Skolr

For starters, the Swiss recognized what any Simcity player knows: fiber is a "natural monopoly." It doesn't make any sense to build multiple, competing fiber networks – any more than it would make sense to build multiple, competing sewer systems or electric grids.

In the US, private fiber providers get city permits to dig up the roads and lay their network. If you have two competing networks, they dig up the road twice.

You'd think that the (more regulated) Germans would lay a single network, but they, too, have multiple, competing networks. German regulators have a complex set of priorities and constraints: to encourage competition, they promote the idea of competing networks in competing trenches, often just meters apart (rather than on competing services running over the same fiber and/or fiber run through the same conduit – pipe – laid in a single trench).

This makes setting up fiber extremely capital-intensive, so Germany backstops this system with "essential facilities sharing" – a rule that requires the incumbent (formerly state-owned, now partially state-owned) Deutsche Telekom to offer space in its conduit to smaller ISPs that want to thread their own fiber from their data-centers to their customers' homes. This is a good idea in theory – but in practice, DT has largely captured its regulators and so it is free to place all kinds of administrative hurdles in the paths of competitors seeking to use its lines.

The result is that Germans can get fiber from multiple, heavily capitalized network providers who overbuilt redundant systems under the city streets, squandering capital digging trenches that they could have spent on providing faster and/or cheaper connections.

Meanwhile, in the US, they leave this all up to "the market" (though, of course, there's no way "the market" could get fiber laid down without public participation, because the clearing price for privately negotiated licenses to dig up every street in town is "infinity"). The US is dominated by a cartel of massive incumbents: there's AT&T (formerly a regulated monopoly that was so entangled with the US government that it was effectively a for-profit state enterprise) and the cable giants, Comcast and Charter, who divide up the country into exclusive territories like the Pope dividing up the "New World."

These companies generally enjoy regional monopolies, which means they're less interested in making profits (money you get by mobilizing capital) than they are from extracting rent (money you get from sweating assets). For example, when Frontier went bankrupt in 2020, we got to look at its internal bookkeeping system, and learned that the company treated 1m customers who had no alternative carriers as special assets because it could charge them more for worse service and poor maintenance:

https://pluralistic.net/2022/12/15/useful-idiotsuseful-idiots/

This means that US fiber networks tend to be underbuilt (the opposite of Germany's overbuilt networks), meaning that even if you're buying "gigabit" fiber, you're probably sharing that one gig connection with your whole block or neighborhood, so you only get your nominal throughput at weird hours when all the other subscribers aren't streaming Netflix.

(Note that there are cities in the US with a better situation; particularly cities served by Ting, which is owned by Hover, the amazing domain registry. Ting operates an excellent mobile carrier and a fiber networks in many cities. If you are lucky enough to have Ting as an option, then you should treasure that option.)

So, that's Germany and America. What did they do in Switzerland?

For starters, they ran a four-strand, dedicated line (an insulated wire with four separate strands of fiber in it) to every house. That wire terminates at your wall with a "neutral, open hub." Any carrier can provide service over those four strands: Swisscom (the incumbent, majority state-owned carrier); Init7 or Salt (national, commercial carriers); or a local ISP.

Each of the strands in your neutral hub operate independently. That means that you can switch from one carrier to another with a click. You can also run two or more carriers' signal through your hub, meaning that you can try out a new carrier before canceling your old one. The carriers compete on price, speed and customer service – but they don't compete on who can actually connect your home to the internet.

The origins of this excellent system are in 2008, when Switzerland's Federal Communications Commission convened a roundtable to determine the future of the country's broadband. Incredibly, it was Swisscom that pushed for the multi-strand, dedicated fiber system, on the grounds that anything less would lead to monopolization.

I say "incredibly," because in all my travels over the past three decades, a single encounter with Swisscom stands out as the most absurd and backwards run-in I ever experienced with a telco.

It was while I was working as EFF's delegate to the United Nations in Geneva, as part of an infinitesimal coalition of digital rights group convened by James Love and Manon Ress of Knowledge Ecology International. Geneva is not a forgiving city for someone working for a cash-strapped NGO: it's a city where everyone (except you) is on a lavish expense account courtesy of a national government, or (better still) an industry body that lobbies the UN.

My usual daggy two-star hotel (which cost as much as a four-star in London) didn't have its own wifi: instead, you signed on through Swisscom, which did not offer its own payment processing. To get onto the Swisscom wifi, you had to buy a scratch-off prepaid card that was good for a certain number of hours or minutes. The hotel was always sold out of these cards.

So my normal ritual upon my arrival in Geneva was to scour the tobacco shops around the train station for scratch-off cards. Normally, this would take four or five tries – the shops would either be completely sold out, or would only have the two-hour cards (needless to say, these were a lot more expensive on a per-hour basis than the one-day and multi-day cards).

On one trip, though, all the shops were sold out of these cards, so I skipped breakfast the next morning to wait outside the doors of the Swisscom offices, which opened five minutes late (the only business in Switzerland that wasn't achingly prompt!). The clerk let me in eventually, but when I approached his counter, he made me trudge to the opposite end of the room to take a number (I was the only person in the shop).

After an ostentatious delay, the clerk called out "Numero un!" and I went up to his counter and asked for a three-day card. No dice, he was sold out. Two-day cards? Nope. One-day? Uh-uh. He only had two-hour cards, too. Literally, the Swiss national telco had run out of integers.

This incident stuck with me so durably that I wrote it into my third novel, Someone Comes To Town, Someone Leaves Town. You can hear me read that passage here:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/08/17/aura-of-benevolence/#sctt-slt

So it's frankly amazing to me to learn that Swisscom – who will forever be synonymous in my mind with the most catastrophically stupid internet delivery system imaginable – demanded this anti-monopoly fiber rollout.

But – as Schüller points out – Swisscom's foray into uncharacteristic reasonableness was short-lived. By 2020, the company had regressed to its mean, and was demanding an end to the neutral, four-strand, point-to-point system, petitioning for regulatory permission to switch to a cheaper, slower, shared hub-and-spoke system. This system wouldn't just be slower – it would also require all of Swisscom's rivals to rent access to its fiber, with Swisscom having the final say over who could compete with it and how.

This went all the way to the Swiss federal courts, who ruled that Swisscom had failed to demonstrate "sufficient technological or economic grounds" for the change and fined the company CHF18m for wasting everyone's time with this stupid idea (that is, "violating Swiss competition law"). And so it is that, in 2026, you can get 25Gbit symmetrical fiber throughout Switzerland. Wunderschön!

Schüller closes out his piece with a set of recommendations for countries hoping to replicate Switzerland's broadband miracle: open access to physical infrastructure; point-to-point service; neutral fiber standards; municipal fiber; and strong antitrust enforcement to keep the incumbent carriers in line.

These are great recommendations; they address the contradiction of regulated monopoly telcoms provision. On the one hand, these networks are natural monopolies, and they can only exist with extensive government intervention (at a minimum, to clear the way for poles, trenches and conduit for the physical fiber).

On the other hand, telcoms (especially broadband) play an important role in the political realm, because broadband connections are essential to civic and political engagement. You can't turn people out for a protest, or run an election campaign, a referendum, a ballot initiative, a regulatory notice-and-comment campaign, or even a campaign to get people to a public meeting or listening session without broadband.

This means that state-provided broadband is an incredibly tempting target for political corruption and regulatory capture. Think of all the terrible things that governments are doing with broadband regulation today, like Trump demanding that service providers turn over the identities and locations of his political enemies so that ICE can hunt them down and kidnap or murder them; or "age verification" systems that accumulate mountains of easily raided personal information on adults and children.

Do you want Trump's FCC chairman Brendan Carr setting content moderation policies for your internet connection? The guy who wants to pull TV and radio stations' broadcast licenses if they criticize Trump and Israel's catastrophic Iran war?

https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/17/brendan-carr-pretends-to-be-tough-demands-broadcasters-support-disastrous-war/

Do you want your local ISP being run by your mayor? I mean, sure, there are some reasonable mayors out there, but imagine if your ISP was managed by Eric Adams, Boris Johnson…or Rob Ford:

https://www.patreon.com/posts/rob-ford-part-1-111985831

Saying that broadband should be run "like a utility," raises more questions than it answers. I, too, want broadband run "like a utility," but that doesn't mean that I want the whole show to be provided solely by my federal or municipal government. A "utility" model for broadband should mean running conduit to every home in town, with point-to-point connections that deliver broadband via a municipally owned network – but not just that.

The municipal network should also offer "essential facilities sharing" in two forms: first, they should allow anyone to set up an ISP by renting shelf-space in the municipal data-center and installing their own switches that can provide internet to anyone in town. This would let large and small companies set up ISPs, as well as co-ops and nonprofits, or even tinkerers wanting to provide access to a group of friends. Beyond that, the city should rent space in the conduit itself, to support point-to-point links beyond those offered by the city – for example, between a university campus and an offsite supercomputing center, or two buildings owned by the same company, or even as a parallel set of fiber connections run by someone who's fed up with getting their internet service from Eric Adams.

This is a "pluralized" utility model: one that involves the city in providing infrastructure at several layers, as well as a "public option" – but which doesn't allow a city that's in thrall to Moms For Liberty to decide what you can say on the internet.

This principle generalizes beyond internet provision, too. Many people have observed that social media, with its strong "network effects" (meaning its value increases as more people use it), could be a "natural monopoly" and want a social media "utility." I can see the reasoning there, but if there's one thing we've learned from zuckermuskian legacy social media, it's that centralized control over speech forums is a moral hazard and an attractive nuisance. It's a political prize beyond measure, and it attracts all sorts of skullduggerous bids to suborn it and harness it to some political faction.

But there's a pluralized utility model for social media, too, thanks to modern, federated social media systems like Mastodon and Bluesky. These are open platforms that can support multiple, interconnected servers that all talk to one another. Unlike, say, Twitter, where you can only talk to other Twitter users, federated social media allows you to talk with anyone on any server, provided they want to talk with you.

As with fiber, a "utility" model for federated social media would feature public intervention at multiple layers of the system. Governments could (should!) run their own servers, providing the canonical source of government information. They can also provide turnkey cloud services for people who want to start their own services – and they can spin out the code that goes into these services into free/open source projects that others can use (and contribute to). Governments could support people who are trying to migrate off of legacy social media (for example, through library workshops and helplines), and pay to label and tag media (for example, media that is compliant with the public education curriculum). Governments could also offer public servers where you could sign up to get online – and because federated social media makes it easy to move your account from one server to another, it would be easy to move from that server to one run by a nonprofit, a co-op or a business:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/06/25/eurostack/#viktor-orbans-isp

Think of this pluralized utility model as being something like your city's roads. It's great for your city to provide roads, and great for them to run buses on those roads, and to create bike lanes and bike parking spots and other infrastructure. For roads to be "public," it does not follow that everything on them be licensed and operated by the municipal government: we can still have private bikes, bikeshares, regulated taxis and licensed private motor vehicles. The roads are still "public" but Boris Johnson doesn't get to decide where you can go.

In 2023, I got scammed by a fake restaurant. I was on the couch with a friend from out of town who'd come by to watch a movie. We were chatting and decided to order from our local Thai restaurant. The top result on Google was a paid ad (marked out with the word "ad" in 8-point, grey-on-white type) that had a plausible domain name, which led to a replica of my local place's menu, only with the prices set 15% higher. I didn't even notice – not until the restaurant called me to say that they'd had a flood of orders from these scammers, who charged their customers' credit cards 15% over the odds, then placed an order for delivery using their own credit card numbers. I ended up contesting the charge with Amex, getting the scammers' Wix and credit card accounts canceled, and shaming Google into blocking their ads:

https://nypost.com/2023/02/25/cory-doctorow-duped-by-fake-thai-restaurant-scam/

Then there's the guy who used leaked data from my credit union to impersonate their fraud department, calling me up and social-engineering me out of the last seven digits of my card number (not the last four, as is common – most banks use the same nine-digit prefix, so the final seven digits are all you need to derive the whole card number). The scammer called right after I used two dodgy ATMs in New Orleans, during my last hour in town when I was rushing around to get my most favorite sandwich in the world before leaving. It was the day that a Boeing 737 Max lost its door-plug so the airport was a zoo and we barely made the flight, so I lost the hour I'd planned to use to call the bank's fraud department back. Again: if, if, if. If he'd called an hour earlier – or later. If there hadn't been a giant aviation disaster. If I hadn't been traveling. The scammer had to get lucky once, I had to be lucky every time:

https://pluralistic.net/2024/02/05/cyber-dunning-kruger/#swiss-cheese-security

I got scammed again last Christmas week. I was in NYC with my wife and daughter and I'd gotten great tickets to see The Outsiders on Broadway. It was my kid's first musical and to her surprise, she loved it. In the cab back to the friend's place we were staying at, we talked about what other musicals she might want to see. She loves South Park, and I'd seen banners advertising The Book of Mormon (which was created by the same people) in LA. So I looked up "book of mormon tickets los angeles" on my phone in the cab and found the production's website and ordered the tickets, working quickly in the cab because it was one of those websites that has a countdown timer so you have to finish your transaction in five minutes.

It wasn't the real Book of Mormon website. It was a scam website, reselling Book of Mormon tickets at a 200%+ markup. That fact was noted in infinitesimal writing on the main screen, which I missed in the crowded taxi backseat while I raced the countdown timer. I figured it out about 20 seconds after the transaction cleared, and immediately emailed the vendor to cancel it. All I got was a series of smug "all transactions final" emails from outsource customer service reps (in the end, I was able to get my credit card issuer to reverse the transaction, but it took months). But yeah, I got scammed by a sleazy company called "Bigstub." Fuck those guys.

Every time I got scammed, the con that got me was nearly identical to a con that I'd avoided on numerous occasions. The fact that I'm actually pretty good at spotting this kind of hustle, 99.9% of the time, didn't mean I was immune it it. It just meant that I was vulnerable under very special circumstances, and those very special circumstances do crop up from time to time.

This is the most important lesson of scams: that no matter how well-attuned you are to cons, you can still be conned. The belief that you are immune to a con actually makes you a mark. It's for that reason that I recount the tales of how I got scammed – to help other people understand that being sophisticated, alert and even paranoid is no guarantee that you will be safe.

I'm not the only person for whom a detailed knowledge of scams created immunity from being scammed. Troy Hunt is the proprietor of HaveIBeenPwned.com, the internet's most comprehensive and reliable breach notification site. Hunt pretty much invented the practice of tracking breaches, and he is steeped – saturated – in up-to-the-minute, nitty-gritty details of how internet scams work.

Guess who got phished?

https://www.troyhunt.com/a-sneaky-phish-just-grabbed-my-mailchimp-mailing-list/

Hunt had just gotten off a long-haul flight. He was jetlagged. He got a well-constructed, plausible counterfeit email from Mailchimp telling him that his mailing-list – which he absolutely relies upon – had been frozen after a spam complaint, and advising him to click on a link to contest the suspension. He was taken to a fake login screen that his password manager didn't autopopulate, so he manually pasted the password in (Mailchimp doesn't have 2FA). It was only when the login session hung that he realized he'd been scammed – and by then, it was too late. Within minutes, his mailing list had been exported by the scammers.

In his postmortem of the scam, Hunt identifies the overlapping factors that made him vulnerable. He was jetlagged. The mailing list was important. Bogus spam complaints are common. Big corporate sites like Mailchimp often redirect their logins through different domains, which causes password manager autofill to fail. Hunt had experienced near-identical phishing attempts before and spotted them, but this one just happened to land at the very moment that he was vulnerable. Plus – as with my credit union scam – it seems likely that Mailchimp itself had been breached (or has an insider threat), which allowed the scammers to pad out the scam with plausible details that made it seem legit.

Hunt's forensics on the scam are very interesting. Of especial note is the fact that Mailchimp had retained the email addresses of thousands of former subscribers who had already unsubscribed, meaning that their data was exposed as well. It's not clear why Mailchimp would do this, but I will note that the company is extraordinarily spammer-friendly and goes to great lengths to make it easy for spammers to add you to their lists, and impossible to get off of all those lists;

https://pluralistic.net/2024/07/22/degoogled/#kafka-as-a-service

Getting scammed doesn't mean you were stupid, or careless. Frequently, it just means you were distracted, upset, or distraught. We're living through a moment of total, all-consuming chaos, and the scammers are sharpening their blades – not least because the people running the show are unabashed grifters who openly boast that when they get one over on you, "that makes me smart":

https://pluralistic.net/2024/12/04/its-not-a-lie/#its-a-premature-truth

Buyer beware – it's ugly out there, and it's gonna get a lot worse before it gets better.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog:

https://pluralistic.net/2025/04/05/troy-hunt/#teach-a-man-to-phish

Image: Cryteria (modified) https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:HAL9000.svg

When billionaires like Warren Buffet tell Jesse Eisinger that he doesn't pay tax because "he thinks his money is better spent on charitable works rather than contributing to an insignificant reduction of the deficit," he is, at best, technically wrong about why we tax, and at worst, he's telling a self-serving lie. The US government doesn't need to eliminate its debt. Doing so would be catastrophic. "Retiring the US debt" is the same thing as "retiring the US dollar."

So if the USG isn't taxing to retire its debts, why does it tax? Because when the USG – or any other currency issuer – creates a token, that token is, on its face, useless. If I offered to sell you some "Corycoins," you would quite rightly say that Corycoins have no value and thus you don't need any of them.

For a token to be liquid – for it to be redeemable for valuable things, like labor, goods and services – there needs to be something that someone desires that can be purchased with that token. Remember when Disney issued "Disney dollars" that you could only spend at Disney theme parks? They traded more or less at face value, even outside of Disney parks, because everyone knew someone who was planning a Disney vacation and could make use of those Disney tokens.

But if you go down to a local carny and play skeeball and win a fistful of tickets, you'll find it hard to trade those with anyone outside of the skeeball counter, especially once you leave the carny. There's two reasons for this:

1) The things you can get at the skeeball counter are pretty crappy so most people don't desire them; and ' 2) Most people aren't planning on visiting the carny, so there's no way for them to redeem the skeeball tickets even if they want the stuff behind the counter (this is also why it's hard to sell your Iranian rials if you bring them back to the US – there's not much you can buy in Iran, and even someone you wanted to buy something there, it's really hard for US citizens to get to Iran).

But when a sovereign currency issuer – one with the power of the law behind it – demands a tax denominated in its own currency, they create demand for that token. Everyone desires USD because almost everyone in the USA has to pay taxes in USD to the government every year, or they will go to prison. That fact is why there is such a liquid market for USD. Far more people want USD to pay their taxes than will ever want Disney dollars to spend on Dole Whips, and even if you are hoping to buy a Dole Whip in Fantasyland, that desire is far less important to you than your desire not to go to prison for dodging your taxes.

Even if you're not paying taxes, you know someone who is. The underlying liquidity of the USD is inextricably tied to taxation, and that's the first reason we tax. By issuing a token – the USD – and then laying on a tax that can only be paid in that token (you cannot pay federal income tax in anything except USD – not crypto, not euros, not rials – only USD), the US government creates demand for that token.

And because the US government is the only source of dollars, the US government can purchase anything that is within its sovereign territory. Anything denominated in US dollars is available to the US government: the labor of every US-residing person, the land and resources in US territory, and the goods produced within the US borders. The US doesn't need to tax us to buy these things (remember, it makes new money by typing numbers into a spreadsheet at the Federal Reserve). But it does tax us, and if the taxes it levies don't equal the spending it's making, it also sells us T-bills to make up the shortfall.

So the US government kinda acts like classical physics is true, that is, like it is a household and thus a currency user, and not a currency issuer. If it spends more than it taxes, it "borrows" (issues T-bills) to make up the difference. Why does it do this? To fight inflation.

The US government has no monetary constraints, it can make as many dollars as it cares to (by typing numbers into a spreadsheet). But the US government is fiscally constrained, because it can only buy things that are denominated in US dollars (this is why it's such a big deal that global oil is priced in USD – it means the US government can buy oil from anywhere, not only the USA, just by typing numbers into a spreadsheet).

The supply of dollars is infinite, but the supply of labor and goods denominated in US dollars is finite, and, what's more, the people inside the USA expect to use that labor and goods for their own needs. If the US government issues so many dollars that it can outbid every private construction company for the labor of electricians, bricklayers, crane drivers, etc, and puts them all to work building federal buildings, there will be no private construction.

Indeed, every time the US government bids against the private sector for anything – labor, resources, land, finished goods – the price of that thing goes up. That's one way to get inflation (and it's why inflation hawks are so horny for slashing government spending – to get government bidders out of the auction for goods, services and labor).

But while the supply of goods for sale in US dollars is finite, it's not fixed. If the US government takes away some of the private sector's productive capacity in order to build interstates, train skilled professionals, treat sick people so they can go to work (or at least not burden their working-age relations), etc, then the supply of goods and services denominated in USD goes up, and that makes more fiscal space, meaning the government and the private sector can both consume more of those goods and services and still not bid against one another, thus creating no inflationary pressure.

Thus, taxes create liquidity for US dollars, but they do something else that's really important: they reduce the spending power of the private sector. If the US only ever spent money into existence and never taxed it out of existence, that would create incredible inflation, because the supply of dollars would go up and up and up, while the supply of goods and services you could buy with dollars would grow much more slowly, because the US government wouldn't have the looming threat of taxes with which to coerce us into doing the work to build highways, care for the sick, or teach people how to be doctors, engineers, etc.

Taxes coercively reduce the purchasing power of the private sector (they're a stick). T-bills do the same thing, but voluntarily (they the carrot).

A T-bill is a bargain offered by the US government: "Voluntarily park your money instead of spending it. That will create fiscal space for us to buy things without bidding against you, because it removes your money from circulation temporarily. That means we, the US government, can buy more stuff and use it to increase the amount of goods and services you can buy with your money when the bond matures, while keeping the supply of dollars and the supply of dollar-denominated stuff in rough equilibrium."

So a bond isn't a debt – it's more like a savings account. When you move money from your checking to your savings, you reduce its liquidity, meaning the bank can treat it as a reserve without worrying quite so much about you spending it. In exchange, the bank gives you some interest, as a carrot.

I know, I know, this is a big-ass wall of text. Congrats if you made it this far! But here's the upshot. We should tax billionaires, because it will reduce their economic power and thus their political power.

But we absolutely don't need to tax billionaires to have nice things. For example: the US government could hire every single unemployed person without creating inflationary pressure on wages, because inflation only happens when the US government tries to buy something that the private sector is also trying to buy, bidding up the price. To be "unemployed" is to have labor that the private sector isn't trying to buy. They're synonyms. By definition, the feds could put every unemployed person to work (say, training one another to be teachers, construction workers, etc – and then going out and taking care of the sick, addressing the housing crisis, etc etc) without buying any labor that the private sector is also trying to buy.

What's even more true than this is that our taxes are not going to reduce the national debt. That guest you had who said, "Even if we tax billionaires, we will never pay off the national debt,"" was 100% right, because the national debt equals all the money in circulation.

Which is why that guest was also very, very wrong when she said, "We will have to tax normal people too in order to pay off the debt." We don't have to pay off the debt. We shouldn't pay off the debt. We can't pay off the debt. Paying off the debt is another way of saying "eliminating the dollar."

Taxation isn't a way for the government to pay for things. Taxation is a way to create demand for US dollars, to convince people to sell goods and services to the US government, and to constrain private sector spending, which creates fiscal space for the US government to buy goods and services without bidding up their prices.

And in a "classical physics" sense, all of the preceding is kinda a way of saying, "Taxes pay for government spending." As a rough approximation, you can think of taxes like this and generally not get into trouble.

But when you start to make policy – when you contemplate when, whether, and how much to tax billionaires – you leave behind the crude, high-level approximation and descend into the nitty-gritty world of things as they are, and you need to jettison the convenience of the easy-to-grasp approximation.

If you're interested in learning more about this, you can tune into this TED Talk by Stephanie Kelton, formerly formerly advisor to the Senate Budget Committee chair, now back teaching and researching econ at University of Missouri at Kansas City:

https://www.ted.com/talks/stephanie_kelton_the_big_myth_of_government_deficits?subtitle=en

Stephanie has written a great book about this, The Deficit Myth:

https://pluralistic.net/2020/05/14/everybody-poops/#deficit-myth

There's a really good feature length doc about it too, called "Finding the Money":

https://findingmoneyfilm.com/

If you'd like to read more of my own work on this, here's a column I wrote about the nature of currency in light of Web3, crypto, etc:

https://locusmag.com/2022/09/cory-doctorow-moneylike/

Tor Books as just published two new, free LITTLE BROTHER stories: VIGILANT, about creepy surveillance in distance education; and SPILL, about oil pipelines and indigenous landback.

If you'd like an essay-formatted version of this post to read or share, here's a link to it on pluralistic.net, my surveillance-free, ad-free, tracker-free blog: