The Community of Automatons

What is a community of automatons?…We live and interact immersed in digital flows that appear free — yet they’re constantly shaped, controlled, and monitored by algorithms. As online, so in real life: everything is optimized, nothing is truly lived.

Algorithms chase efficiency, forgetting what it means to be alive. This is the cognitive dissonance that transforms us into a community of unconscious automatons. We boast of our freedom, yet we meekly conform to a system that, in the name of well-being and rationality, strips away every last shred of autonomy.

We have confused community with the granular organization of society, solidarity with uniformity, care with control. This is the trap: a gilded cage, expertly crafted on the altar of economic prosperity, public health, and healthcare savings. But no law, however masked by rationality and justice, is legitimate if at its root it destroys freedom.

We have become conformists, incapable of choosing. We have traded the uncertainty of freedom for the security of uniformity. We are passive citizens—bodies present but minds deactivated. Every authentic fragment of our humanity is eroded by the constant flow of a predefined existence. And in this scenario, the algorithmic management of our lives is no longer a dystopian hypothesis: it is our daily reality. So why we refuse to change?

Veiled Control: From State Efficiency to Data Dictatorship

when you became an auomaton?

Behind every new regulation “for the collective good” lurks a disguised subtraction of freedom. Every step toward administrative efficiency is a step away from real democracy. Government apparatuses no longer guarantee our rights: they manage them like managers, reducing freedom to a line item, a cost to cut.

In return they offer cashback, health apps, smart cities, pre-filled forms. And we, grateful, smile. We accept.

Democracy has been transformed into organization. Politics has been ousted from most decisions, deemed “quantitative,” “technical,” “neutral.” Yet they affect our lives. How they affect our lives. A life that today is projected online not as an individual identity, but as an algorithmized collective body.

Every gesture is rationalized. Every behavior predicted. Every action optimized. The citizen is a datum. A cluster. A target. We are not so different from China: here too, in the West, we bow to the dogma of efficiency. Except our control has a more seductive face: it is called market, it is called user experience. It is called “freedom of choice”—in a feed already chosen for us.

Programmed to Conform: the community of automatons

We have changed. Algorithms have trained us. Platforms have rewritten our behavioral code. And we have accepted it. In the name of convenience, well-being, economic efficiency.

But are we still the ones deciding?

If every choice is influenced, filtered, predicted by computational logic, where does our will begin? And where does our freedom end?

We have reached the data dictatorship. An elegant, polished, perfectly packaged dictatorship. Where consent is not imposed, but simulated. Where public choices are born from projections, AI, and dashboards that dress numbers in the garment of objectivity, but hide deep biases and prejudices.

And it doesn’t matter if those who govern are the “digital majorities”: if they are conformist, if they are trained, if they are externally directed, then they are not free. They are just numbers. And numbers do not think. Numbers do not dissent.

Living in a community of automatons: In Search of Meaning in the Algorithmic Age

We live under constant surveillance. Every action is measured, evaluated, profiled. Our daily life is a chain of standardized behaviors. A loop of preprogrammed routine.

To avoid going crazy, we fill our time with empty activities. We accumulate useless objects. We take refuge online to escape a reality that suffocates us. But this is not life. It is a simulation.

Community—once a living space of relationship and participation—has become a calculated abstraction. A totality imposed by algorithms that no one elected. We do not participate. We adapt. We do not create. We obey.

And the data—those are us, carrying our imprint—no longer belong to us. They are the currency that fuels the system controlling us. A system that makes us unhappy, sedated, uniformed. A system that anesthetizes us while it cages us.

Total Efficiency, Zero Freedom: welcome to the community of automatons

Does this total optimization of society—presented as progress, as a solution—really work?

For whom?

At what cost?

Is this the civilization we wanted?

If the price of well-being is the annihilation of will, the death of critical thought, the enslavement to efficiency, then progress is just another form of prison.

FOLLOW THE ALGORITHM?

Absolutely not.

• It’s time to rewrite the code of our existence.
• It’s time to disconnect from the noise to reconnect to freedom.
• It’s time to resist.

#FOLLOWTHEALGORITHM
Decode. Resist. Reclaim.