Why a toaster from 1949 is still smarter than any sold today

I think inertia is leading us toward a quantified state, in which the costs of tracking and categorizing objects — primarily people, phones, cars, and money — as they move from place to place becomes so low that most institutions are doing it by reflex, without either considering or caring for consequences. Eventually, somebody is going to exploit the gap in information (between what is available to ordinary people, and what is available to organizations) in a way that causes enormous, historic harm, as happened in WWII when a particular state realized that IBM had compiled a database that was perfect for populating a list of names of those who would soon be marched off to camps. And that was just census data. Now they know what you read, where you go, who you're with, and how you'll vote.

The unfortunate reality of contemporary political thought is that consequences do not exist until they are felt. Rare is the chicken that fears the farmer. That means we've got two options: we either wait for the pain, or we stop waiting for political consensus.

I think inertia is leading us toward a quantified state, in which the costs of tracking and categorizing objects — primarily people, phones, cars, and money — as they move from place to place becomes so low that most institutions are doing it by reflex, without either considering or caring for consequences. Eventually, somebody is going to exploit the gap in information (between what is available to ordinary people, and what is available to organizations) in a way that causes enormous, historic harm, as happened in WWII when a particular state realized that IBM had compiled a database that was perfect for populating a list of names of those who would soon be marched off to camps. And that was just census data. Now they know what you read, where you go, who you're with, and how you'll vote.

The unfortunate reality of contemporary political thought is that consequences do not exist until they are felt. Rare is the chicken that fears the farmer. That means we've got two options: we either wait for the pain, or we stop waiting for political consensus.