The general trend that I see is that institutions [0] will always favor centralization of telemetry and control (eg the concept of legibility). You don't even n

The general trend that I see is that institutions [0] will always favor centralization of telemetry and control (eg the concept of legibility). You don't even need to phrase it in the terms of profiling/tracking per se, although those are instances of the general. I think I even feel the same dynamic with something as banal and informal as home automation. With some kind of computer (eg microcontroller) at every node I certainly could keep the local control local. Or I could just focus on publishing data to the "network" [1] and getting commands back, and making the interface a given device exports as simple as possible. We see the results of this harsh dynamic for platforms that allow for hub-less control (eg Zwave I think). Nifty and more robust, but it adds to the bespokeness and siloing/lock-in. It's just so much more complexity that then has to be configured, and then grokked to know what the system will actually do. Whereas backhaul state and control to a general purpose Linux machine running python and you can do "whatever you want" (modulo that singular machine having a problem). Not a great dynamic for those of us that like freedom. [0] or really any entity, corporations and governments can just fulfill the imperative at scale [1] full extrapolation in the corporate context - "cloud"