The profits that spew out of our ad-infested internet accrue to Google most of all. For the last couple of years, Google has seen an astounding $40 billion dollars per year flow into its coffers from US online advertising alone – a market in which it commands an astounding ~30% share. And then there's the international market on top of...

In Less Is More, Jason Hickel provides a brief history of capitalism from the year circa 1500 onward, which includes an account of the European enclosure movement. Where formerly public commons, like forest, streams, meadows, and land of all types, were turned into private property with titles and deeds for the lords to exploit. Ending...

It passed! It fricken passed. I could barely contain my excitement when I saw the tweet from Matt Stoller that the Arizona House passed HB2005. This is the anti-monopoly bill that will prevent Apple and Google from using their gatekeeper role in mobile to force developers to use their exorbitantly-priced payment processing, and stop th...

This gushing review was first posted to our automatic check-in question in Basecamp: What are you reading? Normally I do a big batch of everything I've been reading for several months, but right now I'm so enamored with Jason Hickel's new book Less Is More that I didn't want to wait! I've been a fan of Hickel since I heard him on the C...

The internet can be a pretty grim place, and if you're building software here, you better think about how it can be abused, because odds are that it will. We thought a lot about that with HEY itself. It was one of the key motivating factors behind the screener. Which, immediately after launch, both Jason and I learned is a life-saver i...

I talk a lot about the problem with big tech not just being monopoly power, but also conglomerate power. Fingers in a million pies. Here's a sample from my testimony before the Arizona House of Representatives: “Apple is now involved in offering credit cards, producing TV shows, curating news, offering fitness classes, commissioning vi...

You could have hoped that as the pandemic wore on, the initial rush of companies to adopt employee-surveillance software would peter out. They'd realize that the biggest problem with working remotely is usually not that employees work too little, but that they work too much. No such luck. Employee-surveillance software seems to be as p...

If you would have asked me a couple of years ago whether I thought big tech faced any material threat to their dominance from governments, I would have said no. Because it's been twenty years since the last time any of them did. For basically my entire career, big tech has gotten away with whatever they wanted, whenever they wanted. Th...

After the BBC ran their big story on spy pixels being endemic, there's been a surge of interest in the phenomenon. And for a very good reason: Most people still don't know they're being spied upon when opening emails, and they're shocked when they learn that they are! I went on CNBC Europe this morning to talk about spy pixels, and one...

People are rightfully skeptical about new apps and services on the internet. The industry has a terrible record of conning folks into using something new "for free", then either selling their data to advertisers, selling them in bulk to an acquirer, or just shutting down entirely when the hockey stick can't hit the moonshot into orbit ...

I don't remember when I first heard about organic food, but I do remember only knowing one family growing up where the term was even mentioned. This was in the 90s, and my awareness of pesticides, factory farming, cage chickens, antibiotics-pumped pigs, and the other ingredients of industrial food production simply didn't occupy space ...

As a software maker, it's rare you'll hear customers ask for fewer features, fewer options, or really any degree of less software. The customers you'll hear from are the people who want more. And if you juuuust add that one extra thing (or ten!) they'll stay or they'll signup or they'll upgrade or they'll tell their friends (and if you...

I delivered this testimony before the Arizona House of Representatives today in support of HB2005, which will give all app developers the right to choose their own payment processor, as well as protection from retaliation if they do so. It was a closely contested bill, but in the end passed the committee in a 7 to 6 vote. You can read ...