Articles that make declarations about how bad X is and then follow that up with empty calls to action like "We need to end X" to get people nodding their heads in agreement are common and cheap. What's your solution? Is there one?

Sure, you can draw attention to something bad, but if all you ever do is live off the drama and frantically declare that X "needs to stop" (I loathe that airheaded phrase like few others), what good are you? Who's going to stop it? Passive voice does not impress. When I need to eat, I eat. I don't say "I need to eat" and leave it at that. I'd starve.

Clearly you think it can be stopped. Clearly you think it's not just an unfortunate malady of the age that we must bear. You think it can be fixed. Where's your proposal? How are we going to shift the tech economy away from surveillance?

The growth of the data economy is like the growth of finance. Neither finance nor data gathering actually produce anything. They can help produce something, inform or facilitate the production, but it's not productive in itself. In the limit, you're left with a hot potato economy where people gather data to sell for the purpose of gathering more data.

Maybe this is incentivized by the killing of the industrial base. Everything we buy is from China. All the US does is consume.