"Commercial surveillance allows buyers to figure out the most an individual consumer will pay, and raise prices accordingly; and to calculate the lowest wage a worker will accept, and lower pay accordingly. Commercial surveillance allows companies to "optimize" their products to be nearly so enshtitified that we quit them, but not quite, maximizing the value they can shift from us to them.
To be free people, we don't merely need to be ungovernable.
We need to become unoptomizable.
How do we do that? Well, there are lots of policies that would make it harder for the ultra-rich to "optimize" us so that we are easier to fleece and abuse, but every "optimization" starts with surveillance. After all, you treasure what you measure, and if you can't observe a worker or a customer – or a citizen getting ready to build a guillotine – you can't optimize them.
That's where "privacy first" comes in. There are a lot of people angry about a lot of problems that are all rooted in the unregulated, unrestricted practice of mass surveillance by governments and their corporate partners:"
https://pluralistic.net/2025/08/20/billionaireism/#surveillance-infantalism