Right. It's a great story but to me it's more of a commentary on modern Internet-era ethics than it is a prediction of the future.
It's highly unlikely that we'll be scanning, uploading, and booting up brains in the cloud any time soon. This isn't the direction technology is going. If we could, though, the author's spot on that there would be millions of people who would do some horrific things to those brains, and there would be trillions of dollars involved.
The whole attention economy is built around manipulating people's brains for profit and not really paying attention to how it harms them. The story is an allegory for that.
It's highly unlikely that we'll be scanning, uploading, and booting up brains in the cloud any time soon. This isn't the direction technology is going. If we could, though, the author's spot on that there would be millions of people who would do some horrific things to those brains, and there would be trillions of dollars involved.
The whole attention economy is built around manipulating people's brains for profit and not really paying attention to how it harms them. The story is an allegory for that.