[nonrandomstring]

No, the merchants have spoken.

I'll say in the same spirit that Margaret Thatcher said "there's no such thing as society" [0] that;

There's no such thing as markets.

[0] Please read the full quote (and for extra fun replace the word society with markets). Thatcher was saying something far more subtle than the sociopathy she is credited for. Markets have just replaced "society" as the ideological symbol of those who need something to get on their knees before, or blame.

https://www.thedailybeast.com/context-for-margaret-thatchers...

[Belopolye]

I don’t agree. Conceptually “the market” in this context is just individual purchasing decisions in the aggregate.

The people, voting with their dollars, have decided that they simply don’t care about privacy, libre software, etc as much as we wish they would.

[nonrandomstring]

Perhaps you might agree if you expand your view to encompass more than money. The words "just" and "aggregate" are where I think something important is missed. Collapsing the whole of human life and its myriad vectors of complexity down to one scalar, one single "dollar value", and then based on that making pronouncements about whether people value "privacy" or "security" or whatever, seems child-like to me (The idea. Not you. If you really hold it I hope you can move beyond it.)

"Markets" are like Father Christmas and "The Tooth Fairy"; a comforting one-dimensional idea that ought to serve us for a while, and then be discarded for a more mature perspective on the world. We must all try harder to find words that puncture the suffocating veil of "economic realism" that seems to hold back so much thinking.