Alphabet, the owner of Google, has developed numerous tools to complement the famous search engine. Their use seems instructive and painless. Yet it leads to a loss of our free will and renders us transparent to an industry that derives ninety percent of its profits from the sale of our tastes, our curiosity, our culture. Other companies, like Facebook, do the same, and sell us in packages to politicians eager to capture our votes. This abject trade is fueling a society of total surveillance and flirts with totalitarianism. Yet, nothing is irreversible: we can pass laws that will prohibit this sale-monitoring of our selves. We can take advantage of digital technology and still avoid these multinationals: many more free and non-intrusive solutions exist. Moreover, these advertising companies are not so modern—they only appropriate a technology we know well: writing. By re-appropriating the methods deployed over centuries in academia and in the learned world in general to rationally master this tool, we can redraw the world according to altruistic and democratic values.