Notices by Will Wilkinson (wlknsn@cybervillains.com)

So when the SEC cracks down on, say, Kraken's staking product as an unregistered security, folks just can't admit that the SEC is right. And they certainly can't admit that maybe this is GOOD for the security and decentralization of proof-of-stake networks because it discourages the concentration of staking power in huge centralized pools. Because, of course, regulation can't ever actually help markets function better.

So they complain about the SEC "regulating through enforcement" rather than clarifying the rules, when, actually, the rules are already very clear and enforcement actions are just that -- not the whimsical application of some new underlying rule that the agency refuses to explicitly articulate. Again, it's community ideology, and it gets into people's heads even when its against their particular interests.

A lot of crypto people are the same way about, say, securities regulation, despite the fact that pretty much every token other than Bitcoin and a small handful of other genuinely decentralized networks, neatly fits within the standard definition of a security. Some libertarian crypto types are like, "So what, fuck the law" which is admirably honest. But mostly people play dumb about how or why securities law clearly applies to this or that -- without exactly realizing they're playing dumb.

So you get real discomfort from tech people around even pretty weak proposals for beefed up privacy protections. You get this kind of squirming uneasiness even from tech folks who DO see that surveillance capitalism biz models are problematic. They still find it hard to reconcile themselves to the idea that nearly their entire industry, and their own wealth, is based on companies following the money within a legal structure that left basic rights unprotected against new technical capabilities.

But silicon valley tech culture reflexively treats this point of view as a kind of benighted luddism. So much of the tech economy has had a deep vested financial interest in systemic privacy violation, attention hacking, and preference manipulation that people involved in it have become ideological about it in the OG Marxian sense, which is to say the legitimacy of the whole deal FEELS neutral, natural and apolitical while objections to it FEEL ideological, even radical.

I've gotten to the point where I think we'd be better off in almost every way, very much including actually useful tech innovation, if we had very strict data collection/privacy laws and simply banned targeted advertising. I think freedom and democracy require a robust right to privacy and that we have really imperiled ourselves by treating its systemic for-profit violation as some kind of unobjectionable, neutral manifestation of free enterprise.

The closer I get to this stuff, the clearer it is to me that "addict/surveil/extract/sell" biz models have ruined the internet really are wrecking mental health, propagating disinfo, dissolving social cohesion, etc. with very little real compensating upside. I think the case for this gets stronger everyday. But there is a TON of resistance to this among "tech people" generally, even those who work for places that would benefit from the demise of surveillance capitalism.

After a year at a big, crypto-involved fintech company, I've become increasingly aware of a couple different kinds of annoying industry "mood affiliation" about policy and regulation that muddies a lot of thinking to the point of uselessness.