This is how simple you are: you spend hours online “liking” things, posting pictures, and playing games so mechanical they would bore laboratory rats. All to give information to improve other people’s ads.

This is how utterly simple you are: hardly a cent of your investments or your medical expenses is decided or routed by you; their net effect is to enrich tightly coupled oligopolies with as much meaningful internal competition as the political system they are symbiotic with.

And this is why: you want things to be cognitively easy for you. And so when computers came, you took them as magical magazines, and let companies use them as data processing engines. Do you wonder that corporate profits have risen, that inequality has grown, that you feel hemmed in, outmaneuvered, and outgunned?

It’s not that some have computers and some don’t. It’s not even that some know computers and some don’t. It’s that some (pay people to) use them systematically to access and process data that pertains to their financial, social, and political well-being and goals... and some don’t.

The street is where the cameras are. But where do you think power lies?

It was never a computer revolution. It was a computing one, and it’s been hijacked. If you aren’t having fun living in a 21st century polity with a 20th century toolbox, you are going to want to take it back.