Thread · 5 tweets · 29 Jan 2021

Privacy matters, because legibility is oppression. It's long, but if you read nothing else this month, read @shoshanazuboff's latest piece. nytimes.com/2021/01/29/opi…

She has this right: "A democratic surveillance society is an existential and political impossibility. Make no mistake: This is the fight for the soul of our information civilization." This is ours to fix. It's going to require more than tinkering with cookies.

I notably enjoyed her point that antitrust is important, but would it have been the best approach if we had understood climate change at the time of the Standard Oil intervention? We're in the same position: big tech being anticompetitive is the smaller issue.

If we are to solve the bigger challenges of our times, we need working institutions. We won't solve the climate emergency with the same naive technosolutionism that's been churning out dystopia in the Valley. We'll solve it with democracy.

We need the imagination to reclaim what big tech has taken. We need to invert information asymmetry. We need governance over the attention commons. We are in a dark place, but there is still hope. Welcome to the Third Decade.