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While the book was written in 2018, Lanier has pretty correctly predicted where we'd end up with social media. If anything he was too gracious to companies like Amazon, Apple and Microsoft. At the time their business models were not based on surveiling their users and pitching them new products, but all three companies are on that train now.

Apple watches you and pitches you it's services, and puts ads all over if you visit the AppStore. They've turned the AppStore into a pay to play cesspool that I don't visit anymore. Amazon steals people's products and forces you to give back around 50% of your earnings in fees. This is only possible because they track every move you make on the site, and the copy the products that are popular.

Lanier encourages us to stop doing any social media until the deal is worthwhile, until social media companies that sell our data agree it has value and we get to price access to our data. While it's laudable, that future is highly unlikely to happen.