[kznewman]

I think there are some visionary things here but he misses the 'consent' part. By using free services we do give consent and if we don't like the privacy policies of Facebook et al then nobody forces us to use them. Yes providers should be honest about their policies and some do play dirty tricks. We learn which ones are not really honest so if we keep using them, we can’t really claim surprise or lack of consent.

Free stuff costs. Not money but there are costs. In the future world he is imagining there will be some who want to pay for their own machines and control the software that runs on them.

Being a parasite means riding a host and giving up some critical decisions about where and how the host lives.

[Edit for grammer]

[loup-vaillant]

By "consent", he meant "informed consent". That requires reading the terms of service and understand their implications. Few people actually do that. The rest of us merely click our way to something that "just works".

For instance few Gmail users are actually aware that Google is routinely doing semantic analysis of their e-mail. When I tell them, they're invariably mildly shocked. (I insist on "semantic" even if their methods are statistical, because Markov chains are highly correlated to meaning.)