Public interest · Non-commercial · Evidence-based
Ever feel played?
You are - by engineering.
The platforms you use every day were designed — by teams of engineers, with billions of data points — to keep you on them as long as possible. Not to inform you. Not to connect you. To keep you.
No single actor is in charge. Each party follows its own incentive — and together they form a loop that feeds itself. Follow it round:
"How does this actually work?"
The engagement loop, real-time bidding, device fingerprinting, and search engines as attention machines. The full technology behind what you feel.
Start with the machine → The Symptoms"What is it actually doing?"
Mental health, elections, radicalisation, consumerism. Documented harms, chronological from 2000. What is established and what is still contested.
See the evidence → The Antidote"What can I actually do?"
From individual actions to structural advocacy. The institutions worth supporting. What actually helps.
What actually helps →Want to see it in action?
Three interactive demos show the mechanism working in real time. The Tracking & Targeting demo reveals what every website can see about you, simulates the RTB auction your data enters, and shows how that profile is used to target you. The Gamification demo lets you feel the mechanics — and then watch the same mechanics pointed only at your time. The Data Combination demo shows how three harmless-looking slices of data, held by three different companies, combine into one sharp profile through a single shared key.