This is the part where we ask for something.

The Institute is fictional. The person who built it is not.

The Unfollowology Institute is satire. There is no institute, no faculty, no admissions office and no research budget. There is one person: Sean Lowery, who publishes as SAMX. He’s a veteran and a Gen X web builder in West Virginia’s Eastern Panhandle, and he has spent more than thirty years building websites and online communities, which is how he came to have opinions about all of this.

He also writes The Detention Slip, an email newsletter for Gen X. This site exists partly so you’ll read it. That’s the whole pitch.

What this site does not do

• Nothing here is locked behind an email address. Your results, certificates and downloads are yours either way.
• No pop-ups, countdown timers, fake scarcity, invented testimonials or “only 3 spots left.”
• The tools run entirely in your browser. Nothing you type into them is sent to us or stored by us. A few tools remember small things on your own device, like how many times you pressed the button you were asked not to press.
• No tracking cookies and no analytics. The pages don’t load anything from outside services; even the fonts are hosted here.
• If you subscribe, your email address goes to MailerLite, the service that sends the newsletter. It isn’t sold. Every issue has a one-click unsubscribe link, and it works.

The serious part, briefly

This site makes fun of people who sell certainty, urgency and secrets. It doesn’t make fun of learning. A good guide, course or template can save you weeks of digging, and time is the one thing nobody gets back. What deserves the eye-roll is the junk: products that repackage what a ten-minute search would tell you, then wrap it in a countdown timer. That’s why one of the instruments, Worth It, or Google It?, isn’t a joke at all.

Sean makes information products of his own, too. They’re held to the same test, and you’re welcome to run them through the evaluator. If one doesn’t pass, he’d like to know.

What you’ll get from The Detention Slip

An email from a person, not a funnel: things worth your time, people worth knowing about, and the occasional dry observation about the internet. If it stops being worth your time, unsubscribe. The Institute will consider that a successful outcome.

Why satire?

Because a lecture about attention would be one more thing demanding yours. If anything here made you laugh and then close a tab you didn’t need open, the Institute has done its job and would prefer you not mention it.

Have a question, a correction or a complaint for the Department of Unnecessary Correspondence? Reply to any issue of the newsletter, or reach Sean at samxers.com.