The Market of the Brain and the Culture of Illegality

Data, attention, and power: digital capitalism has turned private life into a commodity, and its logic now shapes markets, culture, and crime.

AI-generated image

Five of the most highly valued companies in financial terms are Meta Platforms, Alphabet, Microsoft, Amazon, and Apple. All of them are of U.S. origin and are the owners of contemporary capitalism. The Big Five, as they are known in financial circles, have, through their technological and digital developments, appropriated almost the entirety of public and private life.

Social relations, communication, and markets are controlled by these five companies. On a second tier—no less important—are companies such as Netflix, Disney, and Spotify, among others, which control access to new forms of entertainment and to culture.

These companies were the driving forces behind the business model known as freemium, a contraction of the English words free and premium. This model, created during the early years of the 21st century, is based on offering two types of services: one basic and free, and another advanced and paid. Contrary to what one might assume, the most profitable service for these companies was—and continues to be—the basic, free one.

Mandatory registration and the forced acceptance of a series of lengthy terms and conditions allow these companies to accumulate countless amounts of personal data and to learn users’ tastes, interests, and behaviors on the web. This information is analyzed through artificial intelligence applications, enabling the creation of detailed profiles of each person who was required to hand over their data in order to use the platforms.

These profiles are offered to companies that generally specialize in selling products or services online. With the data collected and the advertising services—provided by the same companies—advertising agencies create massively personalized campaigns—an oxymoron—focusing resources exclusively on users with profiles of potential customers.

In addition to optimizing marketing expenditures, it has been neuropsychologically and sociologically proven that the continuous repetition of advertisements increases the likelihood that people will ultimately decide to purchase a product. Massively personalized advertising strategies also have the ability to generate interest in products or services for which there had been no prior attraction before the barrage of ads.

Alphabet, the owner of Google and YouTube, together with Meta, which owns Facebook, Instagram, and WhatsApp—companies with significant investments in KoBold Metals, a firm that uses artificial intelligence to detect minerals in Greenland—reported that most of their revenue came from this type of advertising, reaching profits of USD 73.795 billion and USD 39.098 billion, respectively, by the end of 2023. With just a single click, the user who entered the web as a buyer became the commodity.

THE MARKET OF THE BRAIN AND IDEAS

It is not only companies that seek to refine their advertising campaigns through users’ personal and private information. Political parties, lobbying groups, social organizations, and criminal organizations also make use of the incalculable amount of data collected by the Big Five. The ability to influence through highly targeted mass advertising not only shapes people’s behavior in the marketplace, but also molds ethics, political thinking, and culture as a whole.

One of the first to recognize the potential of this model to influence political decisions—when massive and precise data are available—was the campaign team of then–presidential candidate Barack Obama in 2008.

Based on information gathered from social networks and on the analysis of political expressions made by users in one of the tests offered by Facebook, Obama’s campaign initially focused on publishing ads aimed at encouraging the registration of potential Democratic Party voters in the U.S. electoral system.

In a second stage, the ads concentrated on the specific interests of those potential voters who had already registered. The result of this data-driven, personalized campaign was that one million people registered to vote and that Barack Obama won the election by just 700,000 votes.

Artificial intelligence and mass-collected data are also used by criminal organizations to refine and expand their profit margins. Virtual kidnappings, extortion—especially of a sexual nature—and scams become far more difficult to prevent when applications capable of cloning voices are used and when information from the most intimate family circles, made public through social networks, is readily available.

The sector of criminal organizations that has used technology and data for the longest time to optimize results is the one led by lawyers, accountants, notaries, and bankers. Money laundering was one of the first areas in which artificial intelligence linked to cryptocurrency technologies and blockchain platforms was applied.

A 2023 report by the company Chainalysis—dedicated to the collection and analysis of data on blockchain networks—highlighted that transactions on these platforms rose from USD 14 billion in 2021 to nearly USD 44 billion in 2024.

DIGITAL RECRUITMENT AND THE CULTURE OF ILLEGALITY

The different structures of organized crime, with the exception of sectors dedicated to money laundering, show a high rate of turnover or instability when analyzed using terms drawn from labor relations. The average length of membership within a criminal organization does not exceed seven years. In most cases, a criminal career ends or is interrupted when members are killed or imprisoned. In organized crime, there is no agreement among private parties.

This high level of turnover represents a permanent challenge for those who lead such organizations. Ultimately, they must recruit people they know little about—or do not know at all—who are capable of committing all kinds of crimes, even against those who offered them an opportunity in their brief criminal careers. One of the newer tactics—though the strategy remains the same—consists of flooding social networks with videos and memes.

In different regions but with similar cultural backgrounds as a result of globalization, criminal organizations such as the Neapolitan Camorra, the Jalisco New Generation Cartel and Sinaloa's Cartel—along with influencers—display on social media vulgar demonstrations of the luxury they gain by belonging to these groups and committing certain crimes.

Through a large number of accounts on the most popular social networks—formerly Snapchat, today Instagram and TikTok—and an army of bots that function like a cocktail of cybernetic anabolic steroids, criminal organizations, especially those involved in drug trafficking, massively distribute content about the supposed economic and social benefits of joining a criminal organization.

The images are repeated over and over again: luxury cars, dollars, mansions, exotic animals, beautiful women, weapons of various calibers, tons of drugs, and extravagant parties. For a significant portion of young people—especially the grandchildren of the excluded working class—all of this serves as a means to attain a respect that society denies them, even though in reality they receive only fear and resentment.

The accounts of criminal organizations consistently use the same hashtags to attract and retain users. The videos are often accompanied by songs that, in one way or another, are linked to criminal activity. In Mexico, for example, so-called narcocorridos are very popular—a musical subgenre that glorifies drug traffickers, their crimes, their confrontations, their luxurious lifestyles, and their personal relationships.

This entire series of crimes recited in prose is covered with a thick veneer of solidarity that seeks to associate itself with figures such as Robin Hood in international popular literature or Jesús Malverde in Mexican popular culture. Many singers or entire musical groups end up murdered or investigated for complicity with the cartels, while international record labels that produce them and distribute their songs and videos through platforms such as Spotify, YouTube, or Apple Music increase their profits.

In Italy, the role played by narcocorridos is occupied by Neapolitan neomelodic music, a subgenre that has spread across much of Europe, despite the fact that Italian is spoken in only one country and the Neapolitan dialect in just one region of that same country.

One of the best-known exponents of the genre is Tony Colombo, a Sicilian who became a Neapolitan icon. He released more than twenty albums and in 2023 was charged with mafia association, money laundering, and cigarette smuggling along with some twenty other individuals. Two years later, he was acquitted of all charges.

Colombo’s links to the Camorra are not limited to artistic affinity or an alleged criminal business. His wife, Tina Rispoli—also implicated in the judicial investigation in which they were acquitted—was the widow of a mafia boss from the 1990s.

In digital capitalism, users’ cognitive capacity has become the flagship commodity that the Big Five sell to entrepreneurs, political leaders, social actors, and criminal organizations. The information that users pour onto the web—what we search for, what we think, when we share, with whom, where we have been, and even how we felt—constitutes the critical mass of business in this phase of digital capitalism.

Organized crime, and drug trafficking in particular, remains a subculture—an expression of something seemingly marginal—yet it is growing at an accelerated pace. Not only because of the actions of those who promote it, but also because of the appropriation carried out by the actors who shape hegemonic culture.

Entertainment companies, music and audiovisual production firms, and major publishing houses have begun to take an interest in this sector, which appears in songs, series, novels, films, and books, but which in everyday life occupies the crime pages of newspapers.

With a strikingly entrepreneurial, aggressive, and opportunistic outlook, these companies invest in bands, singers, and writers to turn stories of fear, violence, and working-class exclusion into shelf-ready products—devoid of subjectivity and metaphor.

This type of mass cultural production, stripped of critical perspective, is particularly harmful in sectors of society marked by precariousness, inequality, and a lack of future. In this context, organized crime, like any other moderately structured space, offers identity, belonging, symbolic recognition, and money—the master key of this system.

Artificial intelligence and the ability to do business with personal data, behavioral patterns, and the most sensitive and private human interests ultimately shroud the development of communal, diverse, and constantly contested life in a thick fog. The possibility that criminal organizations may use these same tools turns that thick fog into “toxic shit falling from the sky.”