You’re being tracked, blocked, and sold a fantasy. Welcome to the internet in 2025.
I just spent ten minutes of my life reading a "Cookie Notice" from NBCUniversal, and I feel like I need a shower. It’s a masterpiece of corporate doublespeak, a document so dense with friendly-sounding bullshit that it could fertilize a whole field of lies. They talk about "Personalization Cookies" and "Content Selection" like they're doing you a favor, like some digital butler is carefully curating your experience out of the goodness of its heart.
Let's be real. It's surveillance.
They call them "Strictly Necessary Cookies." Necessary for who, exactly? Not for me. They’re necessary for their system to function, a system designed from the ground up to scrape every last crumb of data from your digital life. You get to watch a video of a cat falling off a couch, and in exchange, they get to build a psychological profile on you so detailed it would make the Stasi blush. What a bargain.
And what happens when these faceless "third parties" they mention get ahold of your data? The notice just says they collect it "pursuant to their own privacy policies." That’s a digital shrug. It's the equivalent of handing your house keys to a stranger and being told, "Don't worry, he has his own policy about not robbing people." It's an abdication of responsibility so complete it’s almost impressive.
The Digital Velvet Rope
And the best part? The absolute kicker? Try to protect yourself from this surveillance nightmare with, say, an ad blocker or by disabling scripts, and you get slapped with a digital restraining order. "Access to this page has been denied."
You’re a bad user! You're a bot! You're not playing the game right! The rules, offcourse, being that you must stand there and let them rifle through your pockets. Your browser "does not support cookies," it scolds, as if your browser has a moral failing. The hypocrisy is staggering. They demand you enable the very tools of your own tracking to gain access to the content they want to serve you ads on.
It’s like a nightclub with a mandatory strip search at the door. You want in? We need to see everything. Don't like it? The street's that way, pal.
This is the bargain we’ve all been forced into. We don't pay with money anymore; we pay with privacy. And if you won't pay up, you're not a customer—you're a problem to be blocked. I run a half-dozen extensions to keep this junk at bay, and half the time the modern web is a broken mess for me. And you know what? It’s probably for the best. At least I know the silence is real.
And Now for the Main Event: The Hype Machine
Which brings me to the grand casino floor of this digital circus: the stock market. Because if you think the cookie notice was a work of fiction, wait until you see the stories they tell on Wall Street.
Take a company called USA Rare Earth. A week ago, you’d never heard of it. Now, it's one of the Stocks making the biggest moves premarket: GameStop, USA Rare Earth, Applied Materials, Zillow and more. Why? Because its CEO, Barbara Humpton, whispered the magic words into a CNBC microphone: she’s in "close communication" with the White House.
A company with zero revenue—let me repeat that, zero—is suddenly worth $3 billion because of a vibe. A rumor. A carefully crafted piece of PR.
"Close communication" could mean anything from daily briefings in the Oval Office to her intern getting a canned email response from a White House server. It doesn't matter. The story is what's for sale. The story is that the government, in its infinite wisdom, is going to anoint this revenue-less company as the savior of the American rare earth supply chain and shower it with cash, just like it did with MP Materials.
So people are piling in, desperate not to miss the rocket ship. This is a bad idea. No, 'bad' doesn't cover it—this is a five-alarm dumpster fire of speculative mania. It’s not investing; it’s buying a lottery ticket based on a press release. The whole thing is a narrative machine, churning out hope and greed in equal measure, and it's built on the same foundation as that cookie notice—a promise that sounds great until you read the fine print.
And the fine print here is that USA Rare Earth makes no money. It has a plan to build a facility, but plans don't pay the bills. The stock isn't trading on reality; it's trading on a fantasy. A fantasy that you, the little guy, can get in on the ground floor of a government-backed gold rush. But what really happens when the hype dies down and the company still has to, you know, actually build a profitable business? Then again, maybe I'm the crazy one here. Maybe stories are all that matter now.
The whole system, from the trackers in your browser to the tickers on Wall Street, feels like one giant, elaborate magic trick. We’re so focused on the puff of smoke—the "personalized" article, the soaring stock price—that we don't see the trapdoor we're all standing on. They want you to believe in the narrative, the potential, the story... and honestly, most people will.
It's All Just Code and Mirrors
Let's not kid ourselves. The invisible trackers monitoring your clicks, the digital walls that block you for wanting privacy, and the speculative fever dream propping up a company with no sales—they're all the same thing. They're illusions. They are carefully constructed narratives designed to make you accept, to make you comply, and to make you buy in. One takes your data, the other takes your money. The end result for you is the same. You're the product, the mark, and the exit liquidity. And we just keep clicking "Accept."
Tags: usar stock
