What this is, and why we're building it in the open
Ever feel played? You are being engineered.
Not by a conspiracy. By something simpler and harder to escape: incentives. The platforms most of us use every day were built to maximise one thing — engagement — and the gap between engagement and your wellbeing is where the harm lives.
This site is an attempt to explain that machine. How it works, what it has cost us, and what can be done about it.
What we’re trying to achieve
Most writing about technology and attention asks you to feel something — usually alarm. We’re trying to do something different: show you the system and let you draw your own conclusions.
That means three commitments.
First, the mechanism, not the moral panic. We explain how engagement optimisation, behavioural advertising, and recommendation systems actually function — the documented mechanics, sourced to peer-reviewed research, official investigations, and primary documents. Where the science is contested, we say so plainly.
Second, understanding as the defence. The most reliable protection against manipulation is recognising the technique. Good journalism, rigorous science, and democratic institutions have correction mechanisms that commercial manipulation systems do not. Those are worth understanding, and worth defending.
Third, written to be understood. The main argument on every page is written in plain language that doesn’t assume specialist knowledge. If you want to go deeper — the precise academic term, the methodology, the places experts disagree — that detail is one tap away, but never in your way. We explain why we built it this way on the “How We Communicate” page.
Built in the open
We are a small, non-commercial, public-interest project — a Dutch foundation in the making. There are no ads here, and there never will be. The whole site, including its source and its documentation, is public.
That includes our mistakes. When we get something wrong, we’ll correct it and log the correction publicly. The site’s credibility rests on being checkable, so every claim links to its source.
Soft launch — and a request
We’re soft-launching soon, and before we go wider we want feedback from people who’ll be honest with us.
Does the main argument land? Is anything unclear, overstated, or missing a source? Does the calm tone help, or does it undersell something that deserves more weight? If you read a page and come away more capable rather than more anxious, we’ve done our job — and if you don’t, we want to know.
The project will be translated and localised into other languages over time, because the machine is global even when the laws and the politics are local. English is simply where we’re starting.
If you’d like to help — by reading, by poking holes, by pointing us at evidence we’ve missed — you’re early, and that’s exactly the right time to arrive.