I shudder to imagine all of the companies that license their consumer data databases, as well as the “insights” that consultant-types extract from them (and who their clients are),

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Not only governance suffers.

Entertain me for a moment. Imagine a utopia in which you don’t need to distrust technology or guard yourself against the companies that control it. No data harvesting or sharing; your privacy, likes and preferences safe and your own. No schemes to come up with algorithms that enrage you and dominate your attention. Imagine that you could trust LLMs to be trained with only the best, curated sources and where their operation is completely open and transparent. Imagine how we would express ourselves through our tech and through social media. Technology would become deeply, deeply personal, benign, helpful and at the service of humankind… as it should be.

The idea is so crazy that it is borderline unthinkable, right?