2/ One heuristic that keeps popping up: "[N]ew products won't succeed if they are marginal improvements [...] They need to be ten times better or ten times cheaper than the current best in class to compel companies and consumers to adopt (p.49, @kupor).
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3/ Setting aside the implicit high growth needs of VCs and the founders who approach them which do color this statement a bit, it seems like a pretty sound product heuristic. (Fuck, up until recently, I was still using Dotster for my domains because of switching costs to my AWS!)
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4/ Meanwhile, I'm a sophisticated computer user who thinks endlessly about the harmful interactions between social media, surveillance capitalism, and the attention economy. I care about privacy — my own and everyone else's. And...I still use fucking Gmail.
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5/ Spoiler alert: I can't imagine strong privacy as anything other than a perceived marginal improvement, if it's even perceived as an improvement at all.
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6/ I have so many smart and passionate friends working on solutions to the problem of privacy but even in the era of endless mass data breaches and intentional exploitation, people express the same kind of concern for it as they do for alternative Alternate Side Parking rules.
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7/ Again, I *want* privacy advocates to win — I am one of them! But privacy-first design seems like an exercise in futility *if the goal is mass adoption.* And, if that's not the goal, then you're just selling a luxury good which is a far less useful thing to advocate for.
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Replying to @generativist
I'm currently working on a talk called Against Web Scale, and I think you're making a classic fallacy here: you're equating "success" with "mass adoption", which is only a victory if you're using monetized adoption as your success metric. The problem is success metrics.
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Replying to @mykola @generativist
In other words: the VC model itself is _fundamentally_ incompatible with a healthy internet and technology culture. They force zero-sum outcomes, strategically influence markets to collapse options and ruthlessly prune those who don't make mass profit.
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Replying to @mykola
Oh yea. But, it's also unrelated to how I am conceptualizing "success" in this thread, which is mass consumer adoption of tech that values privacy. One product may be a vehicle for that, but "success" for me is a new ecosystem. I don't think you get there with privacy-first.
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Replying to @generativist
I agree that success is a new ecosystem. I wonder if "privacy first" is the wrong starting point, though. I wonder if passing a law that says "No non-anonymized user data may be collected by corporations" would work, just introducing constraints that work towards our goals?
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That seems *kinda* like what @tristanharris and @aza are doing at @HumaneTech_. If governments use regulations to shape ecosystems, then this is one that needs shaping! I'm just not sure we'd ever get anything like that in the US political climate...
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