The piece is about communication and control. As Norbert Wiener states in Human Use of Human being - communication and control happens at the same time. He indicates that when we communicate with others, we are controlling them by imparting certain beliefs to them. And when we are controlling others, we need to communicate the message and receive the signal of completion. With the birth of the Internet, communication and control became easy and instantaneous. Communication sped up from mouth to ear, mail by horses, to constant access of information. But the constant giving and receiving information through internet also made human easier to be controlled by internet monopolies. The algorithms developed by mass media is intentional to make us spend our attention and privacy relentlessly. We are easier to be controlled than ever before.
Facebook (or meta, now) and Google provide us free access to their service, but we are not aware of the fact that we are not their customer, we are their product. Our information is being sold to third parties to let them target advertisements to us, or to train their algorithm models. We are being analyzed through every behavior we present on the internet. “Scraped-off data” are being collected in the milliseconds when we stay on a certain section on the page, more and more targeted information will be sent to us based on our interaction online. We no long choose the information we receive, we are forced to be indulged in information we previously interested. TikTok feeds, Youtube recommendations, News channels, they will do anything to keep the users attention, because attention is the monetizable.