andthen.one is a home for essays about the modern internet: how platforms shape behaviour, how advertising quietly funds everything, and how technology companies build systems that influence far more of daily life than they publicly admit.

Some pieces grow out of reporting. Others come from the slower process of noticing patterns that the news cycle rarely has the patience for.

I’m Shantanu David, a journalist based in India.

I started out writing about food and other features fodder for publications such as The Indian Express, CNN-News18, The Morning Standard, and Times Crest, back when it still existed in glossy print and the internet had not yet reorganised itself around infinite scroll.

Over time the stories shifted, and interests expanded. The platforms behind the media ecosystem started becoming as interesting as the content flowing through them.

Today my reporting focuses on technology, media markets, Artificial Intelligence, marketing and advertising and the economic incentives shaping the internet. This work has appeared in publications including exchange4media and The Current.

This site exists because not every idea fits neatly into a newsroom story format, and because the internet occasionally benefits from someone asking slightly inconvenient questions about how it actually works.

New essays appear as the ideas assemble themselves.

I’m available (for professional purposes only) at shantanudavid.writer@gmail.com