Everything you do without thinking was taught to you on purpose
This site collects forty ordinary internet habits. Every one of them is correct behaviour on the sites you use all day. Every one of them does something different when you carry it onto a market that runs over Tor, and almost nobody notices the moment it happens.
Open every habitRead how a page works
You are not being careless. You are doing what twenty years of good software design trained you to do. Fields fill themselves in. Tabs come back. Photos back themselves up. Somebody remembers your password so that you do not have to. Every one of those behaviours was built by people who wanted your day to go better, and on an ordinary website every one of them still does.
A habit is not a decision. That is the whole point of one. By the time you have decided anything, the password manager has already offered, the screenshot is already in the gallery, and the note you sent yourself is already sitting on a server with your name attached to it. The gap between the reflex and the thought is where this site lives.
None of these are mistakes. They are mistakes here, and only here, and that is a much stranger thing to get used to.
So the pages are not filed by how bad something is. They are filed by where you learned it, because that is the only thing that predicts when it will fire. A habit learned in a browser fires in a browser. A habit learned from paying for things fires when money is involved. If you know which room of your life a reflex came out of, you know roughly when to expect it, and expecting it is most of the work.
Where the habits come from
Seven origins. Each one is a place that taught you something reasonable. Each group opens with an essay about what that place trained into you and why the training was good.
The browser · 7 habits
Habits the browser taught you
Seven conveniences the browser offers by default, why every one of them is good design, and what each of them does here.
Open this groupThe phone · 7 habits
Habits the phone taught you
The phone is the most personal computer most people own and the one with the fewest walls inside it.
Open this groupSigning in · 6 habits
Habits from signing in to things
Signing up is a form nobody reads, because everywhere else every field on it has a way back behind it.
Open this groupPaying · 5 habits
Habits from paying for things
Receipts, references, refunds and a number to call. Five habits learned from paying, and what is left of them here.
Open this groupOther people · 5 habits
Habits from talking to people
Chat, forums and review forms taught everyone to ask, paste and be specific. That training is the part that leaks here.
Open this groupThe work machine · 5 habits
Habits from the machine you work on
The best machine in the house and the most reliable network on offer usually belong to somebody who is not in the room.
Open this groupThe room · 5 habits
Habits from the room around you
The habits in this section have nothing to do with software. They come from the furniture, the people and the bin.
Open this groupHow to read this site
There is no order you have to follow, but this is the one the pages were written in.
- 1Start with the group you spend the most time in
If you live in a browser, start at the browser. If you do everything on a phone, start at the phone. The habits you have most of are the ones from the place you spend most of your hours.
- 2Read the two panels at the top of a page first
Every habit page opens with the same pair: what the habit does on a normal site, and what the same habit does here. If those two panels look identical to you, the page is not for you and you can skip it.
- 3Take the "what to do instead" list literally
It is written as steps rather than principles because principles do not fire fast enough to beat a reflex. A reflex is beaten by an arrangement you made in advance.
- 4Come back to the last section a week later
Every page ends with a way of catching the habit after the fact, and those checks are collected in one place on the check afterwards. Nobody retrains a reflex on the first reading.
What is on a habit page
Every one of the forty pages has the same six parts, in the same order, so that you can read the part you came for and leave. That shape is described in full on how a page works.
- The habit
- One sentence naming it plainly, with no hedging and no build up.
- Why it is automatic
- Where you learned it and why it is the right thing to do in the place you learned it. This part is not an apology, it is the argument.
- What it actually does here
- The mechanism. What file gets written, what request gets made, what ends up somewhere you did not intend. Concrete, not ominous.
- What to do instead
- Something specific enough to act on this evening, not a principle to carry around.
- How to notice you did it anyway
- You will do it anyway. This is where to look afterwards to find out that you did.
- Where the page stops
- One line on what the page is not claiming, because a page that claims everything is worth nothing.
What this site is not
It is not Mars Market and it has nothing to do with whoever runs Mars Market. It cannot sign you in, find an order, argue a dispute or pass a message to anybody. If something has gone wrong for you, no page here can undo it, and any page anywhere that says it can is worth being suspicious of.
It does not tell you whether any of the three addresses at the top of this page is working. Nothing on this site ever opens one. That is a deliberate limit rather than a gap: a clearnet page that claims to know what a hidden service is doing this minute is describing something it is not in a position to know. What the site does with those addresses is explained on the addresses page.
It does not tell anybody to use a market, and it takes no view on that at all. It contains no advice about goods, no advice about vendors and no instructions for doing anything illegal. It is a site about reflexes, and the reflexes on it are the same ones that leak on a bank site, a medical portal and a job application.
Questions about the site itself
Is this a guide to using Mars Market?
No. There is no walkthrough here, nothing about signing up, nothing about ordering and nothing about goods. It is about habits people already have, most of which they use on a hundred ordinary websites a week.
Why file habits by where they came from instead of by how risky they are?
Because risk ratings do not help you catch a reflex, and origin does. A ranked list tells you what to worry about. A list sorted by origin tells you when to expect the thing to fire, which is the only moment you can do anything about it.
Do I need to break all forty?
No, and trying to would be a good way to break none of them. Most people find three or four on this site that they actually do, and those are the only ones worth the effort. The full list is there so you can find yours quickly.
Is any of this specific to Mars Market?
Very little of it. The mechanisms are the same on any site reached over Tor, and several of them behave the same way on an ordinary website you would rather not have in your history. Mars Market is the case the site is written around because that is what people arrive here looking for.
Does the site track me or ask me for anything?
No. There is no account, no form, no newsletter, no comment box, no cookie banner and nothing to click accept on. There is also nothing for sale, no advertising and no arrangement with anybody.