Internet has achieved a true miracle: it has made useless, lazy, and redundant people, who are good for nothing, work for free as advertisers for others. It has turned them into advertising agents for those with initiative and originality, whether these are benign or malicious, depending on the purposes and criteria each individual or group holds about themselves or others, and pursues within the planetary network.
In my view, this is the greatest achievement of the sedative mercantile slavery ever seen in the history of commerce and human life. This process even has the luxury of giving them a few cents to further stimulate and preserve, even more effectively, their unhappy, dependent, and yearning servitude. This is what mercatransmitters do without being aware of it.
The emotional dependence and ideological magnetism that any message circulating on the internet provokes in a vulnerable mind—and no brain is without its Achilles’ heel—are superlative. Thus, the uncontrollable urge to forward, comment on, and promote it, increasingly in an unconsciously degraded manner, always benefits, and more than anyone else, the “big capital,” which moves—without lifting a finger—the mercantile and global relations inherent to the network. Internet turns any potential adversary into an advertiser. Perfect. Arguably the best advertiser. A mercatransmitter.
Note that on the internet there are no interpreters, only followers and detractors—don’t call them haters: hatred implies a minimal dose of voluntarism. On the internet, there are only engineers of commerce and emotional, parasitic commentators who recite others’ texts, crafted by the engineers of commerce.
Internet is, above all, retransmission of prior messages, which devalue as they are retransmitted, eventually leading to an aberrant transduction that dissolves itself in the infinite gumminess of the network. In other words: on the internet, there are only advertisers. Mercatransmitters. And a lot of neurosis, which is the engine of the global pseudoneuron. Internet has neuroticized the planet.
An internet user is an advertiser who does not know they are one. In this context, useless people today have an emotional capacity that big capital has skillfully mobilized, turning it into an extremely profitable labor force serving itself—that is, big capital. The cheapest labor is on the internet. It works devotedly for others, without others having to do anything. And it doesn’t know it. The most admirable thing is that this labor force is carried out and executed by human beings who are absolutely good for nothing. That’s why they are there. They are the mercatransmitters. The human resources of 21st-century advertising.
Jesús G. Maestro
The Mercatransmitters: What Are They and What Are They For?
