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This Is Your Brain on the Modern Internet: A Jumble of Corporate Garbage
Someone just handed me a stack of papers—digitally, of course—that is supposed to represent a coherent thought. It’s a Frankenstein's monster of text: a cookie policy from NBCUniversal, a stock market preview for United Airlines, and a captcha challenge asking me if I'm a robot. And I think, somewhere in this unholy trinity of corporate sludge, lies the perfect, soul-crushing snapshot of what it feels like to be alive online in 2025.
This isn't an accident. This is the whole damn system, printed out. It’s a user agreement, a balance sheet, and a loyalty test all rolled into one. A machine built by lawyers and MBAs that first tells you how it will dissect you, then tells you how much the pieces are worth, and finally has the gall to ask you to prove you’re even human.
Give me a break.
Welcome to the User Agreement for Your Life
Let's start with the cookie policy. It’s a masterpiece of weaponized boredom, a legal document so dense and jargon-filled it’s clearly designed to be ignored. "HTTP cookies, HTML5 and Flash local storage/flash cookies, web beacons/GIFs, embedded scripts, ETags/cache browsers, and software development kits." It’s a string of words that means absolutely nothing to a normal person, and that’s the entire point.
This is a magic trick. They're telling you exactly how they're going to saw you in half, but they're doing it in a dead language nobody speaks. It’s like a car salesman handing you a 40-page contract in Latin and saying, “It’s all in there, champ, just sign on the dotted line.” You’re not meant to understand it. You’re meant to feel overwhelmed, to sigh, and to click “Agree” just to make the damn pop-up go away.
They list out the different flavors of surveillance: "Strictly Necessary Cookies," "Personalization Cookies," "Ad Selection and Delivery Cookies." It all sounds so helpful, so bespoke. But let's translate. "Personalization" means they’ve learned you’re up at 3 a.m. looking at cat videos and have correctly diagnosed your crushing loneliness. "Ad Selection" means they’re going to use that diagnosis to sell you a weighted blanket and a subscription to a therapy app. This isn't a service. No, 'service' isn't the right word—this is a digital autopsy performed on a living subject.
Does a single, flesh-and-blood human being at NBCUniversal actually expect anyone to read this document? Or is the entire exercise a quiet power play, a way to make us complicit in our own commodification before we even get to watch the show?
Now, Let's Talk About Your Soul's Market Cap
Then we get an analysis asking How Will United Airlines Stock React To Its Upcoming Earnings?. And if the cookie policy was the legal fine print, this is the cold, hard accounting of it all. The language shifts from legalese to the sterile dialect of Wall Street, a place where human experiences like travel, vacation, or seeing family are rendered down into bloodless metrics.
"Consensus estimates anticipate United Airlines to report earnings of $2.67 per share on revenue of $15.29 billion."
I read that and my brain just glazes over. It's abstract, meaningless. I flew United last year, crammed into a middle seat next to a guy who smelled like cheese, and the flight was delayed three hours because of a "maintenance issue." That was a real experience. Annoying, uncomfortable, but human. But here, that entire mess of logistics and human frustration is just a tiny variable in an equation that spits out "$2.67 per share." My misery, your vacation, that couple’s honeymoon—it all gets fed into the machine.
The document talks about "event-driven traders" and the "historical odds of positive post-earnings return." Who are these ghouls? Do they sit in dark rooms, cheering when a stock drops -4.0% because they bet on it? It’s a casino where the chips are pieces of real-world companies that are supposed to, you know, do things. They expect us to believe this is a healthy way to run an economy, and honestly...
This ain't progress. This is taking the most incredible invention in human history—flight—and reducing it to a ticker symbol for dudes named Chad to gamble on. And offcourse, if you don't like the volatility of a single stock, they're happy to sell you on a "High Quality Portfolio" or a "Trefis Reinforced Value Portfolio." Just another product, another way to abstract your money even further from reality.
And Then They Ask If *You're* the Robot
So here we are. You’ve waded through the cookie policy that treats you like a bundle of data to be parsed and sold. You've skimmed the earnings report that sees you as a statistical contributor to a quarterly profit margin. You have been measured, analyzed, tracked, and monetized. You have been systematically dehumanized by the very architecture of the digital world. And after all that, after being processed like a piece of raw material in a corporate factory, a little box pops up on your screen. It shows you a picture of a blurry stop sign and asks with zero irony: "Are you a robot?"
It’s the most profound, insulting, and darkly hilarious question the modern internet could possibly ask. The machines they built to watch us, to predict our behavior, to turn our desires into profit—those very machines are now demanding that we prove our own humanity to them. It's the ultimate gaslight. We’re not the robots here. We’re just living in their world.