It’s very interesting and telling that most of the technology that connects us does not have us as a customer, or a financial beneficiary. One of the key aspects of technofeudalism is the extractive nature of most of our platforms.
Imagine if the progenitors of email thought to require e-stamps, say a thousand emails for a buck. There's a parallel universe where 'Email co.' is a major tech player comparable to Google. Not sure it's a better universe, but bears consideration.
Same, but I realize that nearly everyone I correspond with uses Gmail, so Google has all my emails regardless. (Ok, they don't get my transactional email, since those are usually sent through something like Sendgrid, but... yeah.)
> Same, but I realize that nearly everyone I correspond with uses Gmail, so Google has all my emails regardless.
I know some very privacy-focused person (a friend of mine) who will stop being willing to be in contact with you (or being your friend) if you use an email address at one of these big spying email providers to write him an email.
It is always so tragic to me that, for over a decade, I would have paid for Twitter. But by the time they rolled that out, enough had changed that there's no way I was going to pay for Twitter.
