“Reasonable trade-off” is all too often just a baby step to something so much worse.

Perhaps this really is just Nintendo solving the scalping problem, but it sets the foundation for policies, technology, and cultural apathy that can be even farther weaponized against people and used to manipulate how people spend money. Stuff like this is dangerous as fuck, now more than ever.

Any system used to spy on users’ daily activities and preferentially rewards people that are predetermined to have the greatest chance to make the most profit of off, seems like a fucking awful and disturbingly distopian idea.

I heard this concept somewhere once of “Technical Debt” wherein a thing gets made and it works really well but then it gets updated or new features are added and something breaks, but rather than tear the whole thing apart to fix the issue, a patch or bandaid gets slapped on to ship the thing. Then the next update comes along and this time it takes two bandaids, one to ‘fix’ the new problem and one to keep the old bandaid on. The next update takes three bandaids, then four . . . and so on. The accumulation of all these bandaids is known as the Technical Debt, and it must always be repaid, somehow, someday.

Microsoft stubbornly refuses to repay their technical debt at all costs, Apple is terrified of letting anyone ever get even a glimpse of their mountain of technical debt, and Linux bathes in a weird soup of refusing to let technical debt even happen and dispensing bandaids so fast they make the RedCross look like a joke.