Advertisers don’t really want to know who you are - they want to show diaper ads to people who have babies, not to show them to people who don’t, and to have some sense of which ads drove half a million sales and which ads drove a million sales.

In practice, ‘showing car ads to people who read about cars’ led the adtech industry to build vast piles of semi-random personal data, aggregated, disaggregated, traded, passed around and sometimes just lost, partly because it could and partly because that appeared to be the only way to do it. After half a decade of backlash, there are now a bunch of projects trying to get to the same underlying advertiser aims - to show ads that are relevant, and get some measure of ad effectiveness - while keeping the private data private.

Apple has pursued a very clear theory that analysis and tracking is private if it happens on your device and is not private if leaves your device or happens in the cloud. Hence, it’s built a complex system of tracking and analysis on your iPhone, but is adamant that this is private because the data stays on the device. People have seemed to accept this (so far - or perhaps the just haven’t noticed it), but acting on the same theory Apple also created a CSAM scanning system that it thought was entirely private - ‘it only happens your device!’ - that created a huge privacy backlash, because a bunch of other people think that if your phone is scanning your photos, that isn’t ‘private’ at all. So is ‘on device’ private or not? What’s the rule? What if Apple tried the same model for ‘private’ ads in Safari? How will the public take FLoC? I don’t think we know.

On / off device is one test, but another and much broader is first party / third party: the idea it’s OK for a website to track what you do on that website but not OK for adtech companies to track you across many different websites. This is the core of the cookie question

At this point one answer is to cut across all these questions and say that what really matters is whether you disclose whatever you’re doing and get consent. Steve Jobs liked this argument. But in practice, as we've discovered, ‘get consent’ means endless cookie pop-ups full of endless incomprehensible questions that no normal consumer should be expected to understand, and that just train people to click ‘stop bothering me’. Meanwhile, Apple’s on-device tracking doesn't ask for permission, and opts you in by default, because, of course, Apple thinks that if it's on the device it's private. Perhaps ‘consent’ is not a complete solution after all.

If you can only analyse behaviour within one site but not across many sites, or make it much harder to do that, companies that have a big site where people spend lots of time have better targeting information and make more money from advertising. If you can only track behaviour across lots of different sites if you do it ‘privately’ on the device or in the browser, then the companies that control the device or the browser have much more control over that advertising

it is very difficult to figure out what specific effect ATT has because there are so many factors involved

If ATT were so significantly kneecapping revenue, I would think we would see a pronounced skew against North America compared to elsewhere. But that is not the case. Revenue in North America is only slightly off compared to the company total, and it is increasing how much it earns per North American user compared to the rest of the world.

iOS is far more popular in the U.S. and Canada than it is in Europe, but Meta incurred a greater revenue decline — in absolute terms and, especially, in percentage terms — in Europe. Meta was still posting year-over-year gains in both those regions until this most recent quarter, even though ATT rolled out over a year ago.

there are those who believe highly-targeted advertisements are a fair trade-off because they offer businesses a more accurate means of finding their customers, and the behavioural data collected from all of us is valuable only in the aggregate. That is, as I understand it, the view of analysts like Seufert, Benedict Evans, and Ben Thompson. Frequent readers will not be surprised to know I disagree with this premise. Regardless of how many user agreements we sign and privacy policies we read, we cannot know the full extent of the data economy. Personal information about us is being collected, shared, combined, and repackaged. It may only be profitable in aggregate, but it is useful with finer granularity, so it is unsurprising that it is indefinitely warehoused in detail.

Seufert asked, rhetorically, “what happens when ads aren’t personalized?”, answering “digital ads resemble TV ads: jarring distractions from core content experience. Non-personalized is another way of saying irrelevant, or at best, randomly relevant.”

does it make sense to build the internet’s economy on the backs of a few hundred brokers none of us have heard of, trading and merging our personal information in the hope of generating a slightly better click-through rate?

Then there is the much bigger question of whether people should even be able to opt into such widespread tracking. We simply cannot be informed consumers in every aspect of our lives, and we cannot foresee how this information will be used and abused in the full extent of time. It sounds boring, but what is so wrong with requiring data minimization at every turn, permitting only the most relevant personal data to be collected, and restricting the ability for this information to be shared or combined?

Does ATT really “[deprive] consumers of widespread ad relevancy and advertisers and publishers of commercial opportunity”? Even if it does — which I doubt — has that commercial opportunity really existed with meaningful consumer awareness and choice? Or is this entire market illegitimate, artificially inflated by our inability to avoid becoming its subjects?

Conflicts like these are one of many reasons why privacy rights should be established by regulators, not individual companies. Privacy must not be a luxury good, or something you opt into, and it should not be a radical position to say so. We all value different degrees of privacy, but it should not be possible for businesses to be built on whether we have rights at all. The digital economy should not be built on such rickety and obviously flawed foundations.

The game is that every time we create a new technology, we’re creating new possibilities, new choices that didn’t exist before. Those choices themselves—even the choice to do harm—are a good, they’re a plus.

We want an economy that’s growing in the second sense: unlimited betterment, unlimited increase in wisdom, and complexity, and choices. I don’t see any limit there. We don’t want an economy that’s just getting fatter and fatter, and bigger and bigger, in terms of its size. Can we imagine such a system? That’s hard, but I don’t think it’s impossible.

Miller is the CEO of a new startup called The Browser Company, and he wants to change the way people think about browsers altogether. He sees browsers as operating systems, and likes to wonder aloud what "iOS for the web" might look like. What if your browser could build you a personalized news feed because it knows the sites you go to? What if every web app felt like a native app, and the browser itself was just the app launcher? What if you could drag a file from one tab to another, and it just worked? What if the web browser was a shareable, synced, multiplayer experience?

Miller became convinced that the next big platform was right in front of his face: the open web. The underlying infrastructure worked, the apps were great, there were no tech giants in the way imposing rules and extracting huge commissions. The only thing missing was a tool to bring it all together in a user-friendly way, and make the web more than the sum of its parts.

Browser's team instead spent its time thinking about how to solve things like tab overload, that all-too-familiar feeling of not being able to find anything in a sea of tiny icons at the top of the screen.That's something Nate Parrott, a designer on the team, had been thinking about for a long time. "Before I met Josh," he said, "I had this fascination with browsers, because it's the window through which you experience so much of the web, and yet it feels like no one is working on web browsers." Outside of his day job at Snap, he was also building a web browser with some new interaction ideas. "A big one for me was that I wanted to get rid of the distinction between open and closed tabs," he said. "I wanted to encourage tab-hoarding behavior, where you can open as many tabs as you want and organize them so you're not constantly overwhelmed seeing them all at the same time."

One of Arc's most immediately noticeable features is that it combines bookmarks and tabs. Clicking an icon in the sidebar opens the app, just like on iOS or Android. When users navigate somewhere else, they don't have to close the tab; it just waits in the background until it's needed again, and Arc manages its background performance so it doesn't use too much memory. Instead of opening Gmail in a tab, users just … open Gmail.

Everyone at The Browser Company swears there's no Master Plan, or much of a roadmap. What they have is a lot of ideas, a base on which they can develop really quickly, and a deep affinity for prototypes. "You can't just think really hard and design the best web browser," Parrott said. "You have to feel it and put it in front of people and get them to react to it."

The Browser Company could become an R&D shop, full of interesting ideas but unable to build a browser that anyone actually uses. The company does have plenty of runway: It recently raised more than $13 million in funding from investors including Jeff Weiner, Eric Yuan, Patrick Collison, Fidji Simo and a number of other people with long experience building for the internet, that values The Browser Company at $100 million. Still, Agrawal said, "We're paranoid that we could end up in this world of just having a Bell Labs kind of situation, where you have a lot of interesting stuff, but it's not monetizable, it's not sticky, any of that." That's why they're religious about talking to users all the time, getting feedback on everything, making sure that the stuff they're building is genuinely useful. And when it's not, they pivot fast.

Many national governments around the world are showing themselves to be inefficient and slow-moving in response to long-running problems and rapid changes in people's underlying needs.

Now consider local governments. Cities and states, as we've seen from the examples at the start of this post, are at least in theory capable of genuine dynamism. There are large and very real differences of culture between cities, so it's easier to find a single city where there is public interest in adopting any particular radical idea than it is to convince an entire country to accept it. There are very real challenges and opportunities in local public goods, urban planning, transportation and many other sectors in the governance of cities that could be addressed. Cities have tightly cohesive internal economies where things like widespread cryptocurrency adoption could realistically independently happen. Furthermore, it's less likely that experiments within cities will lead to terrible outcomes both because cities are regulated by higher-level governments and because cities have an easier escape valve: people who are unhappy with what's going on can more easily exit.

I would argue that there are two distinct categories of blockchain ideas that make sense: Using blockchains to create more trusted, transparent and verifiable versions of existing processes. Using blockchains to implement new and experimental forms of ownership for land and other scarce assets, as well as new and experimental forms of democratic governance.

One simple idea that plenty of people, including government officials around the world, have brought up to me on many occasions is the idea of governments creating a whitelisted internal-use-only stablecoin for tracking internal government payments. Every tax payment from an individual or organization could be tied to a publicly visible on-chain record minting that number of coins (if we want individual tax payment quantities to be private, there are zero-knowledge ways to make only the total public but still convince everyone that it was computed correctly). Transfers between departments could be done "in the clear", and the coins would be redeemed only by individual contractors or employees claiming their payments and salaries.

Many more processes could be made more trustworthy with blockchains: Fair random number generators (eg. for lotteries) - VDFs, such as the one Ethereum is expected to include, could serve as a fair random number generator that could be used to make government-run lotteries more trustworthy. Fair randomness could also be used for many other use cases, such as sortition as a form of government. Certificates, for example cryptographic proofs that some particular individual is a resident of the city, could be done on-chain for added verifiability and security (eg. if such certificates are issued on-chain, it would become obvious if a large number of false certificates are issued). This can be used by all kinds of local-government-issued certificates. Asset registries, for land and other assets, as well as more complicated forms of property ownership such as development rights. Due to the need for courts to be able to make assignments in exceptional situations, these registries will likely never be fully decentralized bearer instruments in the same way that cryptocurrencies are, but putting records on-chain can still make it easier to see what happened in what order in a dispute.

There is an inevitable political tension between a home as a place to live and a home as an investment asset, and the pressure to satisfy communities who care about the latter often ends up severely harming the affordability of the former. A resident in a city either owns a home, making them massively over-exposed to land prices and introducing perverse incentives to fight against construction of new homes, or they rent a home, making them negatively exposed to the real estate market and thus putting them economically at odds with the goal of making a city a nice place to live.

What if we could create a divisible and fungible city token, that residents could hold as many units of as they can afford or feel comfortable with, and whose value goes up as the city prospers?

Create economic alignment between residents and the city. This means first of all that the coin itself should clearly become more valuable as the city becomes more attractive. But it also means that the economics should actively encourage residents to hold the coin more than faraway hedge funds. Promote saving and wealth-building. Home ownership does this: as home owners make mortgage payments, they build up their net worth by default. City tokens could do this too, making it attractive to accumulate coins over time, and even gamifying the experience. Encourage more pro-social activity, such as positive actions that help the city and more sustainable use of resources. Be egalitarian. Don't unduly favor wealthy people over poor people (as badly designed economic mechanisms often do accidentally). A token's divisibility, avoiding a sharp binary divide between haves and have-nots, does a lot already, but we can go further, eg. by allocating a large portion of new issuance to residents as a UBI.

And 21st-century digital democracy through real-time online quadratic voting and funding could plausibly do a much better job than 20th-century democracy, which seems in practice to have been largely characterized by rigid building codes and obstruction at planning and permitting hearings.

The main trap that governments should avoid is too quickly sacrificing optionality. An existing city could fall into this trap by launching a bad city token instead of taking things more slowly and launching a good one. A new city could fall into this trap by selling off too much land, sacrificing the entire upside to a small group of early adopters. Starting with self-contained experiments, and taking things slowly on moves that are truly irreversible, is ideal.

Nick Clegg, president of Meta, penned a lengthy Medium post trying to portray a more positive vision to justify the company’s pivot to all-in for the metaverse future. To Clegg, the metaverse is “ultimately about finding ever more ways for the benefits of the online world to be felt in our daily lives.” This frame is backwards, and reinforces the technology-first lens of social construction that has not held up well over time. A better lens to explain the inevitability of the metaverse is that technology will, over time, provide ever more ways for the benefits of the offline world to be felt through online services. Today’s social media is about communication; the metaverse of tomorrow will be about experiences. Its value is not inherent, but rather lies in the ability of technology to recreate and transport things—in particular, experiences—that have inherent value.

Metaverse technology will, in all likelihood, follow that same evolution. Today’s VR headsets are the equivalent of phonographs and radio. But someday, metaverse users will be able to mix their favorite cocktails in their homes, strap on their multisensory gear, and “walk” into a virtual bar to socialize with friends located anywhere in the world. They’d save the $18 that cocktail costs in a physical bar, and spend it on the $18/month subscription fee for their VirtualBar membership. As the world continues to suffer from the COVID-19 pandemic, it’s easy to see the appeal of virtual substitutes for in-person experiences. In 2020, Zoom replaced in-person social events and professional collaborations; in 2030, the technology options will be far richer, and will capture and convey even more (though not all) of the subtle interpersonal dynamics inherent in human interaction.