We used to have freedom.
Then came the Patriot Act: fear forged into law.
Then came the corporations, cloaked in pastel branding, quietly rising as nations of their own.
Now we live beneath a thousand eyes,
some state, some corporate, all ravenous.
The NSA hoovers up everything.
Not because you’re a threat,
But because one day, you might be.
Your entire life, filed away, just in case.
Surveillance isn’t the exception anymore.
It’s the default.
Our digital footprints tracked across servers.
A web tightening around us.
Your phone listens.
Your apps report.
Your data is mined, sold, devoured.
By companies peddling shoes.
And governments that want to ensure you never step out of line.
And worse: foreign adversaries now present poison as gifts.
“Free” apps from authoritarian regimes.
Siphoning your location, your biometrics, your banking, your social graph.
And people line up for them.
Grinning. Addicted. Obedient.
Too distracted to ask why.
No one reads the terms.
No one asks who owns the servers.
No one questions the why behind the dopamine.
We are being mapped. Modeled.
Preemptively profiled.
Not for what we’ve done.
But for what we might do.
And when the system deems you inconvenient...
The dossier’s already written.
The button already exists.
They just have to push it.
And the silence will be swift.
We didn’t lose our freedom.
We sold it.
For a phone that unlocks with our face.
What Am I Supposed to Do? Stop Using Everything?
Yes.
Maybe.
If we all did, the model would collapse.
The harvest would end.
The truth is stark.
These platforms, spyware-laced empires of dopamine and data, exist because we feed them.
Because we’re complicit in our own undoing.
They don’t own the world.
We lease it to them,
One click. One upload. One “I guess it’s fine” at a time.
When the strings show, when the mask slips, most look away.
Not because they’re stupid.
But because they’re tired.
Because surveillance is inconspicuous.
Because the cage is velvet, and full of curated content.
They call me paranoid.
Overreacting.
“Everyone uses it,” they say.
Yes.
That’s the problem.
They say, “I have nothing to hide.”
But they’d never let me film them in the bathroom.
They’d never hand me their passwords, their bank details, their private texts, and say, “Do what you will.”
They’d recoil.
And yet they give it all to companies that don’t even love them.
Firms that’d sell them for a stock bump.
It didn’t have to be this way.
We could have built better systems.
Platforms valuing privacy over profit.
Networks owned by the users.
Spaces free of slot-machine manipulation.
We still could.
But it starts with refusal.
The unglamorous, defiant act of saying no.
Lonely. Unnoticed. Unthanked.
I’m still saying no.
Not because I have secrets.
But because I have a self.
And I believe that self still matters.
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