Creating Something For Me: Reclaiming Personal Value in the Digital Age
Corporations are extracting everything valuable we produce—labor, creativity, homes, land, and even our biometric data.
Every photo you put on Facebook and every tweet you tweet on Twitter X you X on X is fed into a machine to generate money for someone else. With the advent of AI, there is a new money-grabbing tool in town, and the best part is it can use all the same data as the marketing machine!
This might sound a little paranoid, but it really isn’t. It’s all for the greater good of investors who, apparently, know what to do with your money better than you do. But we can fight back. Buy a house. Buy a shack in the middle of the woods if you have to. Don’t let them take that, and don’t pay rent to someone who owns eight properties, whose job is to watch his assets increase and pay himself to call service people to fix his properties… I digress.
Although eight properties is being conservative. That’s just the start for these people.
Back On Track
One thing we can all do is stop giving ourselves away. I have a page in my note-taking system that is just called “Purpose.” It’s not hidden away, organized, or summarized. It just sits right next to the README and the other main directories.
Inside is one line:
Create something for myself.
That is really the purpose of my Obsidian notes, my Todoist app, and my website. Create a digital version of my experiences, my life, and everything I find valuable. Is it a desperate ploy to create something bigger than myself in the vain hope that perhaps someone in the far future will remember “Anthony Herrera” existed and had hopes and dreams? Partially.
It’s also really good for sharing recipes with my friends.
I know that SquareSpace advertises that you can “Turn your dreams into a reality” with them. While that’s not a 1:1 mapping, taking the tools back is really the first step. Your Facebook or X post might go viral, but at the end of the day, is that really your content?
Go out, get your data back and maybe, just maybe, make something out of all the experiences that are you unique to YOU.