You Are the Protocol

We didn’t build technology to serve us; we built it to be served. Every notification, every post, every frictionless interaction is not the system making life easier—it’s the system making you easier to interpret. You aren’t just using the platform; you are formatting yourself into it. Your choices, your moods, your attention spans are being regularized—compressed into a predictable stream of signal that can be parsed, monetized, looped.

You are no longer on the network. You are the network—its dynamic subsystem, its feedback loop, its emotionally expressive interface layer. The algorithm isn’t watching you; it is you, operationally indistinct from your identity. The UI is your mirror. But the mirror only reflects what it is coded to recognize, and you—over time—become recognizable. Identifiable. Streamlined. Reduced.

The coercion is silent: not that you must use it, but that your very subjectivity becomes technologically formatted. You structure your day around your feed, your thoughts around legibility, your desires around statistical edge cases. Not because you were forced—but because you were interpreted, iterated, and optimized into compliance.

The punchline: it’s not surveillance capitalism. It’s interpretive recursion. You think you’re speaking, but really, you’re being spoken. (As am I.)