First of all, I commend the author for publicly acknowledging their mistakes here. Though I admit I still struggle to understand the mindset that allowed the au

First of all, I commend the author for publicly acknowledging their mistakes here. Though I admit I still struggle to understand the mindset that allowed the author to make those wrong-headed conclusions on this topic in the first place. The best I can figure is that this person bought into the great neoliberal lie of our time - the claim that most corporations will value long-term societal stability and well-being over short-term profits + market capture opportunities. When the author writes the following, I wonder if he is still struggling today to make that connection: > The building of tools to aggregate private information in order to ostensibly improve user experience has in fact, at scale, caused strange and negative things to happen. Some of these things are threatening totally unrelated social constructs like democracy, addiction, and human decency. Those constructs are absolutely all related private information in a predictable way. They're related by the fact that the disruption of those fields can be very profitable. Disrupting democracies at scale is profitable to governments. Addiction has been profitable for all of human history. Training people to believe that human decency can be something expressed through which brands of products they buy or do not buy is incredibly profitable for certain brands that sell a certain "ethos", while simultaneously convincing buyers that any other sort of direct action (protests, legislation) are not necessary because the market can make meaningful change if people would only choose to buy from more ethical companies. The problems we're currently facing as a society, due to the the motivations of powerful corporations being misaligned with the best interests of the general public is not unique to tech either. It's long past time to acknowledge that these outcomes are neither strange nor unpredictable.