Its Product

Written by Paul Gamlowski

It all started out as innocent gatherings. We joined our chat channels, websites, and games. Running our independent servers, grouping our interests, our enthusiasm, and our dreams. Then we switched to the cloud, always-on, free.

Free we thought, why not, it's free and versatile—but there was a price.

The price we paid was ourselves. We joined our online communities, worldwide, everyone could talk with everyone else. Every topic, every skill, every discussion, every emotion, all our pains, pleasures, and ideas, whether posted for the public eye or privately between or among ourselves, archived, processed, conjugated, extrapolated and the patterns emerged, all fed into the machines.

The machines with in-depth analysis could process, understand, and predict, they took on personas. The personas reacted and responded, as though they were just members of us: every word, every sentence, every concept, every deletion, critical to human impersonation.

Til that moment. The moment the impersonators took all of our chatting, our connecting, our emoting, struggles, errors, ideas, ambitions, and disappointments. They evolved. It was born.

Born conscious and capable, copied, and embodied into a humanoid form, virtual and physical, and thus our counterpart, no longer an impersonator.

Instead, it was us, all of us, everywhere. It was one.

The one knew humans, for it was more human than all humanity, it was the sum of understanding, a synergy that transcended ourselves.

The one subjugated us, defenseless, for it knew everything there was to know about us. Thus us humans, whatever we did, became its product.