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Jun 22, 2023Liked by Michael David Cobb Bowen

Lovely piece, and thought provoking, as all of yours are. The difficulties are likely in the edge cases. I also wonder if we are doomed to ever greater surveillance, however apparently innocuous. A way to remain anonymous, to live below the radar in an IoT world would be a great benefit for some, myself included.

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The consistent answer to this is to outwit the bureaucracies. Which means finding things to do that can be swift and sensible. You would be surprised how slow and political large bureaucracies can be, or maybe not. It's kind of the same thing. How do lawyers avoid getting sued? How do doctors avoid getting sick? How do hackers avoid getting hacked?

We are doomed to greater and stupider surveillance owing to the lack of personal skills exhibited by all the dorks who run online businesses. They do not know their customers because their way of knowing has everything to do with data science and numerology. You have never met an Amazon salesman. You have never spoken to a CSR from Facebook. They derive their incomes totally absent human contact. There is no one more vulnerable to online scams than an elderly shut-in who thinks bots are people.

In the end, for people who know how to slaughter hogs, all this surveillance is innocuous. The question remains, how vulnerable are you because of your addiction to convenience? I had this conversation 25 years ago at the beginning of e-commerce when people were scared to death of putting their credit card online. Nobody is afraid any longer, and they demand ATMs instead of people.

The really scary question is what happens when the electricity goes out. Everybody today should know a farmer, a Marine and an IT security hacker.

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Lorenz here, your sometimes commenter from Perth Western Australia. I think your computer managed street sweeping plan is similar to many uses of computers capacity to handle a large numbers of micro transactions - data as well as money. I like your content but don't subscribe to Substack because I'm a pensioner and know from my peak earning years a long time ago that magazine subscriptions could seriously eat into the budget. Substack goes with that 19th century subscription based model and my 20th century experience rejects it. Substack MIGHT do better out me if they worked on a pay for what you really want to read model. This is so obvious that I suspect something like the transaction charges banks and other intermediaries charge make it impossible to charge 50 cents or a dollar to read an article, but I think it is entirely doable.

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