I think we've become obsessed with the conservative, scared, frightened, what-about-the-potential-for-abuse viewpoint. Because, in large part, it's the only view we can talk about & sell. Everything else is esoteric & technical & speculative, is just some idea that may not work, & is mostly abstract.

But damage & harm is real, and it makes a powerful headline.

I really believe things would look different if we weren't all to at ends. If we could actually see & experience tech in a modestly reasonable, user-controlled way, if we could see the overlays of weights & pressures that make up our current upvote/downvote algorithm & tune it ourselves... if we had some post-consumer avenues for exploration we were walking, I think we could see society improve itself & make gains. Right now that's unimaginable. The harm & the bad is the only thing we can grasp. In part because computing is kept all in the cloud, in big data keeps, far off & remote, with us here as powerless agents simply receiving whatever signals it deigns beam at us.

Society, if given a chance to do so, would regulate & improve this world. But society's input has not been welcome. Computing has been getting less & less democratic, less and less part of the natural observable world, and more cloistered, closed & shitty, for decades. We cannot even imagine a progressive outlook, where we might participate, and it's hard to guess what things would be like, if we could.