Exhibit No. 13 — surveillance capitalism, liveExhibit No. 13 — surveillance capitalism, retired
(They all are. We're just honest about it.) (Feels lighter already, doesn't it?)
Every eye here tracks your cursor. Every number in that dossier is real — computed from your visit, right now. Nothing leaves this tab. That's the twist: everywhere else, it does. The eyes are gone. The dossier is confetti. Same content, same pixels — minus the part where you were for sale.
Scroll. We'll be watchingScroll. Nobody's counting
Funny how that works.
The business modelThe business model, deceased
Every page you visit runs an auction in the ~100 milliseconds before it loads. The lot on the block: your next few seconds of attention. Here's yours, moving in real time: No bidders. No lots. No 100-millisecond ritual behind the curtain. Your attention goes back to its rightful owner — spend it on something you actually like.
A beacon fires. A few hundred companies learn you exist before the page finishes painting. You never applied for this. You never will. A page loads. That's it. That's the whole event. No beacon, no broadcast, no welcoming committee of data brokers.
Your attention is cut into millisecond lots: age guess, mood guess, purchase intent, insecurity index. The knife is very good at its job. Or skim. Or leave! Nobody is measuring your dwell time, grading your scroll, or wondering what your hesitation near the pricing table meant.
Highest bidder wins the right to interrupt you. The going rate is fractions of a cent. You are paid in "free." The page cost us a few kilobytes to serve. It cost you exactly nothing — not even the invisible kind of nothing.
"We value your privacy" is the most expensive sentence on the internet. It costs you exactly everything it protects. Turns out a page can just… be a page. Radical stuff. Somebody should tell the rest of the internet.
Your attention has earned somebody else $0.0000 this visit. Your cut: $0.00. Money made from your attention since you flipped the switch: $0.0000. As it should be.
An exotic, experimental featureA very normal feature, actually
No 37-toggle consent maze. No "legitimate interest" with 214 pre-checked partners. No guilt-trip modal begging you to reconsider. One switch. It does what it says. That's the whole trick. The maze was never for your benefit — it was the product working as designed. Miss the eyes? Flip it back. We won't judge. Much.
Restricted documentDigital self-defense
This section conflicts with the interests of our 214 advertising partners. It will unlock when the auction closes. There is a switch above. Draw your own conclusions. You don't need a bunker or a law degree. Most of the eyes on the web go dark with three unglamorous, extremely effective moves.
Install uBlock Origin. One extension, five minutes, and most of the eyes on the web quietly go dark. Free, open source, and run with famous stubbornness.
ublockorigin.comSwitch to a search engine that doesn't keep a diary about you, and use email aliases so every service meets a different you. Your inbox stops being a homing beacon.
start with private searchYour card reports every purchase to people you've never met. Learn self-custody — our Bad Wallet is a friendly on-ramp — and your spending stops being someone else's dataset.
meet Bad WalletSurveillance isn't the price of the internet — it's just the business model that got there first. Pages can be sweet without being spies. You just watched one learn. Build sweet things. Refuse sour deals. Leave the eyes to the museums.
Sour Labs — sweet tools, sour to the system.