Cory Doctorow

And so much of kind of the specific neurological injury that arises from getting an economics degree is organized around never asking the question sort of optimal for whom.

I mentioned before that we don't have any privacy law in this country.

One of the things that a privacy law would let us do is to become unoptimizable.

All optimization starts with surveillance, whether it's

Things like TikTok trying to entice your kids to spending more time than they want to spend there, or whether that's advertisers finding ways to follow you around and hit you up with things that you're desperate for, or whether it's discrimination in hiring or in lending.

All of this stuff starts with an unregulated surveillance sector.

We have platforms that take our data and then sell it and use it and recycle it and become sort of the Lakota of information where they use the whole surveillance package.

And we do nothing to curb that behavior.

It is not an incredible imaginative lift to say that we might tell them to stop.

The category that this falls into, it's broadly called bossware.

And there's a whole lot of different versions of it.

Like if your firm buys Office 365, Microsoft will offer your boss

The ability to stack rank divisions within your firm by like how often they move the mouse and how many typos they make and how many words they type.

And then this is amazing.

They will tell you how you perform against similar firms in your sector, which is like the most amazing thing I can imagine.

That Microsoft is finding customers for a sales pitch that says, we will show you sensitive internal information about your competitors.

And apparently none of those people are like, wait, doesn't that mean you're going to show my competitors something?

sensitive commercial information about me.

So you have this on the kind of broad strokes level.

But I have this notion I call the shitty technology adoption curve.