HAS THE NERVOUS SYSTEM OF DEMOCRACY BEEN PRIVATIZED?

When the signals of the territory no longer reach the creation of rules

A river changes color.

The people who live nearby notice first.

The water acquires a different smell. Fish appear at the surface. Someone records a video. Another person sends a message. The community tries to warn others that something is happening.

But the signal finds no passage.

It does not reach the major media. It does not cross the algorithm. It does not arrive with enough force at the offices where decisions are made.

That same morning, a small market fluctuation travels across the country within seconds.

Experts comment. Alerts are issued. Authorities respond. The event receives a name, numbers, and urgency.

Both signals circulate through the same society.

The difference lies in how quickly each one is recognized.

Perhaps communication is more than the means through which we describe the world.

Perhaps it functions as a public nervous system.

Through communication, a society perceives threats, recognizes needs, shares memories, and decides where to direct its attention.

When this system works, what happens in one part of the territory can be felt by the whole.

When it is captured, some signals travel immediately. Others remain trapped in the place where they emerged.

This perception gives rise to a question:

What happens to democracy when its nervous system begins to respond more effectively to capital than to Body-Territories and Biomes?

Who decides what deserves to be seen?

A platform does not need to tell us what to believe.

It can simply decide what will appear first.

It can repeat a message until it becomes familiar.

It can conceal another before we have the chance to encounter it.

It can transform fear, anger, surprise, and outrage into more time spent on the screen.

In digital environments, visibility is not merely recognition.

It is economic value.

Our time produces data. Data help predict behavior. Predictions guide advertisements, campaigns, and commercial decisions.

Whatever captures our attention can also be monetized.

Communication ceases to be only a bridge between people.

It becomes part of an infrastructure of extraction.

Research conducted in Chile by Marcelo Mendoza, Sebastián Valenzuela, and their collaborators analyzed misinformation during the Chilean social uprising and the pandemic. On platforms such as Twitter and Facebook, false and inaccurate content circulated faster and reached more people than truthful information within the dataset studied.

In Brazil, Patrícia Rossini and Camila Mont’Alverne showed that belief in electoral misinformation was related not only to the content people received, but also to political trust and information habits. Participation in political groups on messaging apps was associated with a greater likelihood of believing certain electoral falsehoods.

A lie does not travel alone.

It encounters distrust, fear, belonging, and previous experience.

It also encounters systems designed to reward whatever produces reaction.

This is how the public nervous system can begin to drift away from the needs of the territory.

The most urgent event is no longer necessarily the one that threatens life.

It becomes the one most capable of capturing attention.

When the rule arrives from elsewhere

Within a colonial-extractivist order, communication also prepares the ground for the creation of rules.

First, a territory is described as empty, backward, or unproductive.

Then its water, minerals, forests, labor, and data are presented as available resources.

Finally, rules created far away arrive as though they were the only possible form of development.

The Republic remains formally present.

There are laws, permits, institutions, and procedures.

But the people who inhabit the region may be invited to participate only after the main decisions have already been organized.

The rule arrives ready-made.

The territory receives the task of adapting itself.

In this process, human beings and Biomes come to be observed mainly through their capacity to generate revenue.

The worker becomes cost or productivity.

Attention becomes engagement.

The forest becomes credit.

Water becomes concession.

Minerals become exports.

Life continues to exist, but its language loses space before the language of monetization.

Communication plays a decisive role in this transformation.

It can present extraction as inevitable progress.

It can portray territorial resistance as backwardness.

It can make a distant decision seem technical and neutral.

It can repeat the benefits while reducing the impacts to administrative details.

External interests then begin to speak as though they represented regional necessity.

Latin American researchers have shown how media concentration limits the diversity of voices able to circulate. In Chile, a dialogue involving universities, public institutions, and civil society recommended expanding pluralism and strengthening public, community, and Indigenous media.

UNESCO has also emphasized that Indigenous and community media strengthen pluralism because they allow peoples and territories to narrate their own experiences, in their own languages and through their own knowledge systems.

Perhaps this reveals something simple:

Those who can narrate a territory also participate in deciding what may happen to it.

The algorithm has learned how to speak to us

Artificial intelligence expands this dispute.

It can facilitate translation, organize large volumes of information, and broaden access to knowledge.

It can also produce images, voices, and events that never existed.

A 2025 report by International IDEA examined electoral experiences in Brazil and Mexico and identified the growing use of AI in the creation, selection, moderation, and advertising of content. The study also highlighted algorithmic amplification of harm and the monetization of misinformation.

The risk is not only that we may believe a false image.

It is also that we may begin to distrust every image.

When everything can be fabricated, even a genuine event can be dismissed as manipulation.

The public nervous system enters a state of permanent uncertainty.

Within this environment, attention becomes tired.

Verification requires time.

Comparing sources requires energy.

Reading beyond the headline requires a form of availability that not everyone possesses.

Meanwhile, emotionally intense content continues to arrive.

Perhaps attentional capture does not happen because we lose all freedom.

It happens because some structures possess far greater capacity to choose where our freedom will be exercised.

A Jiwasa Democracy begins with the signal of the territory

A Jiwasa Democracy would reverse this flow.

Instead of rules produced far from a region and imposed upon its inhabitants, the needs of Body-Territories and the Biome would participate from the beginning in the creation of those rules.

Water would become a source of political information.

The soil would send signals.

Communities would identify changes before they became emergencies.

The experience of those who care, plant, fish, walk, and live in the territory would hold value in defining the problem.

This would not mean that only those who live in a certain region could speak about it.

It would mean that no decision could be considered complete without the meaningful participation of those who will live with its consequences.

Jiwasa is not a single voice.

It is the possibility of forming a “we” in which different signals can circulate without one small part of the system deciding in advance which lives deserve visibility.

We can imagine public and community networks connecting:

• environmental alerts;

• Indigenous knowledge;

• universities;

• health services;

• schools;

• local associations;

• data produced by the State;

• experiences narrated by inhabitants.

Communication would cease to function only as a tool for announcing decisions after they had been made.

It would become part of the creation of the rules themselves.

The territory would not merely be informed about the decision.

It would participate in the intelligence that made the decision possible.

The Neuro Challenge Latam

Researchers who study attention, emotion, and decision-making understand mechanisms capable of increasing salience, memory, and emotional response.

The Neuro Challenge Latam proposes a question:

What happens when knowledge created to understand attention begins to be used to capture it politically and commercially?

We can imagine studies comparing:

• true and false news;

• human and synthetic content;

• informative and threatening messages;

• clearly identified and hidden sources;

• content presented with or without context;

• information chosen by the person and information selected by algorithms.

EEG could follow rapid moments of attentional capture, surprise, conflict, and source evaluation.

Recent studies suggest that electrophysiological signals may vary as participants assess the credibility of messages and their sources.

NIRS could track prefrontal activity when a person must decide whether to trust information, especially when the system offers little transparency. Research involving artificial agents has already observed greater processing demands in situations of low transparency and reliability.

These measures could be combined with:

• memory of the source;

• time spent verifying the information;

• comprehension of the message;

• declared confidence;

• changes in opinion;

• perceived manipulation;

• first-person accounts.

The goal would not be to identify vulnerable people or classify citizens politically.

It would be to understand which environments strengthen autonomy and which transform attention into automatic response.

Perhaps the most important question is not whether the brain can distinguish false news.

Perhaps it is:

What kind of communication system gives the Body-Territory enough time, context, and diversity to form its own understanding?

Returning the signals to democracy

We can return to the river.

The water has changed color.

This time, the signal does not remain trapped.

The community has the means to describe what is happening. Universities help measure it. Public data confirm the change. Other territories recognize the pattern. The State responds before the damage becomes irreversible.

Communication once again fulfills a vital function.

It connects perception and care.

In a Jiwasa Democracy, the public nervous system would not exist only to make orders travel quickly toward the regions.

It would also allow the signals of those regions to participate in creating the orders.

Scientific knowledge would meet local experience.

Technology would expand perception without replacing the community.

Visibility would cease to be merely a prize distributed by algorithms.

It would become a condition of political belonging.

Perhaps the nervous system of democracy has been partially privatized.

But the signals remain alive.

They remain in the water, languages, bodies, and communities.

When they begin to circulate again, a new question emerges:

What happens when a territory stops being merely informed about its future and begins to participate in the intelligence that creates it?

This question leads us to the next blog:

Producing Excess, Exporting Territory

Essential references

Mendoza, M. et al. A Study on Information Disorders on Social Networks during the Chilean Social Outbreak and COVID-19 Pandemic. Applied Sciences, 2023.

Rossini, P.; Mont’Alverne, C.; Kalogeropoulos, A. Explaining Beliefs in Electoral Misinformation in the 2022 Brazilian Election. HKS Misinformation Review, 2023.

Medeiros, M. Scientific Dissemination, Misinformation, and Human Rights. Latin American Human Rights Studies, 2023.

Becerra, M.; Mastrini, G. Concentración y convergencia de medios en América Latina. Ensambles, digital edition, 2023.

International IDEA. Artificial Intelligence and Information Integrity: Latin American Experiences. 2025.

UNESCO. Strengthening Media with Indigenous Voices. 2025.

Novelo Montejo, G.; Castells-Talens, A. Indigenizando los medios de comunicación: redes interculturales y comunicación indígena en América Latina. UNAM, 2024.