This is how technology took over our inner lives, and we never even realised it until it was too late. There was no vote. No public debate. No moment where humanity paused and asked whether this was the kind of life we wanted. Technology adoption has only accelerated with the invention of the Internet and, afterwards, smartphones. By some estimates, there are more smartphones than people in some countries, like the USA or China.
Yet here we are — living inside systems designed to capture attention, shape behaviour, and monetise emotion. Smartphones are within arm’s reach at all times. Notifications interrupt thought before it can finish forming. Algorithms decide what we see, what we feel, and often what we believe. And we’ve been told this is simply progress.
What makes this moment unprecedented is not the technology itself, but the speed and invisibility of its psychological influence. In previous generations, cultural change unfolded over decades. Today, it happens through software updates.
Technology has quietly become an environment rather than a tool. And like any environment, it shapes those who live within it. As we live on our devices, we are in their environment, and it is not being used as a tool; it has been for millennia.
For adults, this often shows up as exhaustion, anxiety, distraction, and a persistent sense of being “behind.” For children, the effects are stronger and harder to see. Many are growing up without ever experiencing sustained boredom, uninterrupted play, or privacy free from documentation. Their sense of self is being formed under constant observation.
What’s most concerning is that much of this influence operates below conscious awareness. Platforms are not neutral. They are engineered systems optimised for engagement, persuasion, and prediction. The result is a subtle erosion of autonomy — not through force, but through convenience.
This is not about rejecting technology. It’s about understanding it. Because once you recognise that your attention is being competed for, traded, and shaped, you can begin to relate to technology differently. Awareness restores choice. And choice restores dignity.
How Technology Took Over Our Inner Lives
It started slowly with the World Wide Web, and then later, search engines allowed us to find useful information quickly. The entire landscape changed when these services were essentially offered free to use, and we became the product because the companies offering these social media services monetised our eyeballs, our attention, by selling ads. We never even realised we became the product simply because we are using free services.
Book Recommendation
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This book tackles the debilitating effects of surveillance capitalism from almost every angle: political, personal, social, cultural, and economic. The author’s declarations are an indignant line in the sand, drawn boldly and without apology, as she takes back what has been stolen from us by big tech while we played on our phones. It reframes the debate around data mining in terms of human rights and human agency, clearly defining what is at stake: the right to determine our own futures free of the one-way mirror of surveillance capitalism.
This mirror distorts not only our reflections, but also distorts us until we become the reflections themselves, our desires and thoughts unwittingly shaped by technology that is both invisible and inaccessible to us. Zuboff deftly incorporates a century of economics, philosophy, behaviourism, and social psychology. She offers us a warning that we ignore at our own peril. Just as the maladies of the industrial revolution (global warming, the poisoning of the environment, cancer) went largely unseen in nature for decades, so do the effects of surveillance capitalism on human nature. What’s at risk this time, though, is nothing short of the future of the human mind.