Capitalism as a Subreptitious Programmer
In our daily lives we talk about algorithms, about artificial intelligence, about data and images circulating without rest. We think that what is new is what decides, we suspect that machines design our now. Yet a great hidden programmer has already won the game, has been writing code for much longer: Capitalism.
It needs no output devices or programming languages. Its syntax is made of incentives, of debts, of doubts and anxieties. It is an invisible operating system that conditions our choices before we can call them autonomous. We no longer enjoy free will. From compulsive buying to the way we measure success, the capitalist logic rewrites our behavior line by line, as if it were software that never fails.
The efficiency of this programmer lies in its ability to camouflage itself. It does not appear in the interface: we feel it as “familiar.” We believe we are choosing, when in fact we are navigating within a project that was already predefined. Capitalism hypnotizes with colors, flashes, and sensory stimuli, even emotional ones. It does not order: it suggests. It does not impose: it seduces. It does not present itself as a master, but as an inescapable horizon.
The paradox is that this furtive programmer does not need to conspire. It is enough to let the code it already installed in us run: the fear of losing, constant comparison, the fateful (and false) idea that everything has a price. And so, even when we think we are rebelling, we do so with categories it itself taught us.
In the face of this shadow, resistance is not easy. It is not enough to uninstall an application or close an account. It is about choosing, about thinking for ourselves and relearning how to desire differently, about asking what parts of our script are truly ours and which were imposed. Lucidity does not erase the code, but it can open gaps: breathing spaces from where life is not dictated by efficiency and profitability, but by dignity.
Perhaps that is our most urgent task: to become programmers of our own lives, without accepting that the Shadow continues to write them for us.