Social media users and digital consumers willingly present a detailed trail of personal data in the pursuit of searching, watching, and engaging on as many platforms as possible. Signing up and signing on is made to be as easy as possible. Most people know on some level that they are giving up more data than they should , but with hopes that it won’t be used surreptitiously by scammers, and certainly not for surveillance of any sort.
However, in his book, "Means of Control," Byron Tau shockingly reveals how much of our digital data is tracked, packaged, and sold—not by scammers but by the brands and organizations we know and trust. As technology has deeply permeated our lives, we have willingly handed over our entire digital identity. Every app we download, every document we create, every social media site we join, there are terms and conditions that none of us ever bother to read.
That means our behaviors, content, and assets are given up to corporations that profit from them in more ways than the average person realizes. The very data and the reuse of it are controlling our lives, our freedom, and our well-being.
Let’s think about all this in the context of a social media site. It is a place where you interact with friends, post family photos, and highlight your art and videos. You may even share a perspective on current events. These very social media platforms don’t just own your content. They can use your behavior and your content to target you. They also sell your data to others, and profit massively off of YOU, their customer.
If, for example, you were a talented painter and wanted to paint a picture. You go to a store to purchase paint, brushes, and a canvas. When you create your painting of a beautiful landscape, you could post it online to sell without any middleman dipping a finger into your profit. Now, pretend that the paint brush company, as well as the paint company, the canvas company, and even the store where you purchased supplies, all declare that they will lay claim to your painting. They declare that they deserve to be the ones to determine how it’s priced, they should make a profit from selling your painting instead of you, and they have the right to hand it to another art firm for free without your consent.
Would you accept that? I think the answer would be "absolutely not.”
In another example, imagine you hire a broker to provide you with a personal assistant to help you with your busy life. This assistant is with you 24/7, and she records your behavior and what you do all day long—including your most intimate conversations with your partner in the bedroom. The personal assistant then sends everything she recorded back to the broker who sent her to you. The broker can then sell your information and use it as they please.
Would you allow this assistant and their broker into your life? Again, your answer would be, "Absolutely not.”
In the real world, we actually say "absolutely, yes” in both of these hypothetical examples when it comes to using technology. Worse still, we actively enable it without thinking twice, because it’s easier for us. With this blind trust, we become lucrative commodities for these platforms without a say or without fair rights. We are decrying the loss of civil liberties around the world—and still, we are gladly handing over keys to our data all day long every day.
This is not a technology problem. It’s not even a legal issue. It’s simply a choice we make as part of a capitalist society. These corporations consolidated power, profit, and even propaganda by manipulating our attention and wallets. We shouldn’t let them get away with it. We should own the one thing we each should surely own—our identities.
If we want true liberty, we must reclaim our digital rights and sovereignty. We have the right to own our data, and we have the right not to be sold for profit.
It’s time to hold all internet organizations and social media platforms accountable to strict boundaries around the use of personal data. They simply must honor consumer digital self-sovereignty, where we are not a commodity to be sold, and we should own every shred of our data. Users should have more control over what ads and content appear in our feed. What is seen, and certainly what is created, is ours and should match the experience online we all work so hard to curate.
Akshay Gupta is the chief executive officer of Sez.us, a reputation-based social media platform designed to foster civil, authentic conversation by rewarding respectful engagement and suppressing inflammatory content.
A deep look at how "All in the Family" remains a striking mirror of American politics, class tensions, and cultural manipulation—proving its relevance decades later.
All in This American Family
There are a few shows that have aged as eerily well as All in the Family.
It’s not just that it’s still funny and has the feel not of a sit-com, but of unpretentious, working-class theatre. It’s that, decades later, it remains one of the clearest windows into the American psyche. Archie Bunker’s living room has been, as it were, a small stage on which the country has been working through the same contradictions, anxieties, and unresolved traumas that still shape our politics today. The manipulation of the working class, the pitting of neighbor against neighbor, the scapegoating of the vulnerable, the quiet cruelties baked into everyday life—all of it is still here with us. We like to reassure ourselves that we’ve progressed since the early 1970s, but watching the show now forces an unsettling recognition: The structural forces that shaped Archie’s world have barely budged. The same tactics of distraction and division deployed by elites back then are still deployed now, except more efficiently, more sleekly.
Archie himself is the perfect vessel for this continuity. He is bigoted, blustery, reactive, but he is also wounded, anxious, and constantly misled by forces above and beyond him. Norman Lear created Archie not as a monster to be hated (Lear’s genius was to make Archie lovable despite his loathsome stands), but as a man trapped by the political economy of his era: A union worker who feels his country slipping away, yet cannot see the hands that are actually moving it. His anger leaks sideways, onto immigrants, women, “hippies,” and anyone with less power than he has. The real villains—the wealthy, the connected, the manufacturers of grievance—remain safely and comfortably offscreen. That’s part of the show’s key insight: It reveals how elites thrive by making sure working people turn their frustrations against each other rather than upward.
Edith, often dismissed as naive or scatterbrained, functions as the show’s quiet moral center. Her compassion exposes the emotional void in Archie’s worldview and, in doing so, highlights the costs of the divisions that powerful interests cultivate. Meanwhile, Mike the “Meathead” represents a generation trying to break free from those divisions but often trapped in its own loud self-righteousness. Their clashes are not just family arguments but collisions between competing visions of America’s future. And those visions, tellingly, have yet to resolve themselves.
The political context of the show only sharpens its relevance. Premiering in 1971, All in the Family emerged during the Nixon years, when the “Silent Majority” strategy was weaponizing racial resentment, cultural panic, and working-class anxiety to cement power. Archie was a fictional embodiment of the very demographic Nixon sought to mobilize and manipulate. The show exposed, often bluntly, how economic insecurity was being rerouted into cultural hostility. Watching the show today, it’s impossible to miss how closely that logic mirrors the present, from right-wing media ecosystems to politicians who openly rely on stoking grievances rather than addressing root causes.
What makes the show unsettling today is that its satire feels less like a relic and more like a mirror. The demagogic impulses it spotlighted have simply found new platforms. The working-class anger it dramatized has been harvested by political operatives who, like their 1970s predecessors, depend on division to maintain power. The very cultural debates that fueled Archie’s tirades — about immigration, gender roles, race, and national identity—are still being used as tools to distract from wealth concentration and political manipulation.
If anything, the divisions are sharper now because the mechanisms of manipulation are more sophisticated, for much has been learned by The Machine. The same emotional raw material Lear mined for comedy is now algorithmically optimized for outrage. The same social fractures that played out around Archie’s kitchen table now play out on a scale he couldn’t have imagined. But the underlying dynamics haven’t changed at all.
That is why All in the Family feels so contemporary. The country Lear dissected never healed or meaningfully evolved: It simply changed wardrobe. The tensions, prejudices, and insecurities remain, not because individuals failed to grow but because the economic and political forces that thrive on division have only become more entrenched. Until we confront the political economy that kept Archie and Michael locked in an endless loop of circular bickering, the show will remain painfully relevant for another fifty years.
Ahmed Bouzid is the co-founder of The True Representation Movement.