The dogs have come today

The dogs have come to stay

It’s time to get your gun out

And drive the dogs away

[…]

The dogs know when you’re sleeping

They know when you’re awake

How fast your heart is beating

So be ready, or too late

Diamanda Galas, Double-Barrel Prayer

Imagine you are a wild animal wandering in the forest, a fox or, why not, a deer (0.26). Suddenly, behind your back, you hear a noise: a branch has snapped. You prick up your ears and raise your snout, you don’t perceive the smell of a predator but something is definitely out of place. Spooked, your run through the underbrush and find a place to check out whatever is stalking you. You know from experience that your pursuers know your tracks, that they can tell them apart from all the other marks on the forest and that they can lead them to you. As soon as you see him approaching (it is a hunter) you run again, this time crouching to avoid being seen. You run as fast as you can and in a matter of seconds you’re are beyond his reach.

Now, imagine this hunter has the ability not only to tell your tracks apart but to know what you are going to do next. He could predict your movements at an astonishing speed, before you can even react, so that instead of being behind you he would always be one step ahead. You could run, but no matter how fast, you would know there’s no getting away. It is then that you realize that the forest is not such and that you are in an enclosed place, a walled garden, and that whoever is chasing you is not interested in catching you, but in spying and studying each and every one of your movements. Soon it dawns on you that you are trapped in a protracted game that resembles hunting but feels like an experiment; the garden in which you move is a huge laboratory.

As strange as it may seem, this metaphor is an accurate description of the situation of a great portion of the human population of our time. The walls of our current paradeisos are imperceptible, but no less real for that. They are the walls that in the last two chapters have been sublimated in the legal and media spheres and have now become an enormous wall of code that isolates us from both community and reality.