 The topic of my lecture today, to some extent, is for me, for me the most important topic of the research I have been doing for quite a while, as some of this is in my book, Communication Power, but throughout the last six to seven years this has been my obsession because power relationships are the foundational relationships of society. This has been my lame motive throughout my entire career, power. Why? Because those who are in power determine, shape the institutions and the norms that regulate our lives. So in that sense power relationships are the foundational relationships of society, are the DNA of societies. However, wherever the interesting thing is that wherever there is power, there is always counter power. And in that sense my analysis is not an analysis of domination in the classic tradition of social sciences, it's always an analysis of domination, counter domination, power relationships and resistance to this power. And the ability and the possibility for people whose values and interests are excluded from the institutions of society to voice their dissent and to attempt the change of the institutions that construct society. And in fact our historical experience then and now is always determined by the interaction between power and counter power, a relentless interaction, there is no social peace, sorry. It's an endless constant interaction between the attempt to impose interest from the institutions and the attempt to change the institutions democratically or through different means to be able to introduce new values and new interest in the institutions of society. And therefore the power has always been largely exercised through two main means and this is also the way power has been conceptualized in the social sciences tradition. There are many forms of power but fundamentally there are two major processes, institutions of power, coercive power, persuasive power, the power over the bodies, the power over the minds. Meaning, on the one hand power in the Max Weber tradition as the monopoly of legitimate violence by the state, well I say the monopoly of violence, legitimate or not over the state, that's really what has been considered the main form of power. But always has been another form of power that is the capacity of shape minds to elicit the consensus of the subjects by the action of different centers of power in society or at least the resignation of the subjects that that's the way it is and we cannot do much about it. This is a fundamental process of power which goes long tradition in the social sciences, Foucault but also to some extent the notion of Gramsci about the hegemony in society was related to this capacity to shape minds, to shape the way we think. However, again this both coercive power and persuasive power can be resisted and is resisted and people react against their inability to be able to go into the discourse and into the debate in ways that they are protagonists of the debate. And then they reshape the debate and again so there is power and counter power, there is coercive power and persuasive power in both cases and in both cases but particularly in persuasive power all depends on information and communication. Information and communication had been the critical tools of power and the critical tools of counter power throughout history. Why? Because through communication people are connected so if the process of communication is controlled by those who are in power then the signals that people receive in their brains comes from a system of values, interests, symbols that are adapted to what the powerful think or would like that people think about themselves. And vice versa, the only way to change is when people who do not agree, do not accept the social order communicate with other people who have similar attitudes and similar experience in my language to reprogram the process of communication in terms of their own interest. And again, this communication system, this information retrieval system never ends and is in a constant dialectical relationship. Institutions in general in society are organized around the state and productivity and the source of wealth in our society is organized around capital. State and capital are still the cornerstones of our social organization. So they still dominate anything that happens even in the new technological environment although one of the critical matters about the internet is that the users of the internet have shaped the actual technologies and content of the internet used throughout their history. Both state and capital however operate in a given technological environment in our societies that is the digitization of everything. States seek to establish and maintain power. Capital seeks to increase profits. This has not changed. Power is maintained by the institutional control of communication either governments or media control by big corporations. The maintenance of power requires extensive surveillance for competition with other states and for keeping order internally. While capital expansion depends on the relentless capacity of commodifying everything, transforming everything in a commodity that can be bought and sold. And again in both processes information and communication meaning digital communication in our society are essential. Indeed the internet was characterized and it is as a technology of freedom of free communication and it is a technology of free communication because simply because those who designed the internet technologies in the 1960s, 70s deliberately tried to have to design a technology that would be difficult to control. It is one of the greatest paradoxes of internet history that even if the program that led to internet was financed by DARPA, the defense department of the United States research agency, they actually was not intended as a military use by any means, was actually funding computer scientists working in designing new forms of computer communication. At the beginning they really didn't know what to use for, mainly they tried to use it for using the spare capacity of computers to increase time that they could use the computers by sharing the capacity of either computers. But very soon they derived to our other uses and the most important first in a list that they developed by the computer scientists mainly in the university campuses was about sharing science fiction movies and novels and the way to buy weed everywhere. This is the source of internet collaboration. However, through that these technologies, and that's the critical point, technologies of freedom are only as free as they are used for freedom. But the fundamental transformation is that all communication became digitized and interconnected and created the basis for massive global digital surveillance, which is the most important expression of power in our society. Digital surveillance is comprehensive in an entirely integrated digital environment, is what we call the digital exhaust. The digital exhaust means that all the information is connected and therefore can be treated as a system. The key issue is connecting credit cards, phone calls, computer activity, search history, ID numbers, financial transactions, e-mail communication, social networking sites and all the interaction in the social networking sites. Because there is the possibility of connecting everything with everything, there is also the possibility of surveilling, retrieving information and organizing this information in the interest of those who surveil. So what has emerged, particularly in the last decade, is what I call a global surveillance bureaucracy that whose major quantum leap took place after the 9-11 bombing of New York because that created the basis for funding and legal support in the United States and then throughout the world of extraordinary powers given to the surveillance agencies. Internet, ultimamente, has become, has shown its potential as a space of free expression and disintermediation of communication control. That's why the defense of Internet freedom has become one of the fundamental political battles of the world because of course Internet in itself cannot be controlled but it can be intercepted in many ways and also those who propose messages that are anti-establishment in the Internet can be identified for instance in China and punished. However, I always say, having studied in depth the Chinese system of control, that yes, the messenger can be identified and punished and sent to prison and there are many, many, many hundreds of Chinese activists in jail. However, the message cannot be intercepted, the message as such would have to be intercepted in the entire Internet and this is literally impossible. So if you are the messenger that's important but if you are the message you can go on and live and communicate and diffuse and in that sense the net is a space of free communication. Free communication doesn't mean the kind of freedom for the uses that we would like in normative terms. The Trump movement was very active in organizing networks of racist and sexist mobilizations and the same thing in Germany with the neo-Nazi parties, an alternative for Germany etc. So the fact the Internet has free communication, it doesn't mean that this is for the good uses according to each one's taste. It is for whatever happens in society. Internet is the mirror of society, how good or how bad society is, each one of us, that is immediately reflected in the Internet. So the key question is not about if technology is good or bad because it's not. As the great historian of technology, Marvin Kasper said, technology is neither good or bad, neither it is neutral. Meaning what? That is very important but the effects are undetermined. Internet is used to be and is a free communication system but the uses of this freedom are socially determined. Social media, social networks now are largely taken over the communication space and largely pushing aside the mass media. Mass media were not always reliable, were not always the first system of communication and not always as truthful as they want to say they are. For instance, remember the great New York Times reporting the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq helping to trigger the war. But to a large extent the most important thing now is not the replacement of one system by another but what I call a general cacophony of information and ideas in the social networks. The period of post truth, now lies are called post truth. So everything is there, lies, bots that multiply by hundreds and thousands the fake news that are circulating in the Internet and in the social networks. Can we do something about that? Yes and no because technologically even if some of the bots programs can be deactivated by fake news is literally impossible to control if people produce fake news, if people pollute the information over the Internet. So the only answer is the ability of educated citizens, informed citizens to actively participate in these exchanges and correct information and correct ideas according to their experience, to their values and to their interest. And I finish. The issue is that in the new technological environment which I have tried to show the historical novelty, we still have the oldest social struggle. We still have the struggle against the abuses of power from the state and the exploitation from monopoly companies. And this struggle continues to be and will continue to be in the sense of the freedom and dignity of the humankind, new technologies, all the issues, all forms of oppression and all new forms of struggle and response to the oppression. Thank you for your interest.