I did it. I left Spotify FOR GOOD. Yeah, I know, I just signed up again on Sunday evening, but, hear me out: it never quite sat well with me. There was never the "I love it when a plan comes together" moment for me. Sure, I was back in the driver seat with those well-worn controls with my go-to playlists honed from hours of my craftmanship. Yet, I felt...regret. It did not bring me joy, unlike when I left the platform in the rear view mirror.

And while I struggle with its scope and the articulation thereof, I know that my attitude towards Spotify is part of a larger narrative about our virtual society and our place within it. And perhaps this is the fate of us whom are a bridge between two worlds, those of us whom possess a high level of tech fluency, but, are not naturalized.

I was 17 when I first came online in 1995, and I can remember richly the world that was before the widescale adoption of the Internet, a realm where cell phones were literally telephones enhanced by their mobility, an environment where we were NOT tracked as our individual habits and demographics uploaded to databases, and we didn't have crowdsourced (Google) answers to everything at our fingertips.

There are qualitative and quantitative differences between those whom remember how things were, versus those whom grew up alongside the Internet. For them, it is because it always has been: it's OK (to them) that our every movement is tracked online, and by extension, our real world identities, because that's the way it has always been.

Maybe this is why there is not more of an uproar leading to a pullback from industry. In general, it all comes off like a tech giant standing in our bathroom during our morning shower, posts a "It's all cool, bruh" PR release, and continues to stand in our window at night.

Big Tech just never asks those why questions—sure, you can drive and take Street View images everywhere you go and scan local WiFi networks while you're at it, but, should you? If a corporation is an individual, then an individual who does that is a bit of a stalker, or at the very least, a creep.

But, it's more than that...it's a LOT more. What we watch, what we listen to, what we purchase, where we go, who are friends are, what we do to have fun, where we work, crescendoing into greater power by future rollouts of ubiquitous IoT tech—ALL that data on everyone is a LOT of power; J. Edgar Hoover's famed dossiers immediately come to my mind. And while that kind of control/manipulation on an individual level is frightening, I'd argue that wielding such great power to shape the macro is more disturbing.