Despite the fact that Tim Cook's attack on Facebook and its business model is really just another round in the ongoing fight between Apple and Facebook, he hits

Despite the fact that Tim Cook's attack on Facebook and its business model is really just another round in the ongoing fight between Apple and Facebook, he hits on an important point. Facebook, et al are engaged in an effort to co-opt the freedom and privacy of people the world over and make our entire lives data points to increase their profitability. By depriving us of privacy and choice around our information spheres, these practices derail and stultify our liberty and ability to knowledgeably practice self-determination. This has been done with the tacit support (with a few notable exceptions) of frightened government officials who don't want to be blamed for another 9/11-like occurrence. As Shoshanna Zhuboff put it in her recent OpEd Piece[0]: "The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages. The first is the appropriation of epistemic rights, which lays the foundation for all that follows. Surveillance capitalism originates in the discovery that companies can stake a claim to people’s lives as free raw material for the extraction of behavioral data, which they then declare their private property. The second stage is marked by a sharp rise in epistemic inequality, defined as the difference between what I can know and what can be known about me. The third stage, which we are living through now, introduces epistemic chaos caused by the profit-driven algorithmic amplification, dissemination and microtargeting of corrupt information, much of it produced by coordinated schemes of disinformation. Its effects are felt in the real world, where they splinter shared reality, poison social discourse, paralyze democratic politics and sometimes instigate violence and death. In the fourth stage, epistemic dominance is institutionalized, overriding democratic governance with computational governance by private surveillance capital. The machines know, and the systems decide, directed and sustained by the illegitimate authority and anti-democratic power of private surveillance capital. Each stage builds on the last." [0] https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-surveillance-society-technology.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opinion/sunday/facebook-s...