Sounds like we are thinking along very similar lines. Which leads me to wonder: have you by any chance read Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow? I read it a year or

Sounds like we are thinking along very similar lines. Which leads me to wonder: have you by any chance read Attack Surface by Cory Doctorow? I read it a year or so ago, and my takeaway from it was that he is advocating a mindset of something like "Don't try to use technology to 'beat' the powerful players (corporations, governments, whatever) as they can always out-tech you. Rather, use tech to foster/facilitate policy change in beneficial ways." That's a rough paraphrase from memory, but I think it gets a chunk of the gist of what he was saying. And to the extent that it does, I think he has a point. I think a lot of us techie types, especially the ones who did grow up on a healthy dose of cyberpunk and other sci-fi (and who didn't?) envision an ability to "win" in a contest between nation-state governments and/or powerful multi-national corporations. And in hindsight, maybe that is exactly our fatal conceit, and a view we need to shed.