Cory Doctorow

And I think we can all understand, like, intuitively why this is unfair and why as a nurse you might not want it, but also, like,

Do you really want your catheter inserted by someone who drove Uber till midnight the night before and skipped breakfast this morning so they could make rent?

This is the thing that makes everyone except one parochial interest worse off.

And this is not a free-floating economic proposition.

This is the result of specific policy choices taken in living memory by named individuals who were warned at the time that this would be the likely outcome and who did it anyway.

I think...

One way to frame this rather than around efficiency is around optimization.

And I think that we can understand that for a firm, the optimal arrangement is one in which they pay nothing for their inputs and charge everything for their outputs.

So optimization, things are optimal from the perspective of the firm when they can discover that.

who is most desperate and pay them as little as possible, or who is most desperate and charge them as much as possible.

But from the perspective of the users and the suppliers, things are optimal when you get paid as much as possible and are charged as little as possible.

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.