The Future

by Naomi Alderman

“There never used to be a way to own the contents of everyone’s address book. Or the list of things you bought at the store. Or the words you’d used to talk to your friends. Or the data about where you are. Or the pictures you’d drawn and put in a gallery or on your wall. They’ve taken all that information—scraped the data. They’ve amalgamated that and made it more efficient, but they haven’t used that efficiency to benefit us all; they’ve used it to enrich themselves and keep the rest of us poor.”

That list of your friends belongs to you. You should be able to get it and see their updates—that they write for free—in any way you want. Not just through services that monetize anger and show you ads.”

This is always the secret; this was how these technology fortunes had been made: make it all so easy and enjoyable and frictionless that you never start to ask yourself the big questions about whether this is really how you want to be spending your life.