When Obama was president, I can’t remember many things happening in the world, because I was busy with a life in a corporate environment and university demands on my back, as well as a musician career and relationships I needed to manage. That’s a lot. The internet probably knows details of how that went, but depending on the reader they might be completely lost. I won’t retell stories. But one thing is worth noting: the power of the elites has shaped what my life would become.

As a musician, it’s easy to say that when you’re playing songs written in Japanese, you’re not gonna be mainstream. So it was a hobby, but things got serious and we had plans. With a contribution of unfortunate turns in my relationships management, certain things sounded pretty serious for certain people. I leave that in the open, because honestly, I don’t know. But in other areas, there were definitive points of friction that got me in a situation where I needed to plan for my future, at a very young age. I was being requested to perform multiple high performance tasks, and as many people may be aware, some of that stuff can navigate an ethics code that doesn’t always align with what you have in mind.

So, as a teacher, I worked with many business clients. Any area, you name it. Those that came after only made me realize that high profile people sought for my services. And I built a reputation: of offering more than the average English school business, with their outdated materials and poorly managed policy reinforcement. The debates were open, current and based on real media. There was commentary offered by micro-blogging first, and then longer blogs later. I decided to stick with a succinct format, to make people actually read the texts. And among campaigns I’ve launched, are hashtag #readmore and efforts to make people debate the Common Core (BNCC in Brazil) and the CEFR, an European Framework, as the name tells you. The overall collection of experiences made me realize, at some point, that there was a blur between personal narrative, or rather, personal freedoms, and corporation dedication and commitment. Image, to any worker now, was inherently tied to companies you worked for, not your own personal pages which are none of your employer’s business. That’s when things started to become darker and darker.

If today blackmailing is a popular practice, however little reported on, it is generally referred to as “sextortion“, as the BBC has reported. But now imagine that these types of situations clearly described as cybercrimes take on a corporate face. Imagine that your employer is capable of accessing every move you make, on or offline. The schools are already perpetrating this kind of invasion of privacy, with the premise of solving potential conflict; but aren’t we supposed to focus on good educational curricula that cover media literacy, starting with basic right and duties, and going thorough security measures one can take to be safe online? We know that wouldn’t even be enough, because some people are able to bypass everything, and one day you get an email saying that Pegasus is spying on you. Scary, isn’t it?

But so it seems that these things are tangled. You should get acquainted with the definition of surveillance capitalism, from scholar Shoshana Zuboff, featured on The Guardian and with content across the web. The financial engineers of schematized lives waiting to be crawled and produce predictions of behavior are the people who attack the State and incentivize privatization at all costs. The right wing, historically, has played that role. People like George Friedman have said that, in his work “The Next Decade” (2010), that the Left is concerned with social welfare and the Right is concerned with money. The distinction couldn’t be clearer, but for the right-wingers, it is in their “freedom of speech” to disseminate a culture where lower social classes are purposely humiliated every single day, in every part of the world, while the Magnificent Seven shine bright on the S&P.

For these reasons, media literacy is crucial for understanding how to fight back against authoritarian tech companies, which birthed authoritarian regimes and gave them tools to promote their agendas, and realize who the power players really are. If it’s unlikely that TikTok will get banned, the recent news being that Amazon has a bid, imagine Meta. They’re here to stay. And we have to keep them on watch. And if not go to Zuckerberg personally (his messages are open, and his pages are public), make campaigns against the practices of his conglomerate, along with all the others. What is good, we can give credit to; what is bad, we make sure to bring accountability to; and what is debatable, we brainstorm and come up with better solutions than the biases of algorithms that are shaping our entire freaking lives. This has been the center of the course I propose, and if you’re with me, please visit the page where the syllabus is outlined, in Portuguese, here (the materials are all in English).

What the Right calls polarization is the mere defense of democratic values and basic human rights that have been slowly stripped away from society as we knew it, hugely influenced by corporate power in alignment with tech strategists and the ugly world of marketing. Not surprisingly, fake news are common in their discursive practices, and even if there are projects of law to dismantle their structuring, they wanna play the First Amendment card, appropriating themselves from United States constitutional principles, in the Brazilian case. It is time we put a stop on American influence in foreign governments and societal organization. We will not back down. We will not be intimidated. Our rights were violated first. Whatever happened next is a reaction, and once the cultural colonizers understand that, and also after proper confrontation on their endorsement of extremism that is killing people across the planet, we will have a more just online world and a better society where it’s okay to leave your home with your phone in your pocket.