The Social Dilemma

That's not the case.

Consider the purest examples: Google routinely incorporates factors beyond short term profit into their ranking functions. For instance they ranked SSL using websites higher than non-SSL using websites, to encourage use of encryption. The ads "quality score" system penalises advertisers whose ads appear to be low quality, defined by users not finding them useful. The constant shovelling of social justice themes into the search engine homepage.

The biggest problem these firms have is that they are not focused exclusively on maximising profit. Profit is an excellent metric! It is the sum of all the happiness and utility you are creating across all your customer and userbase, minus effort expended, in a single quantifiable number. Think of all the happiness created by Apple, Amazon, Google and yes even Facebook and Twitter. Hundreds of millions of people use the services of these firms, often for free, and they use it because they like it.

The problem big tech firms have is they explicitly got on board with "let's maximize world happiness" as a goal. Dumb dumb dumb. Nobody agrees what world happiness is, but there sure are a lot of activists who will always be convinced you're not doing enough about it. Once you go down that path you'll never stop walking, and the further you walk, the more abusive the activists get. It's so subjective and unquantifiable you can never tell if you've done enough.

my belief is that we're in a tipping point where the market, as an optimizer, is getting out of control and needs to be reined in

Isn't that just a classical Marxist or Malthusian collapse proposal? People have been predicting that capitalism will somehow collapse in on itself for hundreds of years, it never has because it's a fundamentally natural, evolved and stable system. The alternatives, not so much.

I have a strong bias against any sort of automatically recurring charge. In some ways I'm very illogical about it--yearly subscriptions like Amazon Prime or my VPN aren't too bad because I can see the cost and not worry about it for a while. But I've just been trained through experience to see anything monthly (or less) as a way to disguise the real cost through stretching it out (even if I can easily do the arithmetic and see the annual cost.

Regardless, knowing about the potential for abusing the data compiled on my behavior is enough to make me feel a bit "icky" or mildly uneasy. It's enough to make me avoid using anything from Facebook, for example. But it's not enough to keep me from checking my subs on YouTube or using Google navigation when I drive somewhere new.

If it was as simple as paying $100/year to use Google services without data collection it would be easy, but then what stuff would stop working? A good bit of the usefulness of Google nav or whatever comes from how it collects usage data or ties in with my calendar to remind me when I need to leave to make it to an appointment on time.

And then what about all of the other things I interact with that collect data? Do I need to figure out what they all are and pay them a yearly fee as well? What about the ones who decide it's still easier and more profitable to skip the whole thing and keep making their money by profiling my behavior?

Instead, I end up avoiding Facebook properties, blocking ads, never using rewards cards, trying to ignore the OG offenders (credit card companies), and still feeling uneasy about all the info being analyzed about me daily.

One of the most interesting observations about not having a smart phone was not how my behavior changed, but how others behavior changed. As my friends became painfully aware that I don't have a smart phone, I'm not checking my email 24/7, their texts don't get read-receipts, and they don't see the ellipses as I type text replies... they became less demanding/insistent of my time (except for the urgent things, of course). It was really freeing.

I only got a smartphone again when I lost my Nokia 6 hours before I had to catch a plane for a week long trip -- I pulled an old smartphone out of my junk drawer, threw a SIM card in it real fast, and headed to the airport. I have hardly any apps on it now, and it's great.

its just that the 7 sins always win hands down. even for someone who's aware of their corrupting influence.