By now we all understand the trade-off involved in using the Internet: We let companies collect data about us, and in return they offer a more personalized user experience. But what if I told you that the long-term arc of this trade-off is beyond anything you can possibly imagine? Everything we do online generates data, which platform companies carefully collect and categorize to create digital profiles. Their artificial intelligence (AI) systems then correlate our digital profiles with those of other users to determine what we see online: how our search queries are interpreted, what posts are included in our social media feeds, what adverts we are shown, and so on. This kind of micro-targeting, based on individual psychological profiling, exploits what Daniel Kahneman, 2002 Nobel prize winner in economics, called "fast" thinking – the decisions we make quickly and without conscious consideration, such as whether to click on a link, watch another video, keep scrolling through our timeline, or put down the phone.