>The negative side of this is that you will get offered ads that are specifically tailored to your interests, at the time you are most likely to buy at a price point you can afford.

To me the current system doesn't seem all that different. It's more crude, but it's already trying to do that. So I think we both have been in this dystopia for some time now.

I don't see a problem though. Consumption of ads is a free choice. People have made the choice of wanting to be manipulated for thousands of years (religion or patriotism are common examples).

I removed all ads from my household nearly two decades ago. Anyone that doesn't do that, doesn't object to the manipulation. Everyone knows what ads are for, what they do. It's not like it's a secret. A lot of people just don't mind being manipulated. And changing that I suspect is impossible.

A personal example of this: while going through my divorce, I witnessed several ads targeted towards me for storage units.

Thanks for looking out for me, Google.

And nobody seems to recognize this emotional component, except the people doing the manipulation!

Screwing with my emotions is my #1 beef with tech today. Even more than the freedom thing.

Friends of mine that jealously guard and maintain their emotional state seem to have issued a blanket exception for tech.

Too right. It's just evolution really, survival of the fittest.

Software that can afford to have 100 developers work on it will, on average, out-compete software that is sustained by 50 developers.

Software (note: not necessarily _good_ software, this could also be the shittiest software with a nice lock-in) that is good at making money, can afford more developers, lawyers and lobbyists.

It's nothing new under the sun, but it does suck in a major way.

Right to source sounds strong, but I am curious about how a right to source for software that's no longer produced would work. This could be very beneficial to society, and perceivably speed up progress quite a bit.

If there is one thing I have learnt about the populace at large is they don't pay much attention to private et el issues but when it affects enough of them they change the law in their favour. Companies get plenty of years even decades to exploit but eventually the mainstream is impacted enough that regulation gets brought down in massive heavy handed ways and often not in a good way. Privacy via GDPR and the "cookie law" before it are examples of the mainstream waking up to problems that impacted them. Get too popular and exploit too much and the mainstream will do something about.

There are movements for taking data entirely away from these companies, movements for repair and a host of other things. Eventually they will more than likely become mainstream and big tech is going to find itself on the end of a lot of regulation especially in the EU. There is no way they show self control before the point where DRM, gambling and engagement mechanics are involved they are simply too profitable.

Frankly, any discussion about this invariably becomes a critique of capitalism. If you further generalize “software” to “organization”, your examples would include the various decisions companies make to increase profit: polluting, exploiting their workers, etc. At some point, we just have to acknowledge that a free market simply does not work.