The nursing home analogy highlights an important aspect of the "present" of computers that goes under-reported: Nursing homes are filled with people that no lo

The nursing home analogy highlights an important aspect of the "present" of computers that goes under-reported: Nursing homes are filled with people that no longer contribute to the economy. Agency, privacy, control, exercising of options etc are the very heart of value creation and you simply don't have them when reduced to a transparent, monitored and mined entity. The value generated by the feudal landlord carers can hardly compensate for what is potentially gone missing. If that is so, why aren't "neighborhoods" already thriving economically and thus consigning nursing homes to the dustbin of history where they belong? The answer probably involves many factors besides systemic inertia (recall that feudalism thrived for many centuries). Two of them must be i) oligopolistic scorched earth practices and ii) the missing digital commons (A public good infrastructure that joins private neighborhoods into a functioning whole). While people like Zuboff and others have pointed out the insidious, corrosive nature of surveillance capitalism, the potential economic upside of alternative arrangements needs far more study.