Two winters ago I ran an experiment. I installed a default tracker blocker on every device in my apartment — laptops, phones, even the smart television — and started counting. The first week registered 127,000 blocked requests. The first month crossed 847,000. By December the counter read forty-two million and climbing. Each increment was a data broker that never learned I read longform journalism at 2am or that my partner searches for Lisbon flights every Thursday afternoon.
The Counter Nobody Resets
There is something psychologically different about a counter that only goes up. It sits in the corner of your screen like a running tally of invisible violations you would have otherwise never seen. After six months I stopped noticing the number itself and started noticing what it replaced: the slow page loads, the eerily specific advertisements, the cookie consent banners designed to treat rejection as a four-step bureaucratic process.