Data, Power, and Control

Why it increasingly feels like decisions are made somewhere else

Many people today experience a difficult-to-name sense that their decisions are no longer fully autonomous. This is not about overt coercion or a single defining event. It is a subtler feeling — that choices are becoming increasingly obvious, suggested, or pre-arranged. A person still decides, but more and more often within boundaries they did not design.

This feeling does not come from nowhere.

In the post-digital world, data has become one of the most powerful forces organizing reality. It is no longer merely supplementary information. It has become the foundation for predicting behavior, optimizing processes, and designing experiences. The more data there is, the greater the capacity for prediction. And the greater the capacity for prediction, the greater the influence over decisions — even before they are consciously made.

Power in the post-digital world rarely takes the form of direct control. It does not rely on orders or prohibitions. It operates more subtly. It lies in designing the context in which decisions occur. In shaping what we see, in what order, at what moment, and with what intensity. A person still feels they are choosing, but increasingly they are choosing among options that have already been designed.

In this sense, data becomes a new form of power. Not because it is used against people, but because it is used before their decision. Systems do not tell us what to do. They make certain choices more likely than others.

The problem begins when this mechanism becomes invisible. Most people do not experience the influence of data as control. They experience it as pressure, fatigue, or a vague sense of tension. There is a growing feeling that one must react faster, respond immediately, and adapt to constantly shifting expectations.

In such an environment, reflection becomes increasingly difficult. Not because people do not want to think, but because decisions are made amid continuous stimuli and suggestions. Instead of conscious choice, there is adjustment. Instead of responsibility, delegation.

This leads to a fundamental asymmetry of the post-digital world. Systems know more and more about people, while people increasingly understand less about how systems influence their decisions. This asymmetry does not remove freedom abruptly. It erodes it gradually, through the quiet surrender of authorship.

The greatest danger is not control itself. It is the lack of awareness of where support ends and decisions begin to be made for us. When responsibility dissolves between human and system, it becomes easy to shift it onto an algorithm, a procedure, or the claim that “this is just how things work.”

A data-driven world does not have to lead to a loss of agency. But it can, if people lose the ability to recognize where decisions actually occur. Without that awareness, even the most advanced systems become mechanisms of silent compliance.

That is why the conversation about data, power, and control is not a conversation about technology. It is a conversation about responsibility. About who takes ownership of decisions made in an environment that increasingly predicts them.

In the post-digital world, freedom does not disappear suddenly. It disappears when people stop being the authors of their own choices. And it is precisely here that the most important question of our time emerges: not who has more data, but who takes responsibility for the decisions that follow from it.