Виртуални пространства: синтетични светове
Virtual Spaces: Synthetic Worlds

Summary/Abstract: The increasing access to the Internet and the growing presence of individuals in social networks highlight the importance of virtual spaces for the contemporary human. Companies like Amazon, Meta, Google and others, providing hundreds of diverse services through complex constellations of physical and virtual infrastructure, mediate an ever-increasing part of our everyday life activities. Dwelling in the spaces and using the services of these techno-agglomerations produces vast arrays of data. Through complex and opaque methods and practices of machines and algorithms, sensors and artificial intelligence, the data generated by consumption is rendered into sustainable behavioural patterns and predictive models. Property of the companies owning the technological infrastructure, this newly created knowledge remains inaccessible to the user in its entirety, although generated by the user’s very own interactions within the virtual spaces delineated by the companies. The knowledge-derived power possessed by companies is used primarily for their own purposes – maintaining asymmetric power/knowledge relations vis-à-vis consumers, pursuing financial and other goals, often in tandem with third parties. Thus, in pursuit of their own goals, companies very often violate users; personal privacy in the virtual space through the purposeful use of this knowledge in a variety of ways. A service or app’s terms of use create the aperture through which surveillance practices and privacy violations slip. Containing important, but often vaguely formulated information about the operational activity of the service in use, they are almost always accepted by the user with disdainful trust. Through these legal cracks seep the elusive practices of tech companies, manifesting in deliberate alterations of small details within our personal virtual space, or questionably relevant offers to purchase an item or service. This calls into question the democratic nature of the Internet, as well as human notions of space and freedom of choice in the digital age.

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