Most of the "free" internet is paid for by your attention. Nobody asked you, nobody is checking how it leaves you, and it is designed to be hard to quit. This page explains how it works, and how to unplug from it without spending money.
what you do → what it feeds
Tap a card to flip it.
the machine
No person is sitting there watching you. Nobody needs to. It is a pipeline that runs on its own, and every stage is paid by the next one.
youscroll, watch, search, buy, walk around with a phone
devices + appsTVs, phones and free apps log it, tied to an advertising ID
SDKs + pixelstracking code inside apps and pages ships it out, often to dozens of companies
data brokersmerge it with purchase records, location and public records into a profile
ad exchangeauctions your attention in ~100 ms, every time a page or app loads
advertiserspay for whatever reaction is most likely, and the feed learns to provoke it
The loop closes at the bottom: whatever gets a reaction gets shown more, so the system drifts toward things that wind people up. Nobody has to intend that for it to happen. The fix is the same either way: stop feeding it, which is the next section.
unplug
Everything here is free. Your progress is saved in this browser only.
0/18 done
terminal
Ask questions about how any of this works. It runs on your own computer through Ollama: nothing you type goes to this site or to any company.