We are in a matrix. We can no longer escape this prison-house of language. The walls of the prison are made of the English Language – its imperialistic variant of it.

I argued before that our lives are conditioned by the ideology and the economic condition created by those who own the means of economic production. Our lives are also condition by the language that is globalising, colonising, technologising, and hegemonising. We are living in a ‘hegemonic’ world.

Hegemony comes from the Latin ‘egemon’ meaning ‘to lead’. When used in the context of this modern world in which digital media is dominant, it carries, borrowing Antonio Gramsci, the connotation of ‘common sense’.

We are imprisoned not only by the English Language but also by the economic condition that has transformed the language itself. We are shackled by the technicist version of the language, a version that is imprisoning the mind yet concealed in the language of ‘progress and development’.

Though this is a challenging concept to explain and a difficult proposition to discuss, I will give the example of the creation of the intelligent city of Cyberjaya.

We talk about ‘technology’ and ‘technological progress’ as if technology is neutral and does not have a life-force breathed into it.

Technologies are artifacts that have politics and are governed by rules of political-economy. Technologies have inert human labour fossilised in them; buried by the historical-materialism of the way we evolve as human beings.

The computer is technology that was developed by the Pentagon. The Internet technology was developed by the Pentagon, the same manner other communication technologies were developed by funding from the Department of Defense.