I think it's more serious. Because it is infiltrating everything. Government is out of this feedback loop. Until only very recently no democratic populace, no legislative body, ever voted for what kind of information it desires. We didn't vote for the telephone, for the automobile, for printing, for airplanes, for the birth control pill, for antibiotics, for television, for xerography, for transistors, for space travel, for electricity.
Governments play catch-up in terms of legal code.
The other role government plays is to muscle in on the action and shake down the successful technologists. That's what we're seeing happen today. It's puzzling to me, as a historian, that government suddenly feels left out. Right, and Buckminster Fuller and his colleague John McHale, rarely missed an opportunity to note that current military technology has a way of winding up in your dishwasher twenty years later. But let's move on and talk about Jaron Lanier's thinking, i.e. that the architecture of the operating system is becoming embedded for a thousand years.