Signal: Why we shouldn’t be scared

Fiction:

As I lay in bed, I opened the sleep tracking app on my phone and hit record. The app was new, and promised to provide detailed insights into my sleep patterns, helping me to optimize my rest and wake up feeling refreshed. I closed my eyes and drifted off, feeling comforted by the thought that I was taking control of my sleep for the first time. But as the night wore on, strange things began to happen. The app continued to record my sleep, but the data it was capturing was unlike anything I had seen before. There were long periods of deep sleep interspersed with brief moments of intense activity, as if I was experiencing vivid nightmares that I couldn’t remember when I woke up. The more I used the app, the more I felt like it was monitoring me, analyzing my every move as I slept. And as the weeks went by, I began to wonder if the app was really helping me to sleep better, or if it was controlling me, using my own sleep patterns to manipulate my behavior.

Dennet “Intuition Pumps and Other Useful Tools for Thinking”