Renad Attallah, an 11-year-old girl from Gaza, is active on social media. With a wide smile and a gentle, light tone, Renad—despite the destruction around her—posts regular videos about cooking and substitute recipes amid food shortages. She avoids heavy rhetoric, images of the wounded, or direct accusations—anything beyond the bare minimum of her sole request: survival.

Her content spreads widely and draws strong engagement because it matches platform algorithms perfectly: food + positivity + consistency = engagement. About 1.6 million people follow her, and many did not hesitate to support her on GoFundMe to help her leave the Gaza Strip.

Of course, Renad does not actually live with the same positivity she shows on camera; she separates the reality she endures from the entertaining mode that algorithms reward, maintaining the growth rate of her brand on Instagram—an onerous, harsh burden for a child her age under such conditions. In fact, her sister explained that she encouraged Renad to create content as a way to confront the despair that was consuming her.

In early August, Renad announced to her followers that she had finally managed to leave the Strip and arrive in the Netherlands, accompanied by her sister who had been accepted at a university there. She left with her twin brother and older sister, leaving behind their mother and four other siblings.

I learned of Renad’s departure after a video stopped me in my tracks—another child, perhaps her age or younger, pleading on social media for the same institutions that helped Renad to help all children escape. He could not understand why Renad was able to survive while he was not. The video was stark in its simplicity, because it laid bare our bigger question: Why not me?

The truth is that the boy simply wasn’t known online; he didn’t have a content strategy, or knowledge of platform algorithms, or a large follower base. Consequently, his chances of survival were lower. He had not yet realized that he cannot demand life unless he wraps his need in “added value” for the audience, and that raw sincerity is not “productive” in the eyes of the algorithms—therefore, it has no value. He is a child who has not yet grasped that, outside a parent’s embrace, he will be forced to prove his “value” to the world in order to live with dignity—or in this case, simply to live.

Sadly, this is the direct outcome of “military capitalism,” where possessing a polished, lovable, non-controversial, consumable, and marketable personal brand becomes a basic condition for staying alive. And the commerce here is not limited to monetary exchange; it also includes the exchange of symbols and meanings. The surreality only keeps getting more complex…

The cliché “if the product is free, you are the product” is painfully accurate; our data are the primary product of this era. Whoever monitors, stores, and buys our data—private companies, governments, spyware—can learn a great deal from what we put online: from metadata (time, location, format) to the nature of the content itself (satire, informational posts, memes) all the way to who shares it (gender, age, preferences).

The result: a near-accurate profile of a given demographic. Add to that the network of followers, commenters, sharers, mockers, and admirers, and you get a detailed map that reveals much about a group of people in a specific place and time.

For companies, these data enable precise inferences about our behavior: how we consume and how we communicate. The most famous example is Target, which was able to predict that a teenage girl was pregnant before she herself realized it, by tracking her purchasing behavior on their site. She even began receiving ads for baby products before she took a pregnancy test.

For governments, such data can help predict election results or the outcome of a referendum. As for spyware and repressive apparatuses, it goes without saying: our data become tools for tracking, surveillance, analysis, and identifying journalists, activists, civilians—or anyone these agencies categorize as “wanted.”

In Gaza, posting content becomes a profoundly complex paradox that intersects with Israel’s methods of genocidal warfare: on the one hand, the user has little choice but to post what is happening amid Israeli media blackout; on the other hand, they must present content in ways that fit platform standards that prefer entertainment to news. Still, posting may offer a means to rally followers, raise funds, and improve chances of leaving the Strip. Yet at the same time, this content supplies the Israeli army with a vast quantity of data that make pursuit, targeting, and killing easier.

Parents teach their children from an early age not to share personal details with others, fearing “envious eyes” that might derail projects and plans. They teach them not to tell neighbors what’s on the dinner table, where they’re going and with whom, or any sensitive family details. From a young age they learn to answer any probing question with: “I don’t know,” because secrecy is the strongest form of protection.

This culture of concealment and discretion, rooted in upbringing and Islamic custom (“Meet your needs in secrecy”), has historically fit a region like the Middle East, given the succession of wars over the decades. Under such conditions, the importance of “secrecy” doubles, not only because of “enviers,” but also because of spies, informants, mafias, and loose weapons. Thus parents instill in their children a kind of preventive paranoia:

— “Where are your parents?” — “I don’t know.”
— “Where is your neighbor?” — “I don’t know.”

This paranoia sediments into our behavior and language permanently: we learn how to lace truth with a lie, and a lie with truth, until the two mix so thoroughly that one can no longer be told from the other. We protect the truth without sacrificing ourselves.

But this method is primitive and unsustainable; if you hold onto half-truths and half-lies for long enough, you begin to doubt the truth and believe the lie. Instead of being discreet, you become deceptive. Even so, the reasons for clinging to this paranoia keep multiplying, especially in an age of smart devices and tracking software that follow us across apps. And with the absence of internet privacy laws in most of the world—especially in the Middle East—this paranoia remains users’ only line of defense.

We treat what we disclose as if we were playing “Two Truths and a Lie”: we’re careful always to mix truth with reserve, so we don’t present ourselves to the world unprotected.

But, unfortunately, military capitalism has turned privacy into a luxury not everyone can afford, and not everyone can still say, “I don’t know.”