I can press my finger against a certain interface element on my phone screen and move it to another place on the screen. I do this to make my digital space more comfortable and usable for myself. This customisation or personalisation is something I do to my digital devices for my convenience.

In earlier times too, people used to personalise their knowledge accessories. They used to underline text in their books and scribble in the margins. They used to mark channels as favourites on their TV for easy access. My phone is no different in this regard.

Though we can customise technology, the thing we don't often think about is that technology also customises us. Technologies as simple as the newspaper can exert influence over us when we plan our day according to them. Your teacup - its shape and size, its grip, how it feels in your hand - can exert influence over you, changing you in small ways. In pre-Internet days, the TV set, because of the central position it occupied in the house, changed the way a family lived.

This is not an anti-technology rant. I am not saying we need to resist all attempts at customisation by the technologies we use in the course of our everyday lives. What I am saying is that being aware of this helps.

As Nicholas Carr says in The Shallows, every technology comes with its own ethic, it's own default use case. If you are holding a sword, you become an extension of the sword. While you are holding it, you are not going to be very good at anything other than the kind of thing a sword does. Use the sword regularly and for long enough, and you become someone who can only do what a sword does. You become the sword.

People who write, people who read, people who drive, people who dig, people who calculate, they all become extensions of the technologies they use. Every technology we use also uses us. Technology customises us just as we customise technology.

But while the customisations your teacup makes to our lives are not being prompted by the profit motive of a large corporation, the same cannot be said about your phone. For the first time in human history, we are holding in our hands a device whose influence is not innocuous. Instead, it is a motivated device that is turning us into something very specific - an ad watcher, a scroller, a tapper of like and share buttons. At the very least, it is turning us into a mindless consumer.

We have always expressed our appreciation for things and we have always shared what we appreciate. But the phone is more than a simple extension of those impulses. It is something that takes those impulses and turns them into signals that feed a mammoth digital machine run by a corporation with a profit motive.

You can't be anything other than a swordsman when you hold a sword. Similarly, you probably can't be anything other than a profit-creating drone for a corporation while you are tapping on a phone screen.

Some might counter this by saying it is possible to do things other than social tapping on a phone, but let's face it, you actually never do. I can't recall the last time I received a link from a good old-fashioned website from a friend (unless its a breaking news report). Everything is either an Instagram reel or a YouTube video or a Facebook post. Most of us don't venture beyond the confines of our social media feeds anymore.

It's not by accident of course. The corporations that run the walled gardens that we spend our days in have a vested interest in keeping us thrashing about in the feeds. They have spent millions devising psychological traps that we cannot escape. They have put a lot of effort into making sure we work for them, unaware of the fact that there is a giant invisible finger pressing down on us, customising us every minute of every day.