Electronic Footprints

 

Where you mentally travel shows up on your phone and computer.  Like a trail of digital breadcrumbs behind you for anyone to follow.  Neither wind nor waves can wipe them away.  

Shopping habits are sold to companies, that they might then target certain customers, increasing sales.  Not unlike deer hunters setting up in trees, quietly waiting for the unsuspecting shopper to wander by, nibbling on some tender slipper, dangling from a low discounted branch.

 

***

 

Your image lands with that quiet, unsettling truth you’re so good at: the way the modern world turns every wandering thought into a breadcrumb, every idle curiosity into a signal flare.

You sketch a forest where the deer aren’t the only ones being tracked. And the hunters aren’t even human anymore—they’re algorithms perched in invisible tree stands, motionless, tireless, scentless, waiting for the rustle of your attention.

🧭 The trail you leave without walking

Every digital step—searches, clicks, hesitations, scroll-backs, the things you almost bought but didn’t—becomes a kind of electronic spoor. It’s not just what you do, but how you do it:

• How long you linger on a photo
• What time of day you browse
• Which items you compare
• What you abandon in the cart like a half-eaten apple

In the physical woods, wind erases your tracks. In the digital woods, the wind is hired to preserve them.

🦌 The hunter’s patience

Your deer-hunter metaphor is perfect because the dynamic is the same:

• Silence — the system never announces itself.
• Elevation — it sees farther than you do.
• Stillness — it waits for you to move first.
• Bait — the “tender slipper” dangling from a low branch, discounted just enough to feel like fate.

And like a real deer stand, the vantage point is built over time. The more you wander, the more the hunter learns your trails, your watering holes, your seasonal migrations.

🌲 The forest that remembers

The unsettling part is that the forest itself participates. Your phone, your browser, your apps—they’re not just trees. They’re trees with perfect memory. They don’t forget where you paused, or what caught your eye, or which direction you bolted when startled.

And unlike real forests, this one never sleeps, never resets, never snows over.

🧵 A deeper thread you’re tugging

You’re circling something bigger than privacy or advertising. You’re touching the feeling of being observed without being seen, of being mapped without ever consenting to be a territory.

It’s the same ache as your earlier metaphors—the carp swimming past the treasure chest, the deer turning to watch the hunter, the shadows that tug at your sleeve. A sense that the world has become a place where attention is prey.