I was reminded of David Graeber's description of banking bureaucracies, as I read this. At ground level, bank employees blame irrational form filling, small an

I was reminded of David Graeber's description of banking bureaucracies, as I read this. At ground level, bank employees blame irrational form filling, small and nonsensical process requirements on "regulation." In reality, they are implementing a bank "compliance" policy that is relates to regulation. That way, neither the regulator nor the bank is culpable... either for solving the problem or for consequences of the solution. Meanwhile, the banks themselves probably lobbied for the regulation specifics, and almost certainly wrote large parts of it themselves. It's cozy. At Google-scale, there is no dividing line between between private & government bureaucracies. They're merged in a way that evolves to deflect criticism & responsibility from both. The scariest line, to me, was this: "These companies have access to a tremendously invasive amount of data about people’s lives. And still they don’t have the context of what people’s lives actually are." Well... "luckily" Google & such are getting better all the time at "context." The response to such issues is usually to deepen the bureaucracies, not to pull back.