mikrotext

Preface

We live in predatory times. We web users try to survive in the middle of a jungle, at times not so virtual, where hunters have intensified the stalking. Predators wearing the most varied cybernetic fur establish their monitoring circuits and extend their traps.

In both realms, the online world as well as in this outer space we call “reality”, it seems that the hunting ground of the most powerful has widened to a frenetic rhythm, inversely proportional to the reduction of not a few of our prerogatives as citizens.

Hunting plus virtual stockbreeding: we are read, mapped, monitored, reviewed, controlled, programmed, directed like numbered cattle that will go to the slaughterhouse when the time comes; we are herded like electrical sheep unable to perceive the presence of danger.

We are jumping inside a mental barn. At times it seems that we wear an electronic tag that prevents us from moving without supervision or without allowing our creativity, our cyber navigations and our searches to be milked by hungry economic and political powers.

Our private data, our content on social media, our moribund ability to get free access to information, our clicks, our virtual identities and, ultimately, the different interconnected regions of our lives, have been in recent years under the siege of mercenaries acting with military efficiency. Oriented towards a portentous profitability in dollars or euros, their huge jaws swallow our freedoms and our rights as if they were just a bunch of emoticons or small Pokémon.

Anyone can see that we wander blindly while we pick the most poisonous flowers in the garden of calamities. We have become the stuffed turkey of a dinner to which they pretend to have invited us. We thank them because we are getting polished like a cannon ball meant for a weapon pointing against ourselves.

We feel like we are selling ourselves down the raging river that flows into La Chingada. But something inside us whispers that not everything is lost yet. It’s getting down to the wire, folks, and yet we still have some small but vibrant hope, the cloud-figures in the sky indicate that a mischievous ancestral spirit wants to help us and hack the entangled network of this cyber war, the war for control of the Internet.

It’s not a bird, it’s not a plane, it’s the spirit of Coyote!

The spectral beast has sunk its claws into the World Wide Web and has been digging a system of tunnels between the parallel dimensions of reality, virtuality, fiction and myth, in order to dismantle—and at the same time, celebrate—the farce of a Cyberspace that in its best days could have become truly democratic. In these fateful moments an old master of knowledge has reappeared among us: one that is part animal, part human, a little like a ghost and, equally, a code that enlightens us, inspires us, guides us and advises us during this debacle. This mutant messenger offers its knowledge to address the distorted virtual mirror of a terrible material catastrophe.

Coyote wanders decoding, taunting, challenging the sinister cyber totalitarianism of our time, while simultaneously blowing into our faces, shamelessly enough, a gentle caress of smoke from his fine Cuban cigar.