"If you are not paying for it, you're not the customer; you're the product being sold." Andrew Lewis commented in 2010 on the topic of the social news site Digg. He was piggybacking on a 1973 quote by Richard Serra: "Television delivers people to an advertiser. You are the product of t.v. It is the consumer who is consumed."
When we navigate the modern internet, we traverse a multitude of various free products. Google Search, Instagram, TikTok, Pinterest, and even some AI chatbots. To many of us, we go to these platforms with one intention in mind (I'm going to check my Instagram DMs to see the memes my friends sent). Subsequently, we often find ourselves not sticking with our original intention, our original desired estimate of how much time we would spend there. We find ourselves spending way too much time, or off our path.
Often onto paths we are trying to avoid. Places that we know are not good for us, yet without even really knowing how we got here, we find ourselves here again.
It's not really a sign of any kind of personal defect. All of the platforms we navigate each day for free are working hard every day to pass us around and squeeze money and attention out of us. We are the products, and the ad companies and affiliates are the consumers. They consume our attention and purchase a chance to pitch us their product. The search engines and social media sites are a marketplace where the product companies go shopping for us.
These search engine and social media companies are worth billions of dollars, and most of their revenue comes from advertising. In 2025, Meta earned $200 billion, 97% of that via advertising. Only 3% through other avenues, such as WhatsApp business fees, Meta Verified subscriptions, ad-free EU subscriptions, etc. Some of the best minds of our time and the most powerful corporations are trying, every day, to derail you off your intended use of their product, onto theirs.
As the old saying goes, "sometimes you have to fight fire with fire." Here at StarBlocker, we believe it is time for a new kind of blocker/internet-filter/time-limit software. One that is "intention-based" rather than big whitelists or blacklists of websites, keywords, and mobile applications. One that helps you avoid certain avenues, or helps you stick to yours.
StarBlocker scans your computer visually every few seconds and uses our AI reasoning to determine if you are going down a path from your blocklist (ie: sports betting, online shopping, social media, adult content). You are in charge of what concepts and intentions you want to avoid. If new websites pop up online, our system will already include them, because it's about visual analysis and reasoning, not a list of websites to block. It will softly bring you back to your intention with increasing forced tech breaks.
If you have a specific goal in mind for why you are opening your laptop, you can use StarBlocker's Missions feature. Missions allows StarBlocker to help you stay on a single intention. If your goal is "for 2 hours I will write my book in Typora, and I will be googling 1800s history on Google and Wikipedia as well for the book," StarBlocker will gently guide you back if you stray from that. If you flip to Instagram, your screen will be covered with a soothing blue gradient and a timer for 30 seconds. Do it again within a half hour? 60 seconds, and so on.
StarBlocker catches you early in your path of digression. No more finding yourself down a rabbit hole hours later, wondering what happened. Sign up today for a 14-day free trial.