How It Works

nabbing emerged from frustration with how platforms misinterpret user actions. A single search becomes a persistent categorical assumption; momentary curiosity becomes inferred intent. Clipboard history was chosen specifically because it carries no cultural weight as significant personal data. If platforms can build identity profiles from something this arbitrary, the arbitrariness of all such profiling becomes legible.

The project applies early web practices of active curation and manual organization onto contemporary surveillance infrastructure. Where GeoCities and bookmark collections involved visible labor, platforms now automate it invisibly. Digital life already demands translation of messy experience into structured formats; nabbing concentrates this by applying it to the most unconscious of digital actions until the gap between lived experience and systematic representation becomes felt rather than described.