I had a very interesting experience yesterday. Falling completely off my year-long diet, I decided I wanted a pizza at all costs. So I went to a pizza store. As

I had a very interesting experience yesterday. Falling completely off my year-long diet, I decided I wanted a pizza at all costs. So I went to a pizza store. As it turns out, this was a store I had managed 30 years ago, and I haven't been inside one of these stores since, so it made for a nice moment of comparison. People are the same, the business is the same. What have computers brought? It used to be, when you talked about computers, you talked about data, although at the time we confused behavior and data. Here's my computer. It has my pictures. I write programs on it. There is a thing. I posses this thing. It holds other things I posses that I can do neat stuff with. But a weird thing happened. The arcade had sex with the IBM PC. That is, computers stopped being about "things I own that I can do things with" and became almost exclusively about the experience, the game. Having a good time. If you'd asked me in 89 what the store would evolve into in 30 years, I'd probably say something about robots. Paper free, human free. Maybe humans out front to talk to people with robots working behind the scenes. Instead, the computers controlled the workers. They took orders, they printed tickets to be stuck on boxes, they provided instructions, they tracked how much time the worker took for various things, they provided a cool interface for people to both order and see how their order was being processed. Who owned what that did what? Nobody cared. If you have an enjoyable, perhaps addictive experience doing X, and it's free, who cares about ownership or data? We never thought behavior/experience and ownership would be separate, so we reason poorly about it. On the old net, I would visit sites lovingly-crafted by their owners, with everything their owners enjoyed. We shared the experience of their creation, both creator and consumer. If there was a problem, I'd email. Your site doesn't work. You own it. Fix it. The new net is full of companies providing unique and fun experiences that people like, collecting data on their fellow humans like their lab rats with the exit strategy of being bought out by even larger companies with even more data. We create things we do not own. Instead we're like prostitutes in a red light district that are forced to dance in glass windows. We are displayed. Our existence and the things we create is owned by others. They choose to show the parts of us as they will. Your data isn't important. My experience online using some app is important. Everything else is subservient to that. The old web is gone because it either died or was eaten by companies who understand the new selection criteria. Anonymity is gone. Privacy is gone. Ownership is gone. We are left with just a collective experience which we will optimize for at all costs.