A digital footprint is “the traceable data and activity a user leaves on the internet” as defined by Verizon. We’ve all heard of it before, probably in a middle school assembly when a white woman with a Karen haircut lectured you not to send nudes or you will be bullied until you kill yourself. Then she showed you a picture of a 16-year-old girl who did just that. Then you went to lunch.
But don’t kill yourself yet! Despite the fact that Google and Microsoft have definitely been tracking you since you first looked up “girls kissing”, here’s why you shouldn’t be wasting your time worrying about what you like on Twitter. Excuse me, “X.”
- Once you get bold and start acting like a white man, and by that I mean frivolously frolic around on LinkedIn applying to jobs you're underqualified for, Amazon’s AI will go onto its super secret Instagram account that they definitely have and stalk your activity. It will spend a few hours kicking its legs in blogosphere-bed giggling at the reels you liked and screenshotting your archived posts from freshman year to send to Alexa. But after that, it’ll see how funny you are and realize you are the personality hire that Amazon has been looking for. It’ll quickly possess the body of Jeff Bezos, who has frozen himself to be dethawed in 50 years when follicle implants have been redesigned to look real, and offer you a 31k starting salary! But unfortunately, you’ll only be paid 9 months of the year even though you’ll work for 12. It may not be enough to pay rent but you’re still legally not allowed to get another job. You’ll likely end up striking with our brilliant grad workers at some point.
- I know Walmart is not the most glamorous company you think of when I say Fortune 500 but that's exactly why they want you. Your first-hand life experience running a “dank memes” page in 6th grade with occasional features of your attempts at Drarry fanart to your new coquette-deer-in-a-bow-tomato-girl aesthetic and part-time ASMRtist gig will lend you perfectly to the makeover that Walmart needs. This will prompt a month-long microtrend of romanticization for the #walmartgirl. She will have blue and yellow chrome nails, affectionately named “industrial waste nails”, oversized blazers, and a 50$ water bottle shaped like a shopping cart that she’ll actually roll around!
- Finally, I admit, there’s a chance corporate America may not appreciate your private story name composed entirely of reclaimed slurs, or your repost of a bedazzled IUD where you wrote: “need this.” But, with the rise of artificial intelligence being weaponized by conglomerates, there will also be a tortured child genius, likely born in the Midwest or wherever Chappell Roan is from, who will rise up to code their own AI at 14 years old designed exclusively to expose corporate insider training, union busting, and politician payoffs. Our very own Lisan al Gaib if you will. Using this, we’ll spar off with hiring managers comparing photos of their foreign waste dumping site poisoning local water supplies, as they desperately hold up a screenshot of a reel you liked before James Charles got canceled for grooming. They’ll hand over the contract and starting bonus before you know it.
At the end of my career, I’ll likely be working at JP Morgan as a lunchtime stand-up comedian and friend-to-all for 400k a year after they got exposed for funding fossil fuels again and I advised that they definitely needed to hire a women’s studies major to balance it out. I’ll be using this article as a time capsule to check back in 50 years to see how much of this came true, my money is on everything except Bezos with hair.