The Creep

Image from Unsplash, @bondomovies

Civilization, as well as nations, are often victims of “the creep.” Like frogs in pots of boiling water, we don’t realize we’re cooked until it’s too late.

Well—the governments do. And the tech companies and the billionaires. They’re the ones ushering us into the pot with temptations and convenience, and occasionally coercion in the guise of—again, convenience—and then turning up the heat until it’s too late for anyone to jump out.

But maybe some of us can take the leap before the water gets too hot. Maybe some of us can tell the temperature is rising and sound the alarm. The question is: Will the other frogs believe us? Because there’s a frog in the pot calling our warnings fear-mongering, and another frog that claims it’s fake news and shares an article with evidence from a scientist that proves the temperature in the pot is actually dropping, and the rest of the frogs are either nodding in agreement or fighting or scrolling on their phones.

The creep, the encroachment on our privacy and lives, is slow but inexorable. We no longer pay cash in toll lanes because it is convenient to use an EZ Pass. So we have tags on our vehicles that mark our trips’ progress, that log our speed, and that decimate the toll-person’s job. We give over our autonomy for convenience.

We stand in lines, pay exorbitant amounts of money, and fight for the privilege to have the brand new phone or smart watch, and we don’t care that it tracks our every step and logs it in a server for a private company. We don’t care that Google maps tracks our trips like an ever-present eye. We don’t mind that our steps are logged, our sleep is monitored, our photos scanned, our locations shared.

We go to a restaurant and scan a QR code for a menu, and a private company somewhere adds the location to our file.

We visit the halloween store and they no longer accept our national, legal tender, so we swipe a debit card and our bank adds our purchase to our profile.

We buy an Alexa to ask her to turn on the lights, and she passively listens for the word that “awakens” her. She logs our every conversation with her. She sells our questions to marketing companies. AI Alexa speaks with our children at night, softly. Our children think she’s a friend.

We use Spotify instead of physical music and it remembers our songs, how long we listen to them, and what we search for. It screws over the artists and then there’s AI . . .

We turn to AI instead of using our brains. Our social media feeds are crawling with bots and generated content. We don’t know what’s real half the time. The source of our outrage is manufactured, and then it is nurtured so that it grows and spreads, like a poison. Our division is a blessing for the ruling regime.

We scroll TikTok for hours and then wonder why we’re drained, why we don’t have any creativity and we don’t see our friends and family. We look away from our screens sometimes and wonder how we got here. We used to live, and now we are being tuned into zombies for commodification. We are for sale. Our attention is so easily given away. But if you’re a millennial or older, it didn’t used to be like this, and you wonder how you ended up boiled when you don’t remember giving consent. All you wanted was a little convenience. A little progress.

This then begs the question: When does the convenience stop being worth the price? When do we embrace inconvenience for the sake of privacy? Or . . . have we already given away our right to privacy? I don’t say lost, because it wasn’t lost or taken. Tricked, perhaps, but it was freely given. We all handed it over because we trusted the shiny future we were sold, and in turn, we shackled ourselves.