It's well understood that hedge fund managers underperform index funds but firmly believe they can beat the market.
By the same token, Big Tech is full of smart people who believe they can both predict and shape our behavior if only they could spy on us enough, despite all evidence to the contrary.
Like everyone who has devoted their lives to a delusion, they insist that success is in their grasp, if only they stay the course and double down on their failed strategy.
They're like someone dying of cancer while undergoing 'alternative therapy,' insisting that it's going to start working any day now, if only they can get the right mix of very high quality healing crystals and the rarest of peach pits
(which is basically how Steve Jobs died)
The unfalsifiable hypothesis that there is a surveillance threshold beyond which human free will becomes a deterministic open book is toxic and dangerous, but not because it's true.
Just as hedge fund managers can and do destroy real and valuable things in pursuit of a forever out of reach dream to beat the market...
...so does Big Tech expose us to risk with vast databases of kompromat and endless 'attention maximization' strategies that all come down to, 'scared, angry people click more'
