Underlings

Corporate technology profits are rarely clean margins extracted from neutral ground; they are anchored in offset risk. Cybersecurity vulnerabilities, compromised personal data, algorithmic misclassifications, even the dependence of daily life on opaque infrastructures—all of these constitute the ground on which profit is made. The value extracted is not merely from the technology itself but from displacing its costs: the liability of breaches shifted onto users, the exhaustion of securing one’s own devices, the silent commodification of identity. Profitability comes, paradoxically, not only from solving insecurity but from perpetuating a metastable state in which risk is never eradicated, only continually transferred outward. The system runs on this asymmetry—stability for the corporation, volatility for everyone else.

Yet the mirror turns, and it becomes easier to blame “the technology” as if it were the cause, as if its structures had not been seeded by us in the first place. The ensemble of data points—vast, disordered, inevitably flawed in their taxonomies—reflects back our collective patterns, our weaknesses, our culture already networked long before the platforms. In shifting costs onto ourselves, we also shift responsibility onto the machine: it is the technology, we say, when in fact it is us amplified through technology’s recursive echo. The feedback loops grow tighter until the system shrieks with the tone of its own endless reproduction, a frequency that contains no melody beyond the fact of its persistence. That is the tone: the flat insistence of continuity, a reproduction of reproduction, culture and technology indistinguishable in the scream.