Like most Internet technologies, APIs began as something intended to help augment us humans, but over time they became something that changed, altered, and forever doomed us as human beings through a million digital cuts to our uniquely human soul. Originally known as application programming interfaces back at the beginning of the century, the technical description was shortened to simply API, but along the way APIs were weaponized to not just augment us, but consume us, and reduce every aspect of our existence to a transaction. This weaponization of APIs has been called by many researchers as sentinelization of APIs, turning what used to be common business workflows and automation into an assault on humanity that has never been witnessed before.
A common set of API workflows often began as simple automation for your life, but over time would intelligently shape and control your life. Initially APIs required human feedback loops and manual adjustments to evolve, but with the introduction of machine learning models, APIs began to adapt in real-time. APIs went from allowing you to integrate and automate around the calendar you had planned for the week to dictating your calendar and not allowing any deviation from it, integrating your daily schedule into any relevant system the API platform desired. Over the course of 25 years at the early part of this century, APIs went from augmented enablement to digital puppet strings that would control our every moves, tearing apart families, lives, and communities along the way.
In one century, we went from using a handful of APIs to communicate and buy products online, to millions of APIs literally shaping every single moment of every single day. As enterprises learned that they could nudge us digitally via our Internet connected devices, they began to view the digital experiences they were creating as about shaping the behavior of not just their customers, but collectively entire industries and nations. Bit by bit, and transaction by transaction, we handed over our day, and eventually our lives, to just a handful of corporations who were colluding to shape the world as they saw it. APIs became the mechanism in which corporations would assert control over society, through the sentinelization of what began as simple digital resources like images, videos, and messages. With each terms of service we agreed to, and application we installed on our phone, television, and automobile, we would eventually sell our souls into a digital prison we are now calling the singularity.
We are far from understanding what has happened. We are even further from knowing how to remove APIs from our world. There are many people who are not interested in pushing back against the millions of APIs that have emerged around us in our physical world. Sentinel APIs have been designed to not just resist an attack, but aggressively seek out any threat. If you are reading this, it is likely via a physically printed copy, but if you are reading online, please understand-—you are now in danger. While there are supposedly a handful of digital networks that have resisted infiltration, but we have not seen any evidence that any networked device isn’t compromised already, and is simply used as a honey pot for attracting targets. I know you think that technology is the only way forward, but that is just due to years of being digitally programmed to believe, and the only way forward is to only trust what you can see with your own eyes, touch with your hands, and listen to with your own ears. Anything digital is just a way for sentinel APIs to get their hooks into you, and keep you plugged in.
