As the thing we call the birthday nears, we begin to get well-intentioned reminders from various commercial outlets. Everyone has a different age at which they stop wanting to be reminded of their age, when being reduced to a number begins to feel old hat. The month of my birthday usually starts with a barrage of birthday mail and email adverts from stores from which i’ve ordered shoes and makeup and clothes, offering me a discount code for 15% off to buy myself something nice. This kind of customer care, which is a simple way to get you to buy more stuff, has been around for years, and i’m not one to find fault in discounts. But walking into my pilates studio about a week before the dreaded day, I was greeted with a singsong happy birthday keala from the receptionist. I did a double take as I accepted, unable to remember ever entering my date of birth into their online scheduling system, though i quickly reasoned that i enter all kinds of personal information into various radio boxes without thinking, not that that is reasonable. I questioned the purpose as I changed my clothes, because wasn’t I in the studio to forget the effects of aging, and moreover doesn’t that increase their responsibility in asking me how i feel that day, do any muscles ache, do i need to support my neck and back? I forgot about it anyway while burning through the stomach series.

Next thing i knew i was getting some cash from the ATM and after spitting out my cash a big HAPPY BIRTHDAY flashed across the screen. It is not particularly heartwarming to be bidden happy birthday by a grey machine whose sole function is to reach into its innards to hand you part of your savings with which you plan rapidly to part. I’d prefer an extra $20. In the week of carousing that led up to my birthday, which tends to necessitate extra amounts of drinking to forget, i visited the ATM 3 times, continually reminded of the impending day when the digits were to tick irreversibly upwards, until i felt like i was stuck in a vicious cycle of drinking and being reminded of why i was drinking, by the ATM.

The final surprise occurred on my birthday itself, when i opened my browser and the google search page had been decorated by cakes. For a second i was confused. What famous person, corporation or state’s birthday were those zany google cartoonists commemorating today, that took precedence over the world cup final? Suddenly my eyes narrowed like phillip j. fry, and i opened an incognito browser and typed in www.google.com. The logo meant for the rest of the world was soccerific. I wasn’t surprised that google knew my birthday. I instead felt that i had become minimized into a string of ones and zeros and my personal characteristics entries in a database, and the manipulation of my emotions timed by the programming of functions. And for what purpose? Surely it was not to sell, as in the case of the ATM and the software, so it must be to build goodwill. But haven’t they figured out by now that the birthday reminder can have the precise opposite effect? As there is no other tangible benefit to big data knowing my birthday, i am left only fearfully impressed that the machines have this information about me, and god knows what else, for i will not remember what information i’ve handed over to whom, what click wrap agreements i’ve ever signed. And so, another year older with another year of characteristics accumulated, i shall be more and more manipulated, predicted and grouped. I feel a bit smaller but as a data construct i am hundreds of thousands of bytes bigger, the computer clock ticks and i am going to grow ever larger, like a brain in a japanese anime, until Big Data and i are one.