What strikes me as interesting about this whole discussion is that the tech world should be a lot more knowledgeable about these patterns and far less naive about the typical tech cycle. In a nutshell you can condense it to disrupt, gain marketshare, squeeze the lemon.
Whether it's Uber, AirBNB, Food delivery, Social media, Gaming or restaurants doesn't really matter. What I've seen - under NDA - would make your skin crawl and that's just the very limited sample of all companies out there, and it's mostly just Europe. But over the course of 200+ such in depth looks at how the tech world works it is very clear to me that the new middle-men are at least as bad as the old ones were.
I was just pointing out that this dystopia already can exist without tech. Tech makes it easier and takes power away from the little-guy (the server ‘doesn’t have to’ give the rich prick his expensive menu) but software doesn’t care about impressions.
Go ahead and say tinfoil hat, if i told you about the current state of streaming services or social media back in the early days of those existing we'd all say the same thing. The only barrier to entry to making the world worse is money. Every app i love, every service i use, my experience with the general internet, it's all gotten worse. And it's always in service of tracking and/or profit. So it's not hard to imagine a scenario where this is possible.
It's extremely difficult to not be cynical about the world. I really mean it when i say the social apps i have to use to keep up with friends have only gotten worse. There hasn't been a single improvement in over 5 years. Every update is more ads, more tracking, less human.