People overestimate the power of digital surveillance enormously. You'd think that's not a problem, but at the same time, most people underestimate more banal sources of repression.

You don't have to buy mouse click data on every John Smith when you've handed the handful of media empires to your buddies, reporters are jailed, dissidents are killed and CEOs willingly bend the knee to make a quick buck.

The most precious we normal people have are our attention and the most value is attached to our wallets. Guess what, we part with both when we willingly watch ads.

You don't need an LLM writing 600 lines of SQL, because Google already has a billion lines of code in production, serving ads. Stealing your attention when you should be meeting friends, or meeting a family member's gaze.