Just like oil used to fuel machines, power industries, and enrich the few by exploiting the resources of the many, Data today is what makes big companies go. They (the companies) harvest those data from us daily, and we are constantly providing them on a silver platter, by merely using the very same instruments that they themselves offer us in exchange: video calls, posts on social networks, voice assistants, and now AI.
This website aims to analyze the relationship between the User, the Company, and the Data from different points of view and at different scales: from the most innocent Alexa request to the biggest and most disruptive data breach. All this while attempting to provide some tools for living, or at least surviving, in the digital world.
So (getting back at the oil metaphor), while Paul Thomas Anderson, when dealing with the greed and selfishness of humans, promises us that, yes, There Will Be Blood, in our virtual world the answer is less obvious. We just have to wait and see, always wondering: Will there be blood?
This is a scrollytelling data-visualization website created for the Information Design Course 2024 at Aalto University