Convenience Costs (the extraction economy with Tim Wu)

I do think our online world, and frankly, our regular lives are run by convenience as a force more than we maybe would like to admit. The fact that when you get comfortable and things are convenient, it really becomes hard to change what you're doing. We've fallen into that trap with the tech platforms where we say, "Oh, no, you can't possibly limit their take because they're going to invent the future. And if you object to that, then you're against the future and you're a pessimist and you're ..." And I'm saying we've been blackmailed.

Today we have a special bonus episode of Policy Prompt. What you're about to hear is a prerecorded conversation that was hosted live at Hot Docs in Toronto, Ontario in November 2025, where I speak with Tim Wu about his new book, The Age of Extraction: How Tech Platforms Conquered the Economy and Threaten Our Future Prosperity. Tim Wu is the preeminent scholar and former White House official who coined the phrase "net neutrality". His work explores the rise of platform power and details the risks and rewards of working within such systems. Hope you enjoy this conversation.

One of the incredible words that has come up in a lot of the initial coverage of your book starts with a T, titan. I think that's pretty amazing and incredible. The book has been called urgent, pessimistic, and a dispiriting guide to the way that Silicon Valley's warped our markets and democracy. You and I are going to talk a little bit about the '90s. We're going to define extraction and we're going to offer some Canadian twists. You write in the book that the main goal, I took note, is to help readers understand this emergent form of economic power of our time, the artificially intelligent tech platform, and that the book also aims to answer the question, "Just what happened to the broad spread of prosperity and democracy that many expected to follow the internet revolution." What the hell happened?

The idea of this book, one of the reasons I wrote it, was in some sense to examine that promise from the '90s, that the internet was going to make everybody rich and was going to make every country into a democracy and was going to make everyone with a creative talent a star. I mean, this was a period of extraordinary optimism. And in some ways, I know some of the reviews have said it's in ways pessimistic. In some ways, this writing is motivated by my innate optimism and a sense that we need to learn from what went wrong with our dreams, with our imagined utopia, where we went astray and try to recapture that dream of the '90s, because, at some level, I think it was a good idea.

In other words, it is a great idea that anyone should be able to start their own business on the internet somewhere and reach a new client base. It is a wonderful idea that you could, I don't know, have as your hobby being drawing some kind of cartoon and find a niche audience and have that become a big part of your life. These are all really valid, important things. But I think that we made a mistake somewhere along the lines, and we can talk where, and I think we have allowed, as I discuss in the book, what we thought were the neutral platforms, the catalysts, the hosts who were going to help everything, we've let them just take too much from everybody else. And the message that I'm sending with this book is now is the time to turn back if we want to recapture that vision we once had, we want to get back to this vision of what we can be.

Tell us a little bit more about yourself in the '90s as you're observing and experiencing, no, and sharing in that optimism, right? And maybe when you noticed things start to turn, right? When you started to sort of smell this shift maybe before you were feeling it.

Well, I'll say one thing is I had a better time with the 1993 World Series than the most recent one. I'm still recovering from that. I made the unwise decision to come here for those games last weekend, and I feel like I'm ... Anyway, flying in today, I could see the SkyDome out of the ... Or what's it called now? Something Centre?

It's called [inaudible 00:04:44]-

Yeah. Well, I could see the SkyDome and I kind of had to look away. It was painful. But I believed in it. I believed, and I think our generation saw this technology as a liberating force. In some ways, the instantiation of the human potential movement of the '70s and '60s, which sort of saw that humanity was just so much more talented and gifted, all of us could find a place. And I bought into it. I think that I went to work in Silicon Valley for a while. Many of the people I worked with were later convicted of felonies. So I had a kind of mixed experience that I can talk a little bit about that was a little bit disillusioning.

But I was there. I was with it. I believed in the dream. And as I said, part of why I wrote this book, it was sort of like a personal investigation of what went wrong. And part of what I did to study that is I went back and I read all the ... I read Wired Magazine, Wired in the '90s, I read all the books written around that time, to try to get at what we were thinking and what really changed or what went wrong.

You say that I would suggest that convenience is the most underestimated and least understood force in the world today. Tell us more. Why?

Yes, I will with a little bit of a lead up. One of the interesting things about the internet of the '90s versus the 2010s, and I really see 2010s as the turning point in this narrative, as you go back, and as I did, and read all the old articles, the emotion or sides of human conduct that they appeal to are really our better angels. So in the '90s, it's all about how the internet is ... There's a real quote from Clay Shirky, which is, "The internet is powered by love." And everybody, and Tim Berners-Lee, who invented the worldwide web, said, "It's all about sharing and kindness and cooperation." And I think there was this belief, that important belief that the old days of greedy capitalism were over, that now essentially the hippies were going to win and that sharing and kindness and cooperation, and that was kind of the idea of the worldwide web, like people would put out stuff and you could surf it. That was the idea of much of the user-created content movement of the '00s. That's why Clay Shirky bought that.

And we'll get back to this convenience question. I think in the 2010s, there was a turn in the businesses tasked with making a buck as to what impulses and human emotions they began to rely upon. And I'll mention two, the second of which is convenience. The first and well-documented is the turn to the important power of addiction, strong emotions like hatred and anger, and what are some of the most activating emotions, and disgust and fear. A turn to those emotions as part of business models was a big part of the 2010s. Not this book, another book, I talk about this somewhat in another book of mine, Attention Merchants, sort of chronicle very carefully the realization that that was the gold. You can really hold on to people by digging at their darkest emotions. So people tasked with making a buck, particularly in social media, began to turn to essentially the dark side.

And the second part, which I write about, as you mentioned, this is really from 2015 on. So jumping ahead a little bit, the major platforms, the familiar faces we know, Amazon, Google, Facebook, and so forth, have sort of gained their dominance by the 2015s. So the change and the challenge becomes not winning, but staying there. I'd say the last 10 years have been a very cynical but very successful bet on the power of human laziness, or I should say a little differently. The fact that when you get comfortable and things are convenient, it really becomes hard to change what you're doing.

And the bets on convenience is sort of this force, certainly not ... Freud said the most powerful forces in the universe were the death urge and the sex urge. I think convenience, at least based on my friends, seems even as powerful, which is like, "Ugh, is there parking?" Or, "God, we got to go to another site other than Amazon, enter a whole bunch of stuff? Forget it." So I do think our online world, and frankly, our regular lives, are run by convenience as a force more than we maybe would like to admit.

So then how to push back on that?

Well, I mean, it's part and parcel of the whole ... You mean on convenience or on the whole change?

Let's probe it just a little bit on that convenience impulse, because I do think it's really interesting. It implicates the reader and the individual outside of business or government. And I think changes us from just being consumers acquiring something and sort of shows a bit of a stickiness or an inertia or an acceptance, this tacit acceptance of how platforms are working or not working.

Yeah. I mean, this topic goes beyond tech platforms. It happens to be their business strategy, but it is a deeper topic is the role and the, I guess, extraordinary power of convenience to shape both commerce, but also our lives. What I think is really interesting is that most of us in our lives ... I mean, it's hard to resist convenience, very difficult, I would say, to reject it all and go live in a mud hut somewhere and, I mean, maybe a few weeks a year for camping or whatever, but most of us find it hard to live without convenient options.

But what's very interesting is if you ask almost anyone, is there something you do where you don't do it the easy way? It almost always ends up being their hobby. And the thing that they often talk about is the source of the most meaning in their lives. So an example, it's obviously easier to microwave dinners than get ingredients and cook something from scratch or bake something, but people take a lot of meaning for that who like to cook. It's easier to drive to the top of a mountain than to climb up there, but mountain climbing is pretty important hobby. So there's something really deep and important in there about what it means to us that when we let others do it for us or take the convenient way, you're able to do more, but your life may mean less. I think this is a particularly important thing with the rise of artificial intelligence. Perhaps you were going to ask that, but I'll go there.

You're the moderator now. You can just tell me.

No, I mean, I've been really interested. So I'm going to ask myself-

No, I'm into it. Yeah, go. Let's go.

I'll ask myself a question, which is people were genuinely optimistic about the internet, excited about it, thought it would be awesome. There were a few people who's like, "Oh, it's going to suck." But a lot of people were into it. Artificial intelligence, I feel there's a small group of people who are really, really into it. I could even do a poll. So how many people are thinking artificial intelligence is really going to improve things? They're looking forward to their super ... they're optimistic about it? Put up your hands. There's a few. And how people are a little wary and think maybe it could make things suck or just like, yeah.

Maybe two-thirds?

Yeah. Actually, frankly, I couldn't see anything. So ...

I think about a third, two-thirds.

Okay. And that's, I think, kind of typical. In New York, people are even more pessimistic, by the way. I would say like one dude who looked like a computer programmer who was into it when I did the same poll in New York. And sometimes I wonder why. And I think it comes back to our conversation about meaning and convenience and things like that, which is the internet held this promise of you, but in some ways better, or you being able to reach more people or connect with your friends or something like that. And artificial intelligence has this kind of allure of doing stuff for you, but maybe also doing the stuff that has meaning or makes it worthwhile to do your job. I mean, for example, I'm an author and that usually means I like the writing part, but AI is also very, very good at ... You know what I mean? It gets at the core of it. And instead you are in the position where you're kind of coordinating, you can ... Supervising what the AIs are doing.

So there is this vision where we all become middle management, kind of overseeing a lot of other little tasks. And I kind of feel like a lot of jobs are going in that direction. I mean, how many of your jobs are sort of doing the thing versus arranging for the thing to be done, right? Or looking for an email that someone wrote a year ago and trying to find a document or something, like how much of it is actually doing, let's say ... And some jobs are doing the thing, like writing or whatever, but the arranging part-

I saw a cartoon where it was like this guy's behind his computer and he's like, "Make a report of these short notes," to a ChatGPT type situation, so it farts out a big report and he sends it to his colleague and then she opens his computer and puts it back in the LLM and is like, "Summarize this report from my colleague." And it's like, "Okay, what are we really doing here? What are we doing?"

And I think that people, yes, I think that among other things, I'm interested in the history of tools and I'm interested in our very identity as tool-using creatures. I think one of the definition of humans is like tool, I don't remember which one, is like tool-using creatures. So I think that we go forward as a society and as a species, frankly, when we manage to improve our tools that augment us, make up for some of our deficiencies, like deficiencies being not strong enough, or it's easier to cook with a frying pan than with your hand.

Great example.

Weird example, but you know what I mean? It's augmentative.

Yeah.

Yeah. But AI feels replacenative, substitutative or something like that, and they get to do the good stuff.

Policy Prompt is produced by the Centre for International Governance Innovation. CIGI is a nonpartisan think tank based in Waterloo, Canada with an international network of fellows, experts, and contributors. CIGI tackles the governance challenges and opportunities of data and digital technologies, including AI and their impact on the economy, security, democracy, and ultimately our societies. Learn more at cigionline.org.

Let's look at platforms in a little bit of a different light, throw them a bone for a second. You talk about that kind of core problem of making small businesses big. And when you talk about it, you have this really lovely shout-out to a three-man Canadian firm named Banana Phone, and you point to enabling platforms as a way to sort of make that link between more open platforms and economic freedom.

Yes.

Can you expand on that? Because I think that helps hinge some of the optimism for the potential future of this economy.

Tim Wu:

Yeah. Let me talk about the dream of what Amazon could have been and what it was, and then what was lost, because I think that's an important story here. By the way, I think one clear evidence of my Canadian nature, the fact I'm always sneaking little Canadian references until-

I love the-

... audiences were ...

Easter eggs.

Americans are the main audience ... Yeah, Easter eggs. I put little Easter eggs for those who are fans of Raffi and his banana phone. So Amazon, one of the big dreams of the '90s that I already mentioned was the idea that it would be much easier to start a business selling even sort of obscure items like the banana phone or this. I profile in the book, a barber in Indiana who has a pomade that I guess he makes himself or somebody starts selling and top shelf pomade and has a lot of luck. So that kind of thing, it's a form of economic freedom. Even that sense, if you had to, you could always start your own business. I think even if it's there, has a kind of a liberating influence on you because you're like, "I really can't take it. I can go." Or you could become wealthy, honestly, independently, and that is a good way.

So Amazon, as I remember, Amazon used to be a bookstore a long time ago, but they only sold books and they were not exactly normal, but they basically just had a lot of books in a warehouse. And then they changed the business model slowly and became a platform, which is to say anyone could sell on Amazon Marketplace. That was a big change because there's a lot more economic juice in the ... I mean, this is what this book's about. And Amazon realized a few things that were really innovations. Maybe the biggest one was they realized that they needed to help sellers finish the deal and do the shipping. The eBay method, which was like a lot of duct tape and boxes, was not scaling. So for businesses, sellers, to get big, they needed someone to fulfill the order. So they really nailed order fulfillment.

So here we are about the year 2012, let's put it there, and Amazon has expanded this, it's growing. And a lot of people quit their jobs or start their businesses on Amazon. And I talked about that barber. I profile in the book some women in North Carolina who make kind of weird little objects like nightstands that you stick your phone to or something like that, like weird little ... but they make a business, make a life out of it. And the key fact from that period is that Amazon's take was low. It was between 15 and 20%. It was a low fee and they offered a lot and everybody went to Amazon. And so in a way it was, like I said, a little bit of the dream of the '90s realized, and since it could have real consequences for freedom and class differences and build a class of sort of sellers. So that was then.

Problem is that once Amazon had everybody, and I mean, had everyone, had most of the sellers, had most of the buyers, and became the dominant ... They fought off Walmart, very good at doing this at all, bought off eBay. They became basically the monopoly. And then they started turning the dial, the extraction dial. I need a phrase for this. They started moving up the fees, moving up the fees, and then finally they hit on the most ingenious method of extracting the most possible money from sellers, which is the idea of sponsored results, which seems really innocuous. Have you ever gone on Amazon? You're looking for shoelaces or bottled water.

Your book.

Yeah. And you get ... Oh gosh, I wonder if we pay for it, but [inaudible 00:20:59] is better for a generic item.

A Sharpie.

Sharpie, good. And then you get all these sponsored links and you don't really know why they're there and they're kind of confusing and sometimes not cheapest. So the sellers bid for those spots. And because they're bidding against each other and because they don't get found unless they're in the top, they get very expensive. So in a way, they bid away their own margins. So that became this really lucrative model and it started earning $10 billion, 20 billion. You know how much it made in 2024? $57 billion coming out of all those junky little ads. $57 billion, which is more than double the advertising revenue of every single newspaper on the planet. So we could have triple the number of newspapers we have, or you can have that little junky sponsored link. They found this one weird trick to make a fortune.

And I think it's the most lucrative. I don't know what it's going to be next year. I think it is the most lucrative. Amazon Web Services makes pretty good money. This has no cost. It has no cost to it, pure profit. And I think it's about as pure an example of valueless extraction that I've found. And I'll say, and there's more. I was doing ... Does anyone know Lena Khan, who was the FTC chair when I was in the White House? So we were doing this thing yesterday and she was telling me, we were doing this New York version of this event, and she was telling me that not only that, but Amazon was extracting from ... It kind of fools people with this auction to make them think that they're getting a placement that they're not actually getting.

Oh my gosh.

And they were taken, like all just taken ... because sellers are desperate and there's a quite amount of fraud in the actual selling of these links. So they've got this racket going on. And the thing that has happened, it's not impossible to sell on Amazon anymore, but this dream that it'll be this redistributive engine that people with a dream will go there and make their fortune has really disappeared. And the margins, I said they're about 15 to 20. Now they're creeping over 50, 60. Some people just lose money. They don't really realize it because you're in these tournaments. It's like a disease. It's almost as if the switch metaphor is a little bit ... You let someone build this toll bridge and everything was great and then you just let them start jacking up, and it's actually worse than that because people don't even know how much they're paying.

And you sort of differentiate a little bit that kind of in this age of extraction from sort of calling that like a junk fee in and of itself because of the activity that's happening. Flipping that again and sort of putting on my best kind of Bay Street brown shoes or whatever, you know what I mean? Instead of a hat, it's like shiny shoes. I think there's a universe that says, "That's actually just really smart business." And the sellers aren't revolting. People are participating. They must accept the terms of this marketplace or they're kind of willing to play ball. How do we turn that assumption that's also very kind of like textbook economic in a way, right? That there will be mobility from sellers towards something different or a rejection from consumers, however kind of tempted they are by convenience. How do we diagnosis it as something that shouldn't be happening?

I understand. First, I want to reject the premise that, I don't think if you said this, but it's always been this way. I think there has been a profound shift of what it means to do business, particularly in the United States, I think Canada's got it too, and it spread to a lot of the world. And one of the reasons I know this is I teach at business school too, and I feel that there has been a shift. I guess if an older model, slightly naive, was trying to build a better product and sell it for a price, I feel we are in the grip of a business mindset, which says the way you make money is you find pain points, you find where you have power over people, and then you extract to the maximum. You get yourself a monopoly over telecom or something, you ratchet those rates up, you take the ... I think market power over the last 10, 15 years has become the model.

I mean, I think we live ... The reason I called the book, The Age of Extraction, is because I feel it. And I want to just be a little more precise what I mean and eventually I'll ... What I mean by extraction, it's actually a technical economic term, I mean it in this sense of taking much more wealth or other assets than the value of what's being provided for the service in some disproportionate amount. Economists call it extraction of monopoly rent. But we've felt this, I think, or maybe you haven't and you've been lucky, but it's kind of that feeling like let's say something happens and you have to fly and you go to the airline counter and basically you have to pay what they charge you. Towns like Toronto, New York, when you think about rents for relatively modest apartments and so little supply, so much demand. In the United States, we have this with prescription medicine all the time. The industry will find some kind of obscure disease and there's only one maker of the drug and they'll just jack up the price. So that is extraction. Those are extractive business models. I think we live in an extractive economy where, frankly, as I just said, the whole idea is to try to find those. Now, you had a question I didn't answer, but ...

Oh, you're answering it. I mean, I appreciate how the book makes sure that that age of extraction spills over from digital to analog. You just mentioned housing, medicine, healthcare, kind of how we're reinforcing that culture of squeezing rather than building. And I think you have answered because I'm sort of asking why does this lens persist that this is good or that it should be rewarded, because that lens is there.

It's not crazy for business people to pursue this model. Although I will note that what I think used to restrain the most extractive business models in earlier times was this thing called ethics or morality where ... You sometimes see it in places and I think as having studied a little the pharmaceutical industry, I feel like at a different period in American history, they would invent the cure for some disease. They would realize that the people who are sick obviously are going to pay anything to get it, but they wouldn't be like, okay, why don't we charge them $100,000 a year for that until they die? There was a sense that we got sense of ethics or morality. I think the United States in particular, private equity has a big role in essentially targeting ethics as a business model. Finding some place ... Another thing I worked on when I was in the White House was nursing homes where I guess traditionally they were run and kind of like charities and people at the end of their lives, people are like, "Oh, those people have a lot of money before they die."

There's been, in the United States, a big investment in nursing homes and trying to basically empty the account before the person's gone with a million different things. So I'm not surprised that business people trained in completely amoral environments try to seek this out or even sort of justify it. Everyone has to justify their own existence, but the craziest thing is we let this happen in a democracy where supposedly we're in charge. That's what's crazy about it. It's not crazy to me that business people glorify it or talk about or try to make themselves feel better about it. The split between morality and business has been there for a while, but the fact we allow it is what shocks me.

I have a democracy question for you. This week, we had a new federal budget introduced in Canada, and I think it remains to be seen for us if Prime Minister Carney is going to govern more like a night watchman or a watch person or a gardener. Could you tell us more about that differentiation in terms of supporting markets and growth?

Yeah. Well, thank you from that. That's drawn from my book. There's various ideas of what the state should be with respect to the economy or just in general, what the role of government should be, society. And one of the classic libertarian positions was the night watchman state. Actually, it goes back for a while. It's kind of a state that stays out of most things and just really shows up when you need. A very minimal vision of the state. I am more attracted by the idea of the sort of gardener model, particularly for economics, which is to say ... Cory Doctorow's mother is here and I was talking about how Cory tried to talk me into communism as a 10-year-old.

So I don't believe that the government does everything well. I think private business does certain things very well. And so the government shouldn't try to grow in this hypothetical garden ... I mean, some things government needs to do, but it does need to try to structure the garden, that is the economy, prevent overgrowth of some that ... You're not going to let mint, which grows very fast, take over your whole garden. And you have to have some kind of structure. But what I talk about in the book and what second half is about is something I call an architecture of equality, which is a more structural approach to try to have an economy that works for people. I mean, just one example that I'll put out there, there are older technologies that have huge power over us, potentially, like electricity in the older days, railroads, but our approach has never been like, "Oh, just let those guys do what they want because they're going to invent the future or whatever. We've been blackmailed here." No one said, when electrified Ontario, no one said, "Well, okay, we'll electrify them, but we're not going to mess with how much they charge because they have to invent the computer or something like that." We're like, [inaudible 00:31:19].

And I think we've fallen into that trap with the tech platforms where we say, "Oh, no, you can't possibly limit their take because they're going to invent the future. And if you object to that, then you're against the future and you're a pessimist and you're living at home with your pets or sad ..." You know what I'm saying? We've been blackmailed by the innovation promise in a way, we were not with electricity, not with trains, not with other industries, and this idea that they alone can invent the future.

Without offering us a vision of that future, really, that's all that compelling, as you've said. Wikipedia is part of the age of extraction though now when algorithmic systems are being trained on it or Elon Musk has a Grok sort of version of it. Earlier this week, it was announced that Microsoft owned LinkedIn, I think they didn't really announce it, it was more low-key, is changing their terms of service so that if you participate on the platform and you want to add me, you're tacitly agreeing to let them take your information to sort of train their model. And we're seeing this in other systems as well. Isn't that a form of tying? And how is that part of the age of extraction where the price of participation on these platforms or with Google is volunteering information that will be monetized for someone and something else?

I mean, that's what's sort of strange about our age that would be hard for others to recognize from a previous era. And this is turning to the word "extraction" as sort of a resource extraction. Many of the business models of our time have in mind the idea of bringing you onto platform, keeping you there. It doesn't matter what you do. It's a little bit more like casino, but the extraction is of us. We're the resource. It's our attention, our time, our data, our kind of cognitive writings. And Wikipedia, a good example, borrowing off all the volunteer efforts of Wikipedia. The crazy thing is we sort of just, I think somewhat a little bit too optimistically, definitely too optimistically, never managed to pass privacy laws, at least in Europe didn't really do a good job either, just let this enormous, most valuable asset of our time just kind of be taken. And with less protests than silver and gold in the Americas, at least those guys put up a fight.

Well, speaking of fight, towards the end of the book, you talk about anger, right? I mean, I do want to know if you are mad and how mad we should be, but you're mostly talking about the risk of anger and observing the anger that is brewing and associated with this model.

Yeah. I mean, one of the reasons I wrote this book, a number of them, one of the reasons I wrote this book is I am really concerned about the fate of liberal democracy in our times and the future of civilization. That's another '90s theme that was definitely ... We were pretty sure that that was going to work out and we're going to be democracies and good times and the third way had saved us. It was nice to look at that way. I was reading recently, there's this German that studies democracy and rates countries, I think we're down to like 12% of the world's population is living in what you would call a liberal democracy. And something like over four billion people are on some version of dictator authoritarian government. I think it was actually over five billion. It was kind of a shocking stat that like, here we are in Canada, and I don't know what to say about the United States, Canada, England, Western Europe, people talk about a bubble, but liberal democracy has become this minority, this tiny end. That's government forms.

I'm worried, gosh, this is going to turn out to be a dark conversation, because the other thing I'm concerned about is turning into a two-class society. And one reason that I'm concerned about that is exactly a trend we're saying, is that I think that when you have too much wealth extraction, when you have a small group take too much money, it really does lead to a profound mass resentment as a political emotion. I think we've witnessed this. And it comes, it's expressed in weird ways. Sometimes it's like, "I hate immigrants," sometimes it's like antisemitism, sometimes it's elites, all kinds of weird stuff. But I think it really comes from a sense that something is unfair. And I think there's a lot of people in the world today who really think things are unfair and that when you no longer trust the major contest or systems or your government, it leads you and makes a country very open to the strong man who says, "I have the answer. I am here for you. The rest of them have screwed you."

And I think that's been the message. It's an old message from the '30s and '20s, had a lot of that. But if you look at Orban in Hungary, you look at Turkey, you look at the United States, it's a very simple message, which is like these system screwing you, the elites get all the money, it's an extractive economy, I'll fix it for you. Now, whether that happens or not, often actually there is some period of populist giving up. Hugo Chavez at first gave a ton of money out to poor people. I went to Venezuela once and the price of gas was like a penny a gallon or liter or whatever. But over the long term, the track record of authoritarian dictatorship leaves a lot to be desired.

I want to tell you and our audience just about one part of the book that really kind of hit. Is that okay? I apologize to Tim because I keep kind of reading out loud from the book, but I really liked what you had to say about becoming empowered while we're also so dependent and that subtle line between it. You write, "What is this human freedom we speak of? If you cannot live without your phone for more than an hour or two, are you really in charge of your own life if you lose hours every day to online randomness or try to win an argument against strangers on Bluesky and Twitter? Dependence on technology can make us soft or eat away at what we take to be our true selves. These are some of the larger stakes in the rise of business models centered on human dependence."

Well, that's some pretty dark stuff there. I can't believe I wrote that. And now I know why some of the reviews say it's kind of a slightly pessimistic look. Yes, I believe that is the challenge of our time. I mean, and I think that in some ways we're at risk of living lives that are not really ours. How often you have some kind of thing you want to do, I don't know, you go online, you go to write one email. Next thing you know, an hour's gone by and what happened to that, or three, you want to buy one product, you go somewhere else? How often is there that line between what you wanted to do and what you do? And I think that has something to do with living a life that's truly yours.

I mean, I didn't even ask you a question. I just read out loud, but I think jumping from that personal experience to kind of the policy world and sort of making it a shared mission is very intriguing and very important. So thank you for writing that. Tim, may you have many more sentences that continue to spark your thinking. Thank you so much.

Yeah, thank you.

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