We've all heard the adage "data is the new oil, and your attention is the currency" at least once over the past years.
Yet I think that many of us ignored the deep consequences of that statement.
Countries go at war for oil. They don't care about fairness, lawfulness, or even about their own reputation when they do so.
If they feel that they need more oil to run their economies, then they'll just go and grab it if they are in a position to do so.
Similarly, tech companies today are waging a war against those who own the data (you and everyone else with a connection to the Internet).
They don't care about fairness, lawfulness, or even about their own reputation when they do so.
They need your data to run a profit, and they'll just grab it, no matter the costs.
So you end up with the average headline on the #NewYorkTimes, from Chrome and without an ad-blocker or a filter on the VPN, which performs 422 network requests and transfers 49 MB of data: https://thatshubham.com/blog/news-audit
On #PCGamer, we're in the order of the 37 MB: https://stuartbreckenridge.net/2026-03-19-pc-gamer-recommends-rss-readers-in-a-37mb-article/
Jokes on how many times we could have gone to the moon and back with the same computing power required to read a book or game review online in 2026 are welcome.
On one hand, it's amazing that hardware and software have progressed so much over the last 30 years that all this bloat can be absorbed - sure, it still takes even a powerful smartphone ~30 seconds to fully process that many requests and that much JavaScript, but think of how long it would have taken you 15 years ago to fully download and watch a video of the same size in your browser.
On the other hand, it's awful that all the technological progress has been used to just cram more crap inside of your browser or device, so the end-user doesn't really see any benefits of it.
And why does a Web page supposed to render a simple static article have to make that many requests and share so much data in the first place, you may ask?
Sure, there may be some paywall code, some Cloudflare bot checks, some Google Analytics, some cookie check to verify your authentication state...but 400-500 requests? 50 MB of data?
Well, what happens in these cases (and it's becoming increasingly common nowadays) is what I would call a "client-side data auction".
The page that you render tries to fingerprint you and grab as much data as it can about you, and send over that data to as many partners as possible.
Those partners can respond by deciding whether to display an ad or not on the page you're rendering, and whether you fit a segment that is worth the cost of repeatedly bidding to show you a certain ad.
Then there's basically a little auction going on as JavaScript code in your browser, where partners gather your data, analyze it, categorize it, evaluate how much it fits the ads that they have in their portfolio, and if the estimated click-through rate for that kind of ad for the segment you likely fit in justifies the investment of the auction, and within 30-60 seconds of your device getting hot to run a dynamic auction just to read the review of a book you eventually get your page rendered on your screen - with 60% of the screen estate littered in ads or affiliate links, and after clicking through a bunch more paywalls, newsletter subscription requests or invites to subscribe to get the full content.
Data is the new oil, and these folks don't care of wreacking havoc on your digital space in order to have it.
Then no wonder if people invest their time to use uBlock Origin on a Firefox fork, set up Pihole or use VPNs with content blocking.
The shittier you make your product, the more people you'll get that can't tolerate the stink.
And the more people start evading your shit, the more your business model will break, the shittier you'll have to make your product in order to squeeze profit.
And then even more people won't be able to stand the shit.
It's never too late to break this feedback loop.
