You are not an end user
On internet real estate and digital sovereignty
You are what you can buy.
You are your bank account.
You are your worth.
You are a lonely wallet on the internet.
Profiling tools use our data to create a sinister version of our digital selves based on our online and offline activity. What we click, what we read, how we look, what we wear, and the backgrounds of our homes become clues in estimating our shopping prowess, inputs for psychological profiles, and levers for manipulation. End users within today’s digital infrastructure have only one primary goal: to make a purchase. The algorithm mines human attention until the purchase is fulfilled.
On glowing screens and scrolling feeds sprinkled with personalized ads, our feverish brains pick up in milliseconds the clues rolling before our eyes: click, fill shopping cart, buy, reset account balance. The little rush of ephemeral happiness—that the empty wallets of our hearts and minds can never truly buy—is on the house.
No matter how much automation is introduced on the market, humans won’t lose their one true job in the techno-capitalist utopia: being an end user. Human existence is reduced to an endless loop of content creation and consumption, tethered to technology that extracts human intelligence and creativity to improve machines tasked with achieving the holy grail of progress: Artificial General Intelligence (AGI).
Your data shouldn’t be someone else’s digital property.
Your work shouldn’t be someone else’s digital property.
Your art shouldn’t be someone else’s digital property.
Your life should not be mined for content.
It is increasingly easier for younger people to earn money by creating online content than it is to find a job. The digital platforms making fortunes by placing advertisements on our screens are mining human lives.
This is how we reduce our unique, beautiful existence to a reel or a post on an endless scrolling feed, a blur of human experiences parsed as free content on the internet. No wonder we increasingly think that our lives are copies of other lives and are nostalgic for times past.
When we optimize our creativity for free online consumption by bringing it to the lowest common denominator to cater to the largest audience, we turn ourselves into a human sketch, doomed to perform a variation of the same theme. Because more of the same but different is always guaranteed to sell.
Meanwhile, our data, our work, and our art are turned into free digital goods from which digital platforms and new technologies can extract value without any added benefit for us. Our lives consumed by the digital slot machine.
You are a node in someone else’s infrastructure.
Once Artificial General Intelligence is achieved, the law of optimization and efficiency will remove the inefficient biological node from the technological infrastructure, enabling us to exploit and extract value from a considerably vaster resource: the universe. In the techno-futurist imagination, the final destination is populating entire galaxies with happily ever after simulations of end users in a techno-utopian hell of our own making.
What do we leave behind as we furiously speed ahead to an illusory future where no one truly lives?
The new generations are already born as end users. Forever nostalgic watching the digital memories we leave behind of a world that could have been. Frozen in time and space, tethered to the gadgets they inherited from us, their youth extracted as content to be consumed by the digital ad machine. For them, human communication will forever be engagement, relationships will be digital transactions, and intimacy online monetization, as they are forced to obey the supreme law that anything goes as long as it sells.
Perhaps they never wanted to spend their one wild, beautiful life like this, but we didn’t give them any choice but to wander the digital recesses of our collective memories searching for a world they will never know. Wanting to stop time. Stop the scroll. Stop the inner vortex of the world from swallowing them whole in the stillness of their rooms. The only light, a glowing screen. Their future slipping away from them like a dream. Their hearts aching for the beautiful pain of feeling alive.
The algorithm determines what you see, what you think, and how you engage.
In the digital world, nothing belongs to us. The digital infrastructure that harvests human bodies and minds is not built for the betterment of humanity. It is built to extract value from us for its owners. It is inherently feudal. We plant our knowledge, skills, time, and dreams on rented digital land, but the harvest fills someone else’s granaries. We are end users of more and more devices connected to our bodies and minds tracking our daily activities, medical records, work records, travels, thoughts, emotions, and longings. This data exists as memory logs of our existence, an extension of our personhood. Humans should own their digital selves, just as they own their physical selves.
Our digital spaces reflect our modern worldview, fixated on extraction and consumption. In the physical world, the planet is the raw material. In digital spaces, human existence is the raw material. Our intelligence is the training input for technologies meant to replace any form of human expression and manifestation in this world. End users are passive recipients of whatever was created to monetize them.
As digital reality becomes our main reality, physical spaces and our means of independent subsistence are slowly encroached by the same feudal lords. Humans as end users of technology. Humans as end users of the planet. Technology as a platform. Earth as a platform. An endless scrolling feed of products, services, and entertainment. In its mindless quest for monetization, the modern algorithm turns our digital and physical existence into one blurry human journey to an ad funnel. One life, one big wallet. Pay in. Pay out. We are physical and digital nodes in someone else’s infrastructure.
Digital spaces are created by human intelligence. The technology of the future is made possible by extracting human intelligence. Yet, these systems are built to strip us of everything that makes us human. Physical sovereignty will not survive without digital sovereignty.
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This essay is part of my ongoing project Cognitive Sovereignty, a year-long exploration of society, technology, nature, and the future of life on Earth through aphorisms and reflections. Each weekly reflection builds toward a larger philosophical collection to be gathered in print.
You can explore the full archive here.
Thank you for reading,
—Claudia B.
When it comes to digital services, we are not the consumers. We are instead the consumed.
Great insights!
The title of your post reminds me of a chapter in "Generation X" (the novel): "I am not a target market".
The themes today are the themes from 35(!) years ago. We are *all* target markets. Or, to put it in a 21st-century term, if it's free, then you're not the customer; you're the product. The only thing that's changed, really, is the efficiency of data collection and the scope of what people can collect.
But then, technology has always been a double-edged sword...