Spiders And Their Web
Digital online web — sticky, addictive, inescapable
Peace be upon you, fellow digital travellers.
Spiders are fascinating creatures. They are not insects but arachnids, distinguished by their eight legs, unlike insects, which have six.
Spiders are solitary by nature. While many insects form large colonies, most spider species are individualistic and often aggressive toward their own kind. Some even display cannibalistic tendencies—whether by devouring their offspring, being eaten by their young, or engaging in sibling cannibalism shortly after hatching.
Though rare, a few spider species exhibit social behaviours, forming colonies that cooperate in web-building and hunting. But for the most part, spiders walk alone.
One of the spider’s most distinctive traits is its ability to spin webs. These silk structures serve multiple purposes—shelter, reproduction, egg protection—but their primary function, the one we all recognise, is to ensnare their prey.
Orb-weaving spiders construct intricate, sticky webs strategically placed to catch flying insects. When a prey is trapped, vibrations ripple through the silk, signalling the spider to strike. It swiftly subdues its victim, injects digestive enzymes, and slowly liquefies the insides, sucking them dry and leaving behind only an empty husk.
Who else builds webs to ensnare prey and drain them until nothing is left?
Tech companies.
Mainly the ones that involve with entertainment and media — distribution and creation. They disguise their platform as something that ‘empower’ the masses. They say, now you can reach more people with your message, the content you created can impact more lives.
However, the number of impactful pieces of content or lives changed for the better isn’t what they’re tracking. They are looking at the amount of time their user are spending on their platform, and every tweak, every new feature they do is to increase this metric. The more time their user spend time on their platform, the more ads they can push to them.
Like spiders weaving their traps, tech companies create digital online webs. They even call it by that name, ‘web’ — the World Wide Web.
Like solitary spiders with cannibalistic instincts, tech giants devour their competitors—absorbing them or wiping them out.
Like spiders sensing vibrations in their web, the tech industry tracks every movement—cookies, analytics, behavioural profiling—all signalling the presence of a potential prey. They don’t call them ‘prey’, they call them ‘users’.
If you think about it, a spider’s web is, at its core, a net. And what does a net do? It catches things.
The tech industry doesn’t even try to hide it—they literally call it ‘the net.’ They claim it stands for ‘internet’ or ‘network,’ but we all know what it is really meant to do.
What are they trying to catch with this ‘net’? Not our physical bodies, they want to capture our attention.
What we pay attention to defines our reality, and algorithm-driven feeds are increasingly what we pay attention to these days. Those who control these algorithmic feeds control your reality, if that is the only thing you are paying attention to.
Spiders employ clever tactics to enhance their traps. Some webs exploit electrostatic attraction—positively charged flying insects are drawn into the web, increasing their chances of capture. Others use web decorations (stabilimenta) to attract prey.
Tech companies operate the same way. Their ‘webs’ are reinforced by aggressive advertising, designed constantly to pull your attention toward them. The industry calls it ‘advertising campaigns’. The word ‘campaigns’ is a military term. It involves strategic manoeuvres to capture valuable targets.
“There is a war going on. The battlefield is our minds, and the price is our soul.” — The artist formerly known as Prince.
In the advertising sense, an ‘advertising campaign’ is a carefully orchestrated operation—a series of coordinated efforts (ads, promotions, social media, etc.) designed to achieve a singular goal: ensnaring more prey that they called ‘users’. The larger their user base, the more they can extract.
And similar to the spiders that subdue and immobilise their prey and drain the life out until what's left is an empty shell; tech companies — typically those offering media platforms — will subdue users with endless feeds, draining their focus, their time, their sense of self, until what remains is a hollow shell, mindlessly consuming content.
They want you to have your head up in the clouds. They are not hiding this, they literally name it, ‘clouds’.
Some spiders go even further, using deceptive signals to lure prey—mimicking mating cues to entice victims into their trap. Tech companies do the same, unapologetically leveraging hyper-sexualised marketing and manipulative design to keep users hooked.
Unlike a lion that hunts actively, a spider builds its web and waits. Occasionally, they will fix or expend the web if needed.
Tech companies do the same. They build a platform once and let the ‘For You’ algorithms do the rest, feeding users a steady stream of content designed to keep them docile and ensnared.
The spider’s web, however, could only catch small insects like flies—creatures that flit from place to place, always seeking stimulation, always searching for food, breeding sites, or mates.
A fly has two large compound eyes, each made up of thousands of lenses, granting it an almost panoramic field of vision. Looking at everything, everywhere, all at once. Yet despite this, it cannot see the web until it’s too late.
Tech companies, like spiders, don’t ensnare everyone. They primarily trap those who go online aimlessly, seeking only fleeting stimulation—hedonistic distractions that keep them stuck in the web.
But if you go online with purpose—if you remain mindful of what you consume—you are not a fly.
You can see the web for what it truly is.
Don’t be a fly.
Stay glitch. Stay human,
Jibone.