When Algorithms Become Masters

It was one of those rare Bangalore afternoons when the city was unusually kind. The rain hadn’t rushed in, the traffic was a whisper instead of a roar, and in the quiet corners of South Bangalore, I found myself seated in Dr. Anjali’s sunlit ophthalmology clinic, tucked away on a busy street that smelled of filter coffee and jasmine.

Anjali — cool-headed, wise beyond years, and now a celebrated eye doctor — had been my classmate once upon a time. A friendship born out of shared lunchboxes and lost assignments. I, Santosh, now live in the maddening world of integration platforms, APIs, and middleware. She still examines the most delicate organ in the body — the eye — and perhaps sees more clearly than the rest of us in more ways than one.

That afternoon was unusually light on patients. She chuckled as she poured us coffee.

“You know,” she said, nudging my elbow, “Pallavi still asks about you. My forever crush now turned dermatologist, your ‘what-if’ girl from 5th grade. Should I arrange a school reunion?”

I laughed, half choking on the coffee, half reliving the butterflies of my childhood. The walls of the clinic echoed with laughter and memories, but the conversation, like most in today’s world, drifted to something heavier.

“So what’s been keeping you busy?” she asked.

“Digital slavery,” I replied, without hesitation.

She squinted. “Is that another software product you’re integrating?”

I smiled. “No, it’s the product we’ve all become.”

We talked. At first casually, then deeply. (These are some invisible chains)

I told her how the world I worked in — the world of modern platforms, gig economies, cloud systems, and app-based labor — had turned into a digital assembly line. One where humans are monitored by code, managed by algorithms, and discarded like bad data when they underperform.

Drivers who deliver food to our doorstep have no idea if tomorrow they'll be “deactivated” because their customer rating slipped by 0.2 stars. Coders in digital sweatshops work 18 hours training AI to one day replace their own job. Teenagers stream for attention, working overtime for hearts and likes — and collapse into depression when the dopamine ends.

They’re all working. But they’re not really free.

“That’s slavery, not employment,” Anjali said quietly.

She adjusted her glasses and leaned back. “You know, I had this 19-year-old boy come in last week. He does delivery for a food app. His retina scan showed extreme fatigue. Turned out, he was doing double shifts to cover his sister’s college fees.”

There was a pause.

“We don’t realize,” she continued, “that while we sip our morning chai, someone is fighting an algorithm just to make enough to survive. We’ve glamorized hustle, made suffering fashionable. But it’s systemic injustice painted with a digital brush.”

The system, I ranted, is not broken. It was built this way.

Governments clap when foreign investments flow in, but the real infrastructure — social safety, workers' rights, digital dignity — is left crumbling. Politicians talk about "Digital India," but they don't talk about who builds it, who breaks under it, and who is forgotten in its shadows.

Tech giants run platforms that have more power than some nation states. They decide who gets work, what is worth attention, and whose voice is amplified. And while a billion users scroll endlessly, hoping for relevance or income, their time, behavior, and emotions are being harvested like crops.

Eyes That See, and Don’t See

Anjali turned philosophical. “I study eyes, Santosh. Most people come in with vision problems. But what bothers me more is when people can see clearly — but still don’t see what’s going on around them.”

She continued, “I remember you in school, always talking about building systems. But did you ever think we’d become systems ourselves? Just nodes. Just metrics.”

That hit me.

We had built APIs to talk to systems. But who built the APIs that now talk to us, judge us, and define our worth?

Hope in Laughter, and Change in Us

The sun was lower now. Her assistant knocked, the next patient was ready.

As I put down my cup and prepared to leave, she grinned.

“Next time you come, bring Pallavi too. Let’s talk about eyes, hearts, and revolutions.”

We both laughed. But the undertone was serious.

We need a revolution — not just in technology, but in empathy, in ethics, and in economics. Because if we don’t rethink digital labor, platform accountability, and data rights now, we’re not automating progress — we’re codifying oppression.

What I feel is

In this age of digital advancement, let’s not forget to ask the human question:

Are we freeing people with technology, or quietly enslaving them under the illusion of choice?

Let’s not just build systems. Let’s build a society worth logging into.