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.

Being human in the digital slot machine.

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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 deep dive builds toward a larger philosophical collection to be gathered in print. You can explore the full archive here.

Thank you for reading,
—Claudia B.