Userism is a new political idea that aims to clarify the complex power dynamics in digital societies. Its goal is to create a social system where the main group of digital societies—the users—are empowered and aware of the power relations and fundamental structure of their reality, allowing them to directly influence the social order.
Userism is necessary because people in digital societies lack the tools to control and shape digitalization, an era-building process currently controlled and understood by only a few. Digitalization is a major change, affecting every part of our lives, including social life, work, and identity. When a small elite controls this process, it creates a huge imbalance of power, potentially leading to terrible and undignified living conditions for societies, cultures, identities, and individuals. This situation means people are not living freely and rationally but are instead controlled by a tiny elite that rules the digital, and through that the physical, world. If this imbalance is not addressed and reversed, it could become permanent. That is why Userism stresses the urgent need for change in this new era.
Userism sees the rise of digital societies not as an addition to previous systems but as the start of the third major era of human civilization, following the farming and industrial eras. Each of these eras has permanently changed human life, transforming relationships among people and with the world, creating clearly different forms from one era to the next, and spreading more quickly each time.
To explain this, Userism uses the idea of abstraction eras: the shift between eras happens at a key moment in a process called "abstraction." Abstraction is the growing ability to turn physical things into symbols, transforming the physical into thoughts and allowing the realm of thoughts to dominate the realm of things. Abstraction is to the mind what evolution has been to the body.
Abstraction happens because humans have absolute control in the realm of thought, shaped by the exchange of ideas and limited only by imagination. On the other hand, the realm of things is where humans face physical rules and necessities like hunger, diseases, famine, and death. Digitalization is a third step towards the supremacy of thoughts over things, and it is as transformative as industrialization was to farming and farming was to the hunter-gatherer way of life.
However, as with any transition into a new era, social relations and power dynamics change. New ideologies and thinking emerge to try to make sense of our role as humans and societies in the world we live in and shape. Userism observes that today, part of the unawareness of users is generated by a particular ideology based on the supremacy of the self and the material dimension. This ideology is "consumerism," born in the late industrial era and seamlessly transitioning into the new one. Consumerism explains our role in the new era starting from a profoundly material base: having things, living them, and showing them. Consumerism celebrates these actions as a way of being someone in society and achieving the goal of being perceived as "successful" and "self-realized."
By making "having it," "living it," and "showing it" our primary social functions to gain recognition, status, and a sense of self-realization, consumerism has a triple effect. The first effect is to justify the existence of digital systems, such as social networks and search engines, which transform our interactions with the digital world into data that can be collected and accessed by the digitalizing elite. Data is the raw resource needed to fuel digitalization. This system ensures elite monopoly over it.
The second effect is distancing us from intellectual and social dimensions, as these become subordinate to material possession and the appearance of the "self." This reduces our sense of identity and belonging, as well as our sense of dignity, since the most relevant aspect is what one manages to have, live, and show, rather than what one feels and is intimately, as part of a group, family, or as a worker. Intellectual and social dimensions are what users need to find their awareness and power to take control of digitalization.
The third effect is promoting consumption, an intuitive, direct way of making users morally willing to give money and data in exchange for things and services, not just out of physical necessity, but as a social-status and individual-identity need.
Userism identifies consumerism, as defined, as an elite-driven ideology opposed to the real interests of users. It stands between users and the possibility of a digital society that uses digital tools to serve humans, not subjugate them. Consumerism offers a simple but misleading answer to the many questions about who humans are in the new digital era. Userism, on the other hand, promotes these questions and seeks to find in the answers not the users' demise, but their empowerment. Digitalization, being a manifestation of abstraction, is not reversible. However, the forms it can take depend only on what the users do with it.
Userism is founded on the belief that users should organize as conscious and responsible individuals and collectives, manifesting the most positive, collective force that has emerged in the digital era. Userism believes that users, though confused and lost by their new social and economic roles in the digital era, can find themselves and take control of digitalization as the human process it is. Userism aims to be a tool to make users become active participants in a world that pushes them to remain passive.
Userism is not about partisanship or antipathy towards anyone or anything, whether a flag, creed, or individual. Instead, userism is about the preservation and safe transition of all flags, all creeds, and all individualities into the digital era. Because userism feels that human identity is threatened, that the power of many is being taken away dangerously fast, and that the happiness humans are asked to seek, today, is not their own.