From Digital Freedom to Militarized Control: Reading Jorge Majfud

Tracing the collapse of internet utopias as Majfud exposes the quiet march from connection to control

Majfud’s Early Warnings on Control, Fascism, and the Betrayed Promise of the Digital Age. The Digital Paradox: Liberation as Prelude to Control

In the late 1990s, the internet was welcomed as the great solvent of hierarchies. Commentators promised a new era of horizontal communication, participatory democracy, and the erosion of traditional gatekeepers. In this triumphant narrative, networks would replace nations, and information would finally slip the grip of power. Yet within a generation, the digital revolution has become inseparable from mass surveillance, data extraction, predictive policing, algorithmic propaganda, and the subtle normalization of authoritarian practices. The same infrastructures that were supposed to liberate have been patiently retooled to discipline, monitor, and manage populations.

Few writers anticipated this reversal with more clarity than the Uruguayan-American author and professor Jorge Majfud. Writing from the early 2000s onward, he treated the promise of digital democratization not as an endpoint, but as the beginning of a counter-movement. For Majfud, the expansion of communication inevitably produces an expansion of control; the more information circulates, the more aggressively power reorganizes itself to monitor, filter, and weaponize it. Long before terms like “surveillance capitalism” or “platform authoritarianism” were popularized, Majfud had already mapped the trajectory from digital euphoria to militarized reaction.

Every new language of freedom, Majfud suggests, generates a new grammar of control.

Majfud in the Early 2000s: Reading the Reaction Before It Arrived

By 2002, when many commentators still celebrated the internet as a self-evident democratizing force, Majfud was already asking a more unsettling question: how would the traditional architectures of power respond to this sudden diffusion of information? His answer was not technological but political. He argued that states and dominant economic interests would not passively accept the erosion of their control over narratives, knowledge, and public perception. Instead, they would respond through a complex strategy of militarization, securitization, and ideological realignment. In early essays such as “Teología del dinero” (“Theology of Money”) and “Tiempos oscuros” (“Dark Times”), published in 2002 in La República, Majfud had already begun to trace—before the concept had a name—the theological dimensions of financial power and the darkening of public life under securitization.

In his essays, Majfud repeatedly warned that the “war on terror” after September 11, 2001, was not merely a foreign policy framework but a domestic grammar for reorganizing Western societies. He interpreted the new security discourse as a cultural project: a way of cultivating fear, demanding obedience, and legitimizing an expanded apparatus of surveillance and control. The digital revolution, far from dismantling this apparatus, gave it unprecedented reach. What was framed as protection against external enemies doubled as a justification for monitoring internal dissent.

Majfud’s early writings insist that the militarization of public life is not confined to police forces, intelligence agencies, or foreign interventions. Militarization, for him, is also rhetorical and symbolic. It appears in how citizens are asked to view themselves—as potential suspects, as data points to be scanned, as audiences to be managed rather than as political subjects to be engaged. Underneath the new language of connectivity, he discerned the emergence of a more disciplined, more tightly supervised social order, one that could coexist quite comfortably with the formal rituals of liberal democracy.

Majfud, J. Theology of Money: The Slow Collapse of the Anglo-Saxon Order. (2025) Selected Essays 2001–2024

Digital Freedom and the Architecture of Control

Central to Majfud’s thinking is the tension between emancipatory practices and the structures that seek to neutralize them. A key expression of this concern appears in his long essay “The Slow Suicide of the West” (originally published in La República in 2002–2003 and later republished in Monthly Review in 2006), where he advances the thesis that the so‑called Western world has always harbored its greatest enemy within itself —its own traumas and inner monsters, from fascism, Nazism, and racism to a persistent impulse to conquer through the destruction of the Other— and where he analyzes the post‑9/11 “war on terror” as a domestic grammar for reorganizing Western societies through fear, surveillance, and securitization. The internet made it possible for marginalized voices to speak, organize, and document abuses of power. Yet the same tools that distributed dissent also generated unprecedented quantities of data about individuals and communities. For Majfud, it was naïve to imagine that such data would remain politically neutral. Power, he argues, rarely ignores new resources; instead, it incorporates them into its own logic.

In this sense, the democratizing potential of the digital sphere coexists with its role as a laboratory for new forms of control. If earlier authoritarian regimes relied on censorship and overt repression, contemporary systems can afford a more subtle strategy: allow speech, but monitor it; allow association, but map it; allow critique, but drown it in distraction or algorithmic noise. Majfud’s essays illuminate this shift from prohibiting communication to governing it, from silencing to saturating.

He also underscored the complicity of corporate power in this process. The platforms that mediate our lives are not neutral public squares but profit-driven infrastructures. Their business models depend on prediction, influence, and behavioral nudging—capacities that align almost seamlessly with the desires of states seeking to track, anticipate, and channel public behavior. The boundary between corporate optimization and political control, Majfud suggested, is thin and increasingly permeable.

What appears as connectivity, in Majfud’s work, is also a new cartography of power—one that traces, records, and anticipates our movements long before we name them as political.

From Prediction to Reality: The 2000s–2020s

Looking back from the 2020s, it is difficult not to recognize the prescience of Majfud’s warnings. The consolidation of mass surveillance after 9/11, later revealed in unprecedented detail by whistleblowers, confirmed his intuition that security rhetoric would underwrite expanded monitoring of ordinary citizens. What was once considered exceptional—bulk data collection, secret judicial procedures, expansive intelligence cooperation—has become normalized within many Western democracies.

At the same time, the commercial internet has matured into an ecosystem of pervasive tracking and behavioral profiling. Social media platforms harvest personal data at a scale that would have been unimaginable in the 1990s. Targeted advertising, algorithmic curation, and opaque recommendation systems shape not only what we consume, but also what we believe and who we trust. Political campaigns and interest groups exploit these infrastructures to micro-target messages, manufacture outrage, and deepen polarization. In this environment, the promise of an open public sphere gives way to a fractured, manipulable attention economy.

Majfud’s analysis of rising authoritarian tendencies in the West also finds clear echoes in the present. Across the 2000s–2020s, populist movements have gained ground by fusing resentment with nationalism, presenting themselves as defenders of “the people” against cosmopolitan elites, immigrants, or imagined internal enemies. Often, these movements adopt a language of anti-system rebellion while simultaneously supporting stronger policing, harsher border regimes, and expanded surveillance powers. The digital sphere, far from neutralizing these currents, has supplied them with tools for rapid mobilization, symbolic warfare, and disinformation.

In this landscape, Majfud’s early insistence on linking militarization, media, and myth-making appears strikingly lucid. Surveillance is not only about cameras and databases; it is also about narratives that justify them. The story that society is perpetually under threat—the story that safety demands sacrifice—prepares citizens to accept practices that would previously have been perceived as intolerable. The line between democratic security and authoritarian management becomes progressively blurred.

Intellectual Courage and the Task of Naming

Part of what distinguishes Majfud’s contribution is not only his analytical reach but his willingness to name uncomfortable tendencies within societies that continue to describe themselves as liberal and democratic. To speak of fascist drifts, militarized imaginaries, and systemic racism in the context of the contemporary West is to challenge cherished self-understandings. Yet for Majfud, critical thought cannot be reduced to loyalty rituals; it must follow problems where they lead, even when they unsettle national myths or institutional self-images.

This intellectual courage is closely tied to his position as both Latin American and North American, as a writer whose work moves across languages, borders, and academic spaces. From this vantage, he reads the digital turn not as a purely technological phenomenon, but as part of a longer history of empire, inequality, and cultural domination. The new architectures of control, he suggests, do not replace older forms of violence and exclusion; they update them. The database and the drone, the algorithm and the border wall, belong to the same historical continuum.

Within the broader landscape of contemporary thought, Majfud’s work stands out for the way it weaves sociopolitical critique with literary sensitivity. He does not simply enumerate technologies and policies; he attends to the stories that justify them, the metaphors that make them seem inevitable, and the silences they require. In doing so, he offers not just a set of arguments, but a way of reading the present—alert to what is being normalized, who is being rendered invisible, and how language itself can either resist or reinforce domination.

Why Majfud Matters Now

To read Jorge Majfud today is to encounter not only a chronicler of the early digital age, but a guide to its still-unfolding consequences. His work reminds us that technologies do not carry political destinies within themselves. They are shaped by struggles over power, narrative, and memory. The internet has indeed enabled new forms of solidarity, exposure, and critical inquiry, but it has also enabled more intricate techniques of surveillance and control than any previous regime could have imagined.

Majfud invites readers—and especially students, teachers, and researchers—to hold these realities together without resignation. Recognizing the militarization of everyday life is not the same as accepting it. On the contrary, clear analysis is a precondition for resistance, for reimagining how communication, education, and collective life might be organized beyond the dictates of security and profit. In that sense, his essays are not simply diagnoses; they are provocations, urging us to think carefully about how we inhabit the digital and political spaces we have inherited.

As Professor Press celebrates authors and professors whose work illuminates our present, Jorge Majfud occupies a central place. His writings exemplify an engaged, interdisciplinary intellect, one that crosses borders and disciplines in order to confront the ethical challenges of our time. Learn more about the authors featured on this site on our Authors page.

A Futuristic Vision from 2000: ‘2055: El ombligo del mundo’

Among Jorge Majfud’s lesser-known but remarkably prescient works stands a short story titled “2055: El ombligo del mundo” (2055: The World’s Navel), written around 2000 and published by Ediciones Irreverentes in Spain (Antología de Ciencia Ficción, 2012) alongside other editions. This science fiction narrative occupies a singular place in Majfud’s broader intellectual project: it is the literary embodiment of the very warnings he would articulate in his contemporaneous essays “Teología del dinero” and “Tiempos oscuros,” published in La República between 2002 and 2003. Where his journalism and essays diagnose the mechanisms of contemporary power, “2055: El ombligo del mundo” imagines their full realization through the form of speculative fiction.

The story is set in the year 2055 and depicts a world of total surveillance—a reality so normalized that resistance has become almost unthinkable. Citizens live under permanent observation, their movements tracked, their communications monitored, their behaviors predicted and shaped by algorithmic systems that have become indistinguishable from governance itself. Privacy has not been abolished through overt prohibition but through a gradual erosion so complete that the very concept of a private interior life has atrophied. The story portrays a society in which the boundary between surveillance and society has collapsed, where monitoring is as ambient as air and twice as invisible. What makes the narrative particularly striking is that it imagines this world before smartphones, before social media, before the mass harvesting of personal data, before the vocabulary of “surveillance capitalism” had been coined. Majfud, writing at the turn of the millennium, had already intuited the trajectory that would emerge only in the subsequent two decades.

The psychological and social effects of this hypersurveillance form the emotional core of the narrative. Majfud’s characters experience a peculiar form of atomization—not isolation, but rather a disconnection that occurs in the midst of total interconnection. The normalization of being watched produces a collapse of interiority. Individuals lose the capacity for genuine privacy, even in their own thoughts, because the internalized awareness of observation becomes inescapable. Self-censorship becomes automatic and unconscious; citizens edit their thoughts before they even fully form. The story documents the transformation of human identity under permanent observation: the self becomes a managed performance, always aware of its visibility, always anticipating judgment. What Majfud portrays is not the spectacular oppression of a totalitarian boot but the subtle psychological dissolution that occurs when privacy becomes not forbidden but obsolete.

The remarkable prescience of “2055: El ombligo del mundo” becomes even more evident when one considers what has actually transpired in the two decades since its composition. The story anticipated not only the technologies of surveillance but the social and psychological mechanisms through which their acceptance becomes normalized. In this sense, Majfud was theorizing through fiction what scholars like Shoshana Zuboff would only later name and analyze systematically as “surveillance capitalism,” and what Byung-Chul Han would explore philosophically as the pathologies of performance under permanent observation. By situating this literary vision within the context of Majfud’s contemporaneous essays—essays that warned of militarization, securitization, and the appropriation of freedom-enabling technologies for purposes of control—we can recognize that the author was articulating a unified and deeply prescient analysis of the coming world: an analysis expressed simultaneously through journalism, philosophical essays, and speculative fiction. The story thus stands as testimony to an intellectual courage that named, and gave narrative form to, the dystopian future that would gradually become the present.

Neomedievalism and the Abyss of Power: ‘City of the Moon’ (2009)

Published in 2009, Jorge Majfud’s novel City of the Moon stands as one of the most disturbing and visionary works of contemporary Latin American literature — a novel that, far from being a conventional dystopia, reads today as an uncomfortable anticipation of political and ecological realities that would only crystallize in the following decade. Written well before the vocabulary of ‘neomedievalism’ had entered mainstream political discourse, the novel depicts a world in which the structures of centralized modern statehood have dissolved, replaced by overlapping zones of private power, warlordism, corporate sovereignty, and ideological tribalism — a fragmentation that Majfud renders not as chaos but as a new order, one with its own brutal internal logic.

The novel is set in a lost, unnamed place in Algeria — a geography at once specific and allegorical. The choice of location is deliberate: Algeria carries the weight of colonial history, anti-colonial struggle, and postcolonial disappointment. In Majfud’s hands, this landscape becomes the site of a final catastrophe — an ecological collapse that serves simultaneously as the novel’s climax and its moral verdict. The environmental disaster is not merely a plot event but the logical conclusion of the social and political arrangements the novel has documented: systems of extraction, exclusion, and domination that treat both land and people as resources to be consumed. The ecological catastrophe in City of the Moon is, in this sense, inseparable from the social catastrophe that precedes it. One does not cause the other; they are the same process viewed from different angles.

The novel’s portrait of neofascism is rendered not through the iconography of historical fascism — the uniforms, the rallies, the official rhetoric of racial purity — but through something more contemporary and therefore more insidious: the normalization of exclusion, the aestheticization of violence, the transformation of political identity into tribal belonging, and the collapse of the distinction between entertainment and propaganda. Majfud depicts societies in which authoritarian tendencies are embraced not despite their irrationality but because of it — because they offer the psychological comfort of certainty, hierarchy, and an enemy. The novel’s neofascist formations are not imposed from above but generated from below, emerging from the same anxieties and resentments that surveillance capitalism would later learn to harvest and monetize.

Read alongside Majfud’s essays from the early 2000s — Teología del dinero, Tiempos oscuros, and the framework that would later be recognized as an anticipation of neofeudalism — City of the Moon reveals itself as the novelistic culmination of a sustained intellectual project: an attempt to think through, in multiple registers simultaneously, the direction in which globalized modernity was heading. The novel ends not with resolution but with ruin — a ruin that is also, in Majfud’s framing, a kind of brutal clarity. What the city of the moon finally reveals is the world as it actually is, stripped of the narratives that had made it bearable. In this sense, City of the Moon is not a pessimistic novel but a diagnostic one — a literary MRI of civilizational tendencies that, more than fifteen years after its publication, continue to advance with the quiet certainty of a geological force.

Sources

I. Works by Jorge Majfud

Majfud, Jorge. “Democracias virtuales.” PiensaChile, 23 Oct. 2010.
Majfud, Jorge. “La generación Post Facebook: Hacia una democracia directa.” Sociedad Uruguaya, Jul. 2012.
Majfud, Jorge. Crisis. Editorial Baile del Sol, 2012.
Majfud, Jorge. “La LUC y la militarización de las sociedades.” Tacuarembó 2030.
Majfud, Jorge. “The Slow Suicide of the West.” Originally published 2002; republished in Monthly Review, Sept. 2006.
Majfud, Jorge. La frontera salvaje. Ediciones Baile del Sol, 2022.
Majfud, Jorge. Essays archive. Majfud.org.
Majfud, Jorge. Author page. Página/12.
1. El tiempo que me tocó vivir — 2004
Essays
This is probably the single most important early collection to cite for the argument in your text. Its table of contents includes:
“Teología del Dinero”
“Tiempos Oscuros”
“Espasmos del Poder Global”
“La sociedad desobediente”
“La libertad y el poder”
“Libertad y Liberalismo”
“La vida humana como efecto colateral”
“El recurso del miedo”
“Desobediencia y disentimiento”
“Cultura e ideología”
“La enfermedad moral del patriotismo”
“Las fronteras mentales del tribalismo”
The collection is available in full through the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.

Read *El tiempo que me tocó vivir* — Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes

2. “La sociedad desobediente” — 2003/2004
This essay is especially important because Majfud explicitly contrasts civil disobedience with increasing military control. His formulation describes a coming period in which the West would face a choice between “greater military control” and civil disobedience.
Read “La sociedad desobediente” — Jorge Majfud

3. “The Slow Suicide of the West” / “El lento suicidio de Occidente” — 2002–2003.
Majfud originally published the essay in La República in 2002/2003, with an English version subsequently appearing in Monthly Review. The essay examines the post-9/11 reaction in terms of militarization, fear, intolerance, authoritarianism, and the erosion of Western democratic values. Majfud interpreted the post-9/11 “war on terror” as more than foreign policy: as a transformation of domestic political culture.
Read “The Slow Suicide of the West” — Majfud.org

4. Neomedievalism — English collection
The collection includes:
“The Culture of Hate”
“Rock Democracies, Paper Freedoms, Scissors Securities”
“The Repressed History of the United States”
“The Pandemic of Consumerism”
“The Slow Suicide of the West”
“Propaganda and the Myth of Reconquest”
“Hurricane Katrina and the Hyperreality of the Image”
“On How to Topple an Empire”
“The Walled Society”
“The Age of Barbaria”
The published table of contents confirms the concentration of essays dealing with propaganda, media, security, consumerism, political power, and the manipulation of public perception. It is about the historical transformation of power and the appropriation of supposedly emancipatory institutions by dominant interests.
*Neomedievalism* — Digitalia Publishing

5. “The Culture of Hate” / “La cultura del odio” — 2006
Majfud describes the relationship between propaganda, obedience, media, ideology, and power. He argues that mass media can become instruments for disciplining citizens and constructing ideological meanings, and explicitly characterizes contemporary communication as simultaneously information and deformation.
Read “The Culture of Hate” — Monthly Review Online

6. “Rock Democracies, Paper Freedoms, Scissors Securities” — 2000s, about the apparent coexistence of liberal democracy and increasingly securitized societies. Majfud explicitly examines the contradiction between democracy, freedom, and security and argues that ideals such as freedom can be transformed into political myths serving powerful interests. It is also included in Neomedievalism.

7. Cyborgs, 2012, Essays
Majfud’s Cyborgs appeared in 2012. His later writing explicitly returns to the book’s argument about the convergence of humans, technology, consumerism, artificial intelligence, and changing conceptions of reality.
This gives you a much stronger basis for saying that Majfud was thinking about the consequences of technological transformation before the current explosion of AI and algorithmic culture.
Cyborgs, Jorge Majfud’s bibliography

8. “The Own Opinion and Other Banalities”, 2015
Majfud’s later English retrospective explicitly identifies this 2015 essay as significant because it anticipated a world in which machines could form opinions about individuals based on their consumption habits and social/racial position.
That makes it unusually relevant to your present-day discussion of: algorithmic profiling, behavioral prediction, data extraction, automated classification, and personalized manipulation.

9. U.S.A. ¿Confía Dios en nosotros?, 2017
Published by the Universitat de València, its contents include:
“El lento suicidio de Occidente”
“La enfermedad moral del patriotismo”
“Las fronteras mentales del tribalismo”
“El recurso del miedo”
“Ron Paul y el anarquismo de derecha”
“El capitalismo postliberal”
and essays concerning American culture, capitalism, nationalism, fear, ideology, and political power.
The university publication record identifies it as part of the Biblioteca Javier Coy d’Estudis Nord-Americans.
*U.S.A. ¿Confía Dios en nosotros?* — Universitat de València

10. La narración de lo invisible: una teoría política de los campos semánticos
Majfud’s central concern here is how political power operates through language and through the construction of meanings—precisely the issue behind your text’s discussion of narratives, metaphors, myths, and ideological framing.
The work originated as a University of Georgia thesis and subsequently appeared in several editions; the 2021 edition identifies it as La narración de lo invisible. Una teoría política de los campos semánticos.
The Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes also catalogs the work.
Read *La narración de lo invisible* — Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes

11. Crisis de las democracias liberales: El derrumbe de la Pax americana — 2024
Published by the Universitat de València in 2024, the book addresses: cultural and media crisis, the culture of distraction, psychological and electoral engineering, markets as dogma, corporations and democracy, and the transformation of elections into empty rituals.
The publisher describes it explicitly as a selection of Majfud’s essays on the crisis of contemporary Western civilization.
*Crisis de las democracias liberales* — Universitat de València

12. Moscas en la telaraña: Capitalismo anglosajón y postcapitalismo norteamericano, 2025
Published by the Universitat de València in 2025, it traces the historical relationship between capitalism, imperialism, slavery, media, democracy, corporate power, and the commercialization of human existence. It develops Majfud’s concept of a “Modelo de Progresión Inversa”, whereby elites appropriate emancipatory ideas and redirect them toward systems of domination.
That concept is extremely useful for your central proposition that the Internet’s emancipatory potential can be appropriated by institutions of surveillance and control.
*Moscas en la telaraña* — Universitat de València

II. Critical Studies on Majfud

“La violencia moral en ‘La reina de América’ de Jorge Majfud.” Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.
Majfud-Albernaz, Jorge. “La literatura del compromiso.” PhD dissertation. University of Georgia, 2008.
García-Teresa, Alberto. “Crisis, a Novel.” Majfud.org, 22 Feb. 2014.
Barahona, Karen, Ph.D. Review of Crisis, by Jorge Majfud. Sociedad Uruguaya / Éxodo Oriental, 2014.
“La narrativa de Jorge Majfud.” Academic bibliography and teaching page. Jacksonville University.
“Ideology and Intervention: A Critical Review of Jorge Majfud’s The Wild Frontier.” Majfud.org, 4 May 2025.
“El presente está lleno de olvidos mercenarios.” Reception essay on La frontera salvaje. Rebelión.
“Estudios sobre Estados Unidos.” CLACSO, vol. 3, no. 10, 2023. [Cites Majfud and La frontera salvaje.]
“Conversaciones sobre ficciones y realidades.” Revista Mito interview with Majfud. Majfud.org, 19 Jun. 2016.
Noel, Urayoán. “Latin American Intellectuals in the Age of Empire.” Latin American Research Review, vol. 48, no. 2, 2013, pp. 210–225.

1. Nina Pluta: “Migrancias y la dimensión transnacional de la crítica en la narrativa de Jorge Majfud”

Nina Podleszańska, Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana.

Dr. Nina Podleszańska, Universidad Pedagógica de Cracovia, examines Majfud’s writing as a transnational project that crosses literature, journalism, politics, and cultural criticism. She identifies his work as that of a dissident subject critically confronting the global political-economic system and emphasizes the circulation of the same critical ideas among his fiction, essays, and journalism.

Dr. Podleszańska presents Majfud not simply as a political commentator but as a writer whose literary and political projects are structurally interconnected.

“Migrancias y la dimensión transnacional de la crítica en la narrativa de Jorge Majfud” — Nina Pluta

2. Laurine Duneau — “La violencia moral en La reina de América de Jorge Majfud”

Laurine Duneau, Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes.

Duneau, Université d’Orléans, France, offers a textual analysis of La reina de América, focusing on moral violence and the representation of violence within Majfud’s fiction. The study is catalogued by the Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes as a critical study of Uruguayan narrative. Duneau’s research extends beyond Majfud’s political essays into specialized literary analysis of his fiction.

“La violencia moral en ‘La reina de América’” — Laurine Duneau

3. Leonor Taiano: “Huyendo hacia la paradoja del Tío Sam: Consideraciones sobre Crisis de Jorge Majfud”

This study examines Majfud’s novel Crisis as a form of analytical and visionary realism, emphasizing its combination of individual experience with the geopolitical context of the United States and Latin America. Taiano also discusses Hispanic-American collective identity, language, migration, and the tension between Hispanic culture and dominant Anglo-American culture.

Dr. Taiano, University of Notre Dame, shows how scholars interpret Majfud’s fiction as a vehicle for geopolitical and cultural criticism, rather than treating the political dimension as merely journalistic.

Leonor Taiano, “Huyendo hacia la paradoja del Tío Sam”

4. El otro en Jorge Majfud

In this thesis for the University of Valencia and later a book, Raúl Ferrer Herrero details and reflects on the representation of “the Other” in Majfud’s work. Besides serving as an intellectual biography of Majfud, the concept of el otro provides a theoretical bridge between Majfud’s literary work and his broader concerns with colonialism, race, migration, identity, nationalism, cultural domination, and the construction of outsiders.

5. “Deconstructing ‘The American Dream’ in Selected Works of Hari Kunzru and Sumit Gupta

Sumit Gupta and Jawaharlal Nehru, scholars at the University of New Delhi, offer a comparative approach that places Majfud within a broader Anglo-American/postcolonial literary context, rather than treating him exclusively as a Latin American writer. They discuss Majfud’s criticism of the United States through the concept of the “American Dream”, including its contradictions, exclusions, and ideological foundations.

6. Bosquejo de la construcción de América Latina. Critical scholarship

The Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes catalogs Bosquejo de la construcción de América Latina as a “Estudio crítico” and specifically indexes its relationship to Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and the critical interpretation of Sarmiento. Majfud’s intellectual project is not exclusively contemporary. His scholarship engages with the genealogy of Latin American identity and ideology, including the nineteenth-century opposition between civilization and barbarism. This essay places Majfud within a longer tradition of Latin American intellectual history and shows that his critique of power is rooted partly in a reinterpretation of earlier Latin American debates.

7. Studies of Crítica de la pasión pura

Majfud’s Crítica de la pasión pura has also generated bibliographic and critical attention. PhilPapers records the 2007 edition and describes the book as a philosophical collection dealing with ethics, morality, fear, history, representations of the world, humanistic evolution, and the reactions of traditional power. The Biblioteca Virtual Miguel de Cervantes likewise catalogs it as an essayistic work. This is useful for scholars interested in the philosophical rather than strictly political dimension of Majfud’s writing.

III. Related Works: Digital Democracy, Surveillance, and Militarism

Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Translated by Alan Sheridan, Pantheon Books, 1977.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, 2019.
Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. PublicAffairs, 2011.

References and Bibliography

Books

Chomsky, Noam, and Edward S. Herman. Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media. Pantheon Books, 1988.
Foucault, Michel. Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Trans. Alan Sheridan. Pantheon Books, 1977.
Morozov, Evgeny. The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom. PublicAffairs, 2011.
Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. PublicAffairs, 2019.
Castells, Manuel. The Power of Communication. Oxford University Press, 2009.
Andrejevic, Mark. Infoglut: How Too Much Information Is Changing the Way We Think and Know. Routledge, 2013.
Lyon, David. Surveillance Society: Monitoring Everyday Life. Open University Press, 2001.

Academic Journal Articles

Zuboff, Shoshana. “Big Other: Surveillance Capitalism and the Prospects of an Information Civilization.” Journal of Information Technology, vol. 30, no. 1, 2015, pp. 75–89. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1057/jit.2015.5
Zuboff, Shoshana. “Surveillance Capitalism or Democracy? The Death Match of Institutional Orders.” Big Data & Society, vol. 9, no. 1, 2022. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/26317877221129290
Keremoğlu, Eda, and Nils B. Weidmann. “How Dictators Control the Internet: A Review Essay.” Comparative Political Studies, vol. 53, no. 10–11, 2020. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/0010414020912278
Jester, Natalie. “Accessible, Transparent, Progressive: Conceptualising the Militarisation of Digital Space through the Social Media Presence of Arms Manufacturers.” Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2023. https://eprints.glos.ac.uk/11708/
“Militarization 2.0: Communication and the Normalization of Political Violence in the Digital Age.” International Studies Review, vol. 23, no. 3, 2021, pp. 1046–1072. https://academic.oup.com/isr/article/23/3/1046/5866651
“Towards a Critical Political Economy of Surveillance and Digital Authoritarianism.” Surveillance & Society, 2023. https://ojs.library.queensu.ca/index.php/surveillance-and-society/article/view/18917
“Digital Authoritarianism: A Systematic Literature Review.” Information Technology & Politics, 2024. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/02681102.2024.2425352
Meserve, Stephen A., and Daniel Pemstein. “Terrorism and Internet Censorship.” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 57, no. 6, 2020. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0022343320959369

Magazines and Online Sources

Parsons, Christopher. “The Militarization of the Internet.” Discussion draft, 2016. https://christopher-parsons.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/a-2016-331.pdf
“The Militarization of Social Media Platforms.” Costs of War Project, Watson Institute, Brown University, 2025. https://costsofwar.watson.brown.edu
Majfud, Jorge. City of the Moon. Ediciones Irreverentes, 2009. A novel depicting the rise of neomedievalism and neofascism in a fragmented world, culminating in an ecological catastrophe set in Algeria.
International Journalists’ Network. “Silenced Voices, Digital Resistance: Policy Report on Platform Authoritarianism.” 2025. https://internationaljournalists.org
Cadwalladr, Carole. “This Is What a Digital Coup Looks Like.” TED-Ed, 2019. https://ed.ted.com/lessons/this-is-what-a-digital-coup-looks-like-carole-cadwalladr
Majfud, Jorge. “Teología del dinero.” La República, Bitácora Magazine, 2002. Recovered and republished at Majfud.org, 19 Oct. 2010, https://majfud.org/2010/10/19/teologia-del-dinero/
Majfud, Jorge. “2055: El ombligo del mundo.” Cuentos. Ediciones Irreverentes, Spain, 2000. A speculative fiction story depicting a future world of hypersurveillance and its social and psychological effects on individuals.
Al Jazeera. “Who Should Control Our Digital World?” The Stream, 17 Feb. 2026. https://www.aljazeera.com/video/the-stream/2026/2/17/who-should-control-our-digital-world

Documentaries and Video Lectures

The Social Dilemma. Directed by Jeff Orlowski. Netflix, 2020.
Coded Bias. Directed by Shalini Kantayya. Independent Lens / PBS, 2020.
In the Age of AI. FRONTLINE / PBS, 2019. https://www.pbs.org/wgbh/frontline/documentary/in-the-age-of-ai/
Golbeck, Jen, and Shalini Kantayya. “How Algorithms Manipulate You (and How to Fight Back).” TED, 2022. https://www.ted.com/talks/jen_golbeck_and_shalini_kantayya_how_algorithms_manipulate_you_and_how_to_fight_back
“Cybernetic Authoritarianism: On Silicon Valley’s Technofascism.” University of Hamburg lecture series, 2023. https://lecture2go.uni-hamburg.de/en/l2go/-/get/v/73380