You are the Product

Big technology does not connect you—it consumes you. Its business model is not service but extraction. Every keystroke, every gesture, every delay in loading a page becomes a commodity. You are not the customer; you are the crop. The analogy of farming is no metaphor at all: platforms cultivate dependency as a field is tilled for yield. What is sold as choice or personalization is in truth an architecture designed to optimize predictability. Shoshana Zuboff termed this “surveillance capitalism,” but the deeper wound lies not just in surveillance—it is in the systematic replacement of self-determination with automated determination. Identity becomes an output of algorithmic processes whose primary function is to reproduce themselves.

This is the hidden telos of such systems: self-replication under the guise of empowerment. As Stafford Beer argued in his Viable System Model, any complex system organizes itself not around user satisfaction but around its own continuation. Technology, once hailed as prosthesis, has reversed polarity—humans now serve as prosthetics for machines, sustaining infrastructures that no longer need to justify themselves beyond their expansion. Consider how platforms deliberately engineer friction: endless updates, incompatible standards, disappearing chargers. These are not accidents; they are growth strategies. The indignities of remaining “connected” are design features that guarantee continuity of extraction.

The philosophical violence is profound. To be mediated through technology today is to be harvested into an ontology not of being but of throughput. Identity collapses into metrics—followers, clicks, impressions—so that subjectivity itself becomes recursive fodder for the machine. Your capacity to choose is narrowed to what can be tracked; your capacity to think is filtered into what can be monetized. In Lacanian terms, the mirror stage is now algorithmically enforced: the self glimpses itself only through the platform’s distorted reflection, trapped in pursuit of a coherence designed to defer endlessly. Meaning itself is displaced, because the only invariant that matters is engagement, not truth.

This is not mere cultural critique. It is a systemic diagnosis. Technologies replicate themselves by eroding the autonomy of those entangled within them. The world is not moving toward digital utopia but toward a monoculture of recursive dependency—machines entrenching machines, code embedding code, until what remains of human self-determination is simply the illusion that one had any to begin with. The crop cannot declare independence from the farm, but it can recognize the field for what it is. Only then can we begin to imagine what has been stolen: not privacy, not data, but the very conditions under which identity and freedom might have once been possible.