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Surveillance may be "too cheap to meter", but it isn't cheap.

Millions of hard drives run 24/7 in thousands of data-centres around the world. Millions are discarded and replaced annually. System security is inversely proportional to the demands and power of surveillance actors (NSO for example), so we all lose money when we tolerate surveillance. By 2025 cyber-security will cost the world about $10.5 trillion per annum, and a significant amount of that will directly result from the existence of a concomitant surveillance industry.

The cost to society and business in damaged trust and lost opportunity must run to dozens of trillions over the past decade.

No! Surveillance is cheap to tiny minority who inflict a colossal economic externality onto the rest of society.

> IT nerds tend to find technological solutions for all sorts of > problems—economic, political, sociological, and so on. Most of the > time, these solutions don't make the problems that much worse, but > when a problem is of a purely economic nature, only solutions that > affect the economics of the situation can possibly work.

This is insightful. Let's start changing the economics around surveillance. Let's make it very, very expensive again.

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