Your life should not be mined for content
A thought on digital spaces
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.
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It is increasingly easier for younger people to earn money by creating online content than it is to find a job. In today’s economy, online platforms that make fortunes from placing online advertisements on our screens have a real necessity to mine humans for content.
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 we never got to live.
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 on a variation of the same theme. Because more of the same but different is always guaranteed to sell.
Meanwhile, our data, our work, 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.
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Cognitive Ecology is a philosophical notebook being written in public and collected in print at the end of 2026. You’re reading it as it takes shape. Start from the beginning here.
Thank you for reading,
—Claudia Befu
I've just belatedly grasped the bigger picture you've been painting for weeks, Claudia. I feel a bit of an idiot for not understanding before now.
I've been saying this for a whiiiiiile now