Binding the Weave

Privacy is dead—more dead than dead—six feet under, reduced to an insignificant concept. I don’t think about that though. Well, usually. The twenty-four hours I spent consciously aware of my digital footprint were an exercise in nothing in particular. I could’ve spent that time thinking about all the ways that technology aids my everyday processes and routines, but I didn’t. My focus fell on countless packets of data about me, or whatever my phone thinks I am, being sent to who-knows-where for who-knows what. I am information, from the moment I was born to me sitting here typing this. Governments, corporations, they see numbers rather than flesh and blood. This isn’t a revelation or anything, not in the slightest, but when you spend twenty-four hours making a mental note of your civil insignificance, it can be rather taxing. I checked Instagram in the morning, ensuring I’d viewed and subsequently liked the twenty reels my friend had sent me at 2AM, each tap a new data point. I got up and made breakfast, passively scrolling through a Reddit thread, feeding my algorithm and myself. I left in a rush, shuffling my spotify playlist and skipping four songs, wedging the data driven hivemind into my brain’s key and tempo. In class, I meandered through all manner of websites, all tracking my clicks and storing a shell of my being in a labryinthine database. I’m not trying to villanize the internet; I’m selling it for what it is. At the end of the day, my existentialist worries felt null and void. Why should I care, care that I’m being pedalled as a compressed data point of digital engagement? What could I, having grown up in a world already frought with the same thing, do to prevent it? Write to local officials? Against what? The IOT as a whole? They’re just as guilty. Like I said, privacy is dead. There is nothing to be done, and there’s nothing I’m going to do. Is that a dismissive mindset? Sure, yeah, but being relentlessly tracked is so routine as to be nonexistant. Congisance is bliss. I know everything around me is trying to get me addicted, get me “hooked.” So what? I take pride, at the end of the day, in knowing enough to know that I can skip my way around engagment farms and “doomscrolling” traps. Being informed is my generation’s greatest defense against the infinity of everything that is digital.