(4) my new niece who is barely about to be 3 months old. She can't read, obviously.

(3) my dad who occasionally reads, but more often watches movies, and mostly dad movies about wars.

(2) my sister-in-law who is an avid reader of romantasy and has many libraries full of all of the obvious candidates. Looking for recs that have any political context happening, but aren't too world-buildy.

(1) my mother who apparently has never met me in her whole life, who gifted me that god-awful Henry Kissinger Genesis AI book last year, and who enjoys works by John Grisham.

Which gets back to the idea of boycott. If we wanted to end surveillance tech and surveillance capitalism, we need more (different?) than legislation to keep it at bay. We actually would need people to want and envision a future that didn't have it, didn't require it, and didn't benefit from it 4/4

The costs of surveillance like Spotify's are too disparate from the benefits for most people to realize. Targeted ads & creepy surveillance kitsch seem annoying at worst; the convenience factor is high; and we've so destroyed alternative music media distribution that it's unthinkable to replace 3/

in the context of boycott, and if it were even possible to outlaw surveillance tech as a business practice (or we had political institutions that would try), it would require having meaningful alternatives and consumers who value those alternatives enough to use them 2/