There was a time when oil felt like a miracle. I should know as my family runs a petrol pump/gas station. We used to get multiple books from the oil giants highlighting the many wonders that oil was bringing.

A thick, dark liquid pulled out of the ground that could move ships, light cities, heat homes, and compress distance. Oil gave us speed. Oil gave us scale. Oil gave us the modern world.

Oil made the world faster. Data made it louder. Neither made it wiser.

At first, it was all upside. Jobs. Growth. Convenience. Prosperity. A future that felt inevitable.

Only later did we notice the cough. The smog. The poisoned rivers.

By the time the illnesses appeared, oil was no longer a choice. It had become infrastructure.

Extraction always begins with permission and ends with dependence.

You could not opt out without opting out of society itself.

Data followed the same arc.

At first, data felt clean. Abstract. Harmless. Ones and zeros floating somewhere in the cloud. We were told it would help us connect, understand, personalize, optimize. Data would make products better. Cities smarter. Lives easier.

And for a while, it did.

Then quietly, without ceremony, data stopped being a tool and became the raw material of power.

Oil polluted the air. Data pollutes the mind.

What oil did to the earth, data is doing to the human inner climate.

Oil made us sick in visible ways. Data makes us sick invisibly.

Every click. Every pause. Every scroll. Every moment of hesitation is extracted, refined, and fed into algorithms that do not care about truth, well-being, or long-term consequences. They care about engagement. Retention. Growth curves.

When extraction becomes the business model, harm is never a bug. It is the cost we choose not to see.

Big data companies speak in neutral language. Signals. Optimization. Personalization.

But beneath that vocabulary sits something deeply human being exploited. Attention. Emotion. Fear. Desire.

The most intimate theft is not of data, but of attention, choice, and silence.

Surveillance is not just cameras on poles. It is prediction. It is nudging. It is shaping behavior at scale without consent that feels meaningful.

Surveillance is not watching what you do. It is shaping what you become.

When an algorithm learns what angers you faster than what calms you, outrage becomes the default product.

Just like oil companies once externalized pollution onto society, data companies externalize harm onto democracy, mental health, and culture.

Pollution is easiest to ignore when it cannot be smelled.

Anxiety becomes a side effect. Polarization becomes a metric. Loneliness becomes acceptable collateral damage.

And like oil, the damage is not evenly distributed.

Those with power can afford privacy, filters, distance. Those without power live inside the exhaust.

The real cost of surveillance is not being watched, but being predictable.

Children grow up inside recommendation engines. Politics is shaped by engagement loops. Truth competes with virality and usually loses.

A society shaped by algorithms slowly forgets how to choose without being nudged.

This is not a rejection of technology.

Oil itself was never evil. Data is not evil. Both are powerful. Both are dangerous when extraction is unchecked and incentives are misaligned.

Progress becomes dangerous when it no longer asks who it serves.

The tragedy is not that we built these systems. The tragedy is that we pretended they were neutral.

Oil taught us this lesson too late. We are still trying to clean the air while arguing about growth. With data, we still have a narrow window to choose differently.

To ask harder questions. To demand limits. To design for dignity instead of addiction.

Convenience is the softest form of control.

Progress without care is not progress. It is acceleration toward harm.

Data can still heal. It can still enlighten. But only if we stop treating humans as oil fields to be drilled endlessly and start treating them as lives that need protection.

When everything is measured, what cannot be measured quietly stops mattering.

The future does not need more extraction. It needs restraint. And courage.

A future built on unlimited extraction always runs out of something. First resources. Then trust. Then people.