While I wrote this a day after I wrote last week’s post, this one got to marinate for a week before it went up and while I didn’t change much beyond my usual editing (grammar, spelling, word choice: the basics), writing this without the sense of urgency inherent to last week’s post means I spent more time thinking and less time reacting. There’s a time and a place for reacting, of course. We should respond with outrage when something awful happens and the corresponding urgency should drive us to act when we otherwise might not. That said, that initial reaction or series of actions doesn’t mean that we’re done with it. We can’t blow up and then move on because that will let companies like Automattic get away with bullshit like creating an opt-out system for actively selling the media created and shared by their customers and userbase because they’ll know they can just ride out the first reaction and do whatever they wanted to do when everyone has moved on. After all, it would be incredibly easy to take more than they want and pretend to be magnanimous and caring when they dial it back down to what their actual goal was. It’s basic negotiating strategy, to aim high and then slowly work your way down to what you actually wanted. So I’m going to keep this particular topic fresh in my mind so long as I continue to use a service I paid for that is now trying to wring extra money out of me by doing whatever they can to benefit from the exploitative and extractive actions of Venture Capital funded plagiarism algorithms.