THE REAL MATRIX: THE REDEFINITION OF INDIVIDUALS AND REALITY

This essay makes an overview of the relationship between surveillance, individuals and reality. To do this, I use a multilevel perspective that connects power (from agency to structure) to social systems theory. This novel connection is supposed to introduce a holistic view on how individuals are managed beyond ideas of resistance and technology. In the first agency level, individuals are constrained by continuous interactions through digital and behavioral exploitation. In the second meso-level, individuals attach to an informational system that renders, sorts, and distorts data fragments that resemble their ontology. Finally, in the third structural level, more than fragmented subjects, I argue that individuals and data constitute a new hermeneutic cycle in which reality itself is redefined in an autopoietic reading of things that rescinds from subjects and knowledge.

Summary. 1. Introduction, 1.1. First level: Individuals interacting by commodification and gamification, 1.2. Second level: individuals immersed in a systemic ‘House of mirrors’, 1.3. Third level: Surveillance driving forces that reshape reality, 2. Conclusion, 3. References.

I discovered that my obsession for having each thing in the right place, each subject at the right time, each word in the right style, was not the well-deserved reward of an ordered mind but just the opposite: a complete simulation system invented by me to hide the disorder of my nature.

Gabriel García Márquez (2004)

1 Introduction

In the last decades, surveillance studies have largely covered how information is used to constitute governmentality and biopolitics in a multiple interaction between surveyors and surveilled (Heller, 1996; Ajana, 2005; Cohen, 2018). At the same time, those interactions have moved from a single concept based on the panoptic to an array of gazes, “veillance” societies, in which people can see others from above, “sur-veillance”, and below, “sous-veillance” (Gray, 2000). This interaction has been analyzed especially through a power perspective in which surveillance entail actions of domination resistance. In this perspective, surveillance also redefines the very individuality of people, as mentioned since the advent of the informational era to current digital capitalism (Baudrillard, 1981; Deleuze, 1992; Hall, 2001; Ball, 2009; Zubboff, 2019).

However, this essay moves from those perspectives (between watchers and watched that resist) to analyze surveillance from a multilevel and systemic perspective that encompasses “veillance” societies. That is, rather than analyzing multiple actors that engage in multiple gaze tactics from above and below, I argue that surveillance, the gaze from above, has created a sphere (a systemic dimension) that undermines the ontology of social actors by the recombination of material infrastructures and communicative arenas. In that sense, I introduce social systems dimension expressing that systems are not restricted to communication as defined in the traditional sense (Luhmann, 1995) or to an infinite cycle of mutual observation and resistance (Mann, 2020). Traditionally, systems are also understood as a set of interactions that allow the differentiation of networks (Luhmann, 2006; Peters & Besley, 2019). Rather, I argue that surveillance constitutes a new social system that not only differentiates from other ones. Ultimately, surveillance reshapes and alters the social structure in which this and other systems connect. In other words, one system (surveillance) can alter reality in holistic manners by re-configuring the hermeneutic comprehension of individuals/things that hinge on it.

By reconnecting power (from agency to structure) to a system perspective, I develop the essay on three levels. The first level relates to the individual dimension in which data users are surveyed and altered in their personal life, either in forms of information consumption and production (as in the case of the commodification of privacy and the gamification of behavior). This level can be equalized to the agency level or the ground on which individuals interact. The second level regards the meso-level or the dimension that assembles individuals and information as a system. In this informational system, individuals interact in a technological environment and have their very individuality managed and distorted in multiple forms such as in a 'house of mirrors'. The third level corresponds to the structural level in which surveillance, as a structural social system, not only redefines individuals and actors but also the very idea of social systems. At this level, surveillance becomes the allegory of a performative reality based on fragments of data. Surveillance dissolves individuals and becomes the great self-referential hermeneutic cycle where efficiency blurs with failures. This cycle, ultimately, would even dilute traditional ideas on governmentality based on a reason of state, biopolitics based on bodies, and veillance based on the mutual capacity to visualize others.

First level: Individuals interacting by commodification and gamification

Many scholars affirm that the ways to construct surveillance entail visibility, representation, meaning, and material opportunities to people (Lyon, 1994, 2007; Caluya, 2010; Wilson & Norris, 2017; Gill, 2019). At individuals’ level, this can be exemplified with commodification and gamification of personal data. Commodification of individual data consists of the acceleration of commercial architecture on the Web stressing “exploitation and enclosure, transforming users into commodities that can be sold on the market” (Petersen, 2008, p.7). To Mark Andrejevic data users are commodities with market value who have little choice over how and when this data is generated and little say in how it is used. In this sense, he describes the generation and use of individuals' data as the alienated or estranged dimension of their activity. To the extent that "this information can be used to predict and influence user behavior, [thus] it is an activity that returns to users in an unrecognizable form" (Andrejevic, 2011, p.286).

Christian Fuchs has also expressed that the contemporary Internet is a specific platform based on the exploitation of “prosumers” (producers and consumers) that create data. This argument could be summarized as the realization of digital techniques through which prosumers are electronically sorted and exploited. Users create content and information that return to them in vicious forms, in the form of commodities extracted from them. Therefore, “the category of the prosumer commodity does not signify a democratization of the media towards a participatory or democratic system but rather the total commodification of human creativity” (Fuchs, 2011, p.301).

Monitoring people is not a bad practice a priori, but it can produce docile subjects that in turn are targets for consumer alienation as expressed by Fuchs, paving the road to intrusive and unaccountable surveillance. For instance, when personal data becomes a commodity or serves for unclear security purposes, digital flows constitute power and feed a disciplinary assemblage that identifies, classifies, and assesses individuals (Gandy Jr,, 2012). Prosumer commodification on Web 2.0 identifies the interests of users by closely surveilling their data and personal behavior.

On the Internet, users do the semiotic work in the frontend while algorithms and engineers develop the backend production of informational services to users. In the case of giant platforms, algorithms seek to predict what kind of information will be of interest to each individual giving personalized experiences (which includes advertising but not only) back to users (Striphas, 2015). In other words, this resembles the constant production and consumption of users' data in a retro-alimentary circuit between user-platform-user to produce add-value "experiences". Meanwhile, this circuit monetizes those informational experiences to third players and owners of the platforms. It means the total fusion between production and the means of production from users in a perfect flow that keeps capitals, information, and goods being distributed into few shareholders and owners of the backend platform. Thus, at the agency level, individuals interact under asymmetric power-informational conditions in which many are commodified at the expense of the material benefit to few people. This kind of interaction also alters the very individuality and behavior of the watched.

For instance, McGrath (2004) and Whitson (2013) express that the power of surveillance could attract or seduce their targets either in terms of loving the "Big Brother" (the watchers) or in terms of gamification. Gamification means that subjectivities or users voluntarily "expose their personal information, which is then used to drive behavioral change. It serves as an emulation of the Panopticon's self-supervision, as it provides real-time feedback about users' actions and gathers large amounts of data in the hands of surveyors. In short, those logics constitute clear cases for governing and regulating the mass of individuals by techniques that are not neutral. In that sense, not only personal information is a valuable source for commercial advertising, but it also reproduces disciplinary effects and normalizes the procedures that sustain surveillance assemblages.

In other words, individuals become monetized by their own individuality and become regulated through rewards and achievements in the gamification performativity logic. Both trends are increased insofar as algorithms regulate and classify, for good and evil, large amounts of individuals data. Despite humans have the capacity to influence algorithms (from their design, retro-alimentation, evaluation), the autonomous decision-making of automated codes gets more influence to establish the criteria, functions, and the semantic results to interpret data. In a market economy where "prioritizing is something we do on a daily basis to cope with the information onslaught" (Diakopoulos, 2015, p.3), algorithms prioritize information in a way that focuses on certain things at the expense of others. By definition, prioritization is about discrimination. As a result, there are profound consequences to individuals that should be considered in this economy. “Search engines are canonical examples, but there are many other consequential rankings —from the quality of schools and hospitals to the riskiness of illegal immigrants on watch lists” (idem, p.14). Algorithms increase the divisionary logic of selection/exclusion when it comes to analyze and interpret reality. For example,

Where knowledge serves to establish authority and underpins judgment, dataveillance claims neither; its value is intrinsically speculative, derived from a stochastic range of possible transformations across multiple contexts. In fact, the performative capacity of algorithmic dataveillance is proportionate to the indeterminacy and deferral of its value as information (Kaplan, 2018, p.180).

In that expansion, current automated surveillance challenges the separation between producer and product, and between sender and receiver of messages (encoding and decoding procedures as expressed by Hall, 2001). Because of the commodification and gamification of data, there are more flexible schemes and relations to encode and decode messages. The exploitation of users' data and the redefinition of their behavior, ultimately, accelerate the abstraction of individuals from their individualities; the recombination of data fragments to recreate and represent subjects. In that sense, the Deleuzian "dividual" is too short to catch up with the current management of individuals as they become data flows of subjectivization. Individual subjects are no longer producers or consumers of content. They turn into prosumer commodities monetized and detached from their original ontology as humans of creation and interpretation. At this level, one can see how surveillance starts to become a hermeneutic cycle (a mode of reading) that uses the most advanced algorithms to digest scattered data from subjects that resemble their individuality.

Second level: individuals immersed in a systemic ‘House of mirrors’

If we consider surveillance as a system, individuals do not interact with each other as mere surveyors and surveyed in “veillance” societies (Mann; Nolan; and Wellman, 2003). Surveillance becomes a system comprised by socio-technical tools in which individuals are immersed and dissolved at the expense of their interaction. Here, surveillance is not only focused on individuals and concrete actors but on the constitution of a system: the amalgam of actors-networks-data. As this system encompasses everyone and becomes dominant, the concept of mutual “veillance” and “sousveillance” recedes at the expense of surveillance from above and increases the concentration of power. Surveillance becomes the great variable in the ‘veillance’ equation. This is because individuals increasingly depend on top-down systems to understand their social interactions and identity. In that sense, giant data processors seek the right data combination as the saint grail that defines the representation of personal information, and so of individuals even.

For example, Johnson & Regan (2014) use the house of mirrors metaphor to describe current data recombination. As when a person enters a house of mirrors and sees his/her image distorted due to the movement and the position of the mirrors, according to those scholars, individuals information is sorted, bounced, and rendered by socio-technical tools in many ways and with different purposes (campaign financing, secure flights, search engines, social networks, online advertising and so on). Thus, not all types of personal information are used in the same way and have the same importance for watchers.

On the other hand, Marx (2004) offers a typology to describe the kinds of personal information most commonly addressed by surveillance. This typology includes 1. Individual identification (the 'who' question). 2. Shared identification (the typification question). 3. Geographical/locational (the 'where', and beyond geography, 'how to reach' question). 4. Temporal (the 'when' question). 5. Networks and relationships (the 'who else' question). 6. Objects (the 'whose is it' question). 7. Behavioural (the 'what happened' question). 8. Beliefs, attitudes, emotions (the inner or backstage and presumed 'real' person question). 9. Measurement characterizations (the 'kind of person' question, predict your future question). 10. Media references (yearbooks, newsletters, newspapers, TV, internet) (the minutes of fame question). According to him, this typology of information is being used in order to redefine the core identification of one person. Despite he does not offer a clear conceptualization of the meaning of the "core", this zone is supposed to concentrate sensitive information from digital personas.

Yet, either in Marx's typology or in the 'House of mirrors', data recombination follows subtle methods being ignored by most users. For individuals, the position of the mirrors, the socio-technical procedures that recombine data can be taken for granted or ignored as their data enters the new hermeneutic surveillance system of actors-networks-data. However, data subjects are not necessarily passive. People can feel they are manipulated/sorted/categorized/labeled by dispositives that produce different versions of life as lived by surveilled subjects. In that sense, power relations are evident as watching groups can regulate the flow of information and knowledge about surveilled subjects. Resistance then can be conceptualized as "breaking or disrupting those flows and creating Spatio-temporal gaps between the watcher and the watched" (Ball, 2005, p.89). Mann, Nolan & Wellman (in Marx G., 2003) even propose ‘sousveillance’, bottom-up watching, as a counter form to surveillance. Sousveillance uses technology to confront bureaucratic organizations by inverting the gaze toward the watchers or surveillance authority, resisting surveillance through non-compliance and interference; blocking, distorting, masking, refusing, and counter-surveilling.

Sousveillance resistance to surveillance can be efficient in a surveyors-surveilled approach. However, it is not enough to disrupt the top-down hermeneutic cycle of surveillance that goes beyond actors and enacts the actors-networks-data system. Moreover, the position to alter power relations from data subjects depends also on the interrelation among many actors to spread resistance beyond surveillance. For example, a technological strategy of resistance cannot be reduced to this domain and needs to be expanded to other social domains. It requires a systemic change. As surveillance becomes systemic, resistance needs to reach structural levels of politics, from local to the international arenas. Something that still has not been seen in contemporary politics as surveillance expands as a subterraneous dimension with limited resistance and counterweight. “even when surveillance is uncovered by other veillance gazes, transparency, new regulation and accountability appear as provisional solutions to counteract surveillance range and impacts. Yet, these aspects still need to be replenished as the hermeneutic cycle of surveillance alters even reality itself.

Third level: Surveillance driving forces to reshape reality

Rather than promoting hard disciplinary means of control, surveillance nowadays also hinges on the "care of the self" (Bevir, 1999), in caring for our reputation and image. State and big market players can monitor the volume, the quality, and the interactions of people without a priori goals of social control. On contrary, their monitoring is similar to the one expressed by Zuboff (2019) in the instrumentarian surveillance. Instrumentarian means that watchers are more concerned about watching the interactions rather than constraining them. For them, it is better to see the pipeline full, no matter the content of the flow and the origin of the liquids, than empty.

In the first and second levels, surveillance could be connected to behavioral and power goals. However, at this level, surveillance would be more connected to the observation of performance and productivity to create more data (from labor to entertainment), rather than disciplining souls (governmentality) and biological bodies (biopolitics). For example, information that would be banal or 'normal' like many posts and messages on social networks has reached, for the first time in human history, the status of a value per se. Surveillance has obtained a retro alimentary logic insofar data matters to collect more data. Watching has reached a self-perpetuation cycle that gradually substitutes previous forms of hermeneutics of reality. To use a science fiction metaphor from Philip Dick, the sleeping electronic sheep also dreams about another electronic sheep dreaming.

This cycle is the continuation of a historical process in which social systems have reached a stage of auto-poietic reproduction or, in rough terms, of self-perpetuation (Luhmann, 1986). In the same logic, informational activities have reached a self-evident value, feeding internal demands to collect, analyze, and produce even more information. Data generates data despite of the observers and gazes, even if they are still present in the ‘veillance’ reality. In that sense, data demands to produce more data to analyze the previous one, which in turn needs to be matched and recombined with more information to be assimilated, restarting, thus, the cycle. But the self-referential process is not limited to data and surveillance. It is being complemented with the a process called ‘differentiation’.

Since the informational revolution in the last decades, differentiation is a process in which every social domain gives birth to a subfield that in turn constitutes a new epistemological social system (Luhmann, 2006). Like a branch that stems from new branches, the social systems are increasing in number and volume. It combines the Deleuzian ‘difference’ or becoming with the epistemological expansion and entropy caused by data. In physics, the universe expands and the celestial bodies are accelerating to the borderlines of the universe in a process called inflation. In the same way, social objects and informational fields are increasing and accelerating to produce new ones. In that process, new differentiated objects and data becomes separated and distant from previous ones. It seems that, despite the hyper-connectivity and the production of new data, one challenge consists of giving an overall sense to the production and volume of data. The idea of a super-panopticon is now too short to catch up with the bulky information produced every day. To do this job, machines and automated procedures deploy provisional tools to interpret targets and data sets, seeking to simplify and reduce the complexity of information. Yet, those tools create new domains of specialization, social knowledge, and technical expertise. Those characteristics, in turn, contribute to increasing the inflationary expansion of entropic data that demands new procedures to interpret it.

Thus, the first driving force in surveillance nowadays goes beyond the theoretical ideas of social control, governmentality, and biopolitics and relates to entropic differentiation that demands for new data analysis. One mobile phone can process the same amount of data produced by analogic-bureaucratic intelligence agencies during the Cold War. Today, bigger amounts of data are produced in shorter periods. And to the problem of data volume, the quality and integrity of data are inversely proportional to the capacity and velocity to process data. Thus, the more data we produce, the more we need to create tools to clean information and listen amidst the noise; especially through the labor of giant data companies who constitute the biggest market field in the global economy (Smyrnaios, 2018).

Yet, at the structural level, differentiation between subjects, objects, and observers increases at accelerated pace. Like galaxies tearing apart from each other to the point their light will never reach adjacent stars in the long future, current differentiation commanded by surveillance rearranges social groups into dis-aggregated and separated informational bubbles. Because of the previous two levels, a limited number of subjects can determine what is accessible, usable, and, most important of all, knowable (Kaplan, 2018). This informational asymmetry also implies that users can systematically be unknowingly exposed to experiments intended to influence their sphere of perception to drive them to adopt certain behaviors over other ones (Zuboff, 2019), increasing patterns of gamification as expressed above. And despite the ability to choose alternative sources of information and resistance, there is less room to escape from systemic surveillance trends based on data.

The second driving force in surveillance is the response from markets and states to give some provisional orientation to the production and monitoring of data. Insofar as they cannot control or handle all the tools to analyze data, they started to focus on the sources of information, that is, they enhanced their ability to gather and monitor information from direct sources: individuals. Beyond being a source of production and labor, a population has become, at the same time, a reserve of information that can be better exploited for the benefit of the dataveillance (data+surveillance) assemblage (Castelluccia, 2020). This exploitation also goes beyond the commodity form and gamification. Populations are potential sources to feed the pipelines of information beyond the ideas of traditional governmentality. Data subjects are valuable because of their constitution: they are subjects of data. Every database now could be as valuable as material sources to determine wealth of nations in the coming future. The expansion and the capacity to manage populations through data is perhaps the new frontier to decide the future of humanity, at least during the current century (Zuboff, 2019).

Informational flows are as vital as the water and food to live in our current societies. Following the evolution of data governance, the traditional economy of scarcity (of material goods) has been supplemented by a new economy of abundance (of immaterial goods). Sharing and distributing material artifacts usually decreases their value but sharing and distributing immaterial artifacts almost always increases their value (Martínez Cabezudo, 2014). This context transcends the labor horizon, affecting mutual interactions, the sense of own reality, and the interactions with reality itself (Jandrić et al., 2019). The digital fusion of material and immaterial production goes beyond the economic sphere to directly address the cultural, the social, the political, and the ontological. In that sense, this type of production redefines biopolitics because it does not only affects life as a whole, producing not only docile bodies and material goods but also the inner conditions for social relations but a system rooted and detached from life (Aradau & Tazzioli, 2020). Thus, it is not necessary to consolidate breakthroughs such as quantum computing, cybernetics complexity theory, and deep machine learning to realize that we have arrived to the age of algorithmic biopolitics. Its current phase, the ‘biologization of digital reason’ (Peters & Besley, 2019) is a distinct phenomenon that is emergent from the application of mechanical reason to biology and the biologization of digital procedures. Indeed, the promise of those technologies works like utopia dreams to justify a technological Manifest Destiny from big techs to “save” humanity.

Moreover, there is no need to move to science fiction scenarios to realize that current data procedures are the extension and redefinition of reality. Thus, if in the past surveillance was closely related to suspicion and dissidence, in which individuals covered something to avoid watchers, today the disciplinary logic is too narrowed. One can think “I am a normal person and my data does not matter, I have nothing to hide”. Yet, the capacity to instrumentalize people nowadays works from individual and social levels to a systemic one. What each person does (or not) matters to build a broader image of populations. Besides, it also matters to constitute and validate this same person (from identity, symbols, to material opportunities). Nobody can live outside informational clusters and bubbles. Data flows are the oxygen that keeps individuality being distorted by continuous imminence data analysis instead of the realization and knowledge of the immanence of a subject –what we want/become prevails upon what we are. Today, there is accurate potential from automated surveillance to reach each person as the techno-social interaction between individuals and machines allows or closes different opportunities to understand the world, and so to live. Thus, giant data processors always strive to deliver or maximize the personal “experience” and the performance for each user. Surveillance works thanks to the differences among the bulky data. In anonymous data, national security realms, and market domains, the recombination, correlation, and matching of data fragments is even more important than the own individuals to create and allocate normality within a population (Van Dijk, 2014). Taking into account probabilistic and statistical judgments, personal data systems, as mechanisms for the sake of identification and assessment, are part of the social system that constitutes the architecture of a continuous performance society that even alters previous ideas of simulation and reality.

Nowadays, simulation not only refers to divisions and criteria to distribute symbols that emulate realness back to individuals in the sense of hyperreality (Baudrillard, 1981). If we consider systems theory and differentiation as one of surveillance driven forces, then it also refers to assuming the insufficiency and indeterminacy of hyperreality or simulation. In other words, the more data is collected from individuals, the more surveillance uncovers that there is to know, which makes people recede even further into their massive mystery and unknowingness (Kaplan, 2018). Far from marking the limit of the ‘Church of Data’, this apparent paradox is simply its functional principle. The aim of surveillance through data nowadays is not modeling or understanding an external object (to simulate reality) but the endless reproduction of this object’s statistical indeterminacy and opacity as the protocol of the system continuing operation. “We can thus see why in hyperreality the two inevitably converge: power (as vigilant connectivity) and resistance (the silence or recalcitrance attributed to the masses) belong to the same logic of simulation” (Kaplan, 2018, p. 186).

In light of that, the myth of our era consists of the illusion that data can speak for itself. Surveillance in the new hermeneutic cycle proclaims that data needs more data. However, this assumption never grasps or fosters a quest for more knowledge, because there is nothing to know (data is always incomplete) and no sense in knowing (to give cohesion and coherence to incomplete data and reality). There is no necessity to know and give sense to a reality comprised of data fragments as surveillance becomes tautological. In that myth, the only thing data processors can do is to declare they can interpret the world and people without their mediation and resistance, and by finding “relevant” correlations. In other words, current surveillance is an autopoietic cycle of tokenistic efficiency. Its cynical meaning, as expressed by Kaplan (2018), disallows a ground for reality representation and undermines subjectivity and agency (even if individuals can exercise some degree of resistance and sousveillance in the first and second levels). Surveillance brings up a symbolic efficiency that enables a self-referential expansion marked by differentiation and informational bubbles. In that path, surveillance continually marks the unity of cognition with data deficits that must be overcome. As the deficits will ever persist, because data is never enough, the cycle of surveillance constitutes an efficient system indistinguishable from endlessly recurring failures, similar to the simulation of the ordered mind expressed in the epilogue by Márquez (2004).

Conclusion

Since the advent of surveillance societies in the last decades, reality itself has been encompassed by a process of collection and recombination of information. That is, if reality in the informational era can be transformed by the use of information itself, surveillance emerged as one of the main fronts to alter the very management of data, and so of individuals. Even interpreters of reality, individuals, have become allegories of themselves because surveillance plays with their ontology in order to create an amorphous mass to be regulated, ordered, sorted, and administrated. Surveillance escapes the multiple connotation of “veillance” societies imposing a top-down gaze that resembles the panopticon but cannot be reduced to it. It also redefines previous biopolitics and social control notions by enhancing specific transformations at three levels.

At the first level, I have shown that surveillance is currently composed of trends such as commodification and gamification to foster rewards and manage behavior. At the second meso-level, surveillance can be compared to the ‘House of mirrors’ in which the lenses (algorithms) alter the meaning and identity of data subjects and their social bounds in the online and offline world. Besides, attempts to resist the lack of fit between data subjects and individualities are subsumed into a continuous battle against surveillance processors with no final endings –in a cycle of eternal resistance, resembling that we always restart from scratch like in the cyberpunk struggle to avoid technological dystopia (Gray, 2000).

At the third structural level, data fragments separated from individualities means the rise of a reality in which individuals are more valuable by their imminence than by their immanence. In this flexible scheme, ideas of social control and discipline are not enough to catch up with current surveillance evolution. This realm constitutes itself as an autopoietic hermeneutic cycle that dissolves data subjects in search of correlations and matches everywhere. And this is not a nostalgic view of technology. Rather, it is technology being shaped by the continuous quest of provisional orientation to data fragments, of fluctuating sense, at the expense of knowledge and dissent (no correlation) as inherent elements that also constitute reality.

Nowadays, surveillance not only refers to divisions and criteria to distribute symbols that emulate realness back to individuals. It also refers to assuming the insufficiency and indeterminacy of simulation. In other words, the more data is generated, the more tools and data are needed to feed this endless hermeneutic cycle. Meanwhile, information bubbles become dis-aggregated and the differentiation of social systems becomes ubiquitous. These trends accelerate the lack of fit between different epistemological communities, creating, thus, a gap and noise that, in turn, restarts and expands a cycle in which surveillance constitutes an efficient system indistinguishable from endlessly recurring failures.

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Published as: Surveillance and the redefinition of individuals and reality, December 2021, TEKNO 19(1):5-12.