chronosensitivity

The coolest thing out there right now is just still having empathy and values. Red pilling, vice signaling, OUT. Caring, believing, IN.

Let me explain exactly why your phone seems to read your thoughts, because the real answer is more invasive than telepathy. Every time you open a website or app, a real-time bidding auction fires in under 100 milliseconds. Your GPS coordinates, browsing history, device fingerprint, age, gender, income bracket, and hundreds of inferred interest categories get packaged into a “bid request” and broadcast to hundreds of companies simultaneously. One company wins the ad slot. All of them keep the data. This happens thousands of times per day per person. A 2018 New York Times investigation found 75 companies pulling precise location data from apps, with some users tracked up to 14,000 times in 24 hours. In 2012, a Target statistician identified 25 products that, purchased in combination, could predict a customer was pregnant and estimate her due date. A teenager’s father discovered she was pregnant because Target sent baby coupons to the house before she told anyone. That was one retailer. Store receipts only. Fourteen years ago. Now scale that. Your phone pings GPS while you sleep. Data brokers link your phone, laptop, and tablet through probabilistic matching of IP addresses, WiFi networks, and behavioral patterns without you ever logging in. The FTC caught two brokers in 2024 categorizing people by visits to reproductive health clinics, political protests, and religious services, then selling those profiles to law enforcement. The algorithm doesn’t hear your thoughts. It compares your behavioral fingerprint against millions of similar profiles and predicts your next interest before you’re consciously aware of it. It makes hundreds of predictions per day. You ignore the misses. The five hits feel like telepathy. You paid for the phone. You pay for the data plan. You generate the signal. And every time a page loads, your identity gets auctioned to the highest bidder before the content even renders. They called it “personalized advertising” because “real-time mass surveillance funded by the people being surveilled” doesn’t fit on a consent banner.

Yes, and that shift away from teen culture wasn’t accidental. Streaming and social media collapsed everything into the same space. Teens and adults are now consuming the same content on the same platforms, driven by the same algorithms. And those algorithms are not built for niche audiences, they are built for scale, retention, and ad revenue. So instead of developing teen-specific stars, as we saw in the 90s and early 2000s, when MTV actively segmented youth audiences through shows like TRL, and the heavy rotation of teen pop, creating space for teen culture to develop separately from adults, the industry now pushes whatever can perform across all age groups. That is why “teen music” faded and “viral music” replaced it. That is also why it feels like teen culture disappeared. It didn’t disappear. It just lost its boundaries. Teen culture no longer develops on its own. It gets absorbed into the mainstream in real time.

this week's column is for all my taste bros out there