It really seems like the idea is to create walled gardens where you profit from every part of the ecosystem. The ecosystem gets augmented with surveillance because surveillance provides the information necessary to fine tune the ecosystem. The surveillance gets augmented with automation, scaling techniques, and machine learning because they believe that better data continues producing better results. Results being anything that effectively drives profit: vendor lock in, sales, monetizing resales, monetizing game sharing, reducing labor costs, …

At a certain point, the rest of the world should decide that the American bar is too low and easily competed with — right? I mean, who wants the fruits of late stage capitalism? I imagine nobody who hasn’t been raised and educated within a culture which pre-accepts these things as normal.

When the rest of the world begins competing better, do they thing foreign gaming consoles will be banned like foreign cars?