While a real concern, & I have huge respect for Shoshana, this feels like such a consumer troll level concern, such the barest bottom of the barrel perspectives. The whole stack is anti-user in almost every way. The name software was supposed to represent softness, flexibility, malleability, reconfigurability, a changable thing. But with the perhaps exception of the web, almost all mainstream computing is sterile control-based systems that have only very narrowly scoped carefully controlled affordances. Computing is almost universally that video game or MMO where your character can jump, but cant hop a single fence or mount a single rock, where the "open world" environment is heavily corralled, illusory.<p>If computing was real at all, had a remotely fair shake to offer, the question of surveillance would be radically different, a sub sub sub concern of much deeper questions of control/permission. We the users could grow some expectations, could experience & judge for ourselves & see the real essence of what is happening; at least some of us. Right now the entire universe of computing is a Dark Forest, is a panopticon; we do not & can not see the computing, cannot grasp it, have no sight of it (be it running in a far off data center or our own cellphones) and yet computing has nigh-unlimited powers to stare at us, to collect fine grained & then aggregate our behaviors.<p>Negotiating for data rights feels like negotiating for atmosphere on the planet. We're arguing for table scraps, for a meaningless basic defense, against basic oppression, when we should be building, shipping, demanding radical change, real and honest systems, finding & practicing systems not of facade interfaces but real & direct & personal power.<p>Modern humanity has arisen atop the natural science, by eliciting excitement to understand, to further ourselves & empower ourselves by our understanding & intellect. But especially in the past 10 years, connected computing has become the most expansive & subsuming arm of a suppressive capitalism the world has ever seen. A new form of connective capitalism, where not just all rights are reserved, but all means modes motive & mechanism are burried deep inside legalese & DRM spheres protecting code & corporation from any potential human involvement. Security is just one facet of this great anti-Natural degredation, this subservience system we have been lashed under & into. And while this story of survelliance is of critical critical importance, I think it misses the root of dehumanization, doesnt really tell the story of the natural state of inquiry & exploration & actualization that industry has rent our people from. That connection with truth, with a reality is a grounding element that, when we are removed from, leaves us adrift, leaves us unable to assess the forces about us.<p>We are betrayed by software & systems across such broad broad senses, cast into ignorance & powerlessness that permits these degradations & abuse, & which, as we are thrown about, fosters dark disbelief against this planet. How much I would like to see new forms of software emerge that are things we can collectively partake & believe in; when Bret Victor talks about things technologists can do or inventing on principle, this seems like the stark missing path that almost all software has shied away from, has maintained hubristic over-control that treats those that use it as powerless grubs, who cannot grasp immediate connection to truth, but must have deeply intermediated systems of control, which the developer & org believes they alone can distil out & provide. A more real truth, of what computing is, is essential to connecting us to the manmade universe of information & systems. And from a more real software, we can collectively see & assess & see & address these systems about us, begin to decide & adjust & shift, out of the fixed points we are shipped into.