You raise some very interesting points. Not trying to argue, but I’d like to share some thoughts I had in response.
The surveillance and ad networks are products of the same ecosystem as any other digital technology. Short of regulating them out of existence, I don’t know how you can’t distinguish between the two with a disposition like ”we want one but not the other.” Telemetry is core to iterative development, and it only becomes “surveillance” when you use it a certain kind of way. Content delivery is no different in how a specialized use case, barely a specialized implementation, can produce an “advertising network.”
Lock-in at platform, ecosystem, and hardware levels is also the easiest path forward many times, from a development perspective. Short of having a bolstering engineer culture that spends time prioritizing quality over capital, how do you incentivize companies to wait for standards to be developed and adopted before they engineer their products? How do incentive them to redesign legacy code such that it uses open standards? How do you tell the difference between priority disparity and intentional ecosystem management for the purpose of lock-in?
“You are the product” is right on the money, and it’s astounding that culturally we know, but most of us don’t seem to care enough. To change that, I think people need to start making better arguments for why “being the product” is bad. Arguments that the average person can relate to. It might help if people understood that a platform that didn’t crowdsource engagement probably wouldn’t have a fraction of the success as the tech giants we see today. This is reminiscent of the feudalist era — they own the land where market + public discourse occurs; they draw influence and power from that relationship.
I have been trying to access the site for over an hour. I don’t know if it’s authentic traffic or a DDOS, but only the front page loads. The wiki subdomain (where the list is) returns 503 server error every time.