“La Casa Tomada” (The House Taken Over) is a story written by the great Julio Cortázar. It tells the story of a couple of brothers who live alone in a large house that strangely begins to be “taken” by something immaterial and Ominous. It is never known what exactly it is that “takes” the house, it is only known that little by little the brothers “can not” enter certain rooms, not because they are closed or blocked, they simply “can not”. I am not going to tell the ending so that those who have not read it can look it up and read it on their own.
Cortázar wrote the story in the context of a dictatorship in his home country, Argentina. It is impossible not to see a parallel between the story and Cortázar’s situation then, living abroad, unable to return home because it has been “taken”.
Since all this “digital migration” started in several networks, I have not been able to stop thinking about “La Casa Tomada”, in how it seems that little by little the digital spaces we inhabited have been “taken” and now we “can not” to be in them anymore. There are several factors that are causing this: the shittification, the rise of reactionary ideas, the bots and AI, the increasingly intrusive advertising, all an abominable and amorphous amalgam that seems to engulf everything around us.
But let’s not kid ourselves, this didn’t start with Musk. The Internet has been taken over since Facebook and other social networks came out. It’s been slow and systematic, it’s just that now it’s become unbearable.
The Fediverse has become to a greater or lesser extent a refuge for those fleeing the maelstrom. It is far from perfect, paradises do not exist, but that does not imply that it is not worth fighting for.
After all, the Internet can’t really be dead as long as we are here. It has been “taken”, and sooner or later it will have to be taken back.
EDIT: More accurate English title of the story. PDF of the story in English. Wikipedia Page of Cortázar.
let’s also not kid ourselves, the us has a hardon about programming/indoctrination and control of information dating muuch further back. but speaking of the dead internet/taken internet, the net neutrality sell-out was a savage betrayal by our elected representatives…
Like others have said, you can’t take back or nothing can really be taken if what was there was never yours.
Instead of thinking of it as a house we were once invited in to enjoy (and we are still allowed to visit) but never own … we should concentrate instead on building a little shack in the woods for ourselves. I really don’t care if it looks pretty, is modern, or even has any running water or a toilet … all I care about is that it’s ours and under our control. I’ll help build these little shacks and support those people who are maintaining them. And I’ll stay in this little unpretty place and enjoy it because I know it’s not controlled by a big corporation.
I grew up jn a poor indigenous family in Canada. We didn’t even have indoor plumbing in the 80s when I was a kid … in first world Canada! So I feel perfectly comfortable living with little or nothing.
I will always prefer going to things that are not owned and controlled by corporations because I know that people or even I own the things I use.
I will go visit the fancy house once in a while to see old friends who don’t want to change but I’ll spend the majority of my time in the woods.
I can try to change people or try to change the world and I may or may not have any success but the only person I can actually ever change is myself.
EDIT: Another added analogy that reminded me of all this was the company town. I have a very old friend who grew up in a mining town in northern Ontario, a place where a big mining company owned multiple homes and maintained them for employees. As long as you were a good worker, you kept your house and paid minimal expenses to stay there. As soon as you fell out of favour, didn’t do good for the company, said anything wrong, retired, grew old or just got too sick and unwell … you were asked to leave and if you didn’t, you were forced to move. Meanwhile, the majority of every other worker who wasn’t a well paid employee of the company, took the little money they had and built their own home in the outskirts. These workers built shanty towns with tiny little homes with leftover lumber and covered over in tar paper and sawdust insulation. They were terribly built, leaked and cold in the winter … but it was theirs and no one could throw them out. People in the company side of town came and went and no one ever owned anything there. They lived the high life when things were good but when they fell out of favour, they lost their prestige and their money.
The point of this story is that in the long run … the shanty town became more developed with activity because of people. Those little houses turned into renovated spaces that evolved into modern houses with people that happily lived in them. The company houses meanwhile all disappeared or almost all disappeared, were demolished and forgotten and the spaces turned into strip malls, grocery stores, parking lots and hotels.
I’ll keep building my little space with my friends in the woods. Hopefully, someday, we’ll end up building a long lasting thriving community of activity maintained by people that will outlast big grand mansions owned by a company.
this so encapsulates my thinking even though I don’t have the upbringing. I just want to have nothing to do with the corporate world.
Very well put. I always appreciate your perspective.
I fucking love this story. Thanks for sharing it!
It tells the story of a couple of brothers who live alone in a large house that strangely begins to be “taken” by something immaterial and Ominous. It is never known what exactly it is that “takes” the house, it is only known that little by little the brothers “can not” enter certain rooms, not because they are closed or blocked, they simply “can not”.
I thought I was reading an SCP lol
Modern capitalism and corporate personhood is basically an SCP in real life.
We joke about it but this modern day real life SCP is actually destroying the world and killing people either directly or indirectly every day and very few people want to admit that this monster exists only to devour everyone and everything.
Start taking it back by creating your own nest here and then slowly self host it on your own equipment if possible. Then it will truly belong to you.
I recommend Neocities since I’ve used it and it actually taught me a little about HTML. Now that I know how my website works, and I have backups that I can download from Neocities when I want, if Neocities ever wants to go down a shitty path, I can always just throw the files I had on there onto my own server (with a bit of finagling I’m sure).
We can have our own green pastures while the average person stays on Facebook/Instagram/whatever.
It sucks, but that’s the cost of having the internet wildly available now. :/
I should consider again to move to neocities… I tried to do it once, but as I already have my blog (in blogger), I thought it was unnecessary (besides I was too lazy to relearn HTML and CSS). But I think that in this day and age, it is necessary…
Sad.grl was able to teach a schlep like me how to HTML, and I have high hopes she will be able to teach you too. :)
Unfortunately, the only way to “take back” the spaces you’re talking about is to go back to them and start flooding the channels. You’d have to bring enough people to overwhelm the current tones. Across MeWe, Facebook, Xwitter, you name it, you would have to go back and bring your voice to overwhelm what you perceive as other tones.
I was daydreaming about this recently. Assuming the content wouldn’t be removed or suppressed (it would), what kind of information could be spread of platforms that would make the majority, most or even all people stop wanting to use it?
How do we liberate even the most captured consumers of the most terrible platforms?
Unfortunately, the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.
You can’t “flood the channels”, not if there’s someone who controls what you can say and hear. That’s the whole point of the dictatorship analogy.
Nah, that would be like going back to the chess board with a player that already took all your pawns, towers and Your Queen (and is blatantly cheating). It’s not taking back form the inside but from the outside. Make our own Spaces grow just as their networks grow so many years ago an overwhelm them just as they overwhelmed us.
As well as owning the board itself and being able to change the rules. It’s a sucker’s game to fight on a battlefield controlled by the enemy without overwhelming advantage.
Exactly 👏
Hence why it has to be a huge, concerted effort. Quantity has a quality all its own.
I disagree, I think enacting legislature in a democracy that holds these entities to strict rules and accountability would be taking them back. The only true way for a people as a whole to hold more influence over it than it’s billionaire owners.
Is it really “taken” though when we never owned those spaces to begin with? The house makes sense because it was “their” house and even the country being “taken” makes sense because it is your country in a way
But the digital spaces that rose like Facebook or Reddit were never owned, they were always on borrowed time and resources.
The Taken analogy also implies that there will be less and less space, but it’s easier than ever to create your own digital space and anybody could do it at any time. It’s just that most preferred to use someone else’s space because it was even easier
Facebook and reddit, I would say, are part of the process of taking. You are right, we never “own” Facebook, Twitter or Reddit, we had the feeling that we did, but it was a fallacy. What we did had before (for those who had it at the time and maybe still have it) were the personal pages and forums of yesteryear, which, after the rise of social networks, no longer had a “place” in the new digital space.
it’s easier than ever to create your own digital space and anybody could do it at any time
Yes, it is easier, but I don’t know if “anybody” can do it. It requires time, resources, very advanced knowledge for the average user and infinite patience. I have a mutual who is struggling to maintain a Venezuelan Mastodon server and is questioning whether to keep it up even though there is almost no one there or continue. It’s not that simple. And in essence, for the average user who knows nothing about servers, the feeling that the world is shrinking and pushing them out is very real.
On the other hand, think that “our” country is not really “ours”, but of those who have the power, who do with it what they want. And our house may not be ours if it is mortgaged or rented. Nuance, nuance, etc, etc…
(Of course, analogies should not be taken as exact).
Yeah I don’t get it. It’s just 2 pages and it never really goes into who or what’s taking over.
Because… That doesn’t matter, maybe?
Or maybe it’s the obvious. Billionaires. Princes. Oligarchs.
It’s a metaphor! it can be anything that fits well, Abstract or concrete, future or past. As long as it’s “Something that pushes you out of a space you used to inhabit”, it works.
What’s the ending of the book! I need to know! Help me, OP! You’re my only hope. Use spoiler tags, please.
They all move to a utopian farm and live happily and safely for the rest of their lives
You can download it (or read it) here
