Good on you.

More and more, people spend their time entranced by powerful algorithms that are cleverly designed to capture your attention and hold it - the algorithms then mine users for data and are constantly increasing their intelligence and ability to hold and milk their human captives. This surely alters peoples consciousness and the nature of human life and society, and belief... There is talk about AI itself reaching a level of consciousness, and although that seems to me incredible, the algorithms do already possess significant power over peoples lives, thoughts, feelings and manifest huge value monetarily and politically. Algorithms can already in some ways, and increasingly will, know us better than we can know ourselves- if we let them...and they are hard to avoid. They forget nothing and monitor everything we do online and, through the IOT potentially monitor you as you walk down the street. They are owned by a few extremely wealthy 'Godking' individuals and corporations who in turn are increasingly linked to and working with governments - the algorithms enable politicians to minutely monitor population sentiments and responses and to formulate messaging. All this interaction between humans and the algorithms is enabled by converting the humans speech symbols into digital machine language...a language stripped of all feeling- a language reduced to zeros and ones- a reduced level of consciousness, but also a very decisive one, that never forgets and can process vast quantities of data very quickly. Is AI and the interconnected algorithms around it a manifestation obstructing/diverting peoples consciousness? Yes, imo.

The internet service in Canada sounds even worse than here in New Zealand where the prices for cable internet are more or less set by a cartel of rentseeking ISPs and the government. However I found one smallish ISP here that provides me with unlimited 4G internet which is quite fast enough for my purposes (can stream medium quality video) for NZD$17(about USD$10) per month.