The age old question persists.
Your body is speaking all the time.
Not in words — in pulses.
A shifting heart rate.
A flicker in the eyes.
A hesitation in breath.
These signals are rich. Continuous. Real.
And increasingly, they’re being recorded — not for you, but for them.
To train algorithms. To optimize products. To predict behavior.
Your stress becomes UX data. Your joy becomes market research.
And so the question emerges:
If your feeling becomes value — who gets paid?
Right now, the answer is simple: not you.
Like farmland, forests, and attention before it, your nervous system is being enclosed. Fenced off. Turned into proprietary infrastructure. Platforms collect emotional data like digital landlords — building walled gardens out of your embodied experience.
But what if we went a different way?
What if the body’s signals — our shared biometric presence — were treated as a commons?
A civic resource. A collective inheritance.
Not to be mined, but stewarded.
Not owned, but protected.
The biometric commons asks:
What infrastructures are needed to protect our signals from being exploited? What rights do we have to our stress, our arousal, our attention? Can we design systems that reward feeling without commodifying it?
This isn’t just about privacy.
It’s about presence as governance.
Because your body is not private property.
It’s not a data pipe.
It’s not an input stream.
It is a relational interface.
A living, sensing part of something larger.
If we’re going to build a future that respects human intelligence — not just cognitive intelligence, but felt intelligence — we’ll need new architectures. Legal. Technical. Ethical. Cultural.
We’ll need systems that:
Return value to the people who generate it Make feeling legible, but not extractive Protect presence as a right, not a resource
Because once sensing becomes currency, the battle over your nervous system will begin.
And we must be ready — not to retreat, but to reclaim.
Next Up: The Sensing Economy, Vol 6. — We Are the Soul of the Machine
In the final essay of the series, we explore why care, meaning, and mortality remain uniquely human — and why our role isn’t to outthink AI, but to feel what it never can.
The Senseai Institute 