OPOSICIÓNS SECUNDARIA INGLÉS – SANTIAGO 2018
PRIMEIRA PROBA
NOME ...................................................................................................... DATE .....................................................
PARTE A – OPCIÓN B – EXERCICIO 1
One hundred and sixty years ago, the first transatlantic telegram traveled from Britain to the US along a
rickety undersea wire. It consisted of 21 words – and took seventeen hours to arrive.
Today, the same trip takes as little as 60 milliseconds. A dense mesh of fiber-optic cables girdles the world,
pumping vast quantities of information across the planet. The McKinsey Global Institute estimates that 543
terabits of data are flowing across borders every second. That’s the equivalent of roughly 13 million copies
of the complete works of Shakespeare.
Other things have also changed. So has its economic significance. Telegrams were useful for
businessmen. But data is nothing less than the lifeblood of global capitalism.
The flow of data now contributes more to world GDP than the flow of physical goods. In other words, there’s
more money in moving information across borders than in moving soybeans and refrigerators.
This is a big shift – and one that has yet to fully sink in for most people. Corporate America, on the other
hand, understands it well. Which is why the tech and financial industries are pushing hard for international
agreements that prohibit governments from regulating these flows. The most recent example is Nafta:
representatives from the US, Mexico, and Canada just concluded another round of talks on renegotiating
the treaty. American companies are lobbying for changes that would deregulate data across the three
countries.
The corporate crusade against data governance is only getting started. If it succeeds, the world’s most
important resource will be entrusted to the private sector and the profit motive, and the rest of us will have
even less power to participate in the decisions that most affect our lives.
Over the past year, a growing number of people have come to realize that data has a dark side. The
information revolution has turned out to be something less than total liberation. The digital sphere is not
intrinsically democratic; rather, what matters is who owns it and how it’s organized.
The digitization of everything has made this abundantly clear. As more of our lives are made into data, the
companies that control that data have grown rich and powerful. It’s not merely that they know so much
about us, from our favorite type of toilet paper to our favorite type of porn. It’s that they use what they know
to inform algorithmic decisions that have a significant impact on society as a whole –decisions like what
kind of news (if any) we consume, or how long we go to prison.
But the stakes are even higher. The emphasis on personal data has obscured the fact that data is not just
personal – it’s commercial, industrial, financial. The reason that corporations are so concerned about who
controls the packets that flow through the world’s fiber-optic cables is because a vast array of profit-making
activities now depends on them.
The global circulation of data, then, is really about the global circulation of capital. And it has enormous
consequences for the global organization of wealth and work.
Data flows enable employers in higher-wage countries to outsource more tasks to workers in lower-wage
countries. They help firms coordinate complex supply chains that push manufacturing jobs to the places
with the cheapest labor costs. They empower a handful of big companies to dominate markets and
monopolize digital infrastructure all over the world.
For these reasons, countries may want to make rules about how information travels across their borders.
But corporate America disagrees. Such laws would amount to “digital protectionism” – an irrational
regression to a more bordered world. Innovation, efficiency, and prosperity would suffer.
