You might think the internet is a swirling cloud of decentralised freedom. Bless. In reality, it’s a tangled mess of invisible choke points, centralised bottlenecks, and nosy gatekeepers. The SHARE Foundation decided to trace where data from Serbia actually goes, and surprise! It’s not very far before it ends up in the hands of a small handful of companies, countries, and—let’s be honest—potential eavesdroppers. One router to rule them all Start with a simple web visit. Your request doesn’t just zip off to its destination—it checks in at the SBB TelePark in Belgrade, where all local traffic passes through a single router. That’s right. If you wanted to spy on everything Serbians do online (purely theoretically, of course), you’d only need to sit at one choke point. And funnily enough, ISPs are legally obliged to do just that. Because what’s a little metadata hoarding between friends? ...

Once upon a time, the internet was supposed to be a free, democratic utopia. Instead, it’s become a glorified panopticon run by Silicon Valley landlords where everyone’s shouting, no one’s listening, and half the “people” aren’t even real. Twitter: Where trolls go to war Serbian elections on Twitter looked less like democratic discourse and more like a pub brawl between colour-coded tribes. Add a few trolls, some anonymous hitmen-for-hashtags, and voila—you’ve got state-sanctioned smear campaigns wearing sock puppet accounts. ...

Welcome to Serbia’s digital political theatre, where every heroic rescue is staged, every dissenting meme vanishes mysteriously, and every comment section is a gladiator arena for astroturfed loyalists. It starts with a snowstorm, a suspiciously well-timed TV crew, and a future prime minister trying out for the role of Balkan Superman. The internet responds with mockery. The government responds with takedowns. Thus begins the SHARE Foundation’s journey documenting over 300 cases of digital shenanigans—think DDoS attacks, creepy surveillance, and disappearing videos—courtesy of state-sanctioned (or suspiciously adjacent) actors. ...

The eternal quest to prove that men are from Mars and women are from Venus—neurologically speaking, of course. For over a century, scientists (and, let’s be honest, people with opinions) have been poking at brains, measuring corpus callosums, and squinting at amygdalae, all in the noble pursuit of confirming whatever gender stereotypes they already believed. Take the corpus callosum, that thick bundle of nerves connecting the brain’s hemispheres. Back in 1906, R. B. Bean—a man who clearly never met a bias he didn’t like—declared that its size correlated with intelligence and, naturally, that women (and certain races, because why stop at one bad take?) had inferior versions. His own lab director promptly debunked him, but the myth persisted. By the 1990s, pop science had rebranded the idea: Women have bigger corpus callosums! That’s why they’re so ~intuitive~! Cue a thousand think-pieces about “female intuition.” ...

Planned obsolescence – capitalism’s most elegant con. Why sell someone a product that lasts when you can sell them the same product repeatedly? It all began in the 1920s, when a group of German industrialists, presumably while twirling their moustaches, formed the Phoebus cartel and decided light bulbs were too reliable. From then on, bulbs would dutifully expire after 1,000 hours, like clockwork. And thus, the great tradition of engineering things to fail was born. ...

The internet, that magical realm where nothing is free, least of all you. Every click, scroll, and half-hearted Google search fuels an invisible economy built on surveillance capitalism, where your digital footprints are harvested, packaged, and sold to the highest bidder. The Orwellian reality of online tracking George Orwell’s *1984* warned of a world where you could never know if you were being watched. Joke’s on him—today, we know we’re watched constantly, and we still click “Accept All Cookies.” ...

Mobile apps are those delightful little spies we willingly invite into our pockets. Sure, they promise convenience, entertainment, or maybe just a way to kill time, but their real business model? Hoovering up your data like a Roomba on steroids. The Great Permission Heist Terms of Service & Privacy Policies are not agreements—they’re hostage notes written in legalese. The average Privacy Policy is 2,518 words long (because transparency is best served as an unreadable wall of text). Reading all the policies for your installed apps would take 16 hours—or roughly the time it takes to regret your life choices. “Free” apps are the worst offenders. They’re not free—you’re just paying in personal data instead of cash. Pre-installed apps are the ultimate betrayal. Your carrier forces them on you (looking at you, Serbian media apps), and you can’t even delete them. Net neutrality? More like net absurdity. “But why do they need all these permissions?” Great question! Here’s what your apps really do with them: ...

The UKUSA Agreement alias the Five Eyes (FVEY), because nothing says “trustworthy global surveillance” like a name ripped from a bad spy thriller. Born in 1946 as a cosy little signals intelligence pact between Britain and America, it soon expanded like an overeager book club, roping in Canada (1948), Australia, and New Zealand (1956) for good measure. Of course, it was all top secret until 1999, when Australia—bless its honest little heart—accidentally let slip that, oops, the Anglosphere had been running the world’s most invasive eavesdropping operation for half a century. ...

The GDPR—Europe’s magnum opus of regulatory overreach, drafted by people who clearly believe consent forms are the pinnacle of human interaction. Born from the ashes of the 1995 Data Protection Directive (which, admittedly, was about as fit for the digital age as a fax machine), this sweeping reform was supposed to “strengthen privacy rights” and “boost Europe’s digital economy.” Instead, it gifted us with pop-up hell, corporate panic attacks, and a cottage industry of “GDPR consultants” who’ve never met a compliance checkbox they didn’t adore. ...