Every Page Is a Choice

There is a scene in Idiocracy where a cabinet member's official title carries a fast-food sponsorship. He gets paid every time he works the brand into a sentence. In 2006 it played as absurd satire, a cheap-shot prediction of a dumbed-down future nobody actually expected to arrive.

Open most websites in 2026 and tell me how far off it was.

You go to read an article. A video you did not ask for starts playing in the corner. A newsletter popup slides over the text before you have finished the first sentence. A cookie banner. A second popup offering a discount if you hand over your email. An ad that reflows the page just as you find your place, so your eye lands on a different ad instead. A chat bubble blinks to life in the corner asking if you have questions. Somewhere under all of it, taking up maybe ten percent of the screen, is the thing you actually came for.

We have normalized this completely. We treat it as the cost of being online, the way you would treat weather. You want to read the thing, you accept the storm of interruption around the thing, because that is just how it is now.

But it is not weather. Weather is no one's fault. Every one of those interruptions is a choice somebody made. Someone decided that the popup should fire before you finished reading. Someone decided the video should autoplay. Someone decided the ad should reflow the page at the moment most likely to produce an accidental click. None of it is ambient or inevitable. All of it is a decision to treat your attention as inventory to be sold rather than as the reason you showed up.

Why it keeps getting worse

Here is the part that bothers me most, and it is the part that explains why the web keeps sliding further in this direction rather than correcting: the clutter often works.

The popup lifts the email capture rate. The autoplay video bumps the engagement metric that someone reports to someone else. The reflowing ad harvests the accidental click. Measured by the dashboard, the cluttered page outperforms the clean one. So the people optimizing for the dashboard keep adding interruption, because each individual addition shows up as a small green number, and the small green numbers are what get rewarded.

What the dashboard does not measure is the cost. It does not measure the reader who closed the tab in irritation and formed a quiet, permanent impression of the brand. It does not measure the trust that erodes a little each time a page treats a person like a resource to be extracted from. Those costs are real, but they are diffuse and delayed and hard to attribute, so they lose every argument against a number that goes up today. That is how you end up sliding toward the Idiocracy scene one defensible optimization at a time. No single decision looks crazy. The accumulation does.

The opposite principle

I built my own site on the opposite premise, and I want to state it plainly, because it is a deliberate choice rather than a matter of taste.

The content is the point of the page. Every element either serves the reader's understanding of that content or it does not belong. No autoplay. No popup flinging itself over the words. No chat bubble pretending to be helpful while actually interrupting. No treating the reason you came as an obstacle between you and an ad.

This is not minimalism for its own sake, and it is not a nostalgia for some cleaner early web. It is a position about respect. A page that buries its content under interruption is making a statement about who it serves. It serves the metric, the ad network, the engagement report, and it treats the reader as the product being delivered to those parties. A page that puts the content first and keeps the surroundings quiet is making the opposite statement: you came here for something, here it is, I am not going to spend your attention on things you did not ask for.

I am betting that the second statement is its own kind of marketing. That the people I want to work with notice when a page treats their attention as something to be earned rather than harvested, and that the noticing builds more trust than any popup ever captured. Maybe that bet costs me a few percentage points on some capture-rate metric. I am fine with that, because the metric was never the point.

What this is actually about

It would be easy to read all of this as a complaint about web design. It is not, or not only. The web is just the most visceral, most universally felt instance of a principle that runs through everything I do.

I build revenue systems for professional services firms. The single most common reason business development fails is the same disrespect for attention that makes a cluttered website repellent. The cold email blasted to a thousand people who never asked for it. The connection request immediately followed by a pitch. The follow-up sequence that is really just a machine for wearing someone down. All of it treats the other person's attention as inventory, something to be captured and converted, rather than as something to be earned through relevance and genuine usefulness. And all of it produces the same result as the cluttered page: a quiet, permanent decision to look away.

The work that actually builds a pipeline runs on the opposite principle. You earn attention by being worth the attention. You reach people through relationships and relevance rather than volume and interruption. You treat the person on the other end as the reason you are there, not as a resource to extract from. The discipline is identical whether you are building a web page or a sales process. The content is the point. Everything else either serves it or gets in the way.

That is why a clean page is not a small thing or a personal quirk. It is the same conviction that governs how I think a business should reach the people it wants to serve. The web doesn't have to be the thing it is becoming. Neither does business development. In both cases, every page is a choice.