The early days of the internet were exciting. It was decentralized, human-based, and largely free, and it was filled with people sharing ideas, communicating, and experimenting with new ways of connecting. It was also slow, awkward, and limited, which made it feel temporary and lightweight.
An element of that early excitement stayed with us for many years. People continued to experience the digital world as a neutral framework, something inert and supportive rather than active or consequential. The systems underneath felt like infrastructure, not like participants. What most people did not know was that those systems were developing rapidly during the same period.
As people moved through digital spaces, traces accumulated. Visits, choices, messages, and preferences didn't vanish after use. They persisted. Engineers and others working inside these systems could see patterns forming long before the people generating them understood what those patterns meant. At a certain point, information that had once seemed incidental began to be collected deliberately.
This shift didn't arrive with an announcement. Most people had little sense of what was happening beneath the surface, and even less understanding of how ordinary behavior could be gathered, combined, and later used. The mechanics were hidden, the implications unclear, and the scale difficult to imagine.
Over time, digital patterns became insights into people’s lives. What someone clicked on, searched for, lingered over, or avoided began to reveal preferences, habits, vulnerabilities, and tendencies. Those patterns were then used to predict behavior, influence decisions, and shape outcomes.
What began as observation gradually became application. Patterns turned into models, and models became tools for advertising, ranking, targeting, and surveillance. Consequences followed, even as the basic question of what it meant for people to exist inside these systems remained unanswered.
This work begins there.