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.”

At the heart of this dystopian bargain? HTTP cookies, those tiny bits of code invented in 1994 by Netscape (without asking, naturally) that turned the web from a private space into a corporate panopticon. Thanks, Larry.

Your digital exhaust is Big Business

Every online move you make—your IP address, browsing habits, shopping tics, even how long you linger on that kind of page—is vacuumed up by trackers, analysed by algorithms, and monetised by advertisers.

  • Google (90% of sites)
  • Facebook (46%)
  • Twitter & Amazon (tagging along for the ride)

…are the usual suspects, hoarding your data like dragons on a gold pile. Even if you avoid them, their tentacles stretch across the web, logging your activity through embedded widgets, analytics, and ad networks.

  • 65% of people say they don’t want targeted ads.
  • 100% of corporations ignore them anyway.

Your “preferences” don’t matter—predictive targeting already knows what you’ll do before you do. Weather, location, socio-economic status, even your mood (thanks, emoji searches!) are fed into the machine to manipulate you better.

The data colonialism of the 21st century

Countries like Serbia? Goldmines of behavioural data, extracted by US tech giants and regional middlemen. Your online activity isn’t just tracked—it’s exported, processed, and sold back to you in the form of “personalised experiences” (read: ads).

The bottom line

You’re not the customer. You’re the product. And the worst part? You’re working for free. Every scroll, like, and search is unpaid labour in the world’s largest immaterial sweatshop.

But hey—at least the internet is “free,” right?