When everything is data, nothing is human.

Big Tech stopped seeing us as people. Now we're just data points to test, nudge, and monetize.

Ever logged onto your favorite social media site or pulled up an app you use all the time and notice it feels… different? That the button or the menu of options you reach for all the time seem to be in a different place or order — or so it feels like but you’re not entirely sure?

I used to think things like that were my imagination. Life seems to get more stressful every day, so maybe I just misremembered? I’m getting up there in years, too, so perhaps my memory isn’t what it used to be. Or so I once told myself.

Nudged into Being Guinea Pigs

Turns out, Big Tech doesn’t just try to nudge us into accepting tracking cookies. They nudge us into becoming their A/B testers. Their guinea pigs. 

It’s not an accident: it’s how they collect data on the best way to make us stay on platform or subscribed to their service so they can wring the maximum amount of information or money out of us until we just can’t take it anymore.

You might wonder, as I have many times late at night, why everything seems more predatory now. Some days, it feels like every interaction online is like a hold-up with the platforms forcing us to choose: your money or your life.

But how did we get to this point where businesses became so morally bankrupt they’re okay with manipulating customers for financial gain? That they don’t just fail to see the harm they’re doing — they actively ignore it?

The answer is that, like so many things going wrong on the internet these days, it all comes down to Google.

How Google Redefined “Information”

From its inception, Google's mission has been to "organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful." Until then, humanity considered information is the tsuff found in books, maps, records, letters — physically embodied data. In the decades since, we've come to redefine what that last bit means.

First we redefined information so it no longer required physical embodiment — digital existence counted, too. Physical books became ebooks. Newspapers became websites then blogs. Maps were no longer sheets of paper but digital routes composed of images taken by Google Streetcar — while it sucked up all sorts of other information as it passed unsecured wifi spots.¹

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From People to Data Points

And as we turned from living our lives in the physical world to living them more online, we became part of that digital information, too. Now "information" consists of digits that embody what we do, when, why and how, what we like, what we avoid, along with digital reproduction of physically embodied data.

And "informationalizing" every interaction, turning it into commodifiable behavioral surplus reinforces the notion that the originators of ideas have no claim to their intellectual property.

So the manipulation? The toying with peoples' lives? The tech bros would have you believe “it's nothing personal, bruh, it's data collection.”

NPCs in the Oligarchs’ Game

See, to the platforms and the broligarchs behind them, we aren't human. We are, as Cory Doctorow recently explained, non-player characters who are ultimately little more than accessories to the game they’re playing:

“But there's another way in which people like Musk are inclined to view others as NPCs: the only way to become a billionaire is to hurt and exploit lots of people.”

And if that exploitation leads to financial losses, addictive behaviors, sexualizing children, mental health crises and even suicide? They’ll tell you it’s not recklessness or disregard on their part — it’s just a glitch in the data.

Now, we’re all embeddings a in a knowledge graph, not people. We no longer create works of art, music, culture. We just generate data.

Cruelty Rebranded as Compression Loss

This reductive approach is how those who nudge and measure us justify what they do, how they think "moving fast and breaking things" is an imperative.

It's not stealing our intellectual property when they steal content, it's gathering data.

It's not intentionally frustrating users when they make using a service difficult or rage-baiting them when they surface oppositional content — it's quantifying their user-base and studying segments. Refining their algorithm.

Our Life is Mere Output

In their view, we're not humans with our own agency, our own lives and emotions that matter. We're datapoints to be studied through extracting our time and money. Big Tech has stopped seeing us as conscious beings with agency. They no longer have what Mustafa Suleyman recently described as the “nature to believe that things that remember and talk and do things and then discuss them feel, well, like us. Conscious."

There's No Sanctuary

Now, lived behaviors have become outputs of an organic “program” that algorithms are designed to predict, segment and influence through nudge architecture and choice engineering. When that leads to unexpected suffering, it’s viewed as compression loss — something to be studied so it can be more efficiently quantifed. 

In doing so, we’ve normalized treating lives that aren't our own as ours to quantify, to influence, even to devalue. We deny others what Zuboff calls the right to sanctuary — a space to exist without their actions being tracked, assessed, measured, and used to further quantify and retarget them. Assimilated.

By ignoring the humanity of others, we have abandoned our own.

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1. Mark Burdon and Alissa McKillop, “The Google Street View Wi-Fi Scandal and Its Repercussions for Privacy Regulation,” Monash University Law Review 39, no. 3 (2013): 702-743.