Algorithmic Telekinesis

An amusing thought dawned upon me like a drop of dew amidst the haystack of things that keep me up at night. An original expression of my own after God knows how long, a creative surge that I must cherish until the outcome I seek for it manifests into my reality. This was something dear to me, and I did not want to bring it to light until its fruition.

But despite "keeping it to myself" and not telling a single soul about this, somehow this thought permeated to the one big conglomerate entity of the contemporary world that we take so for granted that we are almost oblivious to it. Almost as if it was taunting me, it threw small grains of bait at me to unconsciously lure me in. The algorithm, as precise and as useful of a system as it is, is almost ruthless in drawing inferences. This "for you" system that we have made, despite how convenient it makes our internet experience, feels almost like it has us gripped by our throats. First it was able to suggest content based on our interactions solely on the internet (fair enough), but now it can directly infer our thought patterns. Is this some billion dollar psychedelic sorcery, has this system hijacked our brains to eliminate any semblance of originality, or is it a frightening combination of both?

It is obviously no mystery that these tech giants dwell on the sweet elixir of your personal information, and rightfully so. It is the cost you pay for using their services, which, despite being inherently optional, have become so embedded in our lives that we cannot imagine living without them. Siphoning the silicon off their surroundings, they have created monsters that store large records about everything you do and learn a LOT more about you than simply how you interact with their service. With how cookies keep their chocolate chips peeled throughout your internet adventures the footprint you generate is permanent with the persistence of modern databases. Even if you are a paranoid geek running a VM of some obscure kernel and using a TOR browser hooked up to a network of 5 different private proxies that you built for yourself, there is always a backlog of your activity somewhere, no matter how much you confide in your secrecy antics. The reality is that someone who you don't know... or, as this article goes, some "thing" knows more about you than even your closest relatives.

Of course the argument of privacy not mattering any more makes logical sense when everyone's information is so blatantly accessible, but where do we draw the line exactly?

• Your favorite social media is on the brink of pushing ID verification to "protect children", and despite many sensible people being against this idea, some are so oblivious to the disasterous implications that this initiative has, the prime one being that your one-to-one identification document is one malicious API call away from some con-man? Depending on when you're reading this semi-rant, this may effectively be enforced.

• AI, while admittedly a powerful tool at first glance, seems to be thrown around everywhere in the big '25 by out of touch corporate executives with no quality control over it. While it is imperative for automation to reduce manual labour, is laying off an entire team of obsessive nerds who kept these systems in check to obtain marginal profit gains a reasonable thing to do? Who will monitor the potential bugs caused by hallucinated outputs? The imminent problem however, is that instead of simply just being a part of extraneous features e.g content generation, chatbot agents, interpolation and upscaling, it is now being given privileges such as content moderation, with no backlog of human verification. This is catastrophic because people who's livelihood depends on these platforms can be terminated with essentially, no wrongdoing, and possibly no way out.

Have we learned nothing from fiction in this past century? Why are Orwellian nightmares being orchestrated in front of our eyes.