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Technology Amplifies Whatever You Feed It. What Are You Feeding It?
August 25, 2026 
Google grew its profits by 3,500% the year it stopped protecting your privacy. That number is the whole story of the internet.
Larry Page and Sergey Brin started the company believing privacy mattered more than anything, and they weren’t going to bother people with ads. Then they got bigger. New investors arrived with a different view. Privacy went out. Profiling came in. They began watching what people searched, building a picture of each user, and serving ads against it. Profits jumped 3,500%. That is not a footnote in the history of technology. That is the moment the deal changed, quietly, without any of us signing anything.
You stopped being the customer. You became the supply.
Watch how the machine works once you see it that way. Every photo you post, every word you choose, the way you build a sentence, the places you go, the hour you scroll, all of it gets collected. Not because anyone cares about your day, but because the pattern of your behaviour predicts your next move. What you’ll buy. Which car you want. Where you’ll go on holiday. The better they predict it, the more they can charge for the ad that meets you at exactly the right second. It was never about you. It was about your data profile, and your data profile is worth a great deal.
Now point that same capability at the street.
AI gave us facial recognition that picks you out of a crowd from hundreds of meters away. It can identify you by the way you walk, your own movement signature, no face required. You can be followed by automated cameras and never know it happened. In China, more than a billion people live under close to 700 million cameras trained on their daily activity. We told ourselves that was a story about somewhere else. Then London quietly became one of the most surveilled cities on earth. The technology does not care which flag flies over it. It does what it was built to do, and it is patient.
The clearest look at the machinery came with Cambridge Analytica.
Millions of profiles, pulled from a platform people thought they were just using to share photos, sold to outside parties who built psychological maps and aimed them at voters. The point was to move how people felt, and through that, how they voted. People thought they were using the platform. The platform was using them. That sentence is the entire business model, and it has not changed because it cannot. It is in the DNA. Regulation runs years behind it, always arriving after the damage is done.
So far this is the story you already half know, and it usually ends in despair. Here is where I want to turn it.
Technology amplifies whatever you put into it
Technology is an amplifier. That is its deepest nature. It takes whatever you put into it and makes it louder, wider, faster. Greed put into a platform becomes an engine built to harvest attention at the cost of human wellbeing. Fear put into a system becomes surveillance. The same amplifier, pointed a different way, lets one person reach millions with a single idea. The tool is neutral about which signal it carries. It only knows how to turn the volume up.
Which changes the question that matters.
For most of human history, what you carried inside you stayed small. Your kindness reached the people in the room. Your wisdom touched a handful of lives. Now the amplifier is in your pocket, and one person, sitting alone, can move millions. So the urgent question stops being what the platforms are doing to us. It becomes something closer to home. If technology amplifies whatever you feed it, what do you have inside that’s worth amplifying?
That is not a comfortable question, and it isn’t meant to be.
The surveillance, the profiling, the harvesting, all of it is real, and we should resist the parts that strip our freedom. But the deeper response is not only to fight the machine. It is to become someone whose inner signal is worth turning up. The platforms have spent twenty years amplifying our worst impulses because that’s what we fed them. The same machinery is waiting to carry something better, the moment we have something better to put into it.
The internet learned to read you. The real question is what it will find worth repeating.
Over to you.
If technology amplifies whatever you put into it, what is the one thing in you that you’d want made louder? And what would you rather it stopped repeating?
I’d like to hear it. Share it in the comments. I read every one.
Christian Kromme writes The Human Spark – Beyond AI, a newsletter about what it means to be human in a world being reshaped by technology.