Cory Doctorow

And at one point, Amazon was docking drivers for driving with their mouth open because that might lead to distraction while driving.

And so, as you say, it kind of denudes you of all dignity.

It really is very grim.

And, you know, Tim and I used to ride the Toronto Transit Commission buses to school in the morning when we were going to elementary school.

And we loved the drivers who would sing and tell jokes and remember you.

This is the thing that makes...

working in the world, being in the world, great.

It's having a human relationship with other humans, not having standardized labor units that have been automated and standardized to the point where they can be swapped out.

You know, if you give a cashier a cash register instead of making them add up things on the paper, you could give them the surplus to talk with the customers and have a human relationship with them.

Or you could speed them up

so that you fire nine-tenths of the cashiers, and you take the remainder, and you make them work at such an accelerated pace that they can't even make eye contact.

So look, I love you both, but I think you're dead wrong about the GDPR, just as a factual matter about where it comes from, what it permits, what it prohibits, and why it failed, because I agree it failed.

So you may ask yourself, how is it that GDPR compliance consists of a bunch of cookie compliance dialogues?

And the answer to that is that European federalism allows tax havens to function within the federation.

One of the most notorious of those is Ireland, and almost every American tech company except for Amazon pretends that it's Irish so that its profits can float in a state of untaxable grace in the Irish Sea.

And because of the nature of the GDPR, enforcement for these bullshit cookie pop-ups, which are the progeny of the big American tech companies, starts in Dublin with the Irish data commissioner, who to a first approximation does nothing.

So that's only because the companies went to Ireland, broke the law, and said, we're not breaking the law.

And if you disagree, you have to ask the Irish data commissioner to enforce against us.

But a few people, Johnny Ryan with the Irish Civil Liberties Association, Max Schrems with NOYB, this none of your business, this nonprofit, European nonprofit, they dragged some of those cases to Germany.

More importantly, they've got the European Commission to start modifying the way the law works.