The Guinea Pigs
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Imagine a dark movie theater with hundreds of people and no canvas. Each person is wearing a VR headset and has wires and sensors attached to different parts of their body. The audience believes what they have been told: the wires make them all connected. Not just with other people in the dark room, but also with other audiences in other dark rooms that they can’t see or access.
A century ago, cinemagoers shared a common experience when they watched a movie. Nowadays, each user has an individual experience, specially customized to the user’s unique wants, needs, beliefs, values, hopes, fears, dreams, and wishes. With the VR headset on, the user steps into a parallel universe that resembles the real world but is made out of bits instead of atoms. The digital world is both a mirror image and an extension of the user’s perception of reality and is created in a constant feedback loop with a machine.
The machine serves a dual purpose; to engage the user and extract data from them. On one level, the user is playing a game with the machine. On a deeper level, the machine is playing a game with the user.
On one level, the machine is a source of entertainment, pleasure, education, and dopamine that puts the user on a rollercoaster ride of emotion as different centers of their brain light up. On another level, the user’s reactions to various inputs are silently monitored, translated into computer code, and analyzed by the machine.
User data is a valuable resource. Your sense of identity, thoughts, feelings, hobbies, relationships, interests, likes and dislikes, everything that makes you tick, every small nugget of personal information is gold for advertisers. It can be used against you to sell products, but also to modify your behavior or nudge your political views in a certain direction. ChatGPT and other multi-billion-dollar businesses are made from user data.
While you make a profile on social media, social media is simultaneously making a profile on you. Time spent online is time spent in a dark room interacting with a digital world that keeps you hooked like a slot machine. Although we are not yet experiencing the digital world in a virtual reality or openly wearing sensors, the digital world becomes more immersive, distracting, and addicting, while the tools for data collection become more intrusive and ubiquitous.
Free online experiences are paid for with information collected from any device or gadget we have with an internet connection. Data collection occurs whenever you click on pictures of cars to verify you are a human or when you have deeply personal conversations with a chatbot. We are in part creators and consumers in the online world and in part guinea pigs partaking in a colossal experiment.
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