You ask for a recipe, an article, the opening hours of a museum. Before the words arrive, your browser convenes a small financial market on your behalf.
Scripts call scripts. Ad exchanges receive a signal that someone with your approximate location, device, browsing history, inferred income, and vague susceptibility to running shoes has arrived. Companies you have never heard of compare notes. A few milliseconds later, an ad wins. Several trackers record that it happened. The page finally begins to load.
We still talk about “visiting a website,” as though the experience were roughly analogous to opening a book. But most sites are closer to walking onto a high-speed trading floor. Your presence is the asset. The content is what keeps you standing there long enough for the auction to complete.
The weirdest part is how normal this has become. A webpage weighing several megabytes, making requests to dozens of domains, burning battery and bandwidth, and quietly introducing you to an ecosystem of analytics vendors feels unremarkable. We call it the web.
It does not have to be this way. A webpage can still be a document: text, images, a few carefully chosen files, delivered directly from the person who made it to the person who asked for it.
That now feels almost radical.