We are magicians. We work in computer science. It's an arcane discipline full of seemly magical formulas to folks who don't do maths. Even the most junior desktop support technician will seem like they do magic when they fix someone's PC.
We learned programming to create magic of our own. To make computers solve problems for us. I access a non physical world through glass and electricity. I communicate with bursts of light carried through glass cables. Our language is full of magical references like daemons: small programs that do our bidding.
But what happens when we stop understanding our fields? What happens when we wander into the dark forest and collect mana without considering what we give in return for that mana? What happens when we go into strange walled gardens rather than the open web we knew?
We didn't realise that rather than a market garden, we have wandered into a different bounded realm. We were asked to pay a price. We gave our real names to Facebook, Microsoft, Apple, and Google. We made the mistake that our ancestors knew not to do. You never give your real name to the Fae, for Knowing of a true name gives them power over you.
We gave more than our names; we gave our emotions, our connections. All in the name of using a "free social network", that is neither social nor free.
We ate the fruit of a news-feed, the sharing of information, of community built in these locked realms. We set up shop in these realms as big tech drained us of our energy and our ability to find information. The walls became solid; the path out obscured. The fruit seemed delicious, but we discovered the fruit to be poisonous, as disinformation floods our feeds and radicalises us. The walled gardens of Web 2.0 choose what to show you; the gardens starve you of information. The Fae show you the posts that they want to get a reaction from you to feed the poppet they created from the tiny parts of you that were discarded as you walked along their paths.
Big Tech created the new goblin markets as they persuaded us onto their locked digital realms. Big Tech our Modern Fae created our poppets, to influence us, and to ultimately gain power over us.
Data is power. Privacy Advocates know it, Hackers know it, Law Enforcement know it. Some politicians don't want the general public to understand this.
They have your digital poppets. So it's time to reduce the power they have over you.
We need to unbind ourselves from these networks.