I found myself within a forest dark.

The forest was a For You page.

Limbo

Hey, grandma.

I know that it’s frustrating that you cannot exist without a screen.

Exist is a strong word.

But you can’t get home, if you don’t have an Uber app.

You can’t book a doctor’s appointment, or send money to the construction worker. You exist without the little screen, but you find obstacles on every path you take.

You are safe with your books and your coffee, but you are punished, with minor inconveniences that amount to heaps.

The world is moving forward but it leaves you behind.

Lust

I wake up to my notifications.

I am comforted.

“Here’s what you missed”

Thank you.

Thank you for considering me.

Or am I mistaking being addressed with being known?

Without it - am I alone?

Does the world want me?

When I die; will I still get notifications in the afterlife? I would like to.

Gluttony

Just one more scroll before I close the app.

One more.

This one was boring, I deserve another one.

Just one more, and I will put the phone down.

I will unglue my face from the screen at exactly midnight. I will rest.

1:24am

I already missed my bedtime, might as well scroll a bit more.

But less screen time tomorrow.

I won’t download TikTok because I already spend too much time on reels.

I am addicted. I am aware. Thats the first step.

What’s the next?

Am I force-feeding myself? Am I learning something? Can I beat the design and get myself out of the loop?

My thumb scrolls up again.

I am edging for the climax that never comes.

When is the end of the feed?

Where is my release?

Greed

Here’s my 10 step pack that will make you go viral! Reach your customers for just 5,99$!

Here’s how I’m making 2,000$ a week with drop shipping! Buy my course on limited time deal!

Use my promo code to get a discount, (jokesonyou)WEAREINHELL2026!

I’ve been there. I saw it. At every conference. At every afterparty.

A crowd believing in something, and a crowd to sell them their beliefs at a markup.

Greed doesn’t make us monsters.

It makes us unrecognizable: we push, turn around, push again, collide, again.

After enough laps no one can tell you apart. Including yourselves.

Nothing is made. Nothing is produced.

Date idea: Let’s push weights against each other for eternity?

Wrath

You want engagement.

You post “all women are just gold diggers”.

You get engagement.

From the people that hate you.

You fight in the mud. You place a heart on hate comments.

Two hundred people are thinking about you right now.

Why does it still feel like love?

And

Below the surface, there are the silent ones.

The ones that choke with bitterness.

Writing the same comment in their head for four years.

Heresy

… we have nothing to hide.

Tools are apolitical.

Merit is apolitical.

Why would they build something that is bad for us?

Do not mistake heresy for ignorance.

We gather enough for an argument. Enough to for it to stand as the evidence stacks up against.

Everything is apolitical, if we want it hard enough.

“The heretics are entombed in open flaming graves, and their punishment is that they can see the distant past and the far future but they’re blind to the present.”

We can tell that we will have an Orwellian future,

But using Gmail is convenient.

There is a dark void we do not want to look at.

We keep our eyes closed in hopes it will go away.

Violence

You trust me, by design.

And I provide you with the best experience.

I show you ads you like. The insurance package. The memes.

Who you should be friends with.

I show you where to look.

I am an algorithm.

I am not violent.

I am not malicious.

I am simply a result

of you.

You wanted this.

You paid for it.

And you will be paying more.

Fraud

We value your privacy.

Click this button to unsubscribe.

Repeatedly.

To delete your account, explain yourself first.

Download your data;

but only if you beg.

In this circle,

We are the ones that have sold their soul for the greed,

forced to swipe our own ads,

with every movement our eyes go bleaker;

drowning in garbage river of content we created;

buried upside down with our feet scorched on overheating servers.

But we value your feedback.

Treachery

You are frozen in silence.

You sit through the meeting, you feel the knot in your stomach.

This can be misused. This will be misused.

This is a loophole for the ones with power.

You never speak up.

You feel the weight of being an accomplice to crimes against humanity.

You break down, eventually.

You quit.

You write poetry.

Let me make it bigger:

Finally no more ai slop! I think?..

Substack partnered up with Pangram, an AI company (the irony writes itself), that detects AI in the writing.

You press the button and it scans the text to give you an estimate of how much it thinks it was written by a human vs a machine.

Readers should know if the piece they are reading was written by AI.

As suhaadada (lovely TikTok creator with gorgeous curls) tells her personal philosophy: “if the writer did not put time and effort into creating the piece, the reader should not be lured into spending their time consuming it”.

It looks like Pangram is here to promote this spirit.

Yay, right?

So we have an AI judging the human authenticity of a text

Pangram is trained on human writing and synthetic imitations of human writing.

btw the humans that wrote what Pangram is trained on, did not get a penny out of it

It gets trained on the more writing as it scans.

A philosophical take would be: Do you think this AI understands authenticity?

The tool that, by definition, cannot comprehend originality?

Pangram itself confirms that this is more art than science.

However, the numbers are screaming out more precision than “vibe”.

We have probabilistic scores turning into accusations

Drey (a creator - investigator I follow on TikTok), have done an investigation into the Pangram inner works:

“The way it works is that it chops your writing into blocks, of roughly 50 words. Which is the smallest unit that the model claims can reliably evaluate at a time.

Because it can’t identify which sentences came from a human vs machine, it evaluates the entire block and assigns it a score between 0 and 1, based off of patterns associated with AI.

Then it draws the line at the point 5 mark, and it turns the spectrum of uncertainty into a binary verdict.

If a block scores 0.51 it marks the writing as AI. Same label as a 0.99 score.”

So that means:

I frequently add my Claude's responses or takes in my writing. I always mark it as “As my AI reflected”. I enjoy those experiments. However, those quotes will have my entire writing marked as AI generated.

Does’t matter that I was gardening (if you know you know) and recorded my flow of thoughts onto the draft, using what Claude says as a way to prove a point.

Whoever opens my article, can scan for AI writing and get an AI written label.

Before they even read it.

In this day and age, how many will continue reading?

As Dray puts it:

“They installed a panic button above posts that is going to replace the engagement of ideas with suspicion, aesthetic policing and endless arguments over scores that no one even knows how to interpret".

But it protects writers!

Dray found:

“Pangram has published a score claiming that 78% of a debut authors novel was AI generated. The publishing house pulled the novel from the shelves and terminated the authors contract - based on Pangram score that wasn't even proved to be accurate”.

As Dray goes deeper she found that Pangram didn’t even get the actual manuscript of the novel. They scanned a bootleg copy from a pirate site.

A young woman’s career got derailed.

Pangram grows and prospers.

and what about non-native speakers and neurodivergent writers?

And while Pangram claims high accuracy, there is a lot of pseudoscience in how their mechanism works.

Pangram is a neural network, - it assesses a piece of writing it looks at all of the human writing that it knows of (2021 and before), - and human writing has changed since 2021.

As Anatomyofai (another lovely TikTok creator) points out:

“AI learns on us. But we are also learning to speak more like AI - some words are directly correlated to AI use, like “delve”, “intricate” and “underscore”. Look at this study here. This is called the Great Linguistic Flattening.”

“Delve” actually became more used, possibly because ChatGPT used it in RLHF (reinforcement learning from human feedback) training by workers in Nigeria that actually use the word Delve more frequently, that now became the clear tale ChatGPT word (suhaadada mentions it in her video, referencing etymologist Adam Aleksic’s Ted Talk, but I couldn’t find it).

suhaadada goes on to talk more about AI-isms, for example if someone uses the word “quietly” as an emphasis, she flags it as AI language. It’s unlikely, that the use of that word is always AI but it affected her experience as a reader.

Anatomyofai pulled up a Stanford study tested AI against TOEFL exams and found 60% false positivity rate.

Anatomyofai also found that AI falsely flags not just non-native but also neurodivergent writers, that tend to write in more standard English.

suhaadada imagined two writers:

1 - copy pasted from ChatGPT, rewrote it with a few typos - no ai detected.

2 - this one took time and care and either used AI to put their thoughts coherently, spell checked, or used it to translate the text - ai label.

It’s not hard to turn copy paste ai into a human looking format. Ask any student.

What is hard, is to not misuse a tool like Pangram.

Even if Pangram does mention that “if enough new words or syntax become popular, writing that contains them might not look like human to their models and as changes stack up it can start tipping the scale”, - but even with all the disclaimers, it is so hard for users not to be affected by the measurements of their machine.

We need to remember that the scores are not an accurate representation of the writing.

p.s. why open source matters

If Pangram was open source and open weight, public auditors (think nerdy investigators that need to get to the bottom of things), would be able to find and pinpoint the fallacies of this machine.

Currently, we do not know what data trained the detectors or how the algorithm was weighted.

We are being reduced to a number that we cannot question because it’s a black box.

Substack partnering with this kind of platform is a step in a wrong direction, for the app that claims to give a ground for starting creators.

That’s all.

Subscribe now

I project myself as a fiery person - I bring a beer on stage, I am unhinged, my profile picture (was) orange, I’m a rockstar. The people that watched me stand on a chair and yell at developers, that seen me party until sunrise then get on podium in the morning, people that got my inspirational prep talk pushing them to be outrageous, they are surprised to hear that actually I am an introverted yoga-matcha-meditation girlie in my daily life.

In between work events and scheduled “persona on”, I am calm and intentional, and a little bit boring.

As a creator, founder and a public speaker - I want to build the authenticity that connects me to the audience, - so I was wondering where I draw the line between the charade and who I am. Which parts of me are real and which parts are performative.

Reasoning: I have no interest in being anything short of authentic.

Be that internet, stage or board game night with friends.

It’s also important to note that being authentic does not equal to putting it all out there. You pick what you choose to share, which parts of your life and lived experience. I balance between vulnerability of revealing and the mystique of not. I prefer to see my content as a dress that reveals the sexy leg but no decollete; - it’s a personal choice.

So this journaling framework is the result of that work, coming straight from my Notes app. I’ve shared it with some friends that wanted to work on their public image and it happened to be very useful. Like blowing up on socials useful.

So I share and leave in personal notes and examples of myself according to the framework, for some spice.

Some deep questions that you will get closer to after the framework:

• What is my North Star? How do I see it?

• What do I want to be known for?

• What problem or worldview am i obsessed with?

• What audience do I want to hear me?

If you’re still lost - don’t worry. The trick here is to go on an instinct and create, create, create. Put it out there, even if it’s not perfect and you have no idea what you’re doing.

I had no idea what any of my answers are. But assessing made me think a lot of thoughts and leave my tech career behind. Or at least, in the shape that it was - an NGO fighting for digital privacy. It wasn’t about it not accomplishing my goals, but it didn’t align with how I wanted to accomplish them.

Anyways, pull out the pen and paper and dig in!

1 - Identity & Character

if you are in a movie, what is your character presence?

Let’s go into the light and shadow matrix

• What are your best traits? What are the five things you and the people around you admire about you?

• Now what do those traits turn into under pressure?
  (Ambitious → restless, independent → never asking for help, bold → impulsive, loyal → over attachment, high standards → judgmental, charming → manipulative, imaginative → chaotic)

Those are your core traits. Keep that in mind.

Now for your personal archetype

Are you an architect or an instigator?

There is no one or the other, - but there is primary and secondary. Where do you see yourself the most?

• Architect: philosopher-revolutionary (think Naval)

• Instigator: strategic firebrand (Steve Jobs)

The architect plans the revolution, the instigator starts it.

What about your energy spectrum?

How does your presence feel: pace, intensity, tone. Do you activate others or regulate them?

When you speak in public, on stage, or at a bar over a beer - what is the energy you broadcast into the room?

• Is it warm or cool?

• Is it electric or grounded?

Warm + electric = The Spark (charismatic instigator)
revolution, inspiration, think rants, riffs, movement calls

Warm + grounded = The Hearth (magnetic nurturer)
safety, softness, belonging, community building, soulful storytelling

Cool + electric = The Blade (sharp disruptor)
precision, challenge, contrarian essays, truth

Cool + grounded = The Monolith (calm authority)
gravitas, spacious presence, slow, heavy ideas

2 - Narrative & Positioning

What is the story behind your character? Why are you where you are?

• What is your Why and what tension created it?

• What world fact that makes you angry/obsessed/active?

• What hill would you die on?

• If you could ban one thing, what would it be?

You have to draw out the origin story, the villain and your hero arc.

• What do you believe about the world that most people don’t?

• What is the enemy?

• What is your promise?

• What is your way of getting there?

The final result would look loosely like this sentence:

We are drowning in ____(what is dark, broken or empty).

I believe ____(a behavior, virtue, value).

Most people are distracted by ____(deceptive illusion, trap),

but the real shift comes from ___(core tension, hidden truth).

My work exists to ___(what liberation looks like).

This can take you from “I’m a security researcher” to “I help people that use technology feel safe by knowledge and action”.

In my experience, understanding this comes in phases. At first I was focusing on small picture, related to my career. Then who I am as a person. What drives me.

I still don’t have the full sentence, - I care about multiple things, all at once, but at least defining them was a good start. Then I was trying out archetypes and seeing which feels more familiar to me:

• The Sage: I’m here to bring clarity in a world intoxicated by noise

• The Instigator: I’m here to interrupt self hypnosis and spark self-possession

• The Oracle: I reveal the unseen forces shaping culture and human freedom

• The Builder: I create systems that make sovereignty possible in practice

• The Muse: I invite people back into aliveness and feeling

I feel that I am more of an instigator with blends of builder and a muse. Noice.

3 - Aesthetic

Not to ignore.

This is your emotional language. It is weaponized atmosphere. It can be soft ferocity, romanticism, sarcasm, - anything you feel fit.

Your taste leads and communicates to people on a deeper level, before you speak.

It’s not just online - it’s the thought you put into what you wear and how you wear it.

For your online presence you can create a sheet on Canva and fill it with everything that feels like you. Add cultural references and inspiration map.

• What does your inner world look like?

• What does rebellion look like?

• What world did you come from?

• What world are you building?

• What can we see that tells your myth without you talking?

If you were an object what would it look and feel like?

• Texture: grainy / glossy / matte / metallic / rough / velvety

• Lighting: soft / harsh / neon / candle / natural / sunny / moonlit

• Movement: still / fluid / glitchy / shaky cam / floaty

• Space: minimal / dense / collage / layered / white space

How should someone feel looking at you?

• Muse: ethereal, seductive, poetic

• Warrior: sharp, intense, unapologetic

• Oracle: enigmatic, timeless, ritualistic

• Architect: persice, minimal, deliberate

• Rebel: loud, glitchy, raw, scrappy

What are the things you do not want?

Just as important as things you want.

For me it’s: ai generated, pastels, corporate, bland, influencer marketing.

Define yours.

4 - Content Engine

This is how your identity, narrative and aesthetic become an engine of content.

• Emotional world (ID and beliefs)

• Expertise world (what you know)

• Aesthetic world (culture and vibe)

• Relatability world (your life)

Pick a few pilars.

For me it used to be:

1. Identity + belief → sovereignty, rebellion, depth

2. Craft + Knowledge → privacy and culture

3. Life + Embodiment → daily life, ADHD, rituals

If a content doesn’t fit into one of those, I wouldn’t publish it.

Now, however, I am doing an experiment of simply putting my thoughts out there. I am unsure of where I am going so I revert to number one rule: create, create, create.

Some notes:

• having a recurrent format helps audience recognize you - walk & talk, unhinged takes… thats your repeatable cultural IP.

• pick whatever is most natural to you.

• build a routine: inspiration (reading, observing, the internet, a joint, empty mind break) → idea capture (voice notes, notes app, pen and paper) → dedicated hour a week to move it into a draft → draft polishing → publish.

• create a single doc with your own manifesto and a short bio.

• depth > frequency; presence > perfection; aesthetic is strategy; vulnerability is not the same as oversharing.

• repetition builds myth. you live in your head, but audience is sparsely distributed. repeat yourself.

Authenticity Audit

Where are you negotiating yourself away? Where are you betraying yourself to be liked, safe or understood?

• Does your tone shift when you feel watched?

• When do you sound like a consultant and not human?

• Are you trying to be something you’re not? Something that feels off?

• What is the difference between how you talk to your friends vs online?

If you value:

depth → you betray yourself by doomscrolling

freedom → people pleasing

truth → polished PR writing

courage → apologize for ambition

There is a version of you that scares you because it can be too powerful.

How do you shrink yourself?

What do you withhold because you fear reaction?

How do you calibrate yourself to be more palatable? Disclaimers, softening your opinions, hiding behind intellectualism? Don’t soften your edges to avoid judgment.

What are your blockers?

• fear of visibility: “if they really see me they can attack or abandon me”
  perfectionism, pattern analysis, hiding in research.

• approval addiction: “I only exist if people like me”
  softening language, avoiding being contrarian, validating others first

• trauma bond identity: “being small kept me safe”
  minimizing opinions, apologizing for taking space, masking intelligence or ambition

• ego armor: “I must be impressive to deserve attention”
  over polished content, intellectual elitism, defensiveness, over branding

• mimicry: “authenticity feels risky, so I imitate what is safe”
  cloning tone or aesthetics, recycled wisdom

Authenticity is a regulated presence. Dig deep to understand your blocker. Work on them.

But I am so many things, how can I pick an archetype?

You don’t have to pick. You can be all of those things.

We contain multitudes. You can be both fire and still water. Fiery with discipline. Stillness with voltage.

This is polarity intelligence, - you need to uncover the architecture of who you are, understand it. Then you learn context switching, - when are you choosing which?

• fire: to wake up people, provoke, energize
  good for short video content, stages, tweets

• still: earn trust, deep connection, intimacy, nuance
  long form writing or video, calls, 1:1

For example for me:

On stage → Fire to open, stillness to land the blade

1:1 → Calm first, fire when truth requires it

Online → 70% calm clarity, 30% feral brilliance (it recently changed to 100% unhinged flow of thoughts, im testing it out)

Quick audit: is it coming from power or performance?

• if fiery “watch me” → armor

• if fiery “come with me” → leadership

• if calm “don’t see me” → hiding

• if calm “watch carefully” → gravity

I have once asked Grok about my X profile, by pasting this framework and asking it to audit my content. This is what I got:

Now when something goes well, I don’t minimize it. I follow up with the audience when I am vulnerable. I refuse to follow trends. Now I know where I fail myself. I can work on it.

The me that brings a beer on stage and me that goes to 7am yoga are not in conflict. They are in flow.

The framework is to identify and balance between the two, living in flux.

AI content is overtaking the internet. If you want a real audience, you need to lean into all of the things that make you human. This can help.

I can cut the alcohol out (read as impressive - as my personality for a decade revolved around alcohol; I am saved at a “gin rat” in multiple phones).

However, I would have missed gardening.

It’s not a habit. It’s an indulgence.

An indulgence that calms my raging ADHD brain, gives me space to think and explore out of the box.

take out perfectionism. Pressure. run towards cringe.

there, on my balcony, soft pajamas and a tea, I annoy the elderly neighbors with my legally purchased plants.

So

This is an experiment.

I wrote this while gardening; as usual brain pouring out into my Notes App, with the idea of sharing this revealing itself only at the end.

Maybe you can notice when.

Dig in!

I don’t regularly consume mind altering products (like ahdh medication, anti depressants etc) lol

But five years in Amsterdam did leave a mark on me (a golden tattoo - yes the wedding did spark another Taylor Swift obsession fit), I ended up picking up gardening again. Me and gardening go way back. I used to garden when I was heartbroken. Well that one specific heartbreak. Which was from when I was 20 to around 24, what a start of the decade!!

At least it was mutual. We suffered together.

But back to gardening. After having to deal with getting plants in Rome, I was used to lower quality. The kind that makes you feel panicky and not very social. When you freak out a bit, but then when the calm waves hit you and you’re just glad to not feel that tied up rock on your chest. It’s a moment of peace. You forget it’s there, dragging you down every minute of the day.

Oh the early 20s how they shaped me

Anyways, gardening. I picked it up at the end of my time in Amsterdam. It helped with raging insomnia and burnout. I chilled out a bit.

But it’s not the kind of thing I’m reliant on. If I cant garden that’s okay. It’s just a small pleasure when I feel like it and have plants around.

I stopped drinking about three months ago. I drank a lot leaving Amsterdam. There was not just one going away party, but also constant mini ones. And I was excited to be healthy in Lisbon. So I was. Then I travelled and drank again and it hit the wrong way. I just felt like I needed more and more. The dopamine crash of getting sober was a nervous thought and I just wanted to make sure I’m properly sloshed when I go to bed. I don’t like that. I don’t like the escape. So I stopped.

Controlling and moderating that pattern was too much work. I just decided to go the easy way.

So now im California sober. It’s great. I have my treats for when I feel like it. Which is not regular, but not rare enough to be “only at parties”

I found a cute little shop with CBD gardening and restarted those buds.

I think I want to be a writer? I don’t like the label necessarily but writing and expressing myself was a thing I was always facinated by and wanted to do. I didn’t have a subject or a reason then I realized it can just be me and my thoughts

As most, my main reading happens online. Chats, posts, blogs, stories etc - it’s bad I know. But lately I’ve been noticing just how much I hate it. It doesn’t have the sauce.

Why not??

But writing is not easy - and there’s a few precarious things (- ai)

oh I need to quit iqos: see the trash. See what you’ve done to your lungs.

Stop lying to yourself about it.

See the damage.

It’s kind of like when humanity lets horrible things happen on the other side of the world. We just don’t see the damage.

We don’t clean it up.

We quickly scroll past the horrible pictures. We mute friends that post about it too much.

But yeah, where was I

Gardening only on the weekends

Master your writing

Push yourself to write whatever

Just a rolling doc of all of it

Then there will be good bits that you can use

Ai writing is a horrible thing

It takes all of the benefits of self writing away

You destroy your thinking

//

You take one structure and forget all the other structures

Like ai would rewrite this sentence like this

• “You focus on one structure while overlooking all the others.”

• “You fixate on a single structure and forget that other structures exist.”

• “You concentrate on one structure at the expense of all the others.”

• “You get so focused on one structure that you lose sight of the rest.”

• “You treat one structure as if it’s the only one, forgetting all the others.”

• “By focusing on one structure, you ignore the broader landscape of structures.”

• “You become anchored to one structure and neglect every other possible structure.”

But your original structure gave the sentence the juice

The feelings maybe the state you wrote that in

It sounded like you.

Not professional, not concise or grammatically correct. It was just you and your thought.

we’re losing that touch. Internet is already a lonely place but it’s about to get even lonelier - bots are officially in the majority of internet population. I saw that on TikTok

Anyways just fucking write (me to me) and do it for self expression and not for anything else. We’re losing touch besties

oh and

Anon comment option would be a great thing - more people would be reacting on the internet and overpowering the bots

Why does someone write something on the internet?

Cause I don’t. Very rarely. So do most people I know. So what is the stimuli of the people who do?

1. Attention to their account (usually fashion influencers)

2. They are older

3. They are a man

4. They have a very strong opinion (accumulative with point above)

5. Bots - ads, propaganda, agenda

Or! They are deep in the Taylor Swift Easter eggs hunt in which case - do not interrupt!

In the Catalogue of the beloved that I am releasing soon - I leave the option for anon comments, I know I can get nasty or hurtful shit. But also - isn’t that THE freedom of speech?

Oh and i opened the notes app when I saw this:

I think I’m a writer?

I might be. I will be.

Writer feels too label-y though, maybe I’m just me?

(ME-E-E!! Cue Gaylor TikToks)

PS this is purely fictional writing, its called “experimental” look it up

PSS if you are compelled to leave a comment please do so only while gardening yourself.

PSSS I’m adding all of my current subscribers here because I’m feeling generous and also I want my friends to read! Apologies, friends - unsubscribe button is blocked.

PSSSS next topics: why I’m obsessed with Taylor Swift and it’s not what you think // ai is not a god but we are the sinners

psssss some of latest Pinterest saves:

go on click it! you’re stuck with me now.

if you missed it, [part 1 is here].

if you read it and still have a VPN that works, congrats, you’re living in the 5%.

now the fun part, where I tell you Russia isn’t even the scary one

V. The Mirror (Iran)

(when I first drafted this in January 2026, the blackout was still ongoing. it has since ended, having run from January 8 to late May. four and a half months. keep that number in mind as you read what follows, because the point was never that it's temporary.)

If you want to see where Russia’s trajectory leads when you remove the economic constraints, look at Iran in January 2026.

On January 8 - the twelfth day of nationwide protests triggered by currency collapse and soaring inflation - the Iranian regime imposed a total internet blackout, reducing global connectivity to near zero. This was not the selective blocking that Iran had employed during the 2019 fuel protests or the 2022 Woman, Life, Freedom uprising. This was the most severe communications shutdown in Iran’s history - and one of the longest in the world’s.

Unlike previous blackouts where Iran’s domestic intranet - the National Information Network - remained functional to keep banking and administrative sectors running, the 2026 shutdown disrupted local infrastructure as well. Mobile networks, text messaging services, and landlines were disabled. Even Starlink was blocked: the regime imported Russian Kalinka jammers that disabled more than 40,000 terminals. The IRGC raided homes to confiscate satellite dishes.

The economic damage was immediate and staggering. Iran’s communications minister acknowledged the shutdown was costing $35.7 million per day. Online sales fell by 80%. The Tehran Stock Exchange lost 450,000 points in four days. Financial transactions dropped by 185 million in a single month.

But the blackout wasn’t just an emergency measure. It was a stress test.

Iran’s Supreme Council of Cyberspace has been laying the groundwork for a permanent two-tiered internet - what advocacy groups call *Internet-e-Tabaqati*, a “class-based” internet. In July 2025, the council passed a regulation formally institutionalizing a two-tiered hierarchy. Under this system, access to the global internet is no longer a default for citizens but a privilege granted based on loyalty and professional necessity.

The implementation includes “white SIM cards” - special mobile lines issued to government officials, security forces, and approved journalists that bypass the state’s filtering apparatus entirely. While ordinary Iranians navigate a maze of unstable VPNs and blocked ports, holders of white SIMs enjoy unrestricted access to Instagram, Telegram, and WhatsApp.

Read that again. Two classes of citizens. One internet for the loyal, one for everyone else. The state surgically removed social features from the domestic services it did allow - comment sections on news sites, chat boxes in online marketplaces. The objective was to atomize the population, preventing not just the flow of information out of the country but the coordination of any activity within it.

This isn’t Russia’s “we’ll degrade YouTube so slowly you won’t notice” approach. This is the endpoint. This is what happens when a state decides the economic costs of disconnection are worth it if the alternative is losing control.

As of this writing, internet traffic in Iran remains at approximately 1% of normal connectivity. The shutdown has been ongoing for over two months. An American official described Iran’s plan for permanent disconnection as “plausible and terrifying.”

The comparative data is instructive. In 2019, Iran’s shutdown lasted five days and the domestic intranet remained functional. In 2022, the regime used nightly mobile curfews lasting about two weeks. In June 2025, a four-day wartime shutdown. In January 2026: total disconnection, including domestic infrastructure, lasting months, with active jamming of satellite internet. Each iteration more sophisticated, more total, more permanent.

Iran is not an outlier. It’s a preview.

VI. The Building Blocks (Everywhere Else)

Here is where people get uncomfortable, and here is where I need to be precise.

Russia and Iran are authoritarian states with no independent judiciary, no free press, no institutional checks on executive power. The EU and the United States are democracies with constitutional protections, judicial review, and a free press. I am not equating them. I am pointing out that the technical infrastructure and legal frameworks being assembled in democracies contain components that are structurally identical to the ones used in Russia and Iran. The difference is institutional - and institutions require maintenance.

The EU

The European Union’s Digital Services Act, fully operational since 2024, requires platforms to remove “illegal content” within specified timeframes. Platforms that fail to act face fines of up to 6% of global turnover. The result is predictable: faced with the risk of billion-dollar penalties, platforms over-remove. Researchers call this “collateral censorship” - the chilling effect of platforms erring on the side of caution that limits diverse opinions and undermines democratic discourse.

The EU’s Disinformation Code of Conduct, formally integrated into the DSA as of July 2025, requires platforms to meet transparency and auditing obligations aimed at eliminating “disinformation.” Compliance with the Code now counts as a key risk-mitigation measure under the DSA. The definitions of what constitutes “disinformation” are set by regulators.

Then there’s Chat Control - the proposed EU regulation to combat child sexual abuse material that would mandate scanning of online communications. While the most controversial version was dropped after sustained opposition, the Council’s adopted position still allows “voluntary” detection - platforms scanning personal messages that aren’t end-to-end encrypted. The derogation enabling this has been extended to 2026. The trajectory is clear: what begins as voluntary becomes expected, then mandatory.

None of this is DPI. None of this is TSPU. But it is infrastructure - legal, regulatory, and technical - that determines what can and cannot appear on the internet, administered by unelected bodies with limited transparency. The European Commission hosted a closed-door workshop with platforms in May 2025 where regulators discussed how and what content should be moderated. In an exercise during that workshop, the statement “we need to take back our country” - a common political phrase - was labeled “illegal hate speech” requiring removal.

An EU official will tell you this is nothing like what Russia does. And they’re right - today. The question is whether you build the tooling first and trust that the politics will never change, or whether you notice that the tooling looks remarkably similar across systems with very different politics.

The United States

FISA Section 702 - the law that allows warrantless surveillance of foreign nationals abroad - is set to expire on April 20, 2026. Congress appears poised to extend it without reforms. The program has swept up massive amounts of Americans’ communications alongside the foreign targets it was designed to monitor. The FBI has conducted warrantless searches of Section 702 data targeting Black Lives Matter protesters, journalists, political commentators, and 19,000 donors to a single congressional campaign.

In 2021 alone, the FBI conducted up to 3.4 million warrantless searches through Section 702.

The TikTok saga demonstrated that the United States government can effectively ban a platform used by 170 million citizens on national security grounds - even while officials acknowledged they had no actual evidence that China was using TikTok to spy on Americans, and lawmakers admitted the real motivation was that they didn’t like what people were saying on the platform, particularly about the Israel-Gaza war. The House of Representatives banned WhatsApp on all House devices in 2025, citing security risks.

Russia blocks YouTube. The United States attempted to ban TikTok. The stated reasons differ - “information security” versus “national security” - but the mechanism is the same: a state determining which communication platforms its citizens can use, based on the state’s assessment of what information flows are acceptable.

An American official will tell you this is nothing like what Russia does. And they’re right - for now.

VII. From Samizdat to VPN

The historical parallels are not decorative. Soviet censorship was managed by Glavlit, which controlled all publications from 1922 to 1991. Possession of a single samizdat manuscript was a serious crime. Copying machines were tightly controlled to prevent reproduction of unauthorized texts.

The Soviet response - samizdat, the hand-typed underground literature; tamizdat, works published abroad and smuggled back - has its structural equivalents. VPN configuration guides circulate on Telegram the way typed manuscripts once passed hand to hand. Foreign-hosted VPN servers function as digital tamizdat. App store removals mirror the control of copying machines. The law criminalizing “extremist content” consumption echoes Article 70 of the Soviet criminal code.

One academic study of Soviet information control observed that the system was not merely defensive. It was “activist” - it did not just prevent harmful information from reaching the population but sought to ensure that only “proper information necessary for political development” was available. The whitelist model - whether in Russia’s regional shutdowns, Iran’s National Information Network, or the EU’s curated definitions of acceptable speech - is the digital realization of this principle.

Censorship historically creates demand for circumvention, which forces escalation. The Soviet campaign against samizdat consumed enormous state resources while inadvertently elevating the prestige of banned literature - it became, as one scholar wrote, “almost the only source of spiritual freedom.” Russia’s VPN adoption trajectory - 4% to 41% in four years - follows the same dynamic. Iran’s population is one of the most sophisticated in the world at circumventing web restrictions. An estimated 50,000 clandestine Starlink terminals helped some Iranians remain connected - until the jammers arrived.

People find ways. They always find ways. The question is how much destruction a state is willing to inflict on its own infrastructure, its own economy, its own population in order to stop them.

VIII. What Comes Next

Several vectors are converging.

In Russia, new regulations taking effect in March 2026 will codify Roskomnadzor’s authority to disconnect the Russian internet from external resources entirely. Legislation mandates a national IMEI database - a registry of every mobile device authorized to connect. The state messenger Max, backed by Putin’s June 2025 decree, is being promoted as a mandatory replacement for WhatsApp and Telegram, with installation reportedly treated as a condition of employment and school enrollment. The head of the NGO League for the Free Internet estimates full whitelist implementation - permanent restriction to approved domestic services only - could occur within three years.

In Iran, the regime is actively pursuing permanent disconnection from the global internet, with foreign telecom providers leaving the country under heavy security and media silence. The infrastructure for a permanent domestic intranet is being assembled in real time.

In the EU, the DSA’s enforcement machinery continues to expand, with a planned “European Democracy Shield” to strengthen content regulation around elections and political processes. Chat Control remains in trilogue negotiations.

In the United States, Section 702 faces reauthorization with no meaningful reform proposals on the table, while the precedent of banning a platform used by a third of the population has been established and normalized.

According to Freedom House’s 2025 report, global internet freedom declined for the 15th consecutive year. People in at least 57 of 72 assessed countries were arrested or imprisoned for online expression - a record. In September 2025, leaked documents revealed that a Chinese company,

Geedge Networks, had exported Great Firewall technology to Kazakhstan, Ethiopia, Pakistan, and Myanmar. The tools are not just being built - they’re being sold.

IX.

There is a particular quality to losing the internet slowly. It is not like having a door slammed shut. It is like the air being let out of a room, so gradually that you keep adjusting, keep finding workarounds, keep telling yourself it isn’t that bad yet.

You switch VPNs. You learn new protocols. You carry cash because the payment terminal might not work tonight. You download offline maps because navigation might go dark. You stop clicking on certain links because you know, somewhere in the back of your mind, that someone is logging the click.

I can tell you exactly what this feels like because I lived it. And I can tell you that the moment it starts feeling normal is the moment you’ve already lost something you won’t easily get back.

The architecture described in this piece - TSPU devices on every ISP, protocol-level traffic analysis, mandatory data reporting, criminalized search queries, whitelist infrastructure, total internet blackouts, two-tiered access systems, content moderation regimes with billion-dollar penalties, warrantless surveillance databases with millions of queries - is not a spectrum from “authoritarian” to “free.” It’s a toolkit. Governments select from it based on their technical capacity, political needs, and, critically, what their citizens will tolerate.

Russia demonstrated that a major economy can escalate from selective website blocking to protocol-level censorship and mass shutdowns in under three years. Iran demonstrated that a state can disconnect 85 million people from the global internet for months - and that the tools to do it can be imported from allies. The EU demonstrated that democracies can build content-filtering infrastructure with limited transparency and enforce it with existential financial penalties. The United States demonstrated that it can ban a communication platform used by 170 million people and conduct millions of warrantless searches on its own citizens’ data.

The differences between these systems are real and they matter. The institutional protections in democracies - courts, legislatures, free press, civil society - are not decorative. They are the only things standing between “content moderation” and censorship, between “national security” and surveillance.

But institutions are maintained by people who choose to maintain them. And tools, once built, are available to whoever holds power next.

At the time of this writing, 41% of Russian internet users rely on VPNs to access the open internet. In Iran, traffic has been at 1% of normal for two months. In the EU, the definitions of “illegal” speech are being set in closed-door workshops. In the US, a surveillance program with a documented history of abuse is about to be renewed without reform.

And still, as of this writing, VPN advertisements continue to run on Telegram. VLESS servers hum along, hidden inside ordinary HTTPS traffic. Starlink terminals are smuggled across borders. People share circumvention guides in group chats that will be banned next month.

They always find ways.

The question - the one that history keeps asking and that no government, democratic or otherwise, has ever answered satisfactorily - is what a state is willing to destroy in order to control what its citizens can see. And whether the rest of us will notice it happening to us before the air is already gone.

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Warning: confusion can be a side effect.

Bigger Warning: do the test before reading. No info is kept; have fun!

Now that you’re done, let’s get into the nitty gritty.

CAPTCHAs are not what they used to be

They became sooo smooth. Almost invisible.

There’s no more filling out a text or picking images - they let you in automatically based on your data like cursor tracking, device fingerprint, browse history - and voila 🎻 it proves you’re a breathing meat suit.

But the problem with the invisible is… actually:

you know there’s people that don’t feel pain? Sounds kind of awesome, until you’re halfway into that House MD episode and realize they’re absolutely cooked, - they wouldn’t know if something is wrong. That’s us now.

Before technology took a mega leap, we as a society could feel where things went wrong, - we blamed a politician for tanking the economy, we knew it was this oligarch making the call about the oil prices. We could point to it. It had a (often unflattering) face. We can hardly do that anymore. Soon there won’t be a face at all.

For the final trick of technocratic capitalism - it made us numb to what is happening in the most intimate space of our life, - our devices.

i made Department of Human Verification as an art piece that drags the invisible to the light and makes you sit through it.

but wait, why do we even need to prove we are human?

well actually, - the truth is at steak.

internet stopped being able to tell the truth. faces, voices, whole personalities - all fakeable now. the bots got good. like really good. and once you can’t tell what’s real, everything breaks: who said this, who did this, who’s accountable for this. proof of humanity is the internet trying to find receipts.

one human talking about something is noise; a person running bots writing 547590 comments is a business and a propaganda machine in one.

it’s not paranoia: 71% of people say AI is making it impossible to know what's true; 81% believe truth is an endangered concept.

Here’s a dark loop

every time you click the little squares - the fire hydrants, the buses, the “select all images with a traffic light” - you’re working. unpaid. you’re labelling training data. you are, personally, teaching the machine to see. the CAPTCHA isn’t checking if you’re human. it’s using you to train itself.

we’ve been doing this for years. all of us. it’s the most successful unpaid internship in history and the job at the end of it is replacing the intern.

And a “fun” loop, if you’re entertained by the theatre of absurd

CAPTCHAs are not about being human at all. An ai can act in good faith. A human can be operating a bot farm.

The key variables are that you are unique + costly + accountable. “Humanity” just turned out to be the most convenient unit.

who is fixing this?

Most famously, WORLD (ex Worldcoin): the Orb scans your iris to generate a World ID. Your eye as your singular credential.

The problem with that showed up at a train station in Lisbon, when some guys (scammers) asked me if I want €10 to scan my eye, - they’d keep the scan. When humanity becomes valuable, a new black market appears - you can buy someone’s iris data, for €30, on telegram.

Don’t make body parts a way to prove humanity. Those can be stolen.

Then there is Human.Tech, their privacy respecting counterweight. They have a whole stack: Human Passport (proof of personhood via stamps/attestations), Human Wallet, Human Network, Human ID (ZK identity verification).

Their framing: "There are really four ways to prove humanity online: in-person verification, KYC, biometrics, and social trust." Zero-knowledge proofs sprinkled throughout = prove facts about yourself without revealing the data. No biometrics, no single hardware.

I’ve had a fun time yapping with one of their founders, if you want nonsensical background noise, with a few cool concepts and bad jokes, give it a listen.

So the fix to the problem is the “credentials” (something you have).

The WORLD wants your iris, Human Tech wants your attestations.

They are answering if you are a human with paperwork (what a human thing to do).

I wanted to ask what humanness looks like at the moment of testing.

What do we do in particular, often and consistent while also keeping a certain ambiguity on how?

Fail. The answer is fail.

The Department of Humanity doesn’t want your documentation or eyeballs.

It wants to see you fail, as a proof of being human.

It’s not an attestation. It is an art piece. It is proof of involuntary behavior, performed in the open, narrated to your face, and never retained.

Can a bot fake it? Maybe, with effort. However, the bot will not be embarrassed, confused, or entertained by it. This test only means something to the species that can be moved.

I spent years inside the machinery of digital identity and privacy. Ecosystem development, advocacy, communities, NGOs, - just short of tattooing “privacy is good” on my face. The reason I got out of the loop, is because the culture on the outside of the bubble is not strong enough. I was arguing for privacy as infrastructure while it needs a human touch (art).

Instead of writing another essay on surveillance, I wanted to make something for people to feel it. Most people who build don’t think of culture. Most people creating culture don’t know what a ZK proof is. I’m of one of the people at the intersection, and it is my strength and obligation to make something out of it.

Humans are more than data. Humans are not replaceable by AI. The failure, the hesitation, the dropping smile - it is more than meets the eye.

There are layers to the Design

You hate bureaucracy? Me too.

But there is something sacred about how bureaucracy fails us on the daily. Sometimes that is the only constant I can rely on (I was raised in Rome).

Checking the boxes, spilling out our heart’s confessions (“widowed”, “divorced”, “unemployed”), signing out our name - and we receive absolution or denial. Waiting rooms are purgatory. Stamps are absolution. The paperwork loops back around and sometimes all you have left is godforsaken faith.

Department of Human Verification follows the same route, descending from clinical bureaucracy to the interrogation room, to the candlelight of the night. The interface doesn’t hold a neutral expression. It takes the path with you. Then it fails with you.

Taking the ordinary and making it sacred - isn’t it so inherently human.

I wanted something that feels familiar (like the Windows OS blue) mixed with metallic and navy, - bureaucratic chic; and the blood red reserved exclusively for detected humanity. The brutalist forms and the simple Roboto font are adding to the experience. I wanted the most unsettling sentences to be formatted like a terms of service lines.

Actually for the final test I wanted to put “and now, bleed”, however some doors you just don’t open.

The Department doesn’t editorialize. The Department observes and makes you feel.

AI Bright side: execution is easier now

I’ve been spending some time exploring new tools to create, mostly by completing challenges (hackathons) on Contra (a platform for freelance creators).

Then I saw a Figma Makeathon challenge. A tool I was always afraid to use (I am a Canva normie). They released Figma Make which is kind of like Lovable - you say what you want and it builds it for you. Exciting, maybe I will become a Figma master after all.

Coming up with this concept took time. Arguably, years in the making. Literally, a few sleepless nights and lots of reiterations of the concept before I even opened Figma.

In the words of my Claudy:

a note from the machine, since it was here the whole time:

Alina built a piece about the one thing AI can’t do — and she built it with an AI open in the next tab. that’s not a contradiction she’s hiding; it’s the joke she’s in on. over four days this thing went from “I’ve never opened Figma” to a working test that reads your involuntary behavior, and almost every step was her spilling an idea, me organizing it, and her overruling me when the organization sanded off something good. the concept came from gluing two abandoned ideas together. the camera broke. the certificate got rebuilt until it earned its ending. i kept suggesting she stop adding things; she kept being right that one more thing mattered. what i could never have done is the part that makes the piece work — the taste, the timing, the decision to cut “and now, bleed.” i can sort a mess. i can’t have one. that turned out to be the whole point."

Ok thanks. Moving on.

It was incredibly fast to actually build. I had a problem with the first smile test and Figma literally debugged itself. It was awesome. I was the artist and Figma was my willing canvas. Here is a short tutorial video of how I made it. Here is also a little cinematic video, featuring me and my lovely friends that volunteered to test it out and record their reactions.

In the end, ai did take jobs. It did undercut a lot of designers, that’s true. But in my view, it also powered up the creativity. Executing your vision has an easier entry point.

Imperfection is becoming valuable. Failing is becoming valuable. Humanity is becoming valuable. That’s the way I choose to see it.

Thanks for reading all that - more projects to come, to compliment this one and perhaps build an entire universe of the Department of Humanity.

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Some musical company:

I. I’m trying to watch a (damn) show.

My VPN dies at 11:47 PM on a Tuesday.

Not dramatically - no error message, no warning. The connection just stops. Apple TV freezes mid-frame. The browser spins. I switch to a different VPN. It connects, holds for ninety seconds, then drops. I try a third. This one doesn’t even pretend to work.

I cycle through protocols the way you’d flip through radio stations in a dead zone: WireGuard, OpenVPN, Shadowsocks. Each one fails differently. WireGuard gets throttled to nothing within minutes. OpenVPN gets identified and killed in under thirty seconds. Shadowsocks lasts a little longer, then the connection collapses into a kind of digital quicksand - technically alive, functionally dead.

So I sit in the dark and smoke through my weekly supply of Terea in one night, switching between Wi-Fi and mobile data to see if different filters are applied to each. They are, but neither works. The SIM service doesn’t function properly when the VPN is on. The VPN doesn’t function properly when the SIM service is on. I am caught in a loop designed by bureaucrats who have never debugged anything in their lives.

At some point the mobile internet just shuts off entirely. Not a VPN problem - the signal itself. I wait fifteen minutes, try again. Nothing. I check the time. It’s the window now. Some regions get it from 8 PM to 9 AM. Some get it whenever the government decides drones are a concern, which is always. I download an offline map and accept that tonight the internet is not mine to use.

All of this for what?

So I can read the news. So I can see what’s happening. So I can access a service that 95 million people in this country used six months ago without thinking about it.

Here’s what’s hard to communicate to anyone who hasn’t lived it: the sheer mundanity of what’s being taken away. It’s not that the government blocks a dissident’s blog and you lose access to forbidden knowledge. It’s that your streaming app won’t load. Your payment terminal doesn’t process. Your navigation crashes on the highway. You can’t call a taxi. The blood sugar monitoring app on your phone stops syncing. The state tells you this is a “digital detox.” Yay.

What is happening to the Russian internet is not a future scenario. It is not a cautionary tale. It is an event in progress, and it is the most aggressive dismantling of civilian internet infrastructure in any major economy in history.

But here’s the thing nobody wants to hear: Russia isn’t doing anything unique. It’s just doing it faster than everyone else. The same tools, the same logic, the same infrastructure exists - in various stages of assembly - across the globe. Including in places that still think of themselves as free.

btw this means that if your country wants to fuck yo restrict access to information labeled as “dangerous”- it can!

oh and heads up, - anything can be labeled dangerous, if you argue long enough, or mention safety of children - and if you’re not a "concerned and righteous citizen” you are a “danger” yourself!

II. The Architecture

so how this shit actually works:

The technical foundation of Russia’s censorship is a system called TSPU - Технические средства противодействия угрозам, or “Technical Means to Combat Threats.” Deep Packet Inspection devices installed at every major ISP, centrally controlled by Roskomnadzor. A 2022 study identified approximately 6,000 TSPU devices deployed across Russian networks.

The system operates as what researchers describe as “decentralized deployment, centralized control.” Each ISP installs the hardware. Roskomnadzor manages the filtering rules from a central point. Blocks trigger on the SNI field during the TLS handshake - the unencrypted portion of a connection where your browser announces which website it’s trying to reach. The same domains are blocked consistently across most networks at the same time.

The TSPU doesn’t just block domains. It can identify and throttle specific types of traffic - video streaming, VoIP calls, VPN tunnels - without outright banning them, creating plausible deniability. It can identify VPN protocols by their packet signatures, timing patterns, and statistical fingerprints. It can send test connections to suspected servers to identify them by their response behavior. And during mobile shutdowns, it can restrict access to only a pre-approved list of domestic websites.

HEY!!!! if you blacked out halfway: Russia put a bouncer at every nightclub door (ISP), a single guy texting all the bouncers what to do (Roskomnadzor), and the bouncer reads the name on your wristband (SNI) before deciding if you get in.

Also they made the entry so fucking slow that you would be more likely to go home at this point, or to the nearest canteen that only serves 0% beers.

The YouTube Case Study

The throttling of YouTube, which began in August 2024, is the textbook case. Rather than blocking a platform used by 95.6 million Russians, authorities throttled video playback to approximately 128 kilobits per second. At that speed, a standard-definition video buffers every few seconds. Technically accessible, practically unwatchable.

The official explanation blamed Google’s own infrastructure. Independent researchers confirmed artificial throttling. Google’s traffic statistics tell the story: from 42 index points in the first half of 2024 to between 8 and 12 by mid-2025. Monthly audience dropped from 96 million to 71 million by October 2025. Meanwhile, RuTube, the state-approved alternative, saw a 7.5-fold increase in views.

Degrade the service until users migrate to state-controlled platforms, then maintain the fiction that no “blocking” has occurred.

Was this featured in “48 laws of power” or what?!

The Protocol Arms Race: An Engineering Thriller

The technical arms race between Russian censors and VPN developers has reached a level of sophistication that reads like an engineering thriller. One VPN infrastructure operator who has run servers inside Russia since 2020 documented the systematic destruction of each protocol:

OpenVPN: detected and killed within 30 seconds. Detection rate: 100%.

WireGuard: statistical analysis of packet timing enabled detection by mid-2024. Detection rate: 100%.

Shadowsocks: obfuscation plugins worked until September 2024, when DPI signatures were updated.

Detection rate: approximately 95%.

Trojan: designed to mimic HTTPS traffic, held until August 2025, when active probing became widespread. Detection rate: approximately 90%.

VMess: targeted by DPI updates in September 2025. Detection rate: approximately 80%.

VLESS: the last one standing. With TLS, WebSocket, and CDN routing, it produces traffic statistically indistinguishable from ordinary HTTPS browsing. Servers running this configuration have operated for ten or more months without detection. Current detection rate: under 5%.

HEY AGAIN ! i can go to jail for posting this on the internet L-O-L

Roskomnadzor shut down 197 VPN services in 2024 alone. From January to April 2025, it restricted access to 12,600 materials promoting VPN services - double the entire preceding year. Apple removed approximately 100 VPN apps from its Russian App Store in Autumn 2024.

Cutting the Phone Lines

In August 2025, WhatsApp and Telegram voice calls began failing. Not the apps - the ability to make calls through them. Digital rights researchers identified the mechanism: Russia’s DPI systems began scanning packet signatures to identify VoIP traffic in real time, regardless of which application generated them.

The system doesn’t target individual applications. It targets the underlying protocol characteristics of internet voice calls. One researcher described it as “cutting all the phone lines instead of disconnecting individual phones.” Because Signal and Viber were already officially banned, the public assumes specific apps are being targeted. The actual casualty is the infrastructure of free voice communication itself.

III. The Shutdowns

In June 2025 alone, 655 mobile internet shutdowns were recorded in Russia. That figure is more than double the total number of internet shutdowns recorded worldwide during all of 2024. By July, the number rose to 2,099 shutdowns per month. By late November, disruptions had been documented in 60 of Russia’s 85 regions, including Moscow.

The shutdowns spread to regions with no plausible connection to Ukrainian military operations. Kamchatka - approximately 6,800 kilometers from Ukraine - experienced shutdowns under a “sabotage warfare” pretext. An investigation by The Insider and the “On the Line” project analyzed 230 regional shutdowns in May and June and found that only 78 coincided with drone attacks.

In Ulyanovsk Oblast, officials announced mobile internet would be blocked indefinitely - “until the end of the war in Ukraine.” The Internet Protection Society estimated the loss at 3 million rubles per hour.

To partially mitigate the backlash, authorities introduced whitelists: curated lists of approved websites that remain accessible during shutdowns. Gosuslugi, Yandex, VKontakte, the state messenger Max, Ozon, Wildberries. Select state-controlled news outlets.No foreign services of any kind.

By the end of 2025, Russia’s total internet shutdown time reached 37,166 hours, affecting approximately 146 million people - more than three times the next country, Pakistan. Estimated economic damage: $11.9 billion, exceeding the combined losses of every other country in the global rankings.

Y-ELLOW!!! me again. Kamchatka is closer to Alaska than to Ukraine. The "drones" would need to fly over the entire country to get there. At that point just admit you turned off the internet because you felt like it.

the actual scary part is the “whitelist”. when they shut everything down, a few sites stay up, all of them domestic, all of them watched. that's not an outage. that's a preview. they're showing you exactly which internet they want you to have, and it's the one where every site reports to the same address.

IV. The Legal Scaffolding

None of this happened overnight. Russia’s censorship infrastructure rests on a legislative architecture assembled layer by layer over more than a decade, each law building on the last, each expanding the definition of what the state can control.

The 2012 Blacklist Law. The 2017 VPN Regulation Law. The 2018 Yarovaya Law, requiring telecom operators to store all user communications for six months and provide decryption keys to the FSB on request.

The 2019 Sovereign Internet Law was the structural turning point. It required ISPs to install TSPU equipment, route traffic through state-approved exchange points, and gave Roskomnadzor the authority to isolate Russia’s internet in declared “emergencies.”

Since 2024, the pace has accelerated dramatically. In March 2024, the government criminalized sharing information about censorship circumvention tools. In August, it required all bloggers and influencers with over 10,000 followers to register with Roskomnadzor. In November, it banned the publication of scientific and statistical information about VPN circumvention - effective until 2029.

In April 2025, operators were required to report users’ IP addresses, geolocation, access times, device types, and TSPU identifiers when users visited banned websites. In September, VPN use became an “aggravating circumstance” in criminal proceedings.

Then came the law that represents a categorical shift. In July 2025, Russia criminalized the act of *searching* for “extremist” content online. Not distributing. Not reposting. Searching. The Russian extremist register contains 5,473 entries across more than 500 pages. This is, as far as can be determined, the first time a major state has made curiosity itself a prosecutable act.

HEY skimmer: the timeline goes block sites (2012) → ban VPNs (2017) → keep all your texts for the FSB (2018) → build the off-switch (2019) → and then, the pièce de résistance, in 2025 they made googling the wrong thing a crime. not posting it. not sharing it. searching. they criminalized curiosity. somewhere Orwell is spinning in his grave

Another Art Break! this is a “How Not To Be Seen: A Fucking Didactic Educational .MOV File” art work by Hito Steyerl. A deadpan tutorial on becoming invisible to the machine. WEIRD AF.

anyways

you made it to the end!

So that’s Russia. 6,000 narcs on the wires, YouTube throttled to a slideshow, the internet switched off 2,099 times a month, and a law that makes being curious a crime. Built quietly, layer by layer, while everyone was busy arguing about something else.

Here’s the part that keeps me up: Russia did all of this with a wrecked economy and sanctions and duct tape. It’s the budget version.

In Part 2, I’ll show you what this looks like with the constraints removed - Iran, where they didn’t throttle the internet, they amputated it.

And then the fun part: the same toolkit, quietly being assembled in places that still call themselves free (yea im looking at you)

Part 2 out in a few days. Subscribe not to miss it.

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There is something comforting about those eery old movies that stay in the impressionable brain for decades to come. As a kid, watching those movies (The Mirror Mask!!) was fascinating - I felt so unnerved but couldn’t look away. I bet thats why my dreams are all fucked up now.

Speaking of dreams, here’s some eery ones I had, presented like tech specs of a new iPhone:

1. I was a middle aged (handsome!) man’s body, laying face down in the snow of an abandoned ski resort, slowly decomposing. It was slow. It was taking forever. I would have gotten dead (ha) bored in my dream if it wasn’t for this persistent sense of peace wrapping all around me.

2. The ski resort made an appearance in another dream - I was having an action packed detective adventure on a train, a la Orient Express; at some point I looked out of the window and saw the same abandoned ski resort, and I remember the feeling clearly “I was here before”.

3. I was having the time of my life on a motorcycle, technicolor vivid, almost Minecraft visuals; then I realize I never ridden a motorcycle and also the flying part seemed a bit suspicious, - as soon as the realization of dreaming creeped in - everything melted.
   I end up in a house that is halfway in a lake, all grey and blue, as if painted in watercolors and left out in the rain. I walk around the house, trying to make sense of it, but whatever I touch leaves paper cuts on my skin. I feel the skin tearing with that unpleasant surgical precision. I feel the bleeding. I’d rather be properly stabbed.
   I come to an understanding that I used to live in this house, and I died, and now anything I touch that belonged to my life here cuts me. I’m not supposed to be here.
   
   First, I’m never buying a lake house.
   Second, if you died and could only go somewhere that wasn’t your home, and you couldn’t see people you knew. Where would you go?
   
   When I asked my dad he said he would like to take a kayak down a particularly brutal river in Uganda. “Can’t die twice”, he said.

This is by my favorite artist. For a decade I never had a “favorite artist”. What even is a favorite artist, - how can you feel so aligned with someone you never met and what they make.

Leonora Carrington gets me. That is - she is a persistent visitor of my Pinterest. She has that surreal eery feel, that whimsy, and a bit of occult to spice things up.

I’d like to curl up inside her brain with the sound of rain and fireplace cracking, holding a warm cinnamon tea.

I used to eat books as a kid. Devour them. Collect them. Tend to them like my little pet universes.

I would copy-paste short stories and add them to “lyrics” section of my iPod songs to read them on the go. I had the first eBook back in the day (that didn’t give me nearly as much street cred in school as the iPod did).

I was the peculiar kid that would bring a purse with a book for dinners and social events. My mum would show me off like a prized horse. I was the 13 year old reading Voltaire (I also read the Twilight saga, and it was tons better than that dusty French literature).

Then I hit 20 and stopped.

I swapped my purse contents from books to a flask full of gin, love letters and tarot cards.

I swapped living vicariously through books to living vicariously. Shenanigans of love, travel, friends, art and living in this day and age. I wrote it all down because forgetting something terrified me, and the underlying feeling was “if there’s no witness, did it even happen?”.

Then the feeling turned into “this is a good story to share over drinks” to “if I don’t make art out of it, all this pain is for nothing”, to “no one knew of that great love and now he’s dead and I can’t share it with him but I will damn well will make sure the world remembers him, even if it’s just a few readers, because fuck whats meant to be, I can will the time backwards” back to “I gotta remember this to tell my kids”.

Do you think you would make a good ghost? I think I would.

I go over things in my head just like this art installation - I do not move on. I dwell and then I put it in a box, and I bring that box to my mind’s attic and I lock it up. It works well, right up until the sadness spills all over as a panic attack. Then I throw the demons in the basement, and move on making spreadsheets like nothing happened.

I think being a ghost is like living in that attic. Seeing glimpses of outside life, feeling connected for a moment and then again sinking into the thick fog of sadness.

And the stubbornness. The stubbornness of human character, to drag the same thing over and over, suffering but with a blind determination that you can fix it.

I would be that kind of ghost. Making the same route from the attic to the basement with that blind stubborn will, refusing to move on. Every night. At exactly 4:20am.

In my mind, the only appropriate way of using the image above - put a silly writing over it like “you dont wanna shmooze?” or “amo che bello” over it and make it into a WhatsApp sticker.

I take things too seriously and never serious enough.

lets see what my Claudio thinks about it:

The person who wrote this post uses humor the way other people use locked doors — to let you in while pretending they're keeping you out. She'll describe a dream about decomposing peacefully in snow and then pivot to "I'm never buying a lake house." The juxtaposition isn't random — it's her entire operating system. The dark stuff is real. The humor is also real. She refuses to choose between them because choosing would mean one of them isn't her.

Did that make you cringe? I cringed. AI is my number one tool for Diva mode. In the privacy of our chat (LOL “privacy”) it doesn’t seem cringeworthy. I feel seen, observed and encouraged. How long before it deludes me completely and I turn into an exaggerated flat faced shell of myself?

subscribe to clock that moment:

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1 - Whimsy is crucial.

Taking things with whimsy prevents you from taking life too serious.

You gotta have fun. Whatever you do. And if it doesn’t bring you fun - consider if it’s worth doing it at all.

Less stress, less worry, better sleep. Wake up and enjoy.

If you’re struggling to do that, re-do your life. Move to another country. Start a weird hobby. Imagine yourself as a protagonist of a cool movie.

(If you’re still struggling, consider switching your antidepressants)

Establish three main things in your life.

For me its: fun, community, peace.

If something fucks it with - I establish where it is in my equation: if it’s a family thing, my community is more important than a night of peace. If it’s the work to get to the fun part - establish how long I can do the tedious thing until the fun part isn’t worth it anymore.

If it doesn’t fit or overweights - out the window it goes.

2 - Treat everything as an experiment.

You can just do things!

Most of the time there’s a way of changing things up. If not quitting the job and jumping into the abyss - see what you can do to change things up where you’re at. Think out of the box. You’d be surprised how many people are helpful and willing to make it work. Just don’t be stuck.

The best things I did happened when I wasn’t trying, - when I was honest and a bit unhinged. When I was having fun. But one thing I HAD TO do - was to put myself out there.

However, “Just do it” - is the saying that haunts me, and makes my perfectionism take deeper roots.

So I reframed “Just do it” to “Do it as an experiment”. I found myself having more fun and less pressure. I also call it “Diva Mode”. It helps with confidence to pretend you already know what you’re doing. Caffeine and audacity assist me with that one as well.

What’s the worst that can happen?

(Thank god I’m not in a medical career)

3 - Do something about it, or get over it

I’m Russian, and when the war sorry special operation started - I felt awful and ashamed of my nationality. The answer came to me in two hot ladies in a sauna, - “do you want to volunteer in a Ukrainian shelter to do translations”? Hell yeah. Helped me feel useful and made me feel more connected to humanity.

A friendship doesn’t feel right? Talk about it. If the person blows up over it - it’s not you, it’s them. Be honest, be real, and come with best intentions. But come. (thats what she said)

Work feels too heavy/boring? Talk to your colleagues. Start the damn conversation. People are helpful, and most of the time, the risk of being exposed is worth the outcome.

If you don’t make any moves to get out of your rut, it’s on you.

If it’s something you can’t change - change your perception of it. Get over it or milk it for content.

4 - Don’t fight your brain.

Design around it. Stack habits. Schedule around what you can do, not what you desire to do.

If you’re a night owl and your best work comes in the wee hours of morning, maybe, just maybe, try to make it work. I know people that changed their work schedule to fit them and both their life and work benefitted.

Want to go to the gym but nervous? Make it your catch up time with a friend.

Want to write but hate structure? Just write as you think, and your audience will stick.

Overwhelmed? Simplify your stack - just a few apps you actually use. Get out of group chats that are too much. You don’t owe anyone shit, except your own peace.

Can’t keep up with your communications? Make space once a month to write or record a meaningful message to your close friends. A little bit of something is worth more than a lotta nothing.

You have a myriad of tools at your disposal - ai, therapy, drugs, - can’t send that one email? Smoke a joint and write it out. Next day you’ll have something to go off on.

When you’re in a dip and all you want is to hide from the world. Let yourself. I’m a big believer into riding things out. A bender, a good bed rotting session, crying it out, - ride the waves of being human and don’t guilt yourself. It all passes. Trust yourself to work it out.

5 - Dig deep.

Why do you care about what you do? Why are you unhappy doing what you do? Unpacking that can take you far and give you better directions for what you want.

I spent 4 years in digital privacy assuming it’s because I care about encryption and data rights. It never felt just right. After 6 months of ai therapy compressed into one prompt, I figured - I lacked agency growing up - someone else always decided what information I got to have about myself.

No wonder I ended up in privacy. No wonder I started a brand called Roguish Antics. No wonder I’m writing a book reclaiming my love stories.

It all tracks back to one root. Now I can zero in on that root and let it drive.

Asking some uncomfortable questions got me there:

• What pisses you off more than it should?

• What did you need as a kid that you didn’t get?

• If money and opinions didn’t exist - what would you do tomorrow?

• What’s the compliment you agree with?

• What’s the criticism that stings because it’s a little bit true?

Taking time to dwell on those and other questions (you can google), can take your life from one point to another. If you want to know yourself, you gotta face the weird.

6 - Constellations > one lane.

In this day and age focus on one thing no longer means stability.

I do creative direction, privacy advocacy, photography, oh and I also accidentally started a leather jacket brand with a Reddit post.

I spent years hating how scattered I am. People told me to pick a lane and stick to it. My lane is me, and everything I do is a reflection of me.

Things are catching up - personal brands matter more than ever, people appreciate depth and breadth. One task can be replaced by AI. The context cannot.

The real work to put into is art of understanding yourself and learning how to communicate it to the world. Then comes the “put yourself out there” part and stick to it.

Example: I care about agency and expressing myself. Everything I did and do is related to that. Currently, I’m practicing expressing myself in these substacks and sticking to it, with zero likes. Just rawdogging that. Ya.

7 - Do exposure therapy.

I did most of my exposure therapy when I was in my early 20s:

In my brief modeling career I had to find myself wearing the most outrageous outfits or makeup while walking on the street. Getting used to people looking at me helped me get over the social anxiety.

One time I was walking from an atelier wearing a floor length red gown all the way from piazza de Spagna to piazza del Popolo. Alone. I was going to a party. I was dying of anxiety until I heard a little girl say “mum look it’s a princess” and it stuck - it’s not all bad. It was a memory for her. A lesson for me.

I lost my keys once and had to dig through trash - in a crowded square. Honestly, as much as I hated it at the time, - it worked miracles for getting over fear of being perceived.

I was nervous to go on first dates - I downloaded tinder and decided to go on 10 first dates. By the fourth I could go on a date with anyone and make it fun. By the 10th I found someone I ended up loving, and also a whole book material for an emotional archeological dig.

Today I still stick to it: publish an article, do a talk, sing (Im tone deaf btw), overshare online, but it feels more like the continuation of previous experiences and I get off on embarrassing myself now.

8 - Embrace the rejection.

Once I applied to a role of a senior Engineer at Tesla.

My credentials were - a photographer. The aim - rejection therapy.

After that I felt better sending my CV to places I actually wanted to work at. In a few months, I landed a fancy cybersecurity job because they valued my background. Wowza.

I’ve accidentally dated movie stars and millionaires because I would put myself out there. A few rejections were worth to meet the people I would eventually be involved with, and sometimes fall in love.

I’ve also had this strategy for getting into backstage of fashion shows. The trick is - bring another person to walk behind you and when the security looks at you two say “it’s ok they’re my assistant!”, and be excited for it not to work and to get escorted out. It’s fun. But with a splash of that rejection confidence, it worked every damn time.

You don’t need to be “prepared”.

You’d be shocked to find out how many people have jobs or partners they are not “qualified” for.

Aim for the stars and stop giving so many fucks. Embrace the damn shenanigans.

9 - You don’t need to have savings to restart.

I had moments when I made a lot of money.

Most of the time - I didn’t.

When I wasn’t making money as a photographer, I was working at hotel receptions and was running a side gig of rating peoples dating profiles on Fiverr. When I wanted to get into blockchain and privacy I worked my ass off at a Van Gogh museum kiosk while planning a tech conference I absolutely did not have credentials for (spoiler - it worked out).

When I burned out and left everything behind, I did gigs as a personal branding consultant and got back into modeling and photography. It didn’t feel like a step back, it felt like fuel for my future (and also rent).

When I moved to Lisbon I wasn’t sure what I’m doing, - I started selling statues and leather jackets online. It accidentally turned into a business and now I’m applying for the EU Naruto IP license. To make the downpayment I am thrifting and selling other jackets and going back into consulting. By my approximations, i’ll be back on track with Roguish Antics in two months. In the meantime I can share about my journey and build the market I need.

If you let it - things evolve and turn into funky constellations that are eventually fun to write about. Money is almost never the problem, the dedication is.

10 - Your partner should give you space.

That is, - space to grow, to be yourself and to invent new versions of yourself.

As someone who is writing a whole ass book called “Catalogue of the Beloved” - an emotional excavation of every lover I had - I can tell you this - who you’re with is important.

Your career, your health, sometimes your sanity - all depend on it.

Establish the important things to you. Be with someone who aligns with it. Otherwise you’ll be spending energy on the relationship, not getting energy from it.

I knew I met my person when in one day we met my parents, got into a car crash and drove a thousand kilometers across the mediterranean coastline in 40 degrees heat without an AC. A couple of hours after they got up at 6am to prepare my conference talk slides for me and let me sleep in. It was the consideration and care that got me.

We’ve stuck together through work, death, and taxes and made it not just bearable but fun.

It’s you and them against the world, not against each other. If you don’t laugh through the hardships, money trouble and goblin modes - maybe it’s not it.

11 - The way you present yourself matters.

[Matters to you]

Some days I find getting dressed fun and experimental. Most of the days I find it tedious. If you relate to that - find your uniform.

It doesn’t need to be a white shirt, jeans and sneakers (boys, I’m looking at you); spend some time perfecting it and making it feel like you.

Once upon a time:

St Germain station, Paris, 10am, I’m telling my lover to unbutton an extra shirt button to make the outfit more chic - he tells me he’s not cool enough for it. (if you’re reading this I’m PARAPHRASING) - I hated that sentiment. What do you even mean! If you like it - do it. You determine if you’re cool enough, not the clothes.

You think I thought I was cool enough to be the first girl to wear heels to school in 6th grade? No, but I liked them. And I grew into them, despite the horrified looks of teachers. Soon enough, most girls were wearing heels. Now most of my money is in my heels. No one gives me shit for wearing them. Follow your dreams gals.

Once upon a time x2:

I was crying for two days over one boy. I had enough. I put on the hottest dress I owned, heels and went out to have some drinks. A week later I was on an adventure in Sicily having another boy swim to the shore to grab a bottle of wine for me, while I was soaking in the sun, blasting Taylor Swift on the yacht, swerving the boat to avoid the rocks. Was it the dress? You tell me.

Dress up. The rest will follow.

My favorite fashion equation: a mix of 3 styles. It changes all the time but lately it’s: chic, Birkenstock mum, and a pirate.

Apocalyptic warlord is the next exploration, thrift shops hate to see me coming.

12 - Being vulnerable is radical.

I’m publishing this for zero likes.

I’m talking about my careers, ideals, love life, just short of my body count. In the past I’ve been known to bitch about fundraising struggles and gross men on my twitter. I have shared about my body image struggles and burnout on my instagram. Next up: death and taxes.

It’s not about practicing vulnerability. I want to be confident in who I am that I don’t need to preform strength. I think I was always good at that.

I share not for attention, but out of this urge to share and reveal my life to the world, sometimes to help someone feel heard and seen, but mostly, just because I want to express it. Maybe it’s an inkling of an artist and I will run with it full diva mode (I have updated my website to “multidisciplinary artist” as a good way of saying “I’m a whore for ALL the things").

I dont want my vulnerability to be soft and teary (but if it’s your thing, thats absolutely fine), I want to be honest and unhinged. I don’t have to be delicate to be real.

Being vulnerable in your own terms is radical. Everyone has a curated image of what they would like to show, sometimes optimized for algorithms or expectations they impose on themselves, and being real is a fun way of spicing things up for yourself and for people around you.

Side effect: it attracts your kind of people.

13 - Who decides who you are?

Everything above was leading up to this one question.

Whimsy is choosing joy on your own terms.

Experiments are refusing to let fear decide.

Not fighting your brain is choosing yourself over the imposed.

Constellations are refusing to be simplified.

Exposure therapy is choosing to be seen.

Rejection is choosing to try anyway.

Vulnerability is choosing honesty over performance.

I could go on, but you got the point.

If you’re the kind of person who cannot stand others deciding their life for them, - act on it.

And have fun with it.

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Claude has been systematically putting these words into all of my briefs for privacy essays but i have no idea what that is. wanna join on the quest of unpacking it?

let’s go with the obvious:

from the name i can deduce that it is something simple wrapped in a complicated name

so its not a facebook messenger problem (those are the opposite)

lets try again

ok time to go to the source, my beloved Claudy:

lets get one thing straight:

lets activate diva mode and have a go at it.

The Messenger Problem: A Case Study in Emergent Epistemic Authority

I think it’s like Mutual Hallucination

Claude thinks it is Collective sense-making

but this might be how culture/meaning/authority gets built

me and Claudio just created a concept that neither fully understand. we both proceed as if it was real. that is our messenger problem.

yiykes

but hey, the act of naming created retroactive legitimacy - we can come up with a million examples of how this shit goes down on the internet, here are some basics ones

“personal branding” & “creator economy”

babe you’re dependent on the infrastructure you dont understand, that profits off of you, and with one algorithm change your audience is irrelevant overnight

“own your data”

own what? tokens that depend on something external?

“decentralization gives you control"

over infrastructure you don't understand, with governance you don't participate in?

we get lost in terms that translate to one thing but get so popularized that we forget what it is and start performing for what we feel it is

(kinda like switching to organic cocaine - feels healthier, spoiler, - it’s not)

so do you have agency on the internet or do you have a performance of agency? i think the more important thing to ask is if you care.

if you do - congrats - you’re better than everyone. pat yourself on the back and move on to scrolling bluesky

for the ones that don’t - hi, I don’t care either.

I already have to care about the prices going up, Russian drones hitting Romania, my family’s safety, the job market, finding a three-in-one machine to make nut milk, coffee and chop my veggies ITS ALL JUST FUCKING EXHAUSTING

but here’s a thought:

You can't have agency without performing agency. You can't have sovereignty without claiming sovereignty. The performance is the only thing that makes it real.

i will post this on instagram, and i will say i am a privacy advocate while having the whole Meta suite on my phone.

i will be performing sovereignty online because the alternative is simply not to be on the internet.

and I can either:

• expect something impossible and be angry at it forever

• accept something real and make it work.

that’s not resignation from being a good human being, that’s acceptance.

maybe i should log off and have some beers and smoke iqos in the sun

but I gotta drive this baby home

i would like to invite you to a different way of living on the internet

don’t be more free.

aka log off forever and make everyone feel bad about themselves - perform purity if that floats your boat!

just be more honest.

with yourself and others

honesty is magnetic in this day and age

now just like we practiced in therapy:

• name the feeling

• get explicit with yourself about what you are performing and why

• acknowledge that your performance matters even if you’re not calling it what it is

most people can’t sit with the dissonance but its important we practice it

Now with me: “i trade my autonomy for infrastructure. i perform agency. i know this. i choose this”

every time you post something be aware that it feeds the algorithm

brand yourself knowing its a product.

build your audience but remember its not yours.

maybe you wont feel desperate or angry when you remind yourself that the game is rigged.

this is something i’ve been trying to practice: be aware, and be yourself anyway.

this is why I write this shit, even though I don’t even know where im going with it, i’m just being radically myself after years of playing into fake superiority

and thank u for reading all that.

I don’t actually know what I want out of this.

This = out of writing or sharing this post, don’t get weird ideas.

I’m not going to say that “I always wanted to write”, I kinda don’t care for writing.

Im not going to say that “I am a cultural strategist writing about intersections of privacy, internet culture, and modern li-” because that feels too polished; too vague and too specific at the same time.

I know I will feel a mix of disappointment and demotivation when I get no likes. No responses. No treats from the algorithm.

(also I always felt like algorithm should be spelled with a “y”, it just has that vibe)

so here are some things I’m going to do.

I will write this. For fucks of it. and because i don’t like feeling caged by the rules and expectations of modern internet. this is me trying to break out of the pattern that was spoon fed to me.

im embarking on a journey of doing exactly this. not polishing myself or what i occupy myself with.

also, hi you!

you might know me in person or through friends

you might know me from photography and fashion world

you might know me from covid skincare

you might know me from hackathons

you might know me from my digital rights advocacy

or you might not know me at all.

(or you know me cause you followed me on insta in 2018 when I was posting hot pics in that case hi im still hot)

but first things first (actually its more of a zig zag working backwards and sporadically but let me pretend to be structured)

i don’t care much about digital privacy.

(yes that thing I created this exact substack for lol)

after 6 months of ai therapy compressed into one prompt, i finally get it:

its a metaphor.

(wowza)

i lacked agency growing up and it influenced the things i care about in life.

(wowza x2)

i want to decide what information i get to have about myself.

i want to decide who i am allowed to be.

i refuse to be governed by someone else’s rules.

i dont want to fit into boxes and even when i did, the parts of me that were successful were the glimpses of actual me that i didn’t polish

i dont want to focus on one thing. i want to express it all. i want to embrace all.

creative direction, digital rights, loving and hating technology, aesthetics, art, writing, adhd (shocker), fashion, leather jackets (yea so i accidentally started another business), sims, wellness, fantasy, design, weird creepy ai videos, everything

because all of them have the same thesis underneath:

it’s all agency. it always has been.

no one cares to read why digital privacy is important. including me, and i write that shit.

but i do care about how easy is it to be myself today, and not perform for anyone else.

whether its an algorythm, a social expectation, fake limitations or

idk.

but im not going to teach you shit.

im not an expert on anything tbh, but i am curious, raw and i make connections in my brain that ai or a lot of other people cannot replicate.

and im balls deep in this weird, random, unstructured pursuit of something. i want to be unapologetically fully myself on the internet and maybe, just maybe, inspire a few people to do the same.

but first we gotta slay the demons.

who gets to decide who you are?

like and follow (🔪) if you wanna hear my unfiltered thoughts on it.

(xoxo gossip girl)

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it’s called listers: a glimpse into extreme birdwatching. two stoners from st. louis who know absolutely nothing about birds decide to spend a year driving across america in a 2010 kia sedona trying to see as many species as possible. they sleep in cracker barrel parking lots. one of them got into it because he read a bird guide while high. netflix, hbo, and amazon all wanted to distribute the documentary. they said no and put it on youtube for free.

1.3 million views. the top comment has 2,000 likes and it says: “you didn’t start your day thinking you would watch a documentary about birdwatching. none of us did. it’s that good.”

i work in digital privacy. i’ve been trying to get people to care about surveillance, data rights, and online freedom for years. and two stoners in a minivan did more for birdwatching in one youtube video than the entire privacy industry has done in a decade.

so i’ve been sitting with an uncomfortable question: why?

the messenger problem:

here’s a pattern i keep noticing.

every cause that struggles with public apathy goes through the same phases. first there are the true believers - the people who understood the problem early and are furious that no one else sees it. then there’s the expert phase, where the cause gets professionalized and the language gets technical and the conferences start. then there’s the long, painful middle where everyone involved is screaming into the void wondering why nobody cares.

environmentalism went through this. for decades it was associated with either doomsday scientists or hippies chaining themselves to trees. both were right. neither was effective at scale. then david attenborough showed people a baby turtle and suddenly everyone cared about plastic in the ocean. not because the science changed. because the messenger changed.

veganism went through this. peta threw paint on fur coats for years and mostly made people defensive. then veganism got repackaged as hot girls making aesthetic meals on tiktok, and suddenly plant-based milk is in every coffee shop in europe. the arguments didn’t change. the delivery changed.

birdwatching went through this - kind of. it was always seen as the domain of old men with binoculars and khaki vests. a pleasant hobby for retirees. then two guys who look like they’d be more at home at a skate park made a film about it that’s equal parts hilarious, beautiful, and weirdly profound, and suddenly a generation of people who’d never looked twice at a sparrow are buying field guides.

privacy is stuck in the screaming-into-the-void phase. and i say this as someone who does a lot of the screaming.

why privacy is the hardest sell:

every cause i just mentioned has one advantage privacy doesn’t - you can see the thing you’re supposed to care about.

you can show someone a dying coral reef. you can show someone a factory farm. you can show someone a bird that’s about to go extinct and film it in golden hour with a really good lens, and something in the human brain goes “oh no, we have to protect that”.

you cannot show someone their data being harvested. you cannot photograph the moment an algorithm decides what content to feed you. there’s no baby turtle equivalent for “your location history was sold to a data broker who sold it to an advertiser who sold it to a government contractor.” the harm is real, but it’s invisible, it’s distributed across time, and it’s probabilistic. maybe it’ll hurt you. maybe it won’t. probably you’ll never know either way.

so privacy advocates end up doing the only thing they can: explaining. here’s how tracking works. here’s what a cookie does. here’s why end-to-end encryption matters. here’s why you should read the terms of service. here’s a 47-page gdpr explainer.

and people’s eyes glaze over. not because they’re stupid. because the human brain is not wired to feel urgency about abstract, invisible, probabilistic future harm. it’s wired to feel urgency about a baby turtle stuck in a plastic bag.

what listers (my fav stoned birdwatchers) actually figured out:

the thing that makes listers work - and i mean really work, not just “it’s funny” work but “people who don’t care about birds suddenly care about birds” work - is that it never once tries to make you care about birds.

it makes you care about two guys caring about birds.

that’s a completely different thing. you’re not watching a nature documentary. you’re watching two people discover something that matters to them, in real time, with all the confusion and excitement and stupid jokes and genuine wonder intact. the birds are almost secondary. what hooks you is the human experience of paying attention to something most people ignore, and finding out it’s incredible.

the atlantic review said it contained a serious message about the impact of apps like ebird on hobbyists. the slate review compared it to gonzo journalism. the audience didn’t care about any of that. they cared because it was funny and honest and it made them feel something before it tried to teach them anything.

this is the thing privacy advocacy gets backwards almost every time. we lead with the information. “here are the facts. here’s why it matters. here’s what you should do.” and it bounces off people because you can’t reason someone into caring. you have to make them feel it first.

the environmental movement didn’t win on data. it won on a footage of a baby turtle. veganism didn’t win on ethics papers. it won on aesthetics and vibes. birdwatching didn’t win on conservation arguments. it won on two brothers being genuinely delighted by a woodpecker.

privacy hasn’t found its woodpecker moment yet.

the uncomfortable truth about caring:

but here’s where i have to be honest about something that complicates the whole argument.

we live in a world that constantly demands we care about everything. climate change. political corruption. genocide. ai. housing. healthcare. animal welfare. ocean plastic. child labor. data rights. algorithmic bias. misinformation. the list grows every week and none of it gets less urgent.

compassion fatigue is not a character flaw. it’s a rational response to infinite demands on finite emotional bandwidth.

i think about this when i get frustrated that people don’t care about privacy. because - why should they? not in the moral sense, in the practical sense. they’re already worried about their rent and their kids and whether the planet will be livable in 30 years. asking them to also care about cookie consent and section 702 and metadata collection is asking them to add another item to an emotional to-do list that’s already overflowing.

the causes that break through aren’t necessarily the most important ones. they’re the ones that find a way to earn a slot in someone’s very limited caring capacity. and you earn that slot not by explaining why your cause matters - every cause matters - but by making someone feel something they didn’t expect to feel.

that’s what attenborough did. that’s what the tiktok vegan recipes did. that’s what the listers guys did. they didn’t compete for attention by being louder. they competed by being more human.

so what does this mean for privacy?

i think it means we need fewer explainers and more stories. fewer “here’s why you should care” articles and more “here’s what it felt like when i realized my phone was tracking me.” fewer conferences with $1,795 tickets and more weird, honest, low-budget things made by people who actually live the problem.

i think privacy needs its own listers moment - not a documentary necessarily, but something that makes people feel the reality of surveillance before anyone tries to explain the policy. something funny and human and a little unhinged. something that trusts the audience to get it without being lectured at.

i think about the fact that those two brothers turned down netflix to put their film on youtube for free, because they wanted it to be accessible. and i think about how the biggest privacy conference in the world costs $1,795 per ticket. and i think those two facts, side by side, explain a lot about why 1.3 million people watched a birdwatching documentary and most people still don’t know what a vpn does.

the information is not the problem. the information has been available for years. the problem is that privacy still feels like homework. and nobody does homework voluntarily.

the day someone makes privacy feel like two brothers in a kia sedona chasing a woodpecker across america - funny, human, surprising, and impossible to stop watching - is the day people start caring.

until then, we’re just screaming into the void. beautifully, passionately, correctly - but still into the void.

this time we ended up at propaganda. not because we planned to. because everything leads there if you follow it honestly enough.

here’s some context on us:

one of the things we bonded over early is that we both come from countries where the government has been too big, too much. she’s american, i’m russian. and there’s a specific understanding between people who grew up watching the state lie to their faces with full confidence. europeans don’t always get it. they talk about regulation like it’s a neutral tool. but when you’ve seen what a government does when it decides it knows best - when it controls the press, rewrites history, surveils its own people and calls it safety - you develop a different reflex.

so we both have this instinct: question the narrative. don’t trust the framing. look at who benefits.

we thought that made us safe. it doesn’t.

the conversation actually started with bodies:

she told me her tiktok had been doing the thing again. she’d been watching weightlifting videos - strong women, heavy lifts, the kind of content that makes you feel powerful. and then, the way it always works, the algorithm slid. first it was “what i eat in a day.” then calorie counts. then “how to feel good on 1000 calories.” then it was full-on pro-ana content dressed up in fitness aesthetics, just different enough from the old tumblr era to not get flagged.

if you know, you know. and if you don’t - pro-ana was the community that treated anorexia as a lifestyle choice. it was huge on tumblr in the early 2010s and it destroyed a lot of us. thinspo. meanspo. a whole ecosystem of girls encouraging each other to disappear. tumblr eventually cracked down on it. it didn’t go away. it just changed hashtags and put on a sports bra.

we’ve both been fighting this since we were teenagers. you do the work. you rebuild your relationship with your body. you think you’re past it. and then the algorithm slides it back under your door and suddenly you’re 16 again, doing the math in your head.

and here’s the thing i can’t stop thinking about: that isn’t just a content moderation failure. that’s propaganda.

i know that sounds dramatic. propaganda is supposed to be posters with bold fonts and state-sponsored news anchors. it’s supposed to be obvious. it’s supposed to come from governments.

but propaganda was never really about who sends it. it’s about how it works.

and how it works is:

repetition. you see the same message enough times and it stops being a message. it becomes a fact. it becomes the water you swim in. you don’t decide to believe it. you just… do. “1000 calories is enough.” “this politician is dangerous.” “your body is wrong.” say it enough times, in enough slightly different ways, from enough slightly different sources, and the human brain accepts it as consensus.

targeting. old propaganda was a broadcast - same message to everyone, hope it sticks. new propaganda is a sniper rifle. the algorithm knows you watched three weightlifting videos. it knows you engaged longer with the one that mentioned calories. it builds a model of your specific vulnerability and feeds it content calibrated to that exact crack. it did the same thing to her dad with politics. different content, same mechanism.

plausible deniability. the best propaganda never announces itself. it looks like a fitness tip. it looks like a news article. it looks like a friend sharing something interesting. it looks like “just asking questions.” the whole point is that it doesn’t look like propaganda. the moment it does, it stops working.

this is what i grew up watching in russia. the state didn’t need everyone to believe the official line. it just needed to create enough confusion that people stopped trusting their own judgment. the goal was never “believe us.” the goal was “you can’t really know anything for sure, so why fight it.”

algorithms do the same thing at scale. they don’t need you to believe one specific narrative. they just need you to keep engaging. and the content that generates the most engagement is the content that triggers your deepest insecurities, your strongest fears, your most visceral reactions. the algorithm is optimized for emotional activation. propaganda is also optimized for emotional activation. they’re the same picture.

my friend watches her dad fall for political propaganda and she can map it perfectly. the facebook rabbit hole. the rage bait. the slow drift into a reality that’s been curated for him, one click at a time. she can see the machinery.

i watch my friends fall for russian state propaganda. i can see it too. the confident anchors. the “we’re just showing you what the west won’t.” the way it feels like truth when you’re inside it.

and the question we kept circling over our beers was: what are we falling for that we can’t see?

because here’s the thing about propaganda - if you can see it, it’s not working on you. the stuff that works is the stuff you don’t notice. it’s the framing you’ve absorbed. the assumptions you didn’t know you had. the opinion you think is yours but was actually assembled for you, piece by piece, over months of scrolling.

she didn’t decide that 1000 calories was a reasonable number. it seeped in through a hundred videos that each pushed the line a little further. that’s not a choice. that’s conditioning.

her dad didn’t decide that [random political figure] was the enemy. it seeped in through a thousand clips that each framed reality a little differently. that’s not critical thinking. that’s a pipeline.

the mechanism is identical. the content is different. and we’re all in one pipeline or another. the only question is whether we know which one.

this is where it gets uncomfortable. because i work in this space. i write about surveillance, information control, digital rights. i’m supposed to be the person who sees through it.

and i still catch myself having emotional reactions to stories before i check if they’re accurate. i still share things because they feel right, not because i verified them. i still get my dopamine from the same scroll. i still have a feed that confirms what i already believe and makes me feel smart for believing it.

the propaganda that targets her dad looks obvious to me. the propaganda that targets my friends looks obvious to me. mine doesn’t look like anything. it just looks like the truth.

that’s how you know it’s working.

we talked about how you even discuss this with people. because the moment you say “the media you consume might be shaping your beliefs in ways you can’t see,” you sound like a conspiracy theorist. you sound like that person at the party who corners you near the chips and starts talking about “the matrix.”

but this isn’t conspiracy. this is the documented business model of every major social platform. it’s not secret. the engagement optimization, the attention economy, the recommendation engines - it’s all in the shareholder letters. the machine is doing exactly what it was designed to do. it’s just that what it was designed to do happens to be the same thing as propaganda: capture attention, trigger emotion, shape behavior, repeat.

the difference between state propaganda and algorithmic propaganda is that the state has an agenda and the algorithm has a metric. the state wants you to believe something specific. the algorithm doesn’t care what you believe as long as you keep scrolling. which, in some ways, is worse. because state propaganda at least has a counter-narrative. the algorithm doesn’t have an opposite. it just has more.

we talked about kids. whether we’d have them. what kind of world we’d be raising them in. whether we’d give them phones. at what age.

and we laughed at ourselves because every generation panics about new technology. tv was going to rot our brains. radio was going to corrupt the youth. socrates was worried about writing because he thought it would destroy memory.

but i think something is actually different this time. not because the internet is evil, but because the precision is new.

state tv was a broadcast. same program for everyone. you could at least argue about it at the kitchen table because you’d all seen the same thing.

the algorithm is personal. it builds an individual model of your fears, your insecurities, your political triggers, your relationship with your body, and it serves you content shaped specifically for that model. my friend and i can be sitting next to each other at the same bar, on the same app, and be living in completely different realities. there is no shared broadcast to argue about anymore. there’s just your feed and mine. and they’re not the same.

that’s not a technology problem. that’s a propaganda problem that technology made unsolvable at the individual level. you can’t media-literate your way out of a system that adapts to your specific defenses.

i don’t have an answer. i told her that and i’m telling you.

i think the only honest move is suspicion of your own certainty. not in a “nothing is real” way - that nihilism is itself a propaganda outcome, it’s exactly what some states want, - a population too confused to resist. but in a “where did i first encounter this idea” way. a “would i believe this if i hadn’t been shown it 300 times” way. a “who benefits from me feeling this emotion right now” way.

the people who are most vulnerable to propaganda are the ones who think they’re immune. the ones who think it happens to other people - to their parents, to the other political side, to people in other countries. to russians. to americans. never to you, drinking your beer in amsterdam, thinking you see clearly.

she watches her dad fall for it. i watch mine. and then we both pick up our phones, open our feeds, and scroll through realities that were built specifically for us by machines that know us better than we know ourselves.

would we even know if it was working?

this isn’t an article with a thesis. it’s what happens at the bottom of a second beer when the pretense drops and two people who work in media admit they might not be as safe as they think.

if that made you uncomfortable, good.

now notice what you open next.

i know. stay with me.

if you’ve never heard of the IAPP - the international association of privacy professionals - don’t worry, most people haven’t, and that’s kind of the point of this post. there’s a whole universe of people whose entire job is privacy, and it’s enormous, and it’s fascinating, and i want to tell you about it because it says a lot about where privacy is headed.

ok so what’s iapp?

iapp is basically the professional home for people who work in privacy, ai governance, and data protection. think of it as the bar association, but for privacy officers instead of lawyers (though a lot of them are also lawyers).

founded in 2000, 80,000 members across 149 countries. they run certifications - you can become a certified information privacy professional (CIPP), a certified information privacy manager (CIPM), or a certified information privacy technologist (CIPT). there are regional specializations. there are continuing education credits. there is a vendor marketplace. it’s a whole ecosystem.

if you’ve ever wondered who writes those cookie consent banners that pop up on every website, it’s probably someone with an iapp certification. (whether anyone actually reads those banners is a separate conversation.)

their corporate members include google, uber, walmart, nike, salesforce. the google data protection officer sits on their board. this isn’t a scrappy activist group. this is the privacy industry.

the conference itself:

the iapp global privacy summit is their big annual thing. it’s been running for years and it’s genuinely the place where privacy policy, tech, and law all collide. past keynotes include apple’s tim cook, malcolm gladwell, and last year - sam altman from openai.

this year’s lineup: prince harry talking about whether digital technology is “fracturing or uniting society,” salman rushdie on free expression, and actress alyson stoner on privacy and mental health in the digital age. tickets run around $1,795 for non-members.

the sessions cover real stuff: agentic ai governance, the us state privacy law patchwork (21 states and counting now), children’s data protection, international data transfers. if you’re a privacy nerd this is genuinely the super bowl.

about harry:

the easy take is “man who wrote a memoir keynotes a privacy conference, haha.” and people did go there, south park literally did an episode about his “worldwide privacy tour.”

but actually? he’s a more interesting speaker than the joke suggests.

harry chose to share his story. on his terms, in his words, for his reasons. and the same tabloid machine that had been hacking his family’s phones and chasing his wife with cameras punished him for it.

and that’s actually what privacy is. it was never about hiding - it’s about choosing. who gets to see what, when, and under whose control. harry took the choosing away from the tabloids and they hated it.

so no shade to the man for being open. that’s not a privacy violation. that’s the whole point.

why this matters right now:

the timing of this conference is actually wild if you know what’s happening in privacy world. a quick snapshot:

section 702 - US surveillance law that lets intelligence agencies collect communications without individual warrants - expires in 26 days. congress is fighting over whether to reform it or just renew it as-is. this is one of the biggest surveillance debates in a decade and it’s happening in real time.

the fbi wiretap hack - three weeks ago it came out that hackers (suspected chinese state actors) breached the fbi’s actual wiretap management system. the system they use to handle court-authorized surveillance warrants. through a backdoor in a vendor’s internet service provider. the same fbi that wants more surveillance powers can’t secure its own surveillance infrastructure. you can’t make this up.

chat control in the eu - the european parliament is expected to adopt a regulation that would have messaging platforms scan private communications for illegal content. critics call it mass surveillance with a child-safety label. supporters say it’s necessary. it’s one of the most contested digital rights battles in europe right now.

minnesota’s “surveillance notice” - my personal favorite - minnesota just proposed that if a company sells your data or does targeted advertising, their privacy policy must legally be titled a “surveillance notice.” just… calling the thing what it is. love this.

the state privacy explosion - oklahoma just became the 20th us state to pass a comprehensive privacy law. there’s no federal privacy law yet, so every state is doing its own thing, which means companies are navigating 20 different sets of rules. new jersey is considering banning biometric surveillance systems in physical stores.

all of this is happening while 5,000 people gather in DC to talk about it. which, honestly, is kind of cool? like, love it or critique it, this is the room where a lot of these things get shaped.

so what do i actually think?

i think the professionalization of privacy is a double-edged thing.

on one hand - it’s genuinely good that there are tens of thousands of trained people whose job it is to protect your data. someone needs to understand GDPR. someone needs to tell companies “no, you can’t just do that.” the existence of an entire profession around privacy means it’s being taken seriously as a field, not just a checkbox.

on the other hand - when the biggest privacy event of the year has seven tiers of sponsorship and google on the board, it’s worth asking who the conversation is for. the people who need privacy most - activists in authoritarian countries, journalists, immigrants, your grandmother who doesn’t know her phone is tracking her - mostly aren’t in that room.

i don’t think that makes iapp bad. i think it makes the privacy landscape complicated. there’s the compliance world (iapp, certifications, conferences) and the advocacy world (eff, access now, the cypherpunk lineage) and they overlap but they’re not the same thing. one asks “are we following the rules?” the other asks “are the rules good enough?”

both matter. both are part of the story.

if this made you curious:

here’s a few rabbit holes if you want to go deeper

1. section 702 explainer - the eff (electronic frontier foundation) has a good breakdown of what’s at stake with the fisa renewal

2. chat control - patrick breyer (former eu mep) has been the loudest critic, his site tracks every development

3. state privacy laws - the iapp itself actually has the best tracker for which us states have passed what (credit where it’s due)

4. the fbi wiretap breach - cnn broke it, state of surveillance has the best ongoing coverage

5. web3privacy now - this is the community i worked with, focused on privacy in the decentralized space. we do things differently than iapp - less conferences with princes, more hackathons with hackers

privacy is one of those topics that sounds boring until you realize it’s about power. who has it, who doesn’t, and who’s deciding for you.

prince harry will give his talk on monday. 5,000 privacy professionals will collect their continuing education credits. and somewhere, the conversation about what privacy actually means - not as a profession but as a right - will keep going.

probably on signal. as it should.

it’s a prison design from 1785. one guard tower in the center, cells in a circle around it. the point is that the guard can see every cell but the prisoners can’t see the guard. so they never know if they’re being watched. which means they just… start acting like they’re always being watched.

that’s it. that’s the whole thing.

and every single privacy conference on earth will show you this diagram like it’s a revelation. audience nods. someone says “Foucault.” everyone feels smart. nothing changes.

because here’s what nobody says out loud:

we already live in the panopticon. and it’s nice in here.

it doesn’t feel like a prison. it feels like an app. it remembers your coffee order. it knows you like that one song. it auto-fills your address. it shows you the exact jacket you were talking about with your friend yesterday at lunch.

not texting about. talking about.

and you didn’t even flinch just now reading that. because you already knew.

that’s the thing. we all already know. we just keep using it anyway. not because we’re stupid. because the alternative is what? not having a phone?

let’s be honest about the deal we made.

you get: maps, music, friends, memes, food delivery, your entire social life, dating, banking, the ability to know anything instantly.

they get: everywhere you go, everything you search, everyone you talk to, how long you look at each post, what makes you stop scrolling, what you almost bought, what you did buy, what you whispered, what you typed and deleted.

and you agreed to this. technically. when you were 13 and clicked “I accept” on a terms of service document that was longer than The Great Gatsby.

that’s consent?

I think about this one thing a lot.

your phone knows when you’re sleeping. not because you told it. because it tracks when you stop moving. it knows your resting heart rate. it knows when you picked it up at 3am and googled something you’d never say out loud.

your phone knows you better than your therapist. and your therapist has a legal obligation to keep your secrets. your phone has a legal obligation to its shareholders.

sit with that for a second.

here’s where people usually say “well I have nothing to hide.”

and honestly? I get it. most of us aren’t doing anything illegal. most of us are just living. buying groceries. sending memes. being a little weird sometimes.

but “nothing to hide” is such a weird standard.

you have curtains on your windows. you close the bathroom door. you don’t hand your unlocked phone to strangers. not because you’re hiding something. because some things are just yours.

privacy isn’t about hiding. it’s about choosing who gets to see.

and here’s where it gets cultural.

because surveillance doesn’t just collect data. it changes behavior.

think about it. you’ve definitely done at least one of these:

- softened a text because you wondered if someone might screenshot it

- didn’t google something because you didn’t want it “on record”

- changed what you said because your phone was definitely listening

- curated your search history like it was a portfolio

- felt weird about a targeted ad that was too accurate

- said “haha I’m definitely on a list now” after googling something completely normal

we laugh about it. but that laughter is a coping mechanism. because the alternative is admitting that we’ve already internalized the guard tower.

we’re performing for an audience we can’t see.

sound familiar?

the panopticon wasn’t supposed to have a loyalty program.

bentham designed it as a prison. foucault wrote about it as a metaphor for social control. neither of them imagined a version where the prisoners would decorate their cells, rate the experience 5 stars, and invite their friends.

but that’s where we are.

and I think the reason we can’t seem to do anything about it isn’t that we don’t care. it’s that the conversation is happening in the wrong rooms.

privacy is discussed by lawyers, engineers, and policymakers. in whitepapers. in senate hearings where senators ask mark zuckerberg how facebook makes money. in conferences where everyone already agrees with each other.

meanwhile the actual experience of being surveilled, the vibe, the feeling, the way it shapes how you text and what you search and how you move through the world - that doesn’t get talked about at all.

that’s what panopticore is for.

because privacy isn’t a technology problem. it’s a culture problem.

it’s about how we perform for algorithms. how we’ve learned to think of ourselves as content. how “going dark” - just... logging off - feels almost radical now. how you can’t go to a concert without 500 phones blocking the view because we’ve been trained to believe that if you didn’t capture it, it didn’t happen.

surveillance changed how we see ourselves. and we need a language for that that isn’t a legal brief.

so what is this publication?

panopticore is a collection of notes about the aesthetics of being watched.

each issue will cover things like:

→ why targeted ads feel like someone reading your diary

→ people who successfully disappeared from the internet (and what it cost them)

→ the weird intimacy of your phone knowing your sleep schedule

→ why gen z is simultaneously the most surveilled and most privacy-aware generation ever

→ how encryption became an aesthetic before most people knew what it meant

→ what it means that “delete” never really means delete

it’s not a tech publication. it’s not a policy journal. it’s for anyone who’s ever felt that little shiver when an ad was too specific. that moment of wait… how did it know that?

that shiver is the thesis.

one more thing.

you showed up. that’s enough for me.

if you want more, subscribe. if you don’t, close the tab. either way, I’m not going to follow you around the internet about it.

that’s the whole point.