Oregon Trail
It all begins with an idea.
When I was a kid I think my first exposure to technology was at my school's computer lab in first grade, where we got to play typing and other games on Macintoshes. Oregon Trail was especially popular at the time. I remember going in each morning and the teacher would pull a floppy disk with my name on it out of a file, I'd stick it into a computer, and my progress would be loaded on the terminal.
This mental image sticks out to me now, in a time when our data and virtual lives are generally stored in remote online services. Besides a physical sense of ownership, more and more of the data itself is being generated with less and less user intervention due to improvements in artificial intelligence.
Our data is not just scattered across the world, we don't truly or psychologically own it. It doesn’t represent something that has been learned, meaning something that has been experienced, processed, and filed away for later use. The effort encoded on the server is in an intangible and inaccessible format that may be used to feed an artificial intelligence system used by the service to improve its product, or it could be bundled and sold to third parties.
(Maybe this is the lifecycle of modern tech companies: provide a service, collect data, sell out, and move on like a swarm of locusts leaving a field of empty husks).
The spirit of enterprise and self reliance are factored out of the equation, at the same time as our lives are under the threat of being reduced to infinitesimally shrinking facets of experience in the real world due to automation, leading me to wonder what the limit is...where are we going, and why?