In 2022, Strahinja Jovanović and his classmates were invited by Mladina magazine to contribute to Proglas, a section dedicated to exploring pressing social themes. The topic was privacy—specifically, digital privacy. In an age where every click, every scroll, every second spent online is tracked, monetized, and stored, the question becomes urgent: do we actually know how much data we give to the digital world?

The answer, Proglas suggests, is no. We accept cookies without reading, click “agree” without understanding, and scroll past privacy policies without a second thought. The data we surrender is abstract, invisible, easy to ignore—until it isn’t.

Strahinja’s response to this challenge was to make the invisible visible. He developed a powerful visual metaphor: what if the cookies that track us were literal cookies—but instead of chocolate chips, they contained tiny cameras? Stacked on a plate, these surveillance cookies accumulate with every website visited, every app opened, every permission granted. The stack grows, and with it, the unsettling realization of how much we are watched.

The imagery is deliberately unsettling. The cookies are rendered with photographic precision, their surfaces warm and inviting—until you notice the lenses embedded in them, each one a silent witness to your digital life. The stack becomes a monument to passive consent, a physical representation of data we never consciously chose to give.

The project asks us to reflect on what we accept without question. Why do we click “accept all” without reading? Why do we trade our privacy for convenience? What would it take for us to truly understand the scale of digital surveillance? Proglas does not offer easy answers, but it offers a provocation—a way of seeing that makes the abstract tangible.

For Strahinja, the project was an opportunity to explore the intersection of graphic design and social commentary. The imagery is clean, precise, almost minimalist, but its message is anything but simple. It draws on the visual language of advertising—the warm, appetizing presentation of a cookie—only to subvert it, revealing the surveillance beneath the surface.

Created for Mladina’s Proglas section, the work reaches an audience beyond the design community. It appears in a magazine read by people who may never think about digital privacy until they encounter this image. For some, it may be a wake-up call. For others, it may simply linger in the mind—a small seed of awareness planted.

Proglas is ultimately about visibility. It argues that we cannot protect what we do not see, cannot defend against what we do not recognize. By turning cookies into cameras, by stacking them into monuments of surveillance, the project gives form to the formless. It makes us look at what we have learned to ignore.

And maybe, just maybe, it makes us think twice before clicking “accept all” the next time.

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