I'm coming around to a the-medium-is-the-message / technological-determinism perspective on the Internet, that it cannot exist as anything like the way it is now and mostly be a force for good. Just can't.

Always on ubiquitous wireless Internet. Decent battery tech so you don't need a power cable to everything. Low-powered cheap computers and sensors (cameras, microphones, those creepy human-body radars Google's about to start putting in phones). Storage so cheap you can collect everything. Algorithms to sift through it.

I don't see any possible way for all those things to exist and for the results not to be, overall, disastrous.

I also see exactly no way to stop it.

Stallman, Snowden, the EFF, and the rest of us are Cassandras. People just don't give a shit. Let alone the future, people are still trying to roll back protections we got in the 18th Century. There just isn't going to be a public consciousness of how we need to limit power from using tech that was invented a decade ago, no matter how many articles or blog posts those weird nerds write about their tinfoil paranoia.

I think we're just doomed to suffer the consequences again and learn from the suffering. It will be hell on earth for a lot of people but the light at the end of the tunnel is that tyranny is an objectively inferior mode of organization, and it always has to collapse eventually.

Whereas the successful founders were the ones who chased the bottom line, improve the world is a benefit.

I fall into the first camp, though I got lucky with an acquisition. However it tainted me on startups and business in general actually having the ability to be ideological. At the end of the day people need to get paid, otherwise it's a volunteer organization, and volunteer organizations don't scale.

Second for business there is a question of "where is the money from with the business model"? Skipping that step leads to a VC acquisition which will subvert it once it gets big enough to "harvest" it at best.

Data-gaming SEO style seems like it would be the logical consequence of the surveillance but that may fall into the legally dodgy on its own.

GIGO spam may be what eventually bursts an ad-tech market. Phone systems are already notorious for being overwhelmed with scam and spam callers. Now imagine click and view farming being similarly leveraged as noise overwhelms signal.

I don't know where you live or work, but wow this is the complete opposite to my experience.

If you hate this industry, HN is an odd place to hang out.

Also don't complain about downvotes.

I guess this is surveillance capitalism at it's best.