual loses the capacity to empathize, negotiate, or deal with otherness.
This social atrophy leaves the population in a state of absolute vulnerability to the saturation of images manufactured for emotional manipulation for political, commercial, and financial ends.
Factions that find themselves cornered and enveloped by profound manipulation but still see the need to participate in discussion spaces capitalize on this deep disconnection, replacing rigorous debate with ideological or identity spam.
Ultimately, this force attempts to empty culture of all vitality and resistance, replacing the organic social fabric with a market of docile illusions and synthetic terrors that keep the population isolated, frightened, and perpetually ready for consumption.
Force C: Pathological Responsibility
To keep this highly extractive and lucrative supply afloat, the system needs to manage the grave consequences of the alienation it provokes in consumers.
In the face of society's rapid mental deterioration, the ecosystem orchestrates a moral panic and executes a clinical diagnosis imposed on the population to individualize and isolate systemic failures, a pathologization of the user.
This diagnosis points to the population having a supposed addiction to screens, a diagnosis that functions as a deliberate mechanism to cover up the true structural and material ruptures causing the psychological collapse.
These real crises are generated by the extreme precarization of hyper-outsourcing, and work without a safety net, mostly mediated by apps (the Gig Economy), and the sustained destruction of resources and physical community spaces.
By exclusively holding the individual responsible for the passive and compulsive consumption of content algorithmically designed to retain attention under extreme levels of anxiety (Doomscrolling), a psychological tax is levied in the form of clinical guilt and shame transferred directly to the user (a Time Tax) [2]. The system blames the isolated user for their own deterioration, successfully deflecting all public and legal scrutiny away from the voracious corporate engineering that deliberately manufactured their dependence.
The impact of this pathologization is the absolute paralysis of systemic critique and collective action.
By convincing the individual that their chronic exhaustion and digital dependence are the product of a moral failure or a personal clinical imbalance, the system successfully deactivates any attempt at citizen or union organization or demands for government intervention.
Political outrage, which materially should be directed toward the corporations responsible for economic precariousness and coercive algorithmic design, is redirected inward at the subject in the form of self-loathing, anxiety, depression, etc.
Society, instead of demanding the restitution of social safety nets and the reconstruction of the physical environment, turns toward the individualistic self-help and wellness industry that seeks to isolate the subject, commodifying false individual cures for the structural damage that the ecosystem itself has inflicted.
As a final consequence, this force guarantees operational, legal, and financial immunity for technological monopolies. While the population consumes its scarce vital energy dealing with the psychological burden of guilt and shame over its supposed lack of discipline in front of screens, the architects of this infrastructure continue to expand extraction without facing citizen resistance; what remains is the consolidation of a perfect model of domination: one where the exploited subject assumes total responsibility for the deplorable conditions of their environment, completely exonerating the corporate machinery that manufactured their despair.
Force D: The Pharmakon
Individual shame and orchestrated moral panic provide the exact legislative fuel required by the State to formalize the surveillance trap in the open, indexed, and perpetually monitored portion of the internet; this is the portion of the internet inhabited by the majority of web users.
When we think that almost everyone has internet access, we must also consider that in many cases this access comes with strings attached, for example, the internet provided in the form of data on specific applications (like cell phone providers that include unlimited data on certain social networks) or through internet providers that profile where users can access.
Under the socially unquestionable pretext of protecting youth, restrictive regulations are promoted, exemplified in legislation like the Kids Act; these laws establish an inescapable toll of biometrics and legal identity imposed on web traffic, forcing the irrevocable linking of online activity with the historical and indelible trail of data and consumption associated with the citizen. The non-negotiable and final objective of these measures is the technical and legal eradication of anonymity, subjugation to numerization, and dehumanization [3].
This asymmetric surveillance is sold to the public through the false narrative that attaching cameras to authority or the State generates bidirectional objectivity and transparency (the Bodycam Illusion). In practice, these tools establish an observation structure that scrutinizes the environment assuming the citizen's imminent criminality, while rendering the state and de facto power of the observer completely invisible (a Carceral Visuality) [9].
This carceral gaze, this illusion of the "bodycam," echoes the first force I listed, in which reality is neutralized and a digital patina is normalized, which disarms and neutralizes us.
By effectively crossing the digital history with biometric identity, the corporate-state alliance acquires the enormous algorithmic capacity to effect irrevocable financial and civil isolation against any dissident or opponent, as well as to channel or foster attention, ideologies, commercial trends, etc.
Faced with this panorama of terminal control, technology manifests as the structural element that operates simultaneously and indissolubly as a poison of oppression and a material cure (a Pharmakon).
The same centralized networks that enable authoritarianism are the ones that force and drive the development of anonymous routing systems in cryptographic layers and dissident advanced privacy infrastructures that obfuscate the origin of data traffic [11]. This independent technical development constitutes a narrow window of civil and political survival available before the verification toll definitively closes over the physical and digital body.
This architecture of verification thus produces a criminalization of privacy and a paralyzing effect on any form of political or organizational dissent.
By eradicating anonymity and linking digital traffic to legal and biometric identity, this system establishes a default presumption of guilt over any citizen who attempts to protect their data or communications.
Under this punitive observation structure, the population internalizes the gaze of the State and the market, exercising perpetual self-censorship given the certainty that the invisible and omnipotent observer possesses the technical capacity to execute their civil and financial death with the simple alteration of an algorithm. It is the materialization of an aseptic authoritarianism that dispenses with overt physical violence to neutralize its opponents. The execution of irrevocable and systematic isolation allows the corporate-state alliance to excise an individual from the economy, public debate, and modern society without the need for a traditional legal due process.
However, in its inescapable manifestation as a tool of simultaneous oppression and salvation, this same structural asphyxiation pushes the resistance to abandon the indexed portion of the web.
The final effect of the machinery is, paradoxically, the irreversible fracture of the ecosystem: the establishment of a public and hyper-surveilled network designed for the docile citizen who is tied down with guilt and anxieties, and the forced consolidation of a cryptographic digital underground that stands as a battlefield for the survival of human agency.
The Fans of the Panopticonly
The point of convergence of these four forces configures a totalizing architecture of confinement where biological, political, and cultural friction is systematically eradicated. The aesthetic domestication of the digital patina acts as the indispensable decoy that disarms our defenses, inviting us to voluntarily enter the biometric slaughterhouse under the promise of empowerment. Once immersed, the machinery executes the erasure of the individual's adult and material agency, replacing human complexity with a parasocial market of docile bodies and synthetic terrors in which the creation of meaning is eroded. When this extractive dissection inevitably breaks our psyche and isolates us, the system deploys clinical pathologization and the time tax so that we embody the responsibility for our own collapse, de facto exonerating the corporate structure. Finally, this exhaustion and orchestrated disorder provide the perfect legal justification for the state apparatus to assimilate the trap, imposing irrevocable digital taxes, annihilating anonymity, and consecrating an omnipotent carceral visuality. As a whole, the machinery seeks not only to surveil or sell, but to execute an absolute sterilization that transforms the vital, resistant, and chaotic fabric of humanity into an obedient, predictable, and perpetually profitable flow.
What Do We Do Then? Or What Don't We Do?
Faced with this structural asphyxiation, insurrection does not reside in a symmetrical confrontation that the system has already foreseen and commodified. Foucault (in The History of Sexuality) mentions that wherever power is exercised, resistance inevitably arises, and this resistance today demands a Nietzschean will: the radical, Dionysian, and affirmative assertion of material life and its forging, rejecting the falsity of synthetic comfort to embrace our own power of creation and destruction of meaning. (Nietzsche shares these ideas with us in The Birth of Tragedy and Thus Spoke Zarathustra).
For this vital force to evade capture by the machinery, it must shed the need for centrality or dominance, integrating itself as a subtle and living presence within the high entropy of our organic relationships.
By adopting the unassimilable fluidity of tactical and non-coercive action, the individual abandons the rigidity that the algorithm needs to profile in order to merge with the dynamic immensity of the universal fabric.
The Daoist concept of wu-wei, frequently translated as "non-action" or "effortless action," does not denote passivity or inaction, but a way of operating that does not force, violate, or impose artificial resistance against the nature of things. Faced with the extractive surveillance system described, thinking of wu-wei is an important tactic because the algorithmic and corporate machinery feeds precisely on binary thinking, predictable confrontation, and rigid identity. The system commodifies direct opposition (the clash, the outrage, the reactive debate) and instantly transforms it into data, categorization, and retention metrics.
For example, one idea would be not to destroy the capture hardware, which presents itself as an act of frontal clash that the system would immediately categorize as traceable vandalism. Something more fluid would be to opt for opacity. Making ourselves difficult to recognize, as is already done with facial paint, but even easier, not using our face on networks.
Evading the panopticon does not imply entering into a reactive debate with the predatory observer or with hyperrealistic propaganda, but fully inhabiting our body, with its deteriorations, with its illnesses, accepting ourselves as anomalous, disabled, questioning our appetites, and also, our minor gazes. Water dodges the arid terrain of parasocial interactions and seeps toward the construction of meaning in organic, face-to-face, and community human interaction; an analog network of affections, with all its sparks, its scrapes, accidents, and ethical demands, which the machine is incapable of quantifying and commercializing.
When the corporate system attempts to transfer the blame for material precariousness and the exhaustion of the gig economy toward individual solutions, the Dao invites us to let shame, guilt, and moral panic pass through the subject without finding anywhere to anchor.
We are not going to try to "cure" structural damage by buying (not even trusting in) individualistic solutions.
Rebellion is exercised rather by reclaiming stillness and rest, not as a self-help product to return to productivity, but as an ungovernable inactivity, without metrics.
Shedding identity centrality means dissolving into the cryptographic collective, becoming illegible to the state apparatus. The eradication of anonymity is evaded not through a legal clash on already captured terrain, but by slipping undetectably through the cracks, using the infrastructure's own asphyxiation to nourish the dissident channels that guarantee the survival of political and material agency.
Thinking of wu-wei as resistance means adopting a posture of unassimilable fluidity, operating analogously to water: yielding to frontal coercion where clashing is useless, but occupying the voids and eroding the foundations of the structure. By refusing to fit into prefabricated taxonomies and by not offering the symmetrical friction that the machinery requires to profile, diagnose, and extract value, the individual becomes algorithmically illegible. This tactical fluidity allows material and intellectual agency to be preserved without exhausting vitality in confrontations that the system has already foreseen, packaged, and sold. This is how a possible rebellion materializes: operating fully in material attunement with the totality of the cosmos without imposing its weight or breaking the balance of the habitat, flowing undetectable and light through the cracks of the panopticon.
Sources
- [1] zoeunlimited - the new ... American Dream - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RO0gURxe7gY
- [2] Taylor Lorenz - Kids Aren't Addicted to Phones — Here's the Data - https://youtu.be/dFKwpjKGYyU
- [3] Taylor Lorenz - Congress Just Voted to Track Your Web History - https://youtu.be/TIqzmatFMUQ
- [4] Taylor Lorenz - Big Tech is Pinkwashing AI - https://youtu.be/yf3hkq4WZKM
- [5] The Kavernacle - Why Far-Right Conservatives LOVE AI Art and AI Slop - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jQkAETsgVN4
- [6] Accented Cinema - The Loneliness of AI "Art" - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PhYMSCpq0QQ
- [7] arsLovesWeb - AI Art Is Slop And It's Killing Your Creativity - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GIY9smB43sk
- [8] Scintillae Podcast & Essays - The MCU is Conservative Propaganda: that's a feature of entertainment media - https://youtu.be/09jjZ0o6Ep0
- [9] Jacob Geller - Reality is a Camera Trick: Film, Bodycams, and the First-Person Shooter - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BEM_qZEX5VU
- [10] Lily Alexandre - The Psychic Burden of Being Watched - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gStjfje6Mq4
- [11] Aaron Nev - Palantir has a nemesis and I accidentally found him - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4l53lJ-Ulkw
- [12] PrideBrary - Why Fascists Love Stories That Hate Them - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lyrlfvAN-kA
