Commodity

This piece comes from a place of paranoia; though perhaps "paranoia" isn't the right word. That implies irrational fear. But how irrational is it, really, to fear something that already owns you?

I'm not a cybersecurity expert. I'm not some recluse with their laptop covered in tape and Tor running by default. I'm just someone who has seen, firsthand, how the internet remembers you. How it exposes you. How it sells you. Even when you think it doesn't.

Before my soul was ever formed, before anyone had ever said my name aloud, I was already sold. My life had already entered circulation. Packaged and stored in systems I never consented to. Medical records, birth certificates, social security numbers. It was over before it began. The day I was born, posts went up online: my full name, my exact birthdate, my location, and the names of the people who created me. My existence was announced to the digital world like a press release, and anyone who cared to look could follow the trail.

From those few posts, you could trace my lineage. My parents. Their friends. Our city. Our house. Our patterns. Comments on baby photos casually name-drop workplaces, tag extended family, mention where we were and when. You could piece together a timeline without ever meeting me. My face, still forming into the one I have now, is already public property. And I never agreed to any of it.

Like any well-meaning parent, mine enrolled me in sports. Competitions followed. So did photos. Now there are records of me as a child. Scores, rankings, team rosters, all tied to my full name, my birthdate, and the location of the gym where I trained. Each year, new digital breadcrumbs: a birthday dinner photo tagged at a restaurant that includes my state in its name; captions that give away the timeline. You could triangulate my life with nothing more than a Facebook album and a functioning brain.

Each birthday, a new post. One year it's from my mother. The next, my father. Over time, a pattern emerges, not just of celebration, but of circumstance. With enough curiosity, someone could begin to infer how things were at home. Who was present. Who wasn't. What changed. What didn't. Piece by piece, my childhood becomes a public record. Unintended, but accessible.

Year by year, memory by memory, my life is mapped and archived in systems I cannot see, stored on servers I will never touch. And nothing is ever truly deleted. There are internet archives that remember everything. Databases that keep records longer than families stay intact. Data breaches that scatter pieces of you across the web like digital shrapnel. The past, once online, is permanent. Storage is infinite to anyone with the money to buy it. And access is rarely denied to those who know how to look.

At some point in the past, an absurd amount of money was spent in an attempt to erase me from the internet, to wipe any trace of my identity from public view. But what those services don't advertise is the truth: they don't remove anything. They simply bury it. They push the results down, out of sight, beneath layers of noise. It's more illusion than deletion.

For a while, it worked. If you searched my name, the shadows pulled back. The trail went cold. But only for a moment. Now, everything is back, resurfaced, reindexed, repackaged by the internet's endless memory. These services offer no permanence. Their protection has an expiration date. And to anyone who knows how to search with intent—anyone who understands how to phrase a query just right—the past is still there, waiting to be uncovered. Nothing is ever truly gone. Only hidden. Temporarily.

This isn't just my story. It's yours too.

If you've never looked yourself up, try it. Really look. Search your full name. Your usernames. Your old email addresses. Cross-reference them. You might be surprised. Maybe even disturbed by what you find. Photos you forgot existed. Comments you barely remember posting. Old accounts tied to forgotten parts of yourself. Pieces of you, scattered like breadcrumbs across a digital forest you never meant to leave behind.

Maybe I'm more paranoid than most. Maybe I spend more time than is healthy thinking about this. But that doesn't make it untrue. Just because we've learned to live with the exposure doesn't make it any less invasive. Just because it feels normal doesn't mean it's safe. There's something deeply unsettling about being so searchable. So visible. So known by machines and strangers in ways we can't even perceive.

But someone is profiting from all of this. It's not just random clutter or innocent nostalgia. Every post, every search, every like, every pause of your scrolling thumb; it's all data. And data is currency. You're not the customer in this system. You're the product. Or more precisely: your attention, your behavior, your desires. These are what's being bought and sold.

Massive corporations, Google, Meta, Amazon, thrive on this. They build profiles more detailed than anything your closest friends know about you. Where you've been. What you buy. What you fear. What time you go to sleep. What kind of people you're attracted to. How long you linger on a photo before scrolling past. It's not abstract. It's not harmless. It's targeted. You are being studied in real time for the sake of keeping you engaged. Attention is money, and your behavior can be shaped, nudged, predicted, sold.

Behind the curtain, there are data brokers you've never heard of, Acxiom, Oracle, Experian, companies whose entire business model is to collect and resell the details of your life. To advertisers, insurance companies, political campaigns. Not only can they know who you are. they can decide who they think you'll become. And they'll market to you accordingly. Your future, commodified.

Does that make you feel good? Does it feel comforting when you casually tell your friend about a cute shirt you want, only to have ads for that exact shirt start popping up everywhere you go online?

It's like the internet is listening. Always watching, always waiting. Your private conversations aren't so private anymore. They become data points, triggers designed to pull at your attention and your wallet. It's unsettling. It's invasive. It turns the simple joy of sharing into a reminder that you're never really alone online.

This isn't a how-to guide on how to stop this, its more of a reminder. Everything you do is surveillance and you can never run from it.