I’m wondering about a series of things that happened recently or gained ground in public debate — and that’s a notion scattered among the big minds and the tiny actions of all individual persons who are lucky and privileged to have a stable DNS enabled connection. Last time I was here, I mentioned a website that has called my attention for its purpose of letting people randomly interact; but in a second look, they might do it elsewhere. The same pattern could be observed when big names talk and they’re not on Bloomberg.

The financial world sure has its thorns and perks. Its language. But the last time we saw something fundamentally systematic change in the internet landscape, it wasn’t the last PayPal CEO buying off the most relevant media company of the last two decades; it was, again, when Verizon played catch with Tumblr. Of course because they wanted to catch something — or someone? Culture changed, and we suddenly saw Instagram ban hashtags. An entire movement, where the early defendants of a clean web weren’t heard, came to the front to talk about children’s safety, wrongly placing the label “child” on every teenager — including the eighteen and nineteen year-olds, who are allowed to not just consume (they’ve always done it) but to create adult content.

But reality is: they’ve always done it. What matters to be looked at is the communications; and on an old blog, I pointed out to a Google bulletin on advertising within messaging, and how that was going to be a policy implemented starting in 2015. Nobody seemed to care. And still, nobody seems to understand that the discussions over AI are in the realm of what’s undesirable but possible or necessary; what’s a good or bad idea. A sort of middle-man comes in: the internet service provider, all of which is describes in the Brazilian Civil Marking of the Internet, from 2014.

But in the spirit of blogging, I come here to tell you about a situation I’ve faced. After having had problems with 2FA, or two-factor authentication (the security precaution advertised only now for everyone by WhatsApp Brazil) and being logged off of my Twitter account during the Trump years, where I engaged with political debates daily, for two months, and then losing my number (apparently because I didn’t pay a minimum of “recharge”), I got a new one, then another, I think, when I was getting ready for an interview for a social project where kids got into sports and general learning, with healthcare benefits and a series of opportunities. This was run by a very famous soccer star in Brazil, who’s been recently involved in some controversy. I had to move fast: news at 6, bakery at 7, shower, LinkedIn scrolling, preparing my talking points, then at 10 the mall would be open and I could ask for the “chip”. What happened was terrible.

The place was in front of my mom’s old house. You had to walk 3 blocks and cross an avenue, a supermarket and a large road, then walk two more blocks; otherwise, close enough. I wanted the mobile data to be able to access Maps. Because it was on the other side of the road and I’d never been there, I was scared that, without money, I’d be lost and not able to communicate — and my mom had moved, so I couldn’t just knock at her home. So I needed that SIM card. Very well. I purchased it not at a store, because they only sell it with a career plan, but at a newsstand, where you can set it up remotely and start using it — you only need your CPF, which is a social security number (there are a number of programs in Brazil). When I did, the phone wouldn’t respond. And when it finally did, I found out I had no credit, only the chip, therefore having to put in another 15 bucks.

I didn’t. Made it to the place, in that post-pandemic, near-catastrophic fear of breathing in, on the bus with terrible windows that were stuck and in the wrong positions, without air conditioning, to another city in a drive of at least an hour. There was a waiting period, then I found a room with candidates that resembled a conference room; I took some tests and answered some questions orally, asking some as well directly to the team; I finished my tests but only got interviewed after 2 hours, and two ladies who probably didn’t speak a word of English watched me introduce myself to a guy who had been everywhere in the world because of sports, and in the end I got home and a lady with the same name had added me on Facebook (and I thought it was her, the HR woman, but it was a random person asking me if I was married).

On the way back, bus packed, I saw a lot of college students (a couple of those girls made me lose my nerve, bastard that I am, but I didn’t even make eye contact or stare or anything, just felt their presence — and it’s weird but also necessary to mention this, considering what the pandemic did to all of us). While I was at the bus, someone called me. Yes, the number was working. Only the internet wasn’t. I grabbed the phone: “Hello?” and someone asked for a famous brand of mouthwash called Cepacol. I was confused. I said, eventually, “I think you got the wrong number”. And it was actually embarrassing because those teenagers and young adults heard me interacting. A 33 year old man, dressed for an interview, but not too formally, filled in sexual tension and not using his phone at all (like a normal person would, like many old ladies would). It must have hit them: “he’s poor”.

But it turns out that, in the period of 5 months or so, I’ve received around 600 messages and calls searching for the same place, which is not related to the brand of mouthwash at all, but is actually a sushi bar in a neighboring city the other way. They were contacted on Instagram, on Facebook, on WhatsApp, I spoke to people 3 times I believe about the issue of redirecting calls, and they didn’t manage to solve it — until, in the past few days, I noticed they seem to have forgotten about me. I did mention this at the store with my ISP provider, in the attempt to understand why my data wasn’t working even with 12 bucks in, the minimum you can recharge, but they said the pre-paid plans had a minimum of 15 real for the internet to work. And so, later, I sent this money, but I had to talk to consumer assistance to get my data to work — all the while figuring out whether Google DNS was a thing that could be good for me.

I suppose there’s many small stretches to this story. but I wanna raise a point: if you need your social security to use the phone’s services, how come people associate you with others? There are services like True Caller, an app which identifies if the call if from a spammer, a marketing agency and all sorts of things. If I’m not mistaken, made in Sweden. They even showed this on Julia Chatterley’s program on CNN. But it came to a point where banks were running campaigns against fraud and Meta itself was doing the same. First, though, 600 plus people bothering me, asking for “the menu” (and if you didn’t know why I mentioned Tumblr, now you do).

I read recently that Brazil hasn’t even been contemplated with full literacy, meaning people are able to read and write. There are millions who don’t. Let alone the people who buy books and read regularly. So we can’t, and shouldn’t maybe, talk about digital possibilities for our country. But we’re the champions of voice recording over WhatsApp. I just wonder if, by any chance, we’re going to have a shot at understanding the AI running on task-focused applications, and if anyone’s going to tell Brazilians that their contributions made the web a better place. Because if we talk about, let’s suppose, Activity Pub, and if we had a reason to be curious at least about blockchain technology and even proposed payments in a system we labelled as creator economy, I’m gonna refer you to my old friend Lanta who said once, very poignantly: “there’s no we”.