Is AI manipulating us?
We Gave Up Privacy for Convenience. But at What Cost?
I used to upload all my photos to Google. I had no idea what it meant.
My Java professor at the ETSII Politecnica de Madrid once told me, “You should read the terms and conditions of the software you install. It is interesting.” All is written there but I don’t know anyone who read those..
When we upload our lives to Gmail, Android, apps and cloud services, they quietly mine every photo, face, message, and location. Google knows what you do and when, based on your calendar, who are your friends, with pictures, where do you drive, if you speed etc.. That “free” storage costs more than you think.
Not in money. In how we feel in our own skin and act consequently.
Many people are now de-Googling their life. I chose the cool one: Apple. It is still a tech giant (luckly), and yes, if the government asks, they’ll hand over your data unless you set up end-to-end encryption. But it’s still the cleanest option out there.
Apple doesn’t sell ads with your soul.
And yes, there are purists who don’t trust Apple either and build their own servers on Linux.
The price to pay is rigor and thoroughness: if they forget a password, you lose everything and you need to be a nerd to be able to set all of this up.
I like my cloud and I like that I can access my notes from a random laptop in Iceland if I need to. But I want that without being watched, tracked, manipulated, and studied.
What really keeps me up at night isn’t that they know what I bought last week. It’s that they know why I bought it. These platforms aren’t just collecting our data anymore. They’re learning our patterns, our moods, impulses, even moments of weakness.
Now AI on top of that.
We can’t even begin to imagine what generative systems will do with years of personal data we left behind us. What can a super intelligence do compiling all this patterns and deep knowledge about us?
I don’t know but I know the tools we use shape how we feel. When our daily productivity tools have ways to keep us engaged, this affects us slowly, like the story of the boiled frog.
When we live in constant distraction, it changes us.
It eats away at attention, at joy, at how our nervous system recovers. We’re always alert, always reacting, always “on”, but not fully ON, or fully OFF. Always in this middle state that leads us in mediocre results in what we do in life. Don’t you want to be in excellence and be cool? 😎
Our phones wake us up, rush us through the day, and keep our brains spinning late into the night. We gave up our rest time, slow time, quiet time, boring time, and there is no pause for the body to say: “I’m okay.”
Too much stimulation, will power and mind create stress and Autoimmune diseases.
Autoimmune diseases (rheumatoid arthritis, lupus, MS and more) now affect 5–10 % of people in industrial countries and up to 80 % of cases report major emotional stress before symptoms appear.
We gave up privacy, patience, presence for… convenience.
And I’m not sure we’re more free.
My grandmother story.
My grandmother was used to sit in our garden in our house in Italy in summer time to watch the sunset. As a kid, I would go to her and ask “what are you doing Nonna?” “Nigot” which means niente, nothing in dialect. She lived a long life in very good shape!
Can you do nothing? like, nothing? no reading, no breathing exercises, no meditation, no music listening. Nothing! When we do nothing, the brain activates its Default Mode Network. That’s the system that lets you reflect, digest, process emotions, connect ideas. You breathe deeper. Your body moves from stress to calm. The parasympathetic nervous system switches on. Your digestion improves. Your thoughts settle. You begin to feel like yourself again. You heal.
The science is clear: boredom isn’t a flaw. It’s a doorway. We’ve just lost the patience to walk through it.
I want to learn from my grandmother, learn to do NIENTE, and select intentionally my tools and how I use them so that I can be fully here, be present and healthy, be a cool stud. 😎